"In Science, ten authors from two consortia discuss how “Negative selection in humans and fruit flies involves synergistic epistasis.” Basically, this means that organisms work hard to rid themselves of bad mutations. Negative selection predominates, they say. We can all be thankful that our bodies try to protect us from harmful mutations, but how did bacteria climb up to humanity that route? One cannot climb Mt. Improbable by trying to stay on the same stair in a howling wind.Science Daily‘s summary of the paper in Science, referenced above, discusses “Ongoing natural selection against damaging genetic mutations in humans.” The authors admit to an idea very similar to John Sanford’s classic, Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome. He claimed that humans pass on so many neutral mutations, the human population is more likely to go extinct than improve by rare ‘beneficial’ mutations, if there are any. This article echoes that concept:
The survival of the human species in the face of high rates of genetic mutations has remained an important problem in evolutionary biology. While mutations provide a source of novelty for the species, a large fraction of these genetic changes can also be damaging. A newborn human is estimated to have ~70 new mutations that the parents did not have. In a project conducted by Brigham and Women’s Hospital research geneticist Shamil Sunyaev, PhD, and University of Michigan professor Alexey Kondrashov, PhD, scientists studied natural selection in humans. Their findings are published in a new paper in Science, where they report that, as a species, humans are able to keep the accumulation of damaging mutations in check because each additional mutation that’s added to a genome causes larger, and larger consequences, decreasing an individual’s ability to pass on genetic material." CEH
So God created man in his own image,..
Genesis 1:27
