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Genetic Entropy & The Mystery of the Genome

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Genetic Entropy is a most beneficial book in that it has arisen as the practical outcome of someone who has worked in the field of genetics. The author's work in genetics is both practical and theoretical. Breeding plants allowed him to see first hand the results of selection. He has combined this first hand knowledge with the more theoretical underpinnings of population genetics to arrive at a conclusion that may surprise the reader. Genetic evidence indicates that mutations, rather than being the friend of human evolution, are actually slowly destroying the human genome.

In this book evidence is shown that most mutations act at such a slight level in terms of increasing or decreasing the fitness level of an organism that they are virtually impossible to select for. This allows for their accumulation until they reach what might be called a "tipping point". Once the tipping point is reached, the species faces extinction within a relatively few generations.

Sanford goes on to show that this "evolution toward decay" cannot be rescued by currently known genetic processes. Natural selection simply slows the process down.

The book is quite readable for the educated lay-person and the appendices contain a useful bibliography of articles by experts in several fields of genetics.

If you would like to read a well documented, brief description of genetics and natural selection, that differs somewhat from the standard textbooks presentation, this book is for you. If you are a person studying genetics this book will provide you with some new information that may help you to interpret other evidence as it presents itself.

With a boatload of peer-reviewed articles, Dr. John Sanford, of Cornell University, certainly has the credentials to commend him as a serious scholar and a powerful force in the field of plant genetics. I wholeheartedly recommend his book.

If the author is right, one fundamental axiom of evolution theory cannot be right. Sanford is asserting that it is not possible to increase information by mutation. This is manifest, since information is not a statistic factor. Information, capable of effecting something, needs at least a receptor which/who understands the message. If for example a molecule changes spontaneously in the genetic substance of the DNA the cell in which this happens should "know" what to do with it!
An "und" can only be understood as "and" when the reader is accepting this contents. There is no change in the meaning. Sanford is asserting quasi that there is a tolerance as long as the meaning is unchanged or is just about insignificant changes ("let us try to take the "und" as an "and"), which are already given due to the variability of the genetic material (the variability a highly complex balanced thing). But for an "und/and" which becomes an "and lkjdfslfgfhkölk" or an "and we do not like foreign language" there is nothing and nobody that has wish or want to be able to understand it, let alone to build up the means for it.
Of course the representatives of evolution theory have sedulously to assert that it be different. But they do not sound convincing.
Sanford is a renowned biologist, who researched 25 years on an American university as a professor, before he wrote this book. In this book he is claiming to have found the proof with his research that there is not such a thing as information increase by mutation. I bet they will not give him the Nobel prise for that. He says that the opposite is just right, mutation effects loss of information. This is easy for imagination, because when you change accidentally the letter string in a text, you will quickly find it unreadable.
Sanford developed some kind of Gene cannon with which it is possible to bring DNA into the cells, thereby implanting selectively pieces of Genes. Professor Bergmann looked through the professional literature for documented mutations. He found 453 732. None of them with an increase of information!
The author is showing: The number of disadvantageous mutations because of a loss of information is even increasing in every organism, because the weakly selectable mutations can not be eliminated and hence do gather. Each generation receives more mutations as the previous one and is therefore inferior to the previous. But how then could there be at all a development to something higher?
Sanford is also calculating that even under the assumption of occasional positive mutations it takes much too long until they settled themselves in the following generations. The evolution of Darwin has not enough time to take place even if the evolution mechanics would work! I missed this statement in many other books on the topic although it is so obvious when you think about the evolution mechanics. A million years sounds big. But for the sheer number of mutations which would be necessary for single steps of the evolution process, facing the many side-steps and failures and blind ends and useless genetic, the disposable generations would never be sufficient for, even if you count one useful mutations on two useless ones (and thereby you would not have even solved the problem of "reading" the new information).
In the period of time in which man is said to have evolved from apes not only one suitable mutation could have taken place! The grade of information density in the genetic material of man is unimaginably high. Darwin didn`t know anything about it.
But it has to be said that others had these statements and conclusions of the author also before him. The enthralling question is properly rather - for believers in evolution: when will they be disproved and - for all the others: how fast the number of scientist will increase who changed the doubt about the correctness of the evolution factors and finally the theory into certainty.
The personal evolution of Professor Sanford can only be called remarkable. He has been a renowned scientist, who became famous among experts through groundbraking discoveries, already before he became a Christian. The farewell from his earlier non-christian world view from which he proceeded all of his life has been a battle for years. It is difficult to throw an ideology over board, when this ideology helped you to live your days comfortably!
But the results of his research left no other choice! His scientific horizon, he says, was enlarged. He goes on to assert that he proved the impossibility of the information increase by mutation. That so many scientists cling to their traditional wrong presuppositions is after his opinion either an ideological obligation or a mythical belief. It must not be that one has been researching his whole life under wrong premises!

