Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Boy with three arms

Today on the news they showed a boy with three arms. He has one arm on left side and two on the right. Neither of the arms on the right are fully functional and if either of them is touched it hurts. We don't know how this happened except that the boy's DNA was somehow altered.

When DNA is altered it is damaged and bad things happen. This is because entropy (disorganization) of DNA tends to increase. In fact, every single one of us will eventually die because entropy tends to increase.

Evolutionist' believe that evolution is the result of natural selection and random mutation of DNA and this leads to more and more complex lifeforms. You might notice that evolutionist' are long winded on discussions about natural selection because we can observe that. What we have never observed is a mutation that leads to an improvement of the human species or any other species. What we do see is the extinction of species. We see species going extinct in modern times and a record of extinct species in the fossil record. This is the result of entropy.

Natural selection can't reverse the affect of entropy on DNA -- it can only slow it down.

2 Comments:

At 11:16 AM, June 28, 2007, Blogger Lord Runolfr said...

How do you know that there's anything wrong with the boy's DNA? It's possible to have good DNA and still have a harmful developmental effect. The fact that the boy has one normal arm suggests that the code for arm development is intact but was not executed correctly for some reason.

Of course, it could, in fact, be a genetic problem. Maybe that activates arm growth on the right side is flawed. Without access to the original source of the story, I can't really know.

Even if that's the case, though, the fact that one mutation had a negative effect on this boy does not mean that all "DNA alterations" are automatically harmful. Everyone has a few mutations, but most of them have little effect (since most DNA doesn't actually code for anything). For mutations that actually change or create a gene, the effect is largely circumstantial -- a change might be helpful in some environments and harmful in others.

As for mutations benefiting species, the effect is easiest to see in species with extremely short life cycles, like microbes. Drug resistance is becoming increasingly common in pathogenic microbes, which helps them to survive and propagate.

 
At 10:29 PM, June 30, 2007, Blogger Randy Stimpson said...

Hello Lord Runolfr,

Let me offer an alternative explanation for drug resistance.

It's possible that the gene pool of a microbe species already contains variants that are resistant to the antibiotics. Applying antibiotics on a repetitive basis then results in the selection of those variants.
Hence the cause is selection not mutation.

 

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