Is Genetic Entropy a real thing? John Sanford VS Zach B. Hancock

Dr. John Sanford is the man who originated the concept of genetic entropy which states that humans and animals deteriorate over time to the point where it is not possible for these complex organisms to survive for millions of years.

Zach B. Hancock is an evolutionary scientist, defending mainstream science that everything can be explained by natural forces. He recently released a YouTube video reviewing John Sanford’s book in which he refutes all genetic entropy arguments.

The video being very long, techy and mathy, it’s not easy to thoroughly address every single point, especially for a layman audience. I’m a simple christian, web programmer and having a background in refrigeration mechanics and thermodynamic. I’m reading litteratures about biology, paleontology, geology and cosmology for years. The concept of genetic entropy was of particular interest too me when I discovered it as I had been studying the age of the earth. It appeared that the conclusion of genetic entropy was in line with a young earth view.

I just hope that this article will put things into perspective and that biologist such as Dr. Robert Carter, Dr Nathaniel Jeanson, Dr. Kurt Wise, Dr. Jerry Bergman, Dr Brian Thomas or others will respond in details to the claims of Hancock as they could be harmful to fragile believers.

For my part, I will provide some quotes and perspectives in response to Hancock. I usually write in french but at the request of a fellow friend worried by the refutations of Hancock, I’m going to write in english this article so that it can be read by the english speaking audience as well. My apologies for my spelling errors and other mistakes.

Goals and responsibility

Our goal as creationist is to defend the faith with good arguments because we think we have good reasons to put our faith in Jesus-Christ and to trust the Bible. What is at stake is « biblically » eternal life VS eternal death (Romans 6:23). We want all our friends and families to be saved so that they can be blessed with the biblical promise. Ultimately, it’s all about the gospel of Jesus-Christ. I recognize that this can seem totally foolish to someone like Hancock.

Conversely, I’m not sure what Hancock’s goal is with his anti-creationist videos. Maybe he thinks the world would be better without Christianity. In any case, his claims undermine the simple view of Scripture that man was created approximately 6,000 to 8,000 years ago. Since the gospel is based on what happened in the Garden of Eden, in a real Adam and Eve and in a short period of time compared to the evolutionary scenario, it cannot stand if its foundations are weakened.

The refutations of Hancock

Basically Hancock refutes everything that can be read in John Sanford’s book. He even criticizes the style of the writing. His disdain for Sanford and his arguments cannot be overstated. This makes me think about 1 Corinthians 1:22-24.

The instruction manual

Sanford sees the genome like an instruction manual. To Hancock this is a too simple analogy, DNA is not a book. He says:

How proteins know what to modify? They don’t. Chemistry is not a directed process, it follows the laws of physics. DNA is not a book. It’s a molecule that reacts in a multitude of ways with other molecules and the emergent properties of these interactions construct a cell. The interactions between cells are what create tissues, organ systems and organisms. These are the most basic facts of biology. So while it’s useful to sometimes describe the genome as an instruction manual, it’s just a simple analogy, not a literalism. Sanford spends the first chapter trying to impress upon his reader that the genome is literally a book. It is the instruction manual of life.

What stroke me in his video is that certain words or terms are never used. For example it’s never question of a « genetic code ». We know as young earth creationist christian that language can be « adapted » in evolutionary literature so as to not use certain words that creationist could use for their own arguments. The idea of a code is not really welcomed for « natural forces believers ».

For example, for many years, proponents of the search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI institute) have been scanning the sky with radio telescopes in the hope of discovering a signal containing coded information, which would mean that there is an intelligence responsible for the code. This seems to be a coherent expectation but strangely the idea of an intelligence behind the genetic code is disallowed by the same kind of people.

Being into the world of web technology such as JavaScript, PHP and others, I do understand what an instruction means. Why does a button turns to another color when it’s hovered by a mouse pointer? It’s because JavaScript and CSS codes instructed it to do so. And behind JavaScript there is a web browser, the chromium engine, the C++ language etc….So many layers of technologies to produce very simple things at the end.

