Kent Hovind on claims for bacterial evolution

I don't follow creationist ministries any more, mainly because they cover so many different topics while I'm trying to keep my focus on the few I feel I understand best, but I did just happen to be watching Chris Pinto's film, Megiddo II (It's at You Tube) in which there is a brief interview with Kent Hovind who neatly sums up one of the main problems:  The claim that mutations are the fuel of evolution doesn't hold up because mutations don't increase but decrease "information" -- or as I've been putting it, they destroy DNA. 

The term "information" is used to refer to the DNA sequence of chemicals -- which can also be called a "code" or a "recipe" -- that produces a given trait in the organism.  A mutation is a change in the sequence of chemicals that make up a segment of the DNA which constitutes a gene, which of course changes the code or recipe or information of that gene that produces the trait. 

That's all mutations do, they alter DNA which is a destructive process, changing the sequence of a gene so that its function is interfered with, often producing no immediate detectable change in the organism, but in thousands of instances producing identifiable genetic disease.  Unqualified beneficial results do not occur.   Kent Hovind pointed out that the claim that mutations in bacteria demonstrate evolution because they evolve immunity to antibiotics is bogus, because the way this happens is that the mutation simply destroys the ability of the bacteria to latch on to the antibiotic.  It's a destructive process, which may have a very temporary beneficial effect, just as the fact that the sickle cell mutation protects against malaria is a beneficial effect, but overall the organism has been damaged, and information has been lost, not gained, the opposite of anything that would lead to evolution.  It was good to hear that spelled out.

Archaeology again falsely claims to have disproved the Flood

Coyote at EvC is restating his ridiculous idea of how the Flood of Noah has been disproved. Another evolutionist PRATT (Point Refuted A Thousand Times) which he repeats at every opportunity.

The idea that the world was created in 7 days and a biblical flood and the tower of babel was assumed as fact by me as soon as I read about such things in the bible. I was 6 years old at the time. Every sermon I listened to from then on confirmed that belief. Every family member of mine believed it except my stepfather who was catholic. It wasn't until 8th grade biology that I heard anything different. It wasn't until I was an adult until I started hearing serious discussions about evolution.

Some of these issues science can readily test.

As just one example, the global flood ca. 4,350 years ago was tested initially by creationist geologists seeking to document that flood. They could not do so, and had to admit that the flood did not occur as described. This capitulation occurred in the early 1800s, long before Darwin.

They had wrong ideas about what such a flood would have done in those days, in fact very much the same wrong ideas Coyote is promoting here, the silly idea that you could "detect" such a flood at a certain depth having left certain remains while the rest of the landscape is completely undisturbed.

Since then the evidence that there was no global flood ca. 4,350 years ago has become overwheming. It is so easy to disprove this that any archaeologist can do it.

I've done it in my own research. What one needs to do is find an archaeological site that cross-cuts the 4,350 year time period. A site that does so by thousands of years is best. Then you examine what occurred before and after that time period, and you look to see if there is any evidence of a major discontinuity at that time.

This is utterly absurd. First of all of course there is no reason to trust such dating of any site. There is no such thing as a settlement that goes back before 4350 years ago, this is all false.

But the main problem is the idea that if there had been a worldwide flood it could be detected in a before-and-after scenario that left any evidence whatever of such a settlement from before the flood occurred. The Flood of Noah absolutely obliterated everything that had pre-existed it and rearranged the land into deep layers of separate sediments containing the bodies of everything that was killed in it. Anything recognizable as a human settlement has been built since the Flood.
This conversation continues over a few posts. Here's the next one.

Can you point me at any papers on this? Thanks.

Just look in any general archaeology text. You will find descriptions of culture sequences from several parts of the world.

None include a flood event with total population and culture disruption at that time period.

Egypt is a good example. Their writings began before the date ascribed to the flood and continued beyond that date. There was no break as would have been seen from a global flood.

