Retrotransposons are not Free

You may have been taught in your high school biology class that DNA point mutations provide the raw material for evolution. Such mutations can cause biological variation which might lead to improved reproductive rates. In those cases such mutations would likely be selected, and evolution would have taken yet another small step. You may have wondered how such unguided point mutations could ever produce the wonders we find in biology. The answer, evolutionists will tell you, is that point mutations are only the beginning of the story. In fact there are a variety of mechanisms, many far more complex than a DNA point mutation, that can produce biological variation. For instance, new research has found that so-called jumping genes, or transposons, provide for even more biological variation than previously thought. As one evolutionist remarked, “This movement of genetic material provides the raw material of genetic evolution.” There’s only one problem: transposons aren’t free.

The advantage of DNA point mutations is they are simple. Given some organic compounds in a warm little pond, and of course the all important sunlight that makes evolution possible, and some sort of reproduction cycle, and … . Well the story does become far-fetched rather quickly, but if you will go with me this far, it is not too heroic to imagine the occurrence of point mutations, of some sort. In other words, point mutations are conceivably free. They just happen, courtesy of nature and the available ingredients that are lying around.

Not so for the many more sophisticated mechanisms in biology that produce variation and are claimed as evolutionary fuel. Consider the retrotransposons that, in addition to its promoter sequence that helps initiate the copying of its DNA into an single-stranded RNA molecule, carries its own handy reverse transcriptase gene which encodes the protein machine that copies the RNA back into a DNA molecule, for later insertion into the genome. This can certainly cause biological variation, but it is anything but free.

With evolution we must believe that so many of the sophisticated biological variation mechanisms, such as in retrotransposons, were produced by evolution. Do you see the problem? In this circular tale that even Hans Christian Andersen could never have imagined, evolution produces the intricate mechanisms that produce evolution.

Evolutionists insist that there is no problem because none of this is impossible. Why can’t evolution produce mechanisms that produce evolution? Unless one can prove this is impossible, evolution wins (an argument that goes back to the sage of Kent himself). Though the evidence fails to prove evolution, it nonetheless must be a fact. In this Alice-in-Wonderland world, that which is not false is a fact (if it is evolution, that is).