This makes me think that if you want to help my christian ministry you can do it with this button with a nice hover effect!

DONATE

But is Sanford exaggerating his idea of an instruction manual comparing to DNA? If you type « genetic code » in google search bar, you’ll end up in the National Human Genome Research Institute in a page that was updated in September 18th, 2023. It says:

Genetic code refers to the instructions contained in a gene that tell a cell how to make a specific protein. Each gene’s code uses the four nucleotide bases of DNA: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T) — in various ways to spell out three-letter “codons” that specify which amino acid is needed at each position within a protein.

Reading such a definition from genome.gov website, I think that Sanford’s definition is quite corresponding to the reality. Apparently « instructions contained in a gene » tell a cell how to make a specific protein. This sounds very different to what we get from Hancock.

The biblical model

Jesus said that we should take his yoke upon us and that we will find rest for our souls (Matthew 11:29). Saying that, the biblical model doesn’t require much math and techy language to be defended in a coherent manner. It may seems a bit easy to just quote scriptures but basically this is a coherent approach for a christian as we’re not constructing or reconstructing a scenario to explain life, we just trust the old testimony, otherwise we would be « guesstimating » things like so many do.

The main beliefs of creationists are based on the Bible. The biblical model includes « by nature » a « supernatural force » then, in such model, it’s stupid to try explaining things without this key element, as much as it seems stupid to invoke God in the circle of « natural forces believers ».

When we deal with the debate Evolution VS Creation, we should all consider properly the nature of the two models. By taking Genesis 1 and 2 at face value, the world was created in a miraculous manner, then we can’t apply our reasoning based on natural processes. The natural processes, what we observe day by day, cannot tell us much about the origin of the world.

As Dr Terry Mortenson (expert in history of geology) would say, the way something works doesn’t tell us much about how it came into being. This is why there’s a lot of agreement between creationists and evolutionists when it comes to observable science but so little when it comes to historical science.

What we believe as christian is that the first kind of organisms were created supernaturally. Then the animals started to use their rich genome to populate the various environment of the earth. These first original couples produced every species that derived from them. We don’t believe in a common ancestor but in a common designer, applying the same set of characteristics to different kind of organisms simply because they have common needs (moving, eating, breathing…).

Note that natural selection and adaptation are parts of the biblical model. We got something like a wild elephant that produced later on mammoths, asian elephants, african elephants etc…. We think that there were in the range of 1000 to 2000 thousand created kinds at the beginning. What we clearly don’t believe is that a frog turned into a prince and that non-living things turned into living things.

We advocate for a forest of life instead of a tree of life (speaking of the fossil record).

As simple as these explanations are, and as unacceptable and laughable as they are for so many modern people, they directly derive from the book of Genesis. It’s not made up by some 21st century guys. We’re not reinventing the wheel.

The processes of evolution

Hancock enumerates the mechanisms of evolution such as:

Natural selection
Mutations
Gene flow
Genetic drift
Non random mating
Genetic recombination

I was careful to listen if there were some new fancy stuff because a lot of informed evolutionists do not argue their case like he does. Some of them now talk about « auto evolution » or « self-organization » beyong the regular mechanisms listed above. To understand why, let’s just read a few quotes taken from the book « the Altenberg 16 ».

This book was written by Susan Mazur, an evolutionist. She reported about the consortium of the Altenberg 16 that was about dealing with the issues of evolution. Basically these quotes are entirely from evolutionists:

“We are grappling with the increasing feeling … that we just don’t have the theoretical and analytical tools necessary to make sense of the bewildering diversity and complexity of living organisms” (from the invitation to attend the Altenberg conference, p. 31).

“The Altenberg 16 … recognize that the theory of evolution which most practicing biologists accept and which is taught in classrooms today, is inadequate in explaining our existence [emphasis added]” (p. 19).

