CreatorWorship

          I have long known from the second law of thermodynamics that all systems involving energy are less than 100% efficient. As I would say to students, “The good news is that you can’t get something for nothing [1st law of thermodynamics or law of conservation of energy], but the bad news is that you can’t even break even [2nd law of thermodynamics]” Emotionally that only discourages people with an engineering turn of mind. To show you just how little the idea penetrates many people’s thoughts, I almost always get a “How about a machine that produces energy that it can use to run…[perpetual motion machine]?” question from one or more students immediately after explaining the laws and sharing the good news/bad news. We have come so far that some have a blind faith in the ability of human ingenuity and technology to overcome the most formidable barriers to progress, even laws of Physics.

         Evolutionists have a similar resiliency in their emotional attachment to what Dr. John C. Sanford calls the Primary Axiom: “man is merely the product of random mutations plus natural selection”. Dr. Sanford, retired plant geneticist of Cornell University, presents an altogether formidable opposition to the Axiom: genetic entropy. Robert Carter simply defines genetic entropy as “…mutations (spelling mistakes in DNA) are accumulating so quickly in some creatures (particularly people) that natural selection cannot stop the functional degradation of the genome—let alone drive an evolutionary process that can turn apes into people.” Dr. Sanford says that useful information in DNA is degenerating; living organisms are degenerating; populations of organisms are degenerating. He referred to Darwinian believers as those who think that populations are getting better by natural selection, but based on his research, they are not. He said that he once also believed that natural variation (arising from mutations in DNA) plus natural selection (of the fittest through conflict resulting in death and survival) equals all that we see biologically. I believe that evolutionists are asking the wrong question based on their false presuppositions: How are species progressing from simpler to more complex? Instead, they we should be asking how species are able to resist extinction in light of genetic deterioration.

         In a recent Facebook discussion one person claimed to have observed modern examples of evolution through bacterial mutation. I pointed out that these adaptations are not species-changing evolution. But Dr. Sanford presents a more damaging argument of the devolving of species by viral and bacterial mutation. One of his examples is the flu pandemic from 1918 to 1920 that killed about 3% of the world’s population. When the frozen body of a soldier who died from that flu was exhumed for research purposes several years ago there was fear of the accidental release of the virus and a return of the epidemic, because it was known that the older strains were stronger. The newer strains of H1N1 are weaker due to genetic entropy. “A key point is that because of the high reproductive rate and the documented phenomenon of genetic entropy, the influenza virus is degenerating rapidly by accumulating 14.4 new mutations per year… It seems that when they leave their proper winged hosts and infect humans, they run out of control and go downhill rapidly because of mutation accumulation, which will lead to their extinction.”

          But doesn’t high mutation rate mean that natural selection has more material for driving evolution forward? This idea could only be true if there were sufficiently more beneficial mutations to increase an organisms’ long-term (mutli-generational) survival than destructive mutations. “Far more mutations are deleterious than advantageous,” says Dr. Sanford. These bad mutations degrade the genome at a much faster rate than good ones could possibly benefit the organism.

          The genetic conclusion of this discussion is that species are definitely not evolving and could certainly not have been around for millions of years at the rate their genome is deteriorating. The belief that “the creation was subjected to futility” and “we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now” (Romans 8:20,22) because of the sin of man fits with the evidence far better than the belief that natural selection through mutation is evolving species.