Orphan Genes Defy Evolution Theory

011Evolutionists claim there is a bridge between man and the apes, the hypothetical [mythological] ape-like ancestor of both. But in reality, no one actually knows what a missing link is because, well, it’s missing! We’ve never seen one. Which is more the shame for evolutionists who depend on innumerable missing links that supposedly lived in the unobserved past and well, just disappeared, to be replaced by evolved descendants.

When Charles Darwin popularized the theory of evolution, he didn’t actually have any evidence that it was true. For his theory to be real science, we should have discovered millions upon millions of transitional fossils that show the development of one species into another species. Instead, we have zero, zilch, nada! Even evolutionist Stephen M. Stanley of Johns Hopkins University admitted that “… the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another.” What scientists find is in fact a sudden explosion of fully formed complex life in the fossil record. Go figure!

Another big problem for evolutionists to overcome is the discovery of orphan genes in the sequencing of all genomes. Whereas the classic model of evolution is based on duplication, rearrangement and mutation of genes with the idea of common descent, orphan genes are lineage specific with no known history of shared duplication and rearrangement outside of their specific species. Another problem for the evolutionary model of animal origins is the fact that these DNA sequences appear suddenly and fully functional without any trace of evolutionary ancestry, a fact that has been highlighted in new studies of animal, fish and insect genomes.

In a recent research paper, published in Trends in Genetics, scientists describe a new set of 1,307 orphan genes that are completely different between humans and chimps. In fact, the chimp-specific genes are not found in any other supposed chimp ancestor. These orphan genes are unique to the chimps just like the human orphan genes are unique to humans.

Another interesting fact is that they represent just a subset of the genes unique to chimps or humans. The research team only analyzed genes that were spliced, meaning complex genes that have coding and noncoding regions. Many other genes in the genome are not spliced and were not included in this study.

In a recent fish study, researchers sequenced the protein-coding genes in zebrafish and then compared the DNA sequences to other animal’s gene sequences. The results of the study found a distinct group of orphan genes only associated with zebrafish and no other animal or type of fish.

Yet another study compared the genomes of seven different types of ants with other known insect genomes. When comparing the ant genes to other insects, researchers discovered 28,581 genes that were unique only to ants and not found in other insects. While the various ant species shared many groups of genes, only 64 genes were common to all seven ant species. The researchers concluded that on average, each ant species contained 1,715 unique orphan genes.

To help explain this glaring problem, evolutionists have resorted to the myth of pervasive horizontal gene transfer (HGT), the process whereby genes are transferred from one type of creature to another without sexual reproduction. Their claim that HGT has contributed to the evolution of many, perhaps all, animals and that the process is on-going in most lineages is a hypothetical fairy tale.

Science can find no evidence that HGT can occur in the wild between multicellular organisms because there are no observed mechanisms for this transfer to take place. It is clear that relying on HGT to explain the spread of “foreign” genes is a stretch, at best, and currently is lacking key pieces of evidence. This is not the first time—and will not be the last time—that evolutionists strain to interpret straightforward evidence. The fact that genes cannot be attributed to VGT and common descent could, instead, be interpreted to mean that these genes were placed there by design, which would be the simplest and most obvious explanation.


Print Friendly

Leave a Reply

