Geneticist Says Human Evolution Has Ended

The Times: “Leading Geneticist Steve Jones Says Human Evolution is Over” That’s one small step for a man, one giant falling-flat-on-its-face step for mankind’s evolution.

Human evolution may be a thing of the past, according to a leading geneticist (and a debate opponent of AiG President Ken Ham on BBC-TV many years ago). Of course, that’s nothing new for those of us who didn’t believe it in the first place!

According to University College London professor Steve Jones, human evolution is slowing and may stop because of the disappearance of older fathers in Western societies. No, not the literal disappearance; rather, Jones points out that males are no longer having children in older age, as was once common.

“Wrapping themselves in knots”

AiG–U.K./Europe’s Paul Taylor, writing in the newsletter for European supporters of Answers in Genesis, made excellent points on Jones’s lecture:

There is a presupposition not stated . . . . The great geneticist supposes that more mutations equal more genetic information in the DNA. Yet this is never observed to be the case. In fact, the mutations caused always involve a rearrangement or loss of information. Thus, the supposed upward pressure of evolution is, in fact, a downward pressure. Jones almost acknowledged this in an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, on the same day as the article. He commented “there is no evidence that humans today are more intelligent than they were in Victorian times.” He also suggested some even earlier historical periods, where people were equally intelligent to those of us today. Either Jones is suggesting that evolution stopped even earlier, or he is acknowledging that it never actually happened in the first place.

This is what is so amazing about Jones's article. It might be fair to summarise it thus:

Actual scientific evidence suggests that humans are not evolving today.
We don't have any evidence that they were evolving in the past either.
But we think that they were!

Why do evolutionists refuse to follow the actual flow of the evidence: that humans never evolved—we are all descended from the man and woman that God made on the Sixth Day of Creation.

So what does this have to do with (supposed) evolution? Jones discussed the topic in a lecture at University College London titled, “Human Evolution is Over.” Jones first discussed the three components of evolution: natural selection, mutation, and random change. Older fathers are more likely to pass on mutations, said Jones, because cell divisions in males increase with age. Jones explained to the Times:

Every time there is a cell division, there is a chance of a mistake, a mutation, an error. For a 29-year old father [which the Times notes is the mean age of reproduction in the West] there are around 300 divisions between the sperm that made him and the one he passes on – each one with an opportunity to make mistakes. For a 50-year-old father, the figure is well over a thousand. A drop in the number of older fathers will thus have a major effect on the rate of mutation.

Thus, the societal trend against older fathers is allegedly dampening human evolution, compared to the ordinariness of men in centuries past fathering children as they grew older.

Jones also notes that modern medicine, care-giving, and agriculture have overcome natural selection and randomness. “In ancient times half our children would have died by the age of 20,” he noted. “Now, in the Western world, 98 per cent of them are surviving to 21. . . . Worldwide, all populations are becoming connected and the opportunity for random change is dwindling.”

Because mutations are harmful in the vast majority of circumstances, it’s possible that this trend will prove beneficial for the human race, just as modern medicine, care-giving, and agriculture have. Of course, in the eyes of evolutionists, it’s the one rare mutation that invents a new anatomical feature that drives the evolutionary story forward, so perhaps this news may upset them!

Also interesting was Jones’s comment about the effect of globalization on the human race: “We are mixing into a global mass, and the future is brown.” This reminds us that we are all one race (Acts 17:26), with our skin merely different shades of brown as caused after the dispersion at Babel (Genesis 11).

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