In my time studying genetics, the claims of evolution have never seemed possible. There are so many things that have to occur to create a protein (even more if you want a functioning protein), and there are so many things that can go wrong in protein manufacturing within a cell. So, when I saw Dr. Sanford's book, I had to give it a read to see what he had to say.

Stanford makes a superb case for genetic degradation rather than forward evolution. The author takes Kimura's, and many other noted geneticists' data (he cites Science, Nature and dozens of other peer-reviewed pubs) and instead of sweeping the data under the rug like population geneticists do (see Scientific American here for an example of this:[...] , he takes the data and applies it to evolution. (*Sanford uses more scholarly journals than the popular Sci Amer. I post that simply as a free means to view how population geneticists see the problems and then sweep it.)

Until looking up some of the sources, I was a little worried that Sanford was not making enough of a case for his initial claims. However, after looking at the sources, Sanford is working from widely held experiments. His changes come later in the application of the data. I will say that looking at the application of the data by evolutionary biologists and looking at Sanford's application, Sanford wins the logic test hands down. The only thing he lacks that the scientists he references is that Sanford is not blindly obedient to the Primary Axiom (the idea that mutation and natural selection drives speciation in evolution.) He simply takes that data logically and notes how the data contradicts the postulations of evolution.

Much of the data Sanford refers to varies slightly from publication to publication, but when he takes the data, he views it in two ways. First, he gives every advantage to evolution when going through the data, and shows how it is impossible for evolution to occur in those situations. Then he proceeds to look at the data from the most commonly held numerical value, and further degrades the chances of evolution to occur.

He deals a lot with probability, but not to an extent that a person unfamiliar with statistics can understand. Sanford uses down to earth analogies for what he postulates, and then goes on to state in more scientific terms the facts he is trying to convey from the analogy.

One does not have to have a firm grasp on genetics or evolution to read this text, but it would help you get more out of the book if you do. There is a glossary in the back, and only on tangential topics does he refer to a term that is not clearly defined for those not trained in biology.

Sanford takes on the tough data without sweeping it under the rug like the population geneticists do. (They do this because they unerringly believe in the Primary Axiom, and assume that since the Primary Axiom is true that this data can be swept under the rug by nebulous processes such as punctuated equilibrium, Muller's ratchet, and others (which he explains if you don't know what they are). the problem with this is the genetic data supports none of these processes, and Sanford attacks that in this writing.)

I would not classify this book as an Intelligent Design book, as he does not focus the majority of text on Intelligent Design. This book is a critique of evolution through genetics. If you want to read about ID, Sanford does allude to a designer at times, and invites people to Christ in his final 2-page chapter stating his beliefs in Jesus as Lord and Savior.


If you are looking for a book on genetic problems behind evolution, and would like to have resources in the book to explain terms and processes (in the glossary and appendices), then this is the book.

The book was written for lay people, with simple pictures and analogies, but the scientific argument presented is extremely compelling and extremely relevant to medicine, health policies, and the design-vs-evolution debate.

Our genome is breaking down constantly, and the negative mutations are piling up faster than the positive ones. No known mechanisms of natural selection are sufficient to change this trend. This implies the falseness of the neodarwinist idea that our genome gradually arose over millions of years of random mutations and natural selection. Other proposed mechanisms such as endosymbiosis, gene duplication, synergistic epistasis, etc do not seem able to address the main problem of the degenerating genome, measured in the lab.

The hypothesis of the book continues to be confirmed by the latest scientific research. For example, the Wellcome
Trust Sanger Institute's recent whole-genome study measured approximately 60 new genetic mutations per generation (Nature Genetics, [...]). Two recent papers in Science show that antagonistic epistasis is far more common than synergistic epistasis, meaning that multiple mutations tend to cancel out any beneficial effect of each one individually and leading to "diminishing returns" ([...]).

On the whole, Sanford's book is well worth reading. It demonstrates yet another fatal flaw in the neodarwinian theory of evolution.

I really enjoyed reading Dr. Sanford's book, Genetic Entropy. Here are some words from it that I particularly appreciated: "the jump in complexity from a bacterium to a human being is arguably as great as the jump from the little red wagon to the space shuttle! There is simply no human technology that serves as an adequate analogy for the complexity of a human life."