“Scientists agree that natural selection can occur. But the scientific community also knows that natural selection has little to do with long-term changes in populations [emphasis added, ellipsis in original]” (p. 5).

“Do I think natural selection should be relegated to a less import role in the discussion of evolution? Yes I do” (Scott Gilbert, p. 221).

“She [Lynn Margulis] sees natural selection as ‘neither the source of heritable novelty nor the entire evolutionary process’ and has pronounced neo-Darwinism ‘dead’, since there’s no adequate evidence in the literature that random mutations result in new species” (Mazur, p. 257).

“The point is, however, that an organism can be modified and refined by natural selection, but that is not the way new species and new classes and new phyla originated” (Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, p. 314).

These quotes, all made by non-creationist experts, show much less certainty than Hancock. You will find a full review article about the altenberg 16 in creation.com website.

Genetic entropy VS punctuated equilibrium

Given what we just read above, and the fact that I knew this before Hancock’s video, I was astonished when he said:

The core reason evolutionary biology has been so successful is that it can explain the emergence of complexity and design using only natural forces.

I don’t want to be unpleasant as Hancock was toward Sanford. My worldview is that both were made in the image of God and I’m not here to make fun of « images of God ». Readers will check by themselves if the above statement is true.

We all know the famous quote from Richard Dawkins « Evolution has been observed. It’s just that it hasn’t been observed while it’s happening« . While this has made more than one creationist laugh, what Richard Dawkins wanted to say is that evolution occurs too slowly to be observed within a lifetime. Indeed it’s supposed to occur over millions of years.

But other evolutionists don’t really agree with that idea of slow evolution and to be frank the data also:

Something quite bizarre happened at the end of the Precambrian Era. Rocks from that time show evidence of an astounding variety of multicelled and hard-shelled life forms that seemingly appeared all at once. Scientists have long pondered the causes of this sudden appearance of new life forms, known as the Cambrian explosion.¹

We see that these life forms appeared suddenly. This seems to be in contrast with the idea of a slow evolution.

The Cambrian explosion is one of the main mysteries of the fossil record. All phyla and many lower taxonomic ranks appear suddenly in the Cambrian. This is the name of the “geological period” at the bottom of the Paleozoic era. Uniformitarians date the Cambrian to approximately 541 to 485 million years before us.

Evolutionists have difficulty explaining it, while creationists understand it as the natural consequence of all specially created life forms not linked by evolutionary ancestry. The quote above shows that complex species arose without even having primitive ancestors or transitional forms to explain their progressive evolution.

Indeed, if the slow and gradual process appears quite complicated in biology, there is also no evidence in the fossil record to support this gradual process. No discipline can demonstrate this.

Evolutionist Stephen J Gould recognized this problem when he wrote:

The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.

Evolutionists therefore propose “ad hoc” hypotheses to explain the lack of evidence. A popular theory is « punctuated equilibrium, » which holds that evolution sometimes occurs so quickly that there are too few intervening generations for any of these intermediate organisms to fossilize.

This seems to contradict the first quote from Richard Dawkins, that evolution could not be observed because it is very slow. Difficult to understand why we can find fossils of complex and optimized species and no intermediate fossils of transitional species.

Evolutionists contradict themselves. Remember Dawkins’s excuse about not being able to observe evolution because it is too slow. Here is a quote that goes along the same lines. The U.S. Department of Energy website admits, as does Dawkins and so many others, that no one has observed evolution occurring in nature or in the laboratory because it is very slow:

As for the fact that we haven’t made evolving life in the laboratory yet, I think that you’re expecting too much of your species. Let’s say, as a first guess, that it took blind Nature a billion years to make evolving life on earth. … How much faster do you want us to go? Even if you give us an advantage of a factor of a MILLION in speed, it would still take us a thousand years to catch up …

We can’t see evolution today because it happens too slowly and we can’t find evidence (intermediate fossils) in the past because evolution happened there too quickly (Cambrian explosion).

