Five years ago: Examples of regulatory gene change producing body change termed “scarce”

From Science Daily (Nov. 14, 2006), we learned: Geneticists succeeded in getting fruit flies with two rows of bristles on the thorax to become flies with four rows of bristles on the thorax, by tweaking some control genes.

Then we read,

These results show that slight changes in the control regions of genes lead to slight changes in the organism, and accumulation of such small differences may result in the creation of a new species. While this is widely accepted by evolutionary biologists, actual examples directly linking small changes in regulatory parts of genes to morphological differences have been scarce.

Especially if no one is around to do the tweaking under laboratory controls.

It’s a good thing the bristles probably don’t matter much. The big news was when researchers altered useful fruit fly halteres and produced a useless second set of wings (photo) , and also produced legs where antennae should be. That’s not evolution or intelligent design, it’s a kludge.

The money shot would have been to produce flies that could carry off the whole fruit bowl instead of just flitting around your mouth while you are eating a peach.

Little admissions add up. The information deficit between what Darwinism needs to prove its case and what actually happens has only grown in the subsequent five years.

Note: The fruit fly image was taken by Muhammad Mahdi Karim in Dar es Salaam and is offered here under the Gnu Free Documentation License.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

From Uncommon Descent: Falls da rain. People are starting to talk openly about Darwinism’s failures

30 December 2010

New Peer-Reviewed Paper Challenges Darwinian Evolution
Jonathan M

Over recent months, papers challenging key elements of Darwinian theory — the kind of papers which are supposed not to exist — have increasingly been slipping through the net and finding their way into the peer-reviewed literature. One such paper, “Is gene duplication a viable explanation for the origination of biological information and complexity?,” authored by Joseph Esfandier Hannon Bozorgmeh and published online last week in the journal, Complexity, challenges the standard gene duplication/divergence model regarding the origin of evolutionary novelty. Read more here

The basic idea is

Bozorgmehr winds up drawing similar conclusions to those drawn by Behe in his recent Quarterly Review of Biology paper: While many mutations can, at first glance, appear to have resulted in evolutionary novelty (such as in the case of antibiotic resistance), closer inspection reveals that the selected adaptations do not, in fact, result in novel genetic components. Bozorgmehr explains that "[i]n many instances...a loss of function and regulation in a harsh or unusual environment can have a beneficial outcome and thus be selected for -- bacteria tend to evolve resistance to antibiotics in such a way through mutations that would otherwise adversely affect membrane permeability," (see Delcour 2009). One example cited in the paper concerns the acquisition of organophosphorus insecticide resistance in blowflies, which is conferred by a single amino acid substitution in a carboxyl esterase. But this insecticide resistance -- though adaptively selected -- is not a case of neo-functionalization, but rather a loss in enzyme activity (Newcomb et al. 1997).

(Links at destination site.)

I wonder if they’ll force this guy to recant. Maybe not. It would sound a bit tinny just now, wouldn’t it?

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Rainy Saturday morning?: Try out this new game ...

Malcolm Chisholm tells me that he has worked the bugs out of a new game called the Richard Dawkins Mutation Challenge.

I'm not much good with games, so I am hoping others will try it and tell me what they think. It is especially timely in light of this.

Random mutation generator: Fun at work

While we are on the subject of the thinkquote below, the meaning of randomness, here is a random mutation generator. See how long it takes to mutate your name into something unpronounceable. For my name, the first try stopped the clock in three mutations, the second in one. (Now get back to work.)