Further on, he wrote these helpful words, which can make some sense to a layman: "These small molecules make up the individual steps of the spiral-staircase structure of DNA. These molecules are the letters of the genetic code, and are shown symbolically as A, T, C, and G. These letters are strung together like a linear text. They are not just symbolically shown as letters, they are very literally the letters of our instruction manual. Small clusters or motifs of these four molecular letters make up the words of our manual, which combine to form genes (the chapters of our manual), which combine to form chromosomes (the volumes of our manual), which combine to form the whole genome (the entire library)."

On pages 105f, Sanford wrote: "If the genome is actually degenerating, it is bad news for the long--term future of the human race. It is also bad news for evolutionary theory. If mutation/selection cannot preserve the information already within the genome, it is difficult to imagine how it could have created all that information in the first place!"

On page 135, he wrote: "a single gene is just a microscopic speck of irreducible complexity within the universe of irreducible complexity comprising a single cell. Life itself is the very essence of irreducible complexity, which is why we cannot even begin to think of creating life ourselves. Life is layer upon layer of irreducible complexity."

On page 150, he wrote: "If the Primary Axiom is wrong, then our basic understanding of life history is also wrong.... If the genome is degenerating, our species is not evolving. There appears to be a close parallel between the aging of a species and the aging of an individual. Both seem to involve the progressive accumulation of mutations. Mutations accumulate both within our reproductive cell lines and our body cell lines. Either way, the misspellings accumulate until a threshold is reached when things rapidly start to fall apart."

On page 154, he wrote: "What is the mystery of the genome? Its very existence is its mystery. Information and complexity which surpass human understanding are programmed into a space smaller than an invisible speck of dust. Mutation/selection cannot even begin to explain this. It should be very clear that our genome could not have arisen spontaneously. The only reasonable alternative to a spontaneous genome is a designed genome. Isn't that an awesome mystery-one worthy of our contemplation?"

Dr. Sanford clearly presents evidence as a geneticist that neo-Darwinism doesn't have a leg to stand on. It is somewhat disconcerting that we are on a genetic spiral toward extinction, with no known remedy to the dilema. His findings mirror what I've discovered as an information scientist, but from a different perspective. Science is beginning to call for evaluation of axioms that are believed as unassailable, and this books adds to the mounting evidence. A great book!

This book is amazing! Dr John Sanford demonstrates his arguments very clearly. (He may be a little repetitious at times, but I suspect this is deliberate because he knows the topics covered in his book will be poorly received by most due to bias before they even glance at the pages.)

The message is loud, clear, and founded in observable, repeatable, present-time, hard science. Though some may choose to debate the finer points of his arguments, Dr Sanford's conclusions are not whimsical. They are simple, factual, and beyond doubt.

We are all mutants. The human biological DNA code is rapidly degenerating with each generation.

The popular notion of evolution is not just imaginative; it is biologically IMPOSSIBLE. The exact opposite of the evolutionary dream is truly, insidiously happening.

It is factual. It is measurable. It is unmistakable. It is irreversible. The human race is doomed. Charles Darwin had no idea about DNA. If he knew what we know now, his life would not have been the same.

Despite the most gregarious and benevolent intentions of men, the facts of biological life and reproduction are all gloom. The scientific forecast - implicit in Sanford's book - spells extinction for the entire human race in less than several hundred generations at best.

The author powerfully presents the evidence for the vulnerability of the genetic code. We are aging as a population while we are loosing genetic information from one generation to the next. This is a realization that stands in stark contrast to the entire body of evolutionary dogma.

The editing was a little rough, but the message was clear. The book was interesting and informative. Rather than a bunch of name calling and condescending comments, I would like to see an attack on the merits of the book if someone believes that it is incorrect.

This book is a great read.

It helps you understand the fundamental level of where evolution should occur, in the genome.

Dr. John Sanford writes a very scientifically based book on how the mechanism of evolution can't work. Random mutations with natural selection CANNOT create complexity or design. Essentially mutations lose or distort information rather than creating it, even with natural selection only choosing "good mutations" which as you find out in this book are statistically negligible once you account for occurrence (one out of a million mutations is anything above the line of neutrality and a mutation occurs in only one out of a million replications), selection, genetic drift, mutational baggage, secondary effects, and further selection and the need of high selective pressure for the "new" attribute.

He gives some mild rebuttals to Richard Dawkin's the Blind Watchmaker examples.

I LOVED the book and would recommend it to anyone.