Punctuated equilibrium (PE) is proposed because the fossil record shows an abrupt appearance of species and a lack of substantial change within the species (crocodiles remain crocodiles, shrimp are still shrimp, etc., despite a supposed period of half a billion years). Proponents of PE attempt to explain how the model that stems from the fossil record fits into their model.

Genetic entropy: fake of fact?

Now what about genetic entropy? Are genomes deteriorating so rapidly and so severely that human survival and that of other complex organisms cannot be projected over too long periods of time? The fact that the genome is deteriorating is not a controversial issue. Let’s read a few quotes from non-creationists.

One from H.J. Muller:

These considerations would lead to the conclusion that mutation as a cause of impairment of human functions is much more general and goes a good deal further than is commonly realized…

The whole make-up of a man is the result of a tremendous succession of mutations that happened to succeed, but the ones which did not succeed, that is, those causing dysfunction, were and are ever so much more numerous in their origination and of far more varied kinds. It is a poor elementary course in genetics which does not bring out the fact that each bodily process and part is the resultant of the activity of multiple genes, every one of which is subject to its varied mutations, some with smaller, others with larger effects. That is, every one of the thousands of genes that resulted from successful mutations is liable to further change, and its next mutation will most probably be a harmful one.

One from pnas.org:

Although mutation provides the fuel for phenotypic evolution, it also imposes a substantial burden on fitness through the production of predominantly deleterious alleles, a matter of concern from a human-health perspective. Here, recently established databases on de novo mutations for monogenic disorders are used to estimate the rate and molecular spectrum of spontaneously arising mutations and to derive a number of inferences with respect to eukaryotic genome evolution. Although the human per-generation mutation rate is exceptionally high, on a per-cell division basis, the human germline mutation rate is lower than that recorded for any other species…

Quantification of the hazards associated with introns reveals that mutations at key splice-site residues are a major source of human mortality. Finally, a consideration of the long-term consequences of current human behavior for deleterious-mutation accumulation leads to the conclusion that a substantial reduction in human fitness can be expected over the next few centuries in industrialized societies unless novel means of genetic intervention are developed.

One from biorxiv.org

The extent to which selection has shaped present-day human populations has attracted intense scrutiny, and examples of local adaptations abound. However, the evolutionary trajectory of alleles that, today, are deleterious has received much less attention. To address this question, the genomes of 2,062 individuals, including 1,179 ancient humans, were reanalyzed to assess how frequencies of risk alleles and their homozygosity changed through space and time in Europe over the past 45,000 years. While the overall deleterious homozygosity has consistently decreased, risk alleles have steadily increased in frequency over that period of time. Those that increased most are associated with diseases such as asthma, Crohn disease, diabetes and obesity, which are highly prevalent in present-day populations. These findings may not run against the existence of local adaptations, but highlight the limitations imposed by drift and population dynamics on the strength of selection in purging deleterious mutations from human populations.

One from meticulousresearch.com:

The global burden of genetic diseases is seemed to be increasing. According to a report published by MJH Life Sciences (U.S.) in 2022, approximately 300,000 babies are born with sickle cell disease per year globally, and nearly 5% of the world’s population is affected by the disease.

The burden of genetic disorders in newborns is also rising. According to World Health Organization 2022 report, Down syndrome, neural tube defects, and heart defects are among the common severe congenital disabilities.

One from upi.com

Researchers have found evidence that indicates the human genome has been deteriorating since the lineage split from that of the chimpanzees some 6 million years ago. While natural selection eliminates the most harmful genetic mutations, the less severe ones remain, some of them forever fixed as part of the human inheritance, the study authors say. What has made Homo sapiens withstand extinction, they say, is the ability to adapt to their environment and their intelligence to overcome most of the unfavorable hands that Nature deals them. ‘

The number of harmful mutations that arise in each generation has been measured, and it is surprisingly high,‘ said James Crow of the Department of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. ‘This supports one theory of why evolution favors sexual reproduction, but the consequences for human health are unclear.’ Delving into humanity’s distant past, two British investigators set out to separate fact from suspicion in the long-standing hypothesis that humans suffer un unusually high rate of deleterious genetic mutations over the generations. What they found may surprise you. ‘

Deleterious mutations are occuring continuously. There are two fates for deleterious mutations; they are either eliminated by natural selection, or they become fixed in the population,‘ Adam Eyre-Walker of the University of Sussex told United Press International. ‘Our paper presents two main results: We have shown that the rate at which deleterious mutations occur, which are subsequently eliminated by selection, has been very high since humans diverged from chimpanzees.