Again there is this idea that you could detect a worldwide flood as having been "included" within culture sequences. No, such a flood would have absolutely destroyed any culture that pre-existed it, leaving not a trace. And again he trusts in the dating of artifacts that there is no reason to trust, as the writings of Egypt.

Just another evolutionist PRATT, Coyote. As you guys are always saying to the creationists, you've been shown to be wrong about this, give it up.

How I Became a Creationist

Somebody started a thread to find out who had known about creationism when so I'll chime in.

I never had a clue about creationism until a couple years after I'd become a Christian in my forties. I was thoroughly indoctrinated in evolution. Of course I knew about the Scopes trial, but I don't think I knew anything about what creationists actually believed and taught. Some idea that they didn't like being descended from apes and that was about it.

I went to church as a child and it was a fairly liberal Presbyterian church though as far as I recall I never heard a word about the age of the earth or how life began or evolved. I did hear the Adam and Eve story but my Sunday School teacher was very open to the question who their children could marry since you aren't supposed to marry a sibling, which already put some doubts about the story in my mind.

I went to live with relatives when I was fifteen and that meant going to a big city school for the first time and there I met people who scorned religion, including a math teacher who spent most of every class performing some kind of antics at the expense of religion. He was considered a great intellect and comedian. My best friend and I worshipped him. Those were the Sputnik years and America was feverishly engaged in promoting science in high schools so we could catch up with Russia. All other areas of study were treated as not worth a bright teenager's time. I wasn't geared to science so I accepted my inferiority, while my best friend went on to get post-graduate degrees in biological science. I did, however, give up whatever I'd acquired of religion to that point, and I first became aware of the theory of evolution in those years, and of course accepted it completely.

Years later I subscribed to Skeptical Inquirer magazine, hoping to find ammunition for my anti-religious and evolutionist beliefs but instead I found that although they covered all the right subjects I couldn't get a grasp of the lines of evidence from what they presented. It left me intellectually suspended. All I could do was take it on faith. Not that I put it in those terms. But the point was that I wanted to be able to muster the evidence for what I believed and it always eluded me.

In my forties I read my way to Christ. I was surrounded by believers in a lot of weird stuff, so it seemed to me, eastern religions, astrology, bizarre cults like Urantia, even pyramid power. I still considered myself to be a rational atheist and it seemed to me the world was coming apart. I thought Western Civilization was the height of human achievement and the political movements that attacked it through the sixties, and the eastern religions and other irrationalisms that rushed in to fill the void, were deeply depressing to me.

A series of events got me looking up something in the New Age bookstore, and some statements by a couple of Hindu gurus I found there got me suddenly believing in God, the God of my childhood though (what little I could remember about all that), not their God. I figured it was all the same. I had no idea who Jesus Christ was or what He had done until much later -- somehow the gospel hadn't really penetrated my head during those years in church. But from then on I read voraciously about religion. I no longer thought all the weird stuff was weird, anything could be true it seemed to me at that point -- and by then I'd had some "supernatural" experiences to help make the case. Occultic or demonic experiences really, through eastern oracles for instance.

It took at least a year to get through the eastern religions to Catholicism, and I thought that's where I was going to stay, but I kept reading and ended up, yes, a Bible-believing Christian. A --*gasp*-- fundamentalist. It wasn't easy with my history to come to that conclusion, not only because of my own ingrained prejudices but those of my acquaintances who were horrified as my reading seemed to be veering in that direction. I was given some books to head me back toward sanity as they saw it, but eventually I overcame all the objections and went thoroughly joyfully "insane." So I lost friends. Well, that's what Jesus said happens when you take up with Him.

And a couple years after that I found some books on creationism, probably in the Christian book store, and began reading in that area. Morris and Whitcomb's Genesis Flood was an eye-opener for me. I laughed when it hit me that the earth really IS only 6000 years old. What an amazing discovery after a lifetime of thinking in terms of billions of years.

Yes you DO get loss of genetic diversity with evolution Part 10

Draft to be changed as I can get to it.

