Hi All,
I wondered if some of the more knowledgeable could take a little time to respond to the following or possibly provide a link that deals with some of the ideas. It is from a Christian Apologetics website, but it won't be helpful to me if you choose to rubbish the article solely on the basis of its source. Sincerely looking for answers - Blacknad.
"Even on a theoretical level, it does not seem possible for mutations to account for the diversity of life on earth, at least not in the time available. According to Professor Ambrose, the minimum number of mutations necessary to produce the simplest new structure in an organism is five (Davis, 67-68; Bird, 1:88), but these five mutations must be the proper type and must affect five genes that are functionally related. Davis, 67-68. In other words, not just any five mutations will do. The odds against this occurring in a single organism are astronomical.
Mutations of any kind are believed to occur once in every 100,000 gene replications (though some estimate they occur far less frequently). Davis, 68; Wysong, 272. Assuming that the first single-celled organism had 10,000 genes, the same number as E. coli (Wysong, 113), one mutation would exist for every ten cells. Since only one mutation per 1,000 is non-harmful (Davis, 66), there would be only one non-harmful mutation in a population of 10,000 such cells. The odds that this one non-harmful mutation would affect a particular gene, however, is 1 in 10,000 (since there are 10,000 genes). Therefore, one would need a population of 100,000,000 cells before one of them would be expected to possess a non-harmful mutation of a specific gene.
The odds of a single cell possessing non-harmful mutations of five specific (functionally related) genes is the product of their separate probabilities. Morris, 63. In other words, the probability is 1 in 108 X 108 X 108 X 108 X 108, or 1 in 1040. If one hundred trillion (1014) bacteria were produced every second for five billion years (1017 seconds), the resulting population (1031) would be only 1/1,000,000,000 of what was needed!
But even this is not the whole story. These are the odds of getting just any kind of non-harmful mutations of five related genes. In order to create a new structure, however, the mutated genes must integrate or function in concert with one another. According to Professor Ambrose, the difficulties of obtaining non-harmful mutations of five related genes "fade into insignificance when we recognize that there must be a close integration of functions between the individual genes of the cluster, which must also be integrated into the development of the entire organism." Davis, 68.
In addition to this, the structure resulting from the cluster of the five integrated genes must, in the words of Ambrose, "give some selective advantage, or else become scattered once more within the population at large, due to interbreeding." Bird, 1:87. Ambrose concludes that "it seems impossible to explain [the origin of increased complexity] in terms of random mutations alone." Bird, 1:87.
When one considers that a structure as "simple" as the wing on a fruit fly involves 30-40 genes (Bird, 1:88), it is mathematically absurd to think that random genetic mutations can account for the vast diversity of life on earth. Even Julian Huxley, a staunch evolutionist who made assumptions very favorable to the theory, computed the odds against the evolution of a horse to be 1 in 10 to the 300,000".
Blacknad.