When we begin to recognize that harmful mutations accumulate generation after generation, then it is not too difficult to realize that time will only make the situation worse. This is a downward slope. The exact figures can be debated, but the trend is not improvement but deterioration. Then genetic entropy is real.

So as far as I’m concerned, John Sanford has just put a name of its own on a phenomena we all observe. Genomes are deteriorating. The second law of thermodynamic (law of disorder) is applying and the deadly arrow of time is not going to reverse its direction…until God’s intervention.

The big picture

The debate on human origin cannot just be focused on genetic. Before talking about natural selection we have to deal with the origin of life from non-living matters. Painful and thoughtful experiences in labs have not given any results(see The Miller–Urey experiment).

In a different time, many jews did not believe in Jesus when he was preaching and doing all sorts of miracles. According to them these miracles were from the demon. But when Jesus rose from the dead, many of them believed because life can only be given by God, such a miracle could not have been produced by the evil one. The logic led thousand of jews to recognize that, the miracle being produced by God, then Jesus is legitimate, it proves his teachings.

We should also talk about the Big Bang model which seems to be « unraveling ». Let me quote an article from ICR institute:

In their editorial, Drs. Frank and Gleiser (both evolutionist) acknowledged that data from the James Webb Space Telescope show that the most distant galaxies seem much too ‘mature’ to be in agreement with Big Bang expectations. Big Bang proponents assume that light from the most distant galaxies took many billions of years to reach us.

Drs. Frank and Gleiser said the problem is “akin to parents and their children appearing in a story when the grandparents are still children themselves.

In the biblical model these observations are not a problem because all the components of the universe have pretty much the same age (less than 10,000 years old).

Examining carefully the different disciplines, it seems that most of the time the biblical model seems to fit naturally to the evidence.

In biology, evolutionists will tell you that « things appeared to be designed but are not designed« . As creationist we’ll stick only to « things appeared to be designed because they are designed« . We just follow the Occam’s razor principle.

In paleontology we see the Cambrian explosion which naturally fits with the creation model. The origin of all the animal phyla occurred within a brief geological timescale. Evolution expects that the most disparate design show up last, not first, it expects large differences built over time and not right from the start.

In cosmology, the solar system seems to be highly organized to make life possible on earth and observation of the remote galaxies doesn’t seem to show baby galaxies but mature ones.

In geology, continental drift, mountains and huge canyons, the worldwide extinction of dinosaurs seem to require Noah’s flood and the ice age that followed to be explained. We barely get those things with the secular model, even though uniformitarianism, the model that Darwin believed, was dropped for a more catastrophic model. Floodings, earthquakes and volcanoes seem to be appealed more and more to explain geological features and fossils. This naturally fits with the worldwide flood composed of many catastrophic subevents.

If we analyse human demography it easily fits a humanity that started some 5 000 years ago or to be more specific « a humanity that restarted after the genetic bottleneck of the flood« .

This is without mentioning enormous problems for the evolution story such as the faint sun paradox, the distance of the moon, the original force of the magnetic field and its following decay rate. All of these things are easily explained in the biblical model but need endless corrections and proposals in the theory of evolution. Data is just not fitting the evolutionary model of the origin.

Novel genes

Hancock argues for novel genes but really, is transforming a microbe or a fish into a human possible even if we grant millions of years? At the end of the day, I believe there is no even enough time to consider the processes of evolution occuring over millions of years.