Subbie:

[Faith]Consider the dog example while we're at it. Every breed of dog MUST show reduced genetic variability compared to its population of origin because if you want it big you're going to have to eliminate everything that tends to smallness, if you want it good natured you have to eliminate everything that breeds for ferocity, and so on

[Subbie] This is only true if the "first dog" had all possible dog genetic information, and subsequent dogs were created by taking out all the stuff that wasn't necessary for that breed of dog. This idea is ridiculous.

The first dog doesn't usually display a perfect collection of all the desired traits a breeder is seeking, just a tendency. Breeders select animals for the traits they desire. If they want bigness they breed with big dogs, if they want sweet natures they breed the sweetest ones in the litter, trying to IMPROVE the particular trait they are interested in, selecting those individuals from subsequent generations that have the best expression of that trait. They chose the original dog because it had such a trait but its descendants are selected to improve on it. Then they breed it with other dogs with the same trait. You don't need ALL original dog traits, just dogs that have the trait you want. When an unwanted trait shows up they are careful to keep that animal from breeding. Over time the traits they are seeking become established and the ones they don't want get eliminated. This is elementary my dear Watson, no doubt highly oversimplified (you don't usually get a single trait without a company of other traits along with it for instance) but nothing at all ridiculous about it.

Then Taz:

[Faith]A nearly obliterated population such as the seals which were hunted to near extinction, may actually come back in large numbers, but they will come back with much reduced genetic variability compared to their original population. Surely this is obvious?

[Taz] No, it's not obvious, because you are using it in the wrong way. It's like saying each individual atom of my computer is colorless therefore my computer is colorless. There's a fallacy for that. Try to guess what it is. While it is true that the seal population came back with less genetic variation than before, we're talking only a couple generations. You are trying to apply a couple generations of seal as an example of evolution. If I didn't get drawn in by your honest tone, I would have said strawman.

What happened with the seal population you described is called a bottleneck, where an event triggered a loss of many traits and the resulting allele frequency is completely different than the one before. In this particular case with the seal, the event is called over-hunting.

Because we know for a fact that each individual in that population carries at least several mutations compared to its parents, if left undisturbed it is inevitable that genetic variation in that population will increase given enough time. By enough time, I'm talking about at 50 generations or so, not a couple.

And again we are denying the obvious to focus on the nonexistent savior of evolution, (beneficial) mutation, and the unprovable effect of lotsanlotsanlots of TIME. Again, built in alleles are quite enough to produce a huge array of variations in most species, while mutations contribute nothing but death to the mix (yeah, even the "neutral" ones whose effect is simply invisible). And that's all they are contributing to these genetically depleted seals too, not a stepping stone to further evolution but the threat of extinction.

And again, even if mutation did contribute viable new alleles, alleles only vary existing traits, what you need is new traits, new "information" at least whole new genes.

[Taz]As a side note, the rattlesnake population in the southwest are going through a bottleneck event as we speak. People there are hunting down every rattlesnake they could find, which are usually the ones that make a lot of noise. The very trait that helped keep their ancestors from being trampled on are now working against them with humans. There are reports of increasing number of silent rattlesnakes crawling around. Goddamn rednecks...

Yeah, they've selected silent rattlesnakes, what's your point? If they keep it up they'll eventually eliminate ALL the genetic possibilities for noisy rattlesnakes -- which is what ultimately happens with all selection events.

[Taz]I'm sure that one day in the distant future, our children's children will label this period as the great bottleneck era for most species on Earth. Man has been changing and molding population genetics to our liking. I'm sure we'll look back one day and realize the vast changes we've made to wild populations everywhere.

Could be, selection happens by many means and human interference is one of them. What you and others who are in thrall to evolution refuse to consider is that such a bottleneck IS evolution -- big changes in this case, just the stuff of evolution, and it DOES come to a screeching halt because of genetic depletion -- it's just that the whole scenario -- striking new traits plus serious genetic depletion -- happens a lot faster than the usual processes of variation. These normal processes, just like bottleneck, all involve some form of reproductive isolation of a portion of the main population that brings about new gene/allele frequencies. This isolation can occur in many ways, such as migration of a random assortment of individuals, a reproductive preference pattern within a population, natural selection having to do with environmental pressures, and so on. Bottleneck just does it faster.

