| Creation Truth Outreach, Inc. Pamphlet |
| © 2007 Creation Truth Outreach, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This pamphlet may be freely copied provided it is copied in its entirety, its contents are not altered in any manner, and additional or tighter copyright restrictions than these are not imposed on it. Revised May 5, 2008 |
| Chapter 4. Limitations On Natural Selection. 4. Natural Selection Is Ineffective If Too Many Issues Appear Simultaneously. Statistical geneticists like to talk about a term called “survival advantage.” This number represents how much of an advantage a particular trait has for its possessors. However, there is a limit to the number of different simultaneous improvements that can take place at a time. Otherwise, they get lost in the statistical “noise.” “As the number of mutations increases, [excluding extremely harmful mutations which result in still births], the individual mutation effect becomes less and less significant, and the efficacy of selection for each one approaches zero.… Each time we add a new trait that must be selected for, the maximum selective pressure that can be supplied to each trait individually must decline. As the number of traits undergoing selection increases, selection efficiency for each trait rapidly approaches zero, and the time to achieve any selective goal approaches infinity…. Trying to select simultaneously against more than several hundred mutations should clearly lead to cessation of all selective progress. Yet, even in a small human population, millions of new mutations are appearing every generation and must be eliminated! In the big picture, we really need to be selecting against billions, not hundreds, of mutations.” 22 |