Genetics Research

By

Joe Spears MS
Genetics
Intelligent Design

Research in genetics has found more evidence which is problematic for evolutionary theory. Below we will examine some of this evidence.

Gene survey indicates animals emerged at same time as people

It is textbook biology, for example, that species with large, far-flung populations—think ants, rats, humans—will become more genetically diverse over time.

But is that true?

“The answer is no,” said Stoeckle, lead author of the study, published in the journal Human Evolution....

In analysing the barcodes across 100,000 species, the researchers found a telltale sign showing that almost all the animals emerged about the same time as humans. 1

The result that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being at the same time, was surprising and not expected:

“This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could,” Thaler told AFP. 2

In trying to explain these results, one idea is that life is always evolving, so that all species at any time in history arose fairly recently.

“The simplest interpretation is that life is always evolving,” said Stoeckle.

“It is more likely that—at all times in evolution—the animals alive at that point arose relatively recently.” 2

However, this is difficult to coexist compatibly with the discovery of the live coelacanth, which scientists claim changed relatively little for tens of millions of years. We could add other examples of extremely old fossils which find counterparts today that are very similar.

The origin of animal species at the same time as humans is, of course, consistent with the Genesis account.

Another thing this research indicated was that there was little connection between species. If evolution is true and actually occurred, then we would expect that species that evolved into other species would be close to each other genetically, since they would be related.

... another unexpected finding from the study—species have very clear genetic boundaries, and there’s nothing much in between.

“If individuals are stars, then species are galaxies,” said Thaler. “They are compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space.

The absence of ‘in-between’ species is something that also perplexed Darwin, he said. 2

We know of the dearth of transitional forms in the fossil record. The genetic evidence now seems to indicate the same.

The question below is asked by Bryan Fischer:

... how can evolution possibly be true when the scientific evidence, based on the best in genetic research, reveals that all living things came into existence at about the same time? 3

Encryption by RNA modification

Not only is there a genetic code with lots of information, but the code seems to be encrypted! 4

But what is encryption?

For centuries, military commanders and others have wanted to send messages, without being intercepted by their enemies or others for whom the message was not intended. One interesting method used long ago was to shave a person’s head, write the message on the bald head, and wait till the hair grew back. Then, even if the messenger were to be searched, no secret message would be found—hopefully, that is, assuming the messenger’s head would not be shaved! 5

Instead of hiding the message, one other method was to scramble or distort the message so it would have meaning to no one, other than the intended recipient, who would know how to unscramble the message. This is known as encryption.

A simple encryption method is to shift each letter of a message to the next letter. Then, for the word “cat,” we would replace the first letter, c, with the next letter, d. We would replace the second letter, a, with the next letter of the alphabet, b. And the third letter, t, would be replaced with the next letter, u. Thus, “cat” would become “dbu.” The encrypted message, with the letters so shifted, would look nothing like the original. However, to anyone knowing to reverse the shift, the message could be “decrypted” and read.

Of course, encryption methods can get more complex. We could shift by five letters, instead of by one. We also can shift the first letter by five, shift the next letter by seven, the next by two, and then repeat the sequence by shifting the next by five, etc.

In these methods, for the intended recipient to read the message, the number of letters to shift for each letter of the message, the encryption key, needs to be known. There are more complex methods, but they still use an encryption key.

When the same key that was used for encryption is also used for decryption or to decrypt or read the message, this is called symmetric encryption. Recently asymmetric encryption has been developed, which uses different keys for encryption and decryption.

Work on these methods to prevent messages from being read has been the work of humankind for centuries. This work has involved mathematicians and other experts. To find encryption present in our genes would be finding more amazing complexity, to add to the already astounding complexity of our genetic information, which increases the difficulty and improbability for evolution to produce such complexity in our genes.

It appears that this encryption has indeed now been found in our genes:

It has long been a mystery why genes code for stretches called introns that are translated but then cut out afterwards. Why are they there? Here’s where the findings get really interesting. Introns appear to help scramble the message, fulfilling the encryption role, ... 6 ,7

Cell differentiation mysteries

The controlling factors forcing one cell to divide into other cells which take on different forms—some muscle cells, some bone, etc.—seem more complex than originally thought.

The following are from Evolution News, quoting Kevin Jiang of Harvard Medical School in his article “From one, many.” https://hms.harvard.edu/news/one-many:

Whether a worm, a human or a blue whale, all multicellular life begins as a single-celled egg.

From this solitary cell emerges the galaxy of others needed to build an organism, with each new cell developing in the right place at the right time to carry out a precise function in coordination with its neighbors.

This feat is one of the most remarkable in the natural world, and despite decades of study, a complete understanding of the process has eluded biologists. [Emphasis added.] 8 ,9 ,10

Recent research has investigated the genes involved in this process.

Now, in three landmark studies published online April 26 in Science, Harvard Medical School and Harvard University researchers report how they have systematically profiled every cell in developing zebrafish and frog embryos to establish a roadmap revealing how one cell builds an entire organism.

...Their analyses reveal the comprehensive landscape of which genes are switched on or off, and when, as embryonic cells transition into new cell states and types.

Together, the findings represent a catalog of genetic “recipes” for generating different cell types in two important model species and provide an unprecedented resource for the study of developmental biology and disease. [Emphasis added by Evolution News] 11 ,12 ,10

What did this research find?

Unexpectedly, the groups independently found that at the single-cell level, gene expression was the same in mutants and wildtype, despite the loss of an essential signaling pathway.

[G]enes marking cell states in one species were often poor gene markers for the same cell state in the other species.

....

In several instances, they found that the DNA sequence of a gene—and the structure of the protein it encodes—could be nearly identical between species but have very different expression patterns.

“This really shocked us, because it goes against all the intuition we had about development and biology,” Klein said. “It was a really uncomfortable observation. It directly challenges our idea of what it means to be a certain ‘cell type.’” [Emphasis added by Evolution News] 13 ,14 ,15

The result is that our ideas of how genes affect cell differentiation are far too simple.

That cells in the same state can have very different developmental histories suggests that our hierarchical view of development as a “tree” is far too simplified, Klein said. [Emphasis added by Evolution News] 16 ,12 ,10

A paper on the website of the University of Basel tells us the following:

The results show that the genetic program that a cell follows on the way to maturity is by no means set in stone. “It seems that the developmental path of a cell is more flexible than we previously expected,” says Alex Schier. 12

Thus, we see recent research indicates the workings of genes in cell differentiation are more complex than we thought. The more complex the mechanism, the more likely it was designed intelligently.

Genetic Entropy

John Sanford is a scientist known for the development of the gene gun, used to genetically modify plants. He has written a book titled Genetic Entropy, which shows evolution to be impossible. He shows that, even if one assumes rare but beneficial mutations and long periods of time, the harmful mutations overcome the beneficial ones, so the net result is downward instead of upward. One might call this devolution instead of evolution. In short, instead of species becoming more advanced over time, they will degenerate over time. More information can be found at the website http://www.geneticentropy.org.

Also Sanford has co-authored a paper dealing with “The Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection,” which was devised by Fisher and was believed to prove Darwinian evolution mathematically. The paper by Sanford and Basener, published in 2018, shows Fisher ignored mutations and corrects the math. They show Fisher’s theorem to be incorrect and that macroevolution is impossible. 17

Conclusion

The above indicate that research shows increasing reason to question the idea that humans, and other creatures, evolved. We see more evidence that reduces the already incredibly small probability that evolution could have occurred at all. As we learn more, we may expect to find even more evidence that there was an intelligence behind the origin of species. 