Yes you DO get loss of genetic diversity with evolution Part 9

And here's Taz on that same thread:

Faith writes:
If you start with twenty alleles in a population for one gene and one of them becomes crucial for a particular environment and therefore gets selected, either rapidly or slowly depending on the selection pressure, you will lose the other nineteen alleles as the one selected comes to determine this particular trait.

But this isn't how evolution works. The other 19 alleles don't just disappear unless there are selective pressures against them.

I clearly defined the situation as having selective pressures. If the selection pressure isn't severe you'll get a reduction rather than a total elimination of the other alleles.

You're still thinking in black and white.

What happens is by some selective pressure, say environmental or predatory, begins to favor one trait out of the 20, we will begin to see a steady increase of that one trait in the population. But the other 19 still remain, perhaps in lower number than before.

For the selected trait to increase, the others have to decrease, it's not a "perhaps" it's a necessity. What do you think "lower number" means anyway? Yes, they may not disappear right away, that would happen only when the new trait has completely dominated the population, but decrease they will when there is selection pressure for that one trait.

Try to think of it like capitalism. Just because Bill Gates began to dominate the silicon valley market doesn't mean all other software companies went belly up. In fact, despite Microsoft's attempts to stamp out their competitions, we still have giant software corporations all over the place. Even in cases of monopolies in the past, no one single commercial entity of a particular market has ever dominated the entire market.

You are determined to put me in the wrong even though what I've said has taken all this into account.

In other words, despite selective pressure favoring one or two or a few traits doesn't mean the overall variation of the gene pool will necessarily decrease.

IF those favored traits come to dominate in the population then the overall genetic variability will tend in the direction of decrease as the other alleles decrease. In many cirdcumstances the other alleles may remain and the original trait distribution could even be regained. But then you don't have evolution, do you? I'm talking about what happens with evolution, with the establishment of new traits or phenotypes, with speciation etc.

Now, if we're talking about the bottleneck effect... that's a different story.

Not really, it's just an extreme and it ought to be taken as an illustration of the formula -- new traits, less genetic variability.

Yes you DO get loss of genetic diversity with evolution Part 8

NWR on that thread:

Faith writes:
My argument is that natural selection and genetic drift, all the processes that select or isolate a portion of a population, do bring about the change called evolution but also always reduce genetic variability, which is the opposite of what evolution needs.

That's not quite right. Yes, selection reduces variation.

If this is typical and I suspect it is, I've been consistent in saying "genetic variability" but those who argue with me keep wrongly saying "variation" which obscures my point. It's genetic variability that is reduced in the making of a new phenotype, and it's the reduction of genetic variability that eventually brings about the end of a particular line of variation because it runs out of allelic possibilities. Up to that point you can still get further variation of phenotypes by further selection events or just by migration of a small proportion of a population.

As far as I know, genetic drift does not affect variation. And mutation increases variation.

Genetic drift is just one of the ways that a new gene pool is formed and reproductively isolated from a larger gene pool, which develops new phenotypes while reducing genetic variability. And again, I'm talking about GENETIC VARIABILITY OR GENETIC DIVERSITY, not "variation."

And here it comes, the savior of evolution, MUTATION. The ONLY way this inexorable reduction I'm talking about could possibly be prevented -- though only in theory because mutation couldn't succeed at that even if it occurred. Any process that kept putting new alleles into the gene pool would only interfere with the development of the new species that is the predictable result of reproductive isolation of smaller gene pools. You couldn't ever get "speciation" at all, you couldn't get the distinctive variations in the ring species.

You are correct, that if there were only processes that reduce variation, then eventually evolution would run out of variation and would stop. But as long as there are also processes that increase variation, there is no reason to expect evolution to stop.

