Hi Russ

You have just totally demolished CTD’s arguments that mutation does not drive evolution. If what you say is true then all dog kinds (wolves, fox’s, coyotes, dingo’s etc) evolved in just four thousand years from two or was it seven of their kind on the ark. Without mutation this entire cohort can only have 4 or 14 alleles at any locus given that they have just 2 or 7 ancestors. But among them today there are many hundreds of known alleles at some loci. So which is false, is mutation and natural selection inventive and CTD is wrong when he states that this is not the case or is the ark story impossible as there must be far more than just seven ancestors of modern dog kind?

To observe ‘invention’ in nature is difficult as it requires many generations for evolution to produce significant changes though some examples are known, bacteria able to digest nylon oligomers or 2-4 dinitrotolulene as just two examples. Neither of these chemicals existed on earth before we invented them last century yet bacteria exist today which can metabolize both.

The most unambiguous examples of ‘invention’ by evolutionary means are seen in lab experiments on bacteria. A classic example starts with a single individual bacteria which is bread up into a colony then exposed to challenges such as toxins over many thousands of generations. In these experiments scientists can take samples of the bacteria and do a DNA analysis at any point, they can also freeze samples at any point to compare how they perform against their descendants of later generations. Given that these experiments start with one individual there is no variability on which selection can work so what is observed is not selection among god invented alleles within a population but among mutation produced variability. All variation observed in these experiments is created by evolutionary means unless god is getting inside the reactors and tinkering in the lab. These experiments have shown some remarkable invention including the creation of new metabolic pathways allowing the bacteria to metabolize novel substances and to thrive on energy sources that their ancestors would be killed by.

This sort of evidence does not prove that god did not create the world six to ten thousand years ago but it does show that evolution is inventive without him (unless he tinkers in real time with all of these organisms). It also clearly shows that anyone who suggests that mutation does not play an inventive role in evolution is wrong.

In Reason

Russell