So evolutionits have discovered the fruit fly’s rapid reproduction ability. So what? The fruit fly remains a fruit fly. So what are the implications of discovering this achievement? Never has any scientist discovered lower kinds of animals evolving into distinct higher kinds—ever!

In the evolutionary view, changes are incremental, occurring slowly over eons of time. These are sorted by natural selection and environmental factors. But we have recently realized that this does not happen exactly in this way. If this were true we should not see many changes in the space of a human lifetime. However, many scientific publications present very rapid changes. Adaptation happens very quickly before our eyes.

The most relevant point is that these changes are reversible and this in itself is a revolution in biology. Changes can occur to an organism’s body or metabolism within one generation, and a few generations later the species reverts to the characteristics of a few previous generations ago. Sometimes novel gene is just an ancient frontloaded information that became redundant and inactive.

These changes occur through genetic programs within organisms, predesigned scripts that run within these creatures in their bodies and cells. This shatters the paradigm of evolution by mutation which indicates that there is a loss of genetic information along the way.

We note, for example, that peppered moths have an internal genetic switch to regulate melanization or pigmentation of the wings. It was previously thought that the birds, by eating the white-winged butterflies, had “selected” these butterflies in favor of the black butterflies, but it is rather the genetic Swiss Army knife that is responsible. Today we find both types of butterflies, with black wings and white wings.

The same type of phenomenon exists in Darwin’s finches, whose beaks varying in size were once explained by food shortages, mutations and natural selection (external factors). But the explanation lies at the genetic level.

We can also mention blind cave fish. They were presented in the evolutionary scenario as slowly evolving fish (although the example was inconclusive as it was perceived that they had lost characteristics and not gained any). Originally surface fish with eyes and pigment on their skin, they had become cave fish with no eyes and very little pigment.

Experiments show that these changes do not require millions of years. These fish go from high pigmentation to low pigmentation very quickly. And what’s more, they are reversible. ICR reports that within 30 days, fish that had not been pigmented for generations began producing dark pigments (the experiments required UV lights). The pigments produced allow them to protect their DNA from UV rays.

Concerning the eyes of these fish, we basically think in the Darwinian paradigm that the cave version « lost » its eyes in a downward evolution but things are not that simple. These fish have a set of sensory features and functions that replace the eyes. They don’t have eyes but they do have lateral line pressure sensors. This allows them to move with precision and avoid obstacles. This can be observed by purchasing this kind of fish and putting them in an aquarium at home.

They have chemical sensing and enhanced brain capacity to process chemical sensing and pressure. This is not simply a loss of eyes but a replacement with a different sensory system adapted to navigation in a very dark place. We should not think that they are less than their surface counteirpart. Both of them are fully optimized to their environment.

Note that this « adaptation feature » is not upward evolution. Everything happens within the set of existing genes.

God in Genesis asked his creatures to multiply and fill the entire earth. As a creationist and Christian we logically expect that his creatures have been “equipped” to be able to accomplish this objective and thrive in different types of environments, seasons, etc.

To get deeper on the subject of novel genes via gene duplication, there’s a good paper from Royal Truman and Peer Terborg that shows that this doesn’t fit the bill when it comes to explain the origin of novel cellular functions.

Can human evolution happens in a few million years?

I suggest anyone to read « searching for Adam » from Dr Terry Mortenson. Here’s some content I found inside.

The copy error rate (genetic mutations) is at least 60 per generation. Using rounded numbers, if the lineages of chimpanzees and humans split between 3 and 13 million years ago and if the years between generations were about 20 years then that means there had been between 150,000 and 650,000 generations since the common ancestor of the two lineages.

In each generation there are about 60 genetic mutations, this implies that there should be a difference of 18 to 80 million mutations between the DNA of chimpanzees and humans in the evolutionary model. Let’s ignore for a moment the genetic entropy that states that a few thousand or millions of mutations are enough to bring a species to extinction.

