Friday, November 1, 2013

A "Perfect Painting" Proves that Beneficial Mutations Are Impossible and Neutral Mutations Are Impossible

7:34 AM  Admin  

There are times when the stupidity of creationists just makes you gasp. This is one of those times. The creationist is Denyse O'Leary, who holds some kind of record for stupidity.

In this case she can be partially excused since she seems to be quoting someone named Laszlo Bencze. You can read the whole thing at: Is there no such thing as a neutral mutation? Art explains why there probably isn’t.

Denyse quotes Laszlo Bencze (I think) talking about a painting by French artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867).
Here is a famous and gorgeous painting by Ingres which I just saw in person at the Frick Museum in New York.

Let’s imagine we can improve it by adding a dot of paint 1mm in diameter to it. In evolutionary terms we will give it a “point mutation,” the smallest possible change. If we add this dot randomly, the odds are pretty high it will damage the painting by creating an obvious, intrusive speck. So let’s give evolution every advantage. Let’s make the process far more likely to succeed by having the great contemporary painter, David Hockney, add the speck wherever he thinks it will “do the most good.”

Now I happen to know that Hockney is a great admirer of Ingres and would be shocked and dismayed at any such request. But if a cruel tyrant under pain of death forced him to do it, Hockney would understand that there is no place he could possibly place a dot of paint that would improve the painting. Like a living thing, the painting is so well crafted that anything he might add to it could only be neutral at best. So Hockney would strive to place the most neutral dot he could by choosing a pigment that matched some dark portion of the painting and hope to hide his speck there.

But would such a speck be truly neutral? No matter how well it matched the color, wouldn’t it be visible as a raised dot under the right lighting conditions? And wouldn’t that actually damage the painting even if ever so slightly? And this is precisely Sanford’s point. In the world of biology it is impossible to create a neutral mutation. The change may be extremely slight, even invisible, yet always a degradation no matter how small.
When you think about it, it's really very sad this this is the best the Intelligent Design Creationists can offer. They are so ignorant that you can almost feel sorry for them.

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