beneficial mutations

Today’s ID the Future extends the discussion of A Mousetrap for Darwin: Michael Behe Answers His Critics, the newest book from Discovery Institute Press. Here the focus is on Parts 4 and 7 of the new book, and in particular Richard Lenski’s Long Term Evolution Experiment at Michigan State. What has this long-running project demonstrated? As Behe explains in the book (and elaborates on in today’s podcast), “The study has addressed some narrow points of peculiar interest to evolutionary population geneticists, but for proponents of intelligent design the bottom line is that the great majority of even beneficial mutations have turned out to be due to the breaking, degrading, or minor tweaking of pre-existing genes or regulatory regions. There have Read More ›

Evolutionists often speak in generalities about beneficial mutations. Such mutations may be rare, we’re assured, but they happen, and when they do, natural selection is there to capture, preserve and pass them along. All right, we now have some data to consider. We can put a number to the frequency of beneficial mutations in a very large sample. The number is …