"Sunday Herald Sun"
January 6, 2002, Sunday
SECTION: EXTRA; Pg. 34

Divine design lacks reason
GRAEME O'NEILL

A CHRISTIAN fundamentalist with a science degree recently wrote to me after
reading my column describing new fossil evidence that whales, dolphins and
porpoises evolved from an amphibious mammal related to pigs and hippos that
lived about 50 million years ago (Sunday Herald Sun, September 30).

My correspondent, PB from Parkdale, says he is irritated when scientists,
or science writers, treat evolution as a given, rather than an issue subject to
debate.

Like all Creationists, he subscribes to the Divine Design theory of
creation: the proposition that life on Earth was created by a supernatural
intelligence.

His critique focuses on gaps in the fossil record and the alleged lack of
fossils of transitional species -- the missing links between modern and ancient
forms.

Evolutionists acknowledge that such gaps exist. It is impossible to
construct an unbroken lineage between, for example, a blue whale with a fossil
species such as the

48 million-year-old Ambulocetus, the so-called "walking whale" found in
rocks in Pakistan.

These gaps prove nothing, except that the fossil record is fragmentary.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

In my reply to PB, I said: "Your difficulty with the fossil record is not
that it lacks continuity or is riddled with gaps, but that a fossil record
exists at all.

"The vast majority of species that have ever lived, including all
vertebrates, lived in the past. Why didn't they get on to the Ark? Why did
elephants and giraffes make it, while all of the dinosaurs, mosasaurs (marine
reptiles, presumably unaffected by flood) and pterosaurs missed out?"

I rarely respond to Creationist correspondence because most of it is
based on the teachings of various sects which caricature the theory of evolution
instead of addressing its substance.

The last episode of the recent SBS series Evolution highlighted the
conflict involved when students from Creationist families are exposed to the
hard evidence for evolution upon entering university.

When a son or daughter comes home having eaten forbidden fruit from modern
science's Tree of Knowledge and feels compelled to offer it to parents and
siblings, tension is guaranteed.

How does one tell one's parents they do not understand evolution because
their church, the centre of their family life, has been feeding them
distortions?

PB has worked as a scientist, yet still makes a common and fundamental
error in believing that evolution is defined by progress and an increase in
genetic information. He concedes that organisms change, but denies this is
evidence of evolution.

"My dispute is not with change itself, but rather the type of change," he
writes.

"Shuffling pre-existing genes and the information contained therein to give
different combinations (genotypes) and therefore different phenotypes (the
physical result of genetic changes on the organism) is not what true evolution
is about.

"Evolution must explain in naturalistic terms the origin of this
information.

"However, I know of not one single mutation that adds information. There
are point mutations that can confer upon bacteria resistance to antibiotics and
insect resistance to insecticides, but every one of these reduces the
information content and the functionality of the organism.

"All mutations studied thus far destroy information. 

"It is incredible to me that after nearly 150 years of evolutionary study,
evolutionists can not provide even one example of increasing information.

"I find it scandalous that the general public (and even most scientists)
are never made aware of this fact."

Evolution is very much about change -- even changes that might result in
reduced complexity.

The malaria parasite Plasmodium is a good example. Studies have shown that
its ancestor was a single-celled alga that has dispensed with most of its genes
for photosynthesis, but betrays its plant ancestry with its vulnerability to the
herbicide glyphosate.

By PB's definition, Plasmodium has lost genetic information. How then, does
he explain how it became one of the most successful, durable and adaptable
parasites on the planet?

Progress is an elusive concept and in the eye of the beholder. But PB's
premise is wrong. His misconception about "progress" in evolution is a common
one.

Evolution does not necessarily involve an increase in genetic information,
nor does it result in a progression from the simple to the more complex.

PB's claim that all mutations destroy genetic information is also wrong --
many mutations are neutral in their effect.

Our existence depends on a marvellous mutation machine that constantly
reshuffles genetic information.

The immune system of mammals is mutation in hyperdrive. It blindly creates
billions of protein molecules -- antibodies -- and by selecting those that work
best eventually arrives at antibodies best shaped to neutralise infections or
parasites.

Many of the hundreds of genes in the human immune system are the result of
duplications of other genes.

The duplicate gene develops its own mutation history and, in time, may be
recruited to a new role -- resulting in the addition of new information and
complexity to the organism's genetic blueprint.

In 1970, geneticist Susumu Ohno, of the City of Hope Hospital in Los
Angeles, proposed that genome duplication had been responsible for major leaps
in animal evolution, such as the transition from invertebrates to vertebrates.

His peers were sceptical, but Ohno's theory has received strong support
from the new science of genomics, which is concerned with mapping the entire
genome.