Genetic Evolution Falsified

Hundreds of your genes work just fine in yeast and plankton, after supposedly a billion years of evolution separating us.

Evolutionists say “common ancestry.” Creationists say “common design.” Who’s right?

Ask Science Magazine, which just published a study from the University of Texas at Austin that should shock evolutionists. The commentary by Mitch Leslie in Science expresses the surprise right in the first sentences:

Yeast and humans have been evolving along separate paths for 1 billion years, but there’s still a strong family resemblance, a new study demonstrates. After inserting more than 400 human genes into yeast cells one at a time, researchers found that almost 50% of the genes functioned and enabled the fungi to survive.

“It’s quite amazing,” says evolutionary biologist Matthew Hahn of Indiana University, Bloomington, who wasn’t connected to the study. “It means that the same genes can carry out the same functions after 1 billion years of divergence.”

Scientists have known for years that humans share molecular similarities with the microorganisms that help make our bread and beer. Our genome contains counterparts to one-third of yeast genes. And on average, the amino acid sequences of comparable yeast and human proteins overlap by 32%.  [average 32%, range 9 to 92%]

That should make for some good bar jokes (“What do you and your beer have in common, Gene?”). Mitch raises a good point, though: shouldn’t organisms so vastly different have vastly different genes after so much time? Darwin’s theory predicted the gradual accumulation of variations. Neo-Darwinism predicted those variations would occur as genetic mutations. It’s been a billion years (in the evolutionary timescale) since any common ancestor of yeast and humans went their separate ways. They should not have much of anything in common. Yet “Despite a billion years of evolution separating humans from the baker’s yeast in their refrigerators, hundreds of genes from an ancestor that the two species have in common live on nearly unchanged in them both, say biologists at The University of Texas at Austin,” comments PhysOrg.

The similarity also extents to genetic pathways.  In Science Magazine, Guy Riddehough states this summary:

How far across evolution do families of genes retain their function? Yeast and humans are separated by roughly a billion years of evolutionary history, and yet genes from one can substitute for orthologous genes in the other. To study this effect systematically, Kachroo et al. replaced over 400 essential yeast genes with their human orthologs. Roughly half of the human genes could functionally replace their yeast counterparts. Genes being in the same pathway was as important as sequence or expression similarity in determining replaceability.

Here’s how PhysOrg spins the findings in favor of neo-Darwinian evolution, as if this biologist expected these results:

“Cells use a common set of parts and those parts, even after a billion years of independent evolution, are swappable,” said Edward Marcotte, professor in the university’s Department of Molecular Biosciences and co-director of the Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology (CSSB). “It’s a beautiful demonstration of the common heritage of all living things—to be able to take DNA from a human and replace the matching DNA in a yeast cell and have it successfully support the life of the cell.”

New Scientist says that it’s not just yeast. Studies of genes in ocean plankton caused the same stunned response by an evolutionist:

We’re a step closer to understanding the microbial community that inhabits the ocean – and it has some striking similarities to the community that lives inside our guts. The microbiome of the world’s biggest ecosystem and one of the smallest appear to function in surprisingly similar ways….

In both, there was an almost identical abundance of genes involved in replication, ion transport and cell motility.

“This certainly was rather a big surprise to us because we expected different ecosystems would have microbial communities with functions that would be completely different,” Sunagawa said at a press conference this week.

If prediction is a measure of scientific validity of a theory, this amounts to a falsification. This “certainly” was not what the evolutionists expected.

Two words beginning with “con-” are often found in scientific papers that appear to falsify evolution (this might be dubbed a ‘con-‘ job). The first is conservation. Genes are “conserved” when they appear un-evolved despite millions of years. The second word is convergence. Genes ‘converge’ when they are similar despite the lack of common ancestry. Evolutionary theory, however, should not expect to use either of these words. Genes and proteins should not be conserved, but exist in a constant state of flux. Organisms should not converge, but diverge. The words conservation and convergence function as rescue devices for a theory that contradicts the evidence.

In the original paper, the authors tried to rescue evolutionary expectations with “scenarios”.* But they knew that the theory was in trouble:

Theory predicts that evolutionary divergence creates Dobzhansky-Muller incompatibilities, because evolutionarily novel mutations in one species are untested in the other species’ genetic background and may be deleterious there.

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*e.g., “In simulated evolution of interacting proteins Ubc9 and Smt3, if binding to the extant partner is not enforced (“Non-Bound”), a protein’s ability to bind its ancestral partner decays rapidly as sequences diverge. However, if extant binding is enforced (“Wild Type” and “Low Stability”), even highly diverged proteins often still bind to their ancestral partners.” They don’t say who or what the “enforcer” is.

Evolutionists play word games to save their dying theory. Common ancestry works except when it doesn’t (“convergence”). Everything evolves except when it doesn’t (“conservation”). Did they expect so much similarity between a yeast and a human being after (in their view) a billion years of time? The surprised look on their faces shouts, “No!” The Darwin salvation army rushes in to the rescue, assuring the low-information reader that this is all “a beautiful demonstration of the common heritage of all living things.”

Creationists are not surprised. We know that intelligent designers often apply the same solutions in disparate systems. Lawnmowers and aircraft utilize similar mechanisms to extract kinetic energy from fuel. A subroutine in one computer program can be inserted and modified for a completely different application. The particular environmental constraints for a machine or program will often dictate the amount of change, but modularity and similarity would be expected for organisms that are all designed for the same global habitat. If anything has “evolved” it has “devolved” from original perfection due to thousands of years of mutation, cosmic rays, disease and degeneration since the Fall.

If rational people demanded that the Darwin spin doctors stop their wanton word games and face up to the criterion of falsification, it wouldn’t take long to cast Darwinian evolution into the dustbin of history where it belongs.