Actually, this could be taken as a concession of my point and end the discussion with me the winner. At least he does acknowledge that I've got the main process right. "Processes that increase variation" come down to only ONE purely theoretical process, mutation, and as I point out in that thread and here as well, mutation 1) doesn't create viable alleles, and 2) if it did it would prevent the formation of species altogether BECAUSE THE FORMATION OF SPECIES / VARIATIONS DEPENDS ON THE REDUCTION OR ELIMINATION OF ALLELES IN THE POPULATION.

As far as I know, what is mostly noticed is that variation stays fairly constant.

Variation or genetic variability? Phenotypes DO remain fairly constant, the processes that are called evolution that lead to new variations aren't continuously occurring in any observable degree and in that case the genetic variability would also stay constant. But when you DO have evolution, when you are getting new phenotypes, then you are also getting reduced genetic diversity.

A bottle neck, such as caused by isolation of a small population, can result in reduced variation. But the variation is rebuilt during succeeding generations.

A bottleneck is simply the most extreme example of the necessity of reducing genetic variability in order to get a new phenotype. In these cases you usually get complete population-wide homozygosity for most of the new traits. But any new phenotype requires some degree of reduced genetic variability.

And you are wrong that the variation is rebuilt. It has not been rebuilt in the cheetah and shows no signs of ever being rebuilt. And if it were, if that species were to acquire new alleles it would also lose its cheetah character. If you are going to get established species, or speciation, genetic variability must be reduced.

The type of argument you are making could perhaps be used to suggest that the theory overemphasizes selection and underemphasizes the production of new variation. But you won't be able to refute evolution this way, because the empirical evidence shows that variation does build up again if it has been reduced - unless, of course, that particular line goes extinct.

Well, here he's invoked "evidence," but there is no evidence whatever that variation (genetic variability?) builds up again. And there can't be if there is such a thing as a species.

Yes you DO get loss of genetic diversity with evolution Part 7

So let's turn to Rahvin for a bit:

Hi Faith. Welcome back.
The problem behind your theory is that it's contradicted by real-world observations. Your predictions are invalidated, because observed evolution has not been reducing genetic capacity for variance.

What are you looking at? If you are looking at the phenotypic variations you may very well see lots of variance. That's microevolution, that's phenotypic microevolution. But if you look at the DNA you should start to see fewer alleles for the selected traits or even population-wide homozygosity for some traits.

The confusing thing is probably that in most cases you don't get any appreciable reduction in genetic diversity. That is, new gene frequencies from a population split just means that you get more of a different kind of allele for a given trait than the other population had, and less of the kind that dominated in the first population, it's mostly a reshuffling. But the fact is that you DO need to reduce or eliminate alleles that produce the "wrong" trait in order for a new trait to become characteristic of the new population, and over a number of selection events and population splits this will show up as a reduction in genetic diversity along with the production and establishment of the new phenotypic trait. IN THE NEW POPULATION. The old population, assuming it's appreciably larger, will no doubt retain the higher proportion of the "wrong" alleles that are lost to the new population because there they aren't "wrong."

It's down any specific line of variation of the phenotype that you are going to encounter this loss of genetic diversity, but since it is down any specific line of variation that you are seeing the production of new traits, that is, evolution, it ought to be clear that the process of production and maintenance of new phenotypic traits, or variation, or evolution, requires this loss of GENETIC diversity.

Even a population split in which the new population is appreciably smaller in number is going to show a lot of phenotypic change along with the genetic reduction, but ANY actual selection of a trait could completely eliminate some alleles and that is where you will REALLY see this formula in operation. Selection definitely reduces genetic variability. Selection is how evolution proceeds. Put two and two together.

Year after year, undergraduate students directly observe evolution in action as they show changes in allele frequency in fruit flies. Other students observe the case of drug resistance spontaneously forming in a population of bacteria.

Are you really looking at the DNA to see the changed allele frequencies or are you inferring them from the "evolution in action" that you are observing, which would of course be the usual microevolution. Drug resistance is the phenotype, what's going on in the DNA?

The process doesn't stop. Variation continues, unimpeded.

