Increasing Homozygosity Predicts Extinction

In accord with the Primary Axiom, both ND biologists and physicists have assumed for decades that natural selection must be the counter-balance to biological entropy. John Polkinghorne recognized the conflict between what he labeled the “pessimistic arrow of time” reflected in thermodynamic entropy and the seeming complexification of biological systems. His solution was to posit an open biological system as the expression of God’s creative will in the so-called “optimistic arrow of time.”[1] Yet while arguing there is no contradiction between these two arrows, Polkinghorne recognized there still remained no demonstrable mechanism—outside of the supernatural—to explain this interpretation. Quoting theoretical biologist John Maynard Smith, Polkinghorne concludes, “there is nothing in neo-Darwinism which enables us to predict a long-term increase in complexity.”[2] By way of analogy, one might consider the earth which functions as an open system that receives energy from the sun. The earth is able to sustain life by converting the sun’s energy to work while not violating the overarching second-law of thermodynamics.[3]Consequently, just as the thermodynamic increase of entropy leads to the ultimate heat death of the universe, the biological increase in homozygosity undermines the optimistic arrow of time and will eventually lead to biological extinction. Robert J. Spitzer summarizes the problem:

Systems do not spontaneously get more organized. To make a system more organized takes something coming in from outside and expending energy…. That is why dead bodies decompose, but do not recompose! Of course, these are, ultimately, probabilistic statements. Entropy can have random fluctuations downward, but these are usually very tiny decreases, and the larger the decrease in entropy, the more unlikely it is to happen.[4]

The same principle holds true for biological systems—mutations can provide some fluctuation in the organisms, but the trend is always toward a loss of information and increased homozygosity. John C. Sanford concludes that mutational entropy within the genome is very strong and “there is now strong biological evidence of genetic entropy in RNA viruses such as the influenza virus. All three strains of influenza which caused major human pandemics in the 20th century displayed evidence of rapidly declining virulence correlating with mutation accumulation.”[5] Genetic entropy refers then to the natural degradation of information contained in the genome over time. This degradation occurs through the regular accumulation of deleterious mutations undetected by natural selection as they are too small to eliminate.

Sanford further illustrates the problem of genetic entropy through recent estimates of the human germline mutation rate which reveal the alarming number of near-neutral mutations calculated to around 93.6 mutations per birth and translates to a conservative estimate of 100 mutations per person per generation.[6] The resulting problem is that no selection scheme within the Primary Axiom can experientially demonstrate the power to reverse the damage being done. Additional research suggests that the probability of producing even one positive mutation is 1 to 10⁶³ for a protein chain of just 92 amino acids.[7]  Summarizing the work of Douglas Axe, Meyer gives the following illustration.[8] Imagine if a person uses a 3-dial bike lock with 1,000 possible combination and allowed a thief enough time to attempt to crack the code 500 times, the probability of him succeeding would be positive. Axe proposed taking the estimated total number of organisms (from bacteria to the highest order of organism) that had ever lived in the Earth (10⁴⁰) over the past 3.8 billion years and assumed that each one generated at least one useful gene in every generation. However, even assuming 10⁴⁰ evolutionary trials over all of earth’s history, the conditional probability of generating a useful sequence compared to the 10⁷⁷ trials needed to produce a useful genetic mutation still remains false (1 in 10³⁷). Selection fails to work when too many mutations are present because there is not enough excess population to “select out” without causing extinction. Jeanson’s observation based on his own research is relevant as he concludes that, “left to themselves, physical structures don’t spontaneously assemble into creatures with heads and tails. Instead, thanks to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, they degrade”^[9] Consequently, the problem of genetic entropy undermines Polkinghorne’s optimistic arrow of time and means that genomic degradation through increasing homozygosity will lead to infertility which will reduce the population base for natural selection and result in extinction of human life. The idea that human life could have spontaneously evolved over billions of years through purely materialistic processes is not sustained by the evidence because no amount of time can counter the problem of increasing homozygosity.