Show me the money

Michael Behe holds to some version of directed mutation. Here I will try to analyze directed mutation as if it was a real theory. Previously I showed that directed mutation does not require some new kind of mutation. It only requires that specific mutations occur at a higher rate than expected by chance. For all of this analysis, I will assume Behe's criticism of evolution is correct, although it has been shown to be fallacious.

Directed mutation assumes that mutations do not arise by chance but must be put in place by some designer. If this was a real theory we would then ask about how and where this happens. The first question is whether or not selection takes over from there. There are two possibilities. Either the designer simply alters the genes of one or a few organisms, and then they survive better than those he didn't design, and so natural selection favors them. Alliteratively, the designer might induce those mutations in the entire species (assuming he can define species better than us) and change the entire species at once, so there need not be a struggle for existence and selection is not used.

It is possible to test these options, although you won't find design theorists proposing these tests or debating these options. I will look at the implications of the second alternative, and argue it is easily disproven. First, it does not fit well with the polymorphism we see at most loci in a species. All organisms in a population would have the mutation, not a mixture of some with it and some without it. More conclusively, we also wouldn't see things like selective sweeps, where other closely linked genes are selected along with the desirable genes.

If a mutation arises in one particular organism, it is surrounded by a specific sequence of DNA, called a haplotype. There will be other neutral mutations nearby. If selection favors a particular mutation, the surrounding DNA will also be favored and selected along with it. The haplotype will spread, not just the individual mutation, in what's called a selective sweep. Thus we can determine how many times a particular mutation arose. For example, there is an allele for the inability to taste PTC. Every human on the planet with this allele has the exact same haplotype at that locus. Thus, the mutation arose only once. On the other hand, there are 3-4 haplotypes for the lactose tolerance allele, so that mutation arose independently several times in the human lineage. We can determine how many times a mutation arose by determining whether the surrounding DNA is the same in all versions of the gene.

If a designer induced a mutation in many individuals simultaneously, the mutation would have a different haplotype in each individual. Eventually the signal degrades, but for mutations that are recent enough and can be tested (several million years in humans) most alleles have arisen only a few times. Thus we can disprove a designer that induces mutations in an entire populations simultaneously. We can prove common descent of mutations.

The first option, in which mutations arise in only one individual, is almost exactly the same mechanism as evolutionary biology. If this were the case, it is almost trivial in it's implications. It would not change most any of the conclusions of evolution. It would just say we have a supplement to mutation. This would still be testable, at least in principle. If these induced mutations occur continuously, as seems likely in Behe's view, we should be able to occasionally detect these freak mutation events (if Behe was correct, many thousands of these mutation events would have been required in the human lineage alone). I don't see Behe designing experiments to show this.

If this was a real theory, Behe would propose which of these alternatives he supports (or perhaps an alternative, like that all mutations were present in the first organism. As absurd at this seems, Behe has suggested something like this. It could also be tested). We might expect to see some creationists who support one of these and some supporting the other, with vigorous debates among themselves as to which is correct and experiments to distinguish between these. If we actually saw this, I would respect the creationists and grant they are doing science, even if it is wrong. But they offer no theory. They do not look at the implications. They do not argue amongst themselves or try to determine which is correct.

Creationists don't get this at all. Whenever they see evolutionary biologists arguing amongst themselves, they think this shows a weakness. It is the exact opposite. It is the lack of disagreement and debate amongst creationists that proves they do not have a theory. They want to have a big tent that includes all flavors of creationists. It seems quite obvious that a theory with a designer who designed everything at once 10,000 years ago is different from a theory involving a designer who designed gradually using directed mutation over 4 billion years, and yet ID includes both of them. A real theory would involve debate about the how and why and where and how to test these alternatives (tests that don't involve Bible quotes). The big tent is proof enough there is no actual theory, just a disparate collection of negative arguments.

I have tried to show just a little bit of what would be involved in taking ID seriously as a theory, based on a few minutes of armchair thought, yet we do not see anything resembling this in ID circles. If you want to be called a theory, do the work. Show me the money.

Not all creationists agree with Behe about common descent, or the age of the earth. How would a real science deal with these debates? I will look at a few of them in future posts.