Creationists complain when science can’t do in 20 minutes what it takes nature millions of years to do.
Induced mutations followed by selection in laboratory experiments have not produced any beneficial structural changes.
What is a beneficial structural change? To scientists a structural change is where a protein is changed in a way that causes the protein to change shape. Not all mutations have this affect and are called neutral mutations. If the protein changes shape then it might not perform the function is was originally supposed to, it might perform the function just not as efficiently, it might perform its original function better, or it might so something completely different.
There we go, those last two papers show that the claim by the creationists is wrong. Beneficial structural protein changes by induced mutation. I could stop there, but what fun would that be?
I guess, that it could be argued that the creationists mean a morphology change, not just a protein change. That is a larger scale change at the organism level rather than the cellular level.
That’s much more difficult to show because major morphological changes are often very bad. However, with diligent searching I was able to find this (in about 2 minutes, if anyone is keeping track).
In this paper, the authors induced mutations in the eyes of mice using a chemical method resulting in a single point mutation in a particular gene. The resulting animals had physically larger eyes that normal mice and reduced the loss of retinal ganglion cells due to glaucoma.
There we go, a chemically induced mutation that resulted in a beneficial, physical change in a higher organism.
The creationist claims… again… are fundamentally wrong. The kicker of this is that I didn’t know about this paper until after I started writing this article. It still took me less than 5 minutes in Google Scholar to find this paper.
To me this indicates one of three things
- Creationists do sloppy research
- Creationists know about this and are willfully lying
- Creationists have a vested interest in NOT learning this kind of thing.
Honestly, it’s probably a mix of all three things.
I don’t do this to prove Christians wrong. That it’s a side effect is not my problem. If creationists do sloppy research, then they should learn to do correct research.
But more importantly, they should do the research, find out what is going on in the realm of science. Because when they say things that are easily proven fundamentally wrong, it’s makes them look bad. It makes them look sloppy or like liars.
It turns people who do know something off. And in this world of instant access to all the content of the internet, anyone who is reasonably competent can prove these claims wrong in minutes.
