John Sanford's declining genes

A creationist friend recently lent me a John Sanford DVD entitled 'The Mystery of Our Declining Genes', which I finally got round to watching this week.

Genetic Entropy

Sanford's main premise is that our genes are degenerating at an alarming rate

Sanford is the latest great hope for creationists; he is a pleasant and reasonable man and apparently a well-respected Cornell geneticist with sound academic credentials, who has moved from atheism through theistic evolution all the way to Young Earth Creationism. 'Declining Genes' is filmed from a 45-min lecture given to the unsurprisingly creationist Creation Ministries, in which he claims to be able to refute the evolutionary Neo-Darwinian synthesis completely by his theory of Genetic Entropy.

I must confess I didn't fully understand (or attend to) all of the talk. His main premise is that our genes are degenerating at an alarming rate, and that 'bad' or harmful mutations are so much more frequent than 'good' or beneficial ones that natural selection is like baling water out of a sinking ship. His view is that selection is God's method of slowing down the inevitable degradation and extinction of species rather than being capable of producing any actual positive developments. He's also put together a computer simulation called Mendel's Accountant (freely available to download) which he claims conclusively backs up Biblical timescales (and the ages of people in Genesis), and supposedly refutes standard evolutionary accounts.

Unfortunately as a layman I can't really interrogate Sanford's biology or his maths, so I'll have to leave that to others. However, so far my search of the web hasn't turned up any good refutations of - or indeed any proper engagement with - his ideas. My initial impression is that his arguments seem, at least on the surface, fairly plausible. However, I remember being equally impressed with Michael Behe's 'irreducible complexity' when I first came across it, and that concept has now been very effectively refuted.

A note of caution

I would just sound a note of caution to excited creationists that a single idea in one field, however impressive, is unlikely to be able to overturn all the overwhelming evidence for an old earth and for evolution across numerous other fields. If there is any weight in Sanford's findings, then they will stand out as a puzzling anomaly to address, but not as the paradigm-shifting argument-clincher that he seems to imagine.

I'm also slightly unsure about Sanford's assumptions - given that most creationists eschew the principle of uniformity, his calculations seem heavily reliant on being able to extrapolate back several thousand years from today's genetic decay rate. I'm not entirely convinced either that 'bad' mutations are necessarily as detrimental as he claims, but I'll need to leave that to more qualified people to clear up.

The second law of thermodynamics

Sanford seems to slightly misunderstand entropy, which is clearly crucial to his theory

Finally, I think that, along with many creationists, Sanford - not a chemist or physicist - does slightly misunderstand the second law of thermodynamics and the principle of entropy, which is clearly crucial to Sanford's theory. Entropy, they argue, must always increase according to the 2nd law; your house doesn't simply tidy itself (cue appreciative chuckles from audience). So the idea of natural selection being able to increase order is clearly laughable and evolution is disproved.

What they don't seem aware of, or are ignoring, is that within any specific system entropy can be decreased - at the expense of increased entropy in its environment. In biochemist Albert Lehningher's words:

"living organisms preserve their internal order by taking from their surroundings free energy, in the form of nutrients or sunlight, and returning to their surroundings an equal amount of energy as heat and entropy".

A useful related idea is Ectropy (the reverse of entropy), "a measure of the tendency of a dynamical system to do useful work and grow more organized" (Wikipedia). The Earth's ectropy is increased (entropy decreased) by the Sun's energy, and a living organism's ectropy is increased by taking in food.

So life could almost be defined as a system designed to decrease or reverse entropy internally while increasing it in the external environment.

Disquieting fundamentalism

Overall, I found watching 'Declining Genes' a strangely disquieting experience - not so much because of its challenge to my theistic evolutionary worldview, but because of its underlying fundamentalism and dogmatism. Sanford is a very pleasant, reasonable and mild-mannered man, and clearly far from unintelligent. But his wholesale adoption of fundamentalist beliefs, principles and jargon struck what seemed to me a jarring note.

He started by remarking on the 'sweet spirit' in the room, which to me sounded like an over-spiritual way of saying that the atmosphere was - unsurprisingly - friendly. He paid tribute to all the members of Creation Ministries who had faithfully been fighting for God's truth while he had been compromising with the world in espousing theistic evolution. And his whole talk was based on refuting the dangerous deception of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis with the unfailing truth of God's Word. There was no room for disagreement, middle ground or uncertainty. God's Word says, and of course the science has to back that up - how could it be otherwise? This kind of thinking scares me, especially in a man of science.