And so it may. VARIATION may continue and continue a long time. You are talking about PHENOTYPIC variation here. In some species you can get lots of new variations of the PHENOTYPES, but my claim is that you will eventually reach a point where you can't get any more because the process requires genetic reduction. REQUIRES it. If you are only looking at the phenotypes you aren't necessarily going to be aware of this. But also, since you are dealing with fruit flies and bacteria you may be getting a lot more phenotypic variation for more generations just because they are likely to be genetically more variable than higher animals. Bacteria have a lot less junk DNA for instance than higher animals, which suggests a lot more genetic variability. It's really not a valid comparison with dogs, cats, mice, and humans.

There is no reduction in the possibilities derived from mutation guided by natural selection. At no point to we reach an evolutionary "endpoint" where no more change is possible.

You have apparently not reached it in the laboratory with fruit flies and bacteria (though I suspect you have), but it is reached every day in the wild, with the elephant seals and the North American bison and the cheetah as the most extreme examples. Yes, they are examples of this process, they are not exceptions. Limiting the numbers of a population is what one does to produce a new phenotype, though it doesn't always happen to the extreme of a bottleneck which of course can threaten the survival of the whole species. But even in these cases they seem to be thriving. Nature does this to many degrees all the time, and nearly depleted genetic variability is the result in the case of a bottleneck or founder effect. Again, this is not merely an extreme, it also demonstrates the pattern I'm talking about.

It's based on the well-known observation that you get new species with reproductive isolation and altered gene frequencies. But what is generally overlooked is that altered gene frequencies NEVER means an increase in variability. It may not change the variability much at any given point, but it certainly does not increase it. For that you would need, yes, mutations, but for many reasons that doesn't happen except as an interference, and even if it did happen it wouldn't change anything outside the parameters of the Species, it would only alter the character of the built-in pattern of traits, it isn't going to produce new traits, new genes themselves.

Preserving a breed, preserving a species, requires reduction in genetic possibilities.

And that's just the examples that we directly observe. The fossil record and the other extant life we see today has variety beyond comprehension.

You are talking about PHENOTYPES, and yes you get phenotypic variety "beyond comprehension" -- especially back before the Flood, which is what the fossils are a record of -- but you get it within the Species and you get it only along with reduced genetic variability. Again, the reduction may be quite minimal in a genetically rich species, which is perhaps what you are looking at, and which must describe all species before the Flood, and even many still, but it is still a reduction.

The genetic and morphological evidence for common ancestry of virtually every living thing on the planet is overwhelming,

You are looking at similarities and ignoring the differences and not thinking about what would have to happen genetically in order to produce those differences. You are looking at patterns and imposing your belief that genetic inheritance is the explanation, you do not actually have evidence of that inheritance. Again, look at the differences between one species and another and genetic inheritance isn't going to be the explanation.

to the point that it's better established than the Theory of Gravity. Given that this is the case, and populations continue to diversify into distinct sub-groups before our very eyes,

Yes POPULATIONS continue to diversify, that's the PHENOTYPE. What I'm talking about is something that happens way down the road in most cases, or suddenly when populations are severely reduced. It isn't going to happen in populations that have a great deal of genetic variability and where population splits occur in great numbers -- you'll get some change and you'll get some reduction in genetic variability but it will be negligible in those cases -- it WILL occur, however, just minimally. Many population splits as in ring species, migrations of small numbers -- this is where what I'm talking about will become apparent.

Whenever you get SPECIATION for instance you should see the genetic reduction I'm talking about, certainly NOT the genetic variability that would be necessary if speciation were the springboard to macroevolution you think it is.

it would seem that your premise, that evolution should grind itself to a halt through some sort of genetic entropy, is falsified.

It is happening every day, you are just looking at the wrong end of the phenomena and you are looking where it is occurring least obviously. Conservationists see it every day and so do breeders, it's what they are both working against all the time, trying to prevent it from happening because it is so often accompanied (in this fallen world) by disease -- disease caused by mutations I dare suppose.