Since humans and chimpanzees have genomes of about 3 billion letters, evolutionists expect a difference of 1 to 3%. But the difference is actually 12%, a number ten times higher than expected. This update is not very well known to the general public who are constantly told about the 99% similarity.

There are important biological reasons why ape-men never existed. One of the main ones is that ten million years is not enough to create all the genetic differences between the two species. Causing all the anatomical changes necessary to transform an ape-like creature into a human would require around 400 million DNA mutations.

Indeed, there are millions of nucleotide differences (“DNA letters”) between chimpanzees and humans. In the evolutionary timeline, this is believed to have happened within a span of 6 to 7 million years. However, calculations show that it would take much longer for these specific mutations to appear and become established within a “hominin” population.

Irreducible complexity

And we do not speak of irreducible complexity. This is the concept that the system needs to be entirely operational right from the start to be functional. If you’re going to transform the spine and the knees of a chimpanzee in order to get a human being, you’d better do it very quickly because slow changes will result in fatal flaws.

Dr Stuart Burgess says:

The human knee joint is an irreducible mechanism that must have at least four complex parts existing simultaneously and in a complex assembly to perform any useful function. The 16 critical characteristics of the knee joint correspond to several thousand information units of the genetic code. These units of information cannot evolve in increments but must exist simultaneously for the knee to perform its basic function.

On one side if evolution is slow, the problem is that lots of changes need to occur rapidly. You’re not going to get your car running if you just add a few pieces at a time. You litterally need tens of thousands of pieces if you ever want to get it started.

On the other side, if evolution happens quickly, then we should be able to observe it. I’m not speaking of a few beneficial mutations here and there but the kind of changes that would transform a fruit fly into something else. When we are speaking of evolution, we are saying, not totally ironically, that a microbe turned into a microbiologist. That’s a very long way to go, through fish, amphibian etc…. We can’t see it today nor can we in the fossil record. So the challenge for « quick evolution » is that it needs to be « very quick » in causing enormous and numerous changes to take a lower kind of animal into a higher one.

That makes me think of something Hancock said near the end of his video, that there are no organisms more advanced than others:

How can theorists possibly explain evolutionary progress (Hancock speaking of Sanford view)? There are two key problems with this question. There is no organism on the planet more advanced than any other because « advanced » is not a biological concept. It’s a social concept. Now we can talk about differences in complexity which has an interesting biological implications but progress does not mean complexity and vice versa.

For me if you’re going to take something that doesn’t walk, swim or speak and turn it into something that now walks, swims and speaks, this does seem to be a progress, because you are getting new features and abilities along the way. So Sanford is right when he speaks about evolutionary progress. The respiratory system, the blood circulation pump, the eyes, the ears, the brain and so many other things had to been built.

Look at that abstract from other evolutionists (sciencedirect.com):

The process of evolution appears as obviously progressive. The earliest organisms on earth were no more complex than today’s bacteria. Three billion years later, their descendants include orchids, ants, sharks, alligators, and eagles, which have appeared successively over several hundred million years, and our species, Homo sapiens, which came into existence within the last 200,000 years.

The concept of progress implies directional change toward a better state or condition. It contains two elements: one descriptive, that directional change has taken place; the other evaluative, that the change represents an improvement or amelioration. According to the continuity of the direction of change, progress may be uniform or not.

According to the scope of the sequence under consideration, progress may be general or particular. There are many criteria by which particular forms of net progress have occurred in evolution. Among the most meaningful is the ability of the organism to obtain and process information about the environment, which in multicellular animals is mediated by the nervous system. The ability to perceive the environment and to integrate, coordinate, and react flexibly to what is perceived has attained its highest degree in the human species.

Adaptation

Let’s note again that adaptation is working within a family of organism. Adaptation is not going transform a pig into an elephant or a bear into a whale, it’s just going to adapt the species that belong to a same family to various environments and conditions. Again, the explanation for adaptation lies at the genetic level. ICR has an interesting model: “Continuous Environmental Tracking”(CET). This is what causes lifeforms to adapt to the environment and not vice versa.

