Twenty Evolutionary Blunders: Dangers and Difficulties of Darwinian Thinking by Randy Guliuzza

Author:Randy Guliuzza [Guliuzza, Randy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Institute for Creation Research
Published: 2017-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

It seems that evolutionists can invoke degeneracy to bolster their favored concept.

To find a way through all of the Evolutionspeak on genomic degeneracy, the student can turn to actual studies of function for the three nucleotides in a codon. These studies point to another major evolutionary blunder since all of these possible evolutionary understandings of degeneracy are not supported by the science.

In Evolutionspeak, Degeneracy Is Stunningly Wrong

A detailed literature review in 2014 found that even if different codons prescribed the same amino acid in a protein, the codon differences still mattered in how the protein was made. The final folding shape of proteins is vital to their function. David D’Onofrio and David Abel documented that the DNA and its corresponding RNA sequence carried information not only for the proper amino acid sequence but also to control the timing of its folding. They “demonstrate that this TP [translational pausing] code is programmed into the supposedly degenerate redundancy of the codon table.”8 What this means is that the code of differing codons, even if they specify the same amino acid, still supplies important information, information that “purposely slows or speeds up the translation-decoding process….Variable translation rates help prescribe functional folding of the nascent protein. Redundancy of the codon to amino acid mapping, therefore, is anything but superfluous or degenerate.”8

A recent experiment again shows that the specific nucleotides in a codon do matter. Mutations to a codon that do not change the protein-coding sequence are called synonymous. The consensus view was, “Until recently, most biologists believed that so-called silent mutations, created by ‘synonymous’ DNA changes—those that do not affect the protein-coding sequence—had very weak effects on the evolution of organisms.” But this long-term experiment with bacteria found “that single highly beneficial synonymous mutations can allow organisms to rapidly evolve and adapt to their environment.”9 Another “interesting phenomenon” was that bacteria with different codons initially, when faced with the same challenges, seemed to converge on the same changes. Researchers found that “furthermore, these mutations occurred at single points within the gene, were highly beneficial, and they seemed to recur in multiple experiments.”9

A nucleotide order that specifies rapid, repeatable, and useful adjustments to changed conditions does not sound like the serendipitous side effect of random “silent mutations” but rather speaks loudly of the designed outcome of intentional planning. The genomic code is not degraded or superfluous. It is also clear that structurally different elements that specify a common element do not necessarily yield the same output. Observations like these prompted D’Onofrio and Abel to conclude, “The functionality of condonic [sic] redundancy denies the ill-advised label of ‘degeneracy.’”10

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