BioLogos, Broken Genes, and Urate Oxidase

The Bigger They Come, The Harder They Fall

Arguments for evolution, the theory that the biological world arose strictly by chance and natural law, are at a high level. The details of how microbes, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and the rest actually were created by random mutations are hard to come by. But, evolutionists explain, the species look like they evolved. Don’t the comparisons of their anatomy, geographical locations, and so forth, make evolution the obvious explanation for their origin? One of the strongest such evidences, according to evolutionists such as Dennis Venema, are the so-called shared-errors. Meaningless or, better yet, harmful mutations found in allied species seem to be obvious signs of a common ancestor. For we would never expect such harmful mutations to have arisen independently. They must derive from a common ancestor. This argument has many problems and seems to be another example of how the stronger that an argument is for evolution, the more deeply it is flawed.

One of the problems with this argument is that it contains two suspicious, unspoken, assumptions.

First, the argument assumes that these mutations are meaningless or harmful. That assumption may well be true but, as any historian of evolutionary thought knows, it is a dangerous. The history of evolutionary thought is full of claims of bad, inefficient, useless designs which, upon further research were found to be, in fact, quite useful.

Second, the argument assumes that these mutations are random. In other words, it assumes there cannot be any common mechanisms, properly operating or otherwise, which could tend toward certain designs and mutations.

In fact convergence is ubiquitous and rampant in biology. Repeated designs appear in species so distant that, according to evolutionary theory, their common ancestor could not have had that design. So even evolutionists must agree that common designs must have arisen independently. And this must have occurred many times over, at both the morphological and molecular levels.

In other instances, such “convergence” must have occurred even in allied species. In fact this is true even for the so-called harmful mutations. For instance, evolutionists believe the urate oxidase enzyme, which catalyzes the oxidation of uric acid, was inactivated in humans and the great apes by harmful random mutations. But the different versions of the gene, in the different species, do not easily align with the expected evolutionary pattern. In fact, even evolutionists have to agree that several of the various inferred mutations, in these similar species, could not have arisen from a common ancestor. Instead, they must have arisen independently:

One exceptional change is a duplicated segment of GGGATGCC in intron 4 which is shared by the gorilla and the orangutan. However, because this change is phylogenetically incompatible with any of the three possible sister-relationships among the closely related trio of the human, the chimpanzee, and the gorilla, it might result from two independent duplications. Alternatively, though less likely, a single duplication occurred in the ancestral species of the great apes and had been polymorphic for a sufficiently long time to permit fixation of the duplicated form in the orangutan and the gorilla on one hand and loss in the human and the chimpanzee on the other hand.

The nonsense mutation (TGA) at codon 107 is, however, more complicated than others. It occurs in the gorilla, the orangutan, and the gibbon, and therefore requires multiple origins of this nonsense mutation.

In contrast, the exon 3 mutation is not shared by H. syndactylus but by the gorilla and the orangutan. The origin of this mutation is therefore multiple and relatively recent in the gibbon lineage.

In other words, when common mutations found in different species cannot easily be explained by common descent, evolutionists do not hesitate to explain them as a consequent of multiple, independent events. This means that, even according evolutionists, similar mutations in allied species do not imply or require common descent. This contradicts the shared-error argument that is supposed to be one of the most powerful evidences for evolution. Unfortunately evolutionists do not include this information in their presentations of the shared-error argument.

The stronger that an argument is for evolution, the more deeply it is flawed.

h/t: DC