The definition of CET is given on ICR website:

CET is a new model that flows from the latest findings in molecular biology—identifying innate sensing systems and logic mechanisms that direct targeted responses to environmental challenges. Living creatures are active, problem-solving entities that continuously track changing environmental conditions and through innate systems purposefully adapt themselves over time to better fit existing niches or fill new ones.

A swiss army knife can do lots of little tasks but you’re not going to cut tons of sugar canes with it. For that you need a saber or in our modern era a machine.

Mitochondrial DNA

We could also discuss mitochondrial DNA (which is an interesting topic I discovered in « searching for Adam » from Terry Mortenson). After 180,000 years, humans would have accumulated over 2000 DNA differences (with a range between 1220 – 4700) via the process of mutation in mtDNA.

In just 4,364 years, humans would have accumulated only 30 to 114 mutations. Starting from the biblical chronology of the Septuagint, i.e. 5,300 years since the flood, the number of mutations would be a little higher.

Currently, about 78 differences exist on average in African populations (i.e. the most genetically diverse of all human ethnic groups), with a maximum difference of about 120.

It is clear that the creationist time scale accurately predicts the number of DNA differences we see today, while the evolutionary time scale predicts numbers an order of magnitude higher. Similar results hold for animal species.

In summary there is no genetic evidence to support an ancient origin of humanity. The DNA differences in the cellular compartment called the nucleus can easily be explained by two people who lived less than 10,000 years ago, as also independently suggested by human demographics.

Secular scientists have been aware of the problem for over 20 years as these scientific quotes demonstrate.

Using our empirical rate to calibrate the mtDNA molecular clock would result in an age of the mtDNA MRCA [most recent common ancestor, or the first human woman] of only ~6,500 years².

Regardless of the cause, evolutionists are most concerned about the effect of a faster mutation rate. For example, researchers have calculated that “mitochondrial Eve”—the woman whose mtDNA was ancestral to that in all living people—lived 100,000 to 200,000 years ago in Africa. Using the new clock, she would be a mere 6000 years old.³

The developmental genetic toolkit

Old and new issues plague evolution such as what the scientists call the « developmental genetic toolkit« . This is a small set of genes coordinating organismal development of body plans. They are present across the multicellular kingdom, in the various phylla and classes. This complex tooklit, in the evolution scenario, must have originated in some common ancestor to all the phyla.

The problem is that this common ancestor for which there is no proof, must have existed prior to first appearance of these phyla, before the Cambrian explosion and before multicellular life. That means the genes that control body plans would have originated when there were no bodies and the genes that control embryological developement had to have originated when there no embryos.

A quote in the Altenberg 16 is really revealing about that:

“At the point when the modern animal body plans first emerged [half a billion years ago] just about all the genes that are used in modern organisms to make embryos were already there. They had evolved in the single-celled world but they weren’t doing embryogenesis [Mazur’s braces]” (Stuart Newman, p. 52).

All of these is in harmony with the biblical model where God develops genomes like swiss army knives, they can adapt to different scenarios because the Creator knew they were going to need different attributes to survive in different environments.

As natural selection cannot explain such things, evolutionist are suggesting new concepts such as self-assembly and self-organization. But these words « organization » and « assembly » seem again to point to an intelligent designer because things, naturally, don’t get organized by themselves.

Conclusion

I do believe that genetic entropy is real because genetic deterioration is a real thing. Bad things are fixed in the human genome, it is transmitted over and over and other bad things will keep accumulating. How fast or how slow it is I can’t say but even if it was very slow, this would credit the creator for having designed a reliable model with repair mechanisms. In the meantime the consequences of the fall of Adam and Eve were not so strong as to degrading too much and too fast the human genome.

As I stated at the beginning of the article, the goal here is to defend the faith and the gospel. This is another John that told us that a long time ago:

John 20:31

…these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.