Natural Selection acts on DNA, not Mutations

aquatus1:
Natural Selection posits that a genetic mutation which confers an environmental advantage to a creature will allow it to replicate at a greater rate than others and therefore pass on the mutation to a greater number of offspring, giving it greater gene pool stability.

Natural selection does not act on genetic mutations, it acts on DNA. 99.999% of an organisms DNA is non-mutated and inherited. It is this that natural selection acts upon. Natural selection acts upon gene-sets – favouring good ones. The only way that mutations come into play is when a catastrophic negative mutation occurs. This is taken care of by natural selection – ie.. the organism dies before being able to reproduce.

Let me give you an analogy. If we improve the design of the O-ring on the Space Shuttle will we get a better shuttle? No. The O-ring is a tiny part of an incredibly complex machine (much like a human-being). It’s a fail-safe mechanism. A “better” O-ring won’t make a jot of difference to the performance of the shuttle. Yet if the O-ring is badly designed the results can be catastrophic as we saw in 1986. A human being is far more complicated than the space shuttle. A mutation would account for a tiny proportion of a human’s design (DNA). So a mutation which had a positive impact is next to impossible to achieve. Where as catastrophic mutations are very easy to achieve.

For a complex system, system failure can occur when only a tiny link in the chain goes awry. But local improvement does not generally lead to global improvement. Highly interdependent systems (like space shuttles or human beings or animals) are far too complex for this simple feedback which Darwinism presupposes.

Without positive feedback, natural selection is doomed to only ever cull mutations, never to invent new genetic information - new organs, new species, new solutions to biological problems.

JV.