mutating mutation explanations

Excerpts from an essay by Phillip Johnson in the October 2007 issue of Touchstone...

Johnson opens with a recent political event...

At a very early stage of the campaign for the 2008 presidential election, a television event was staged at which a domineering host insisted that the Republican candidates answer “yes” or “no” to his question, “Do you believe in evolution?” It was a trick question designed to embarrass, because evolution is not a single, precisely defined concept, but a set of related concepts, some of which are much better supported than others. The candidates should have demanded a precise definition before they would answer, but the format did not permit that option....

By demanding a yes or no answer to his oversimplified question, “Do you believe in evolution?”, the host was refusing to allow the candidates to make sense of his question before answering it. That kind of oversimplification belongs to the realm of partisan politics or comedy, not science.

From there, Johnson notes that the same sort of thing occurs in "the profession"-- from people who, definitely, ought to know better. He uses the Darwinian "explanation" for sickle-cell anemia-- a reference to mutations-- and then makes these comments:

The modern form of Darwin’s theory provides a good answer...[But] the story illustrates a general truth about mutations, which tends to discredit the Darwinian assumption that mutations, with natural selection, can be used to build new complex organisms, like people, from much simpler ancestors. Actually, mutations do not build adaptive complexity, but degrade it....

My colleague Michael Behe’s new book, The Edge of Evolution, uses the long history of the war between humans and the malarial parasite to show what the Darwinian mechanism can and cannot do....

Of course, Richard Dawkins attacked the book and its author when he reviewed it in the New York Times. The review was a literary drive-by shooting. After contemptuous remarks of a personal nature, Dawkins ignored all Behe’s data about what mutations have actually been shown to do, merely commenting that favorable mutations must be sufficiently plentiful to allow us to obtain a great variety of dog breeds. Dog breeders are not dependent upon mutations, however, which would damage their animals. Breeders bring out the variety that was latent in the genome from which they started.

The truth about mutations is sufficiently well known now to scientists around the world, that the day will eventually come when it can no longer be excluded from mainstream scientific discourse. It is often said that science is a self-correcting enterprise. I have faith that this claim is true—in the very long run.