[Last Updated: 22 February 2010]

Dr. Terry Mortenson provides a great example of what evolution isn’t in his review of a 33-page 2004 National Geographic cover story which asked, “Was Darwin wrong?”

It’s examples exactly like this that are typically paraded as evolution in action, when really it is nothing of the sort.

The bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, is troublesome to humans, but doctors can destroy it with an antibiotic. After the patient takes the antibiotic, it is absorbed through the cell wall of the bacterium. It has the genetic information to make an enzyme which reacts with the antibiotic converting it into a poison, killing the bacterium. But due to a mutation, some H. pylori cannot make the enzyme and so cannot convert the antibiotic and so do not die but reproduce, giving the patient and doctor a new problem. The mutant survived through a loss of information, which is not a process that will eventually lead to an increase of information to change a bacterium over millions of years into a biologist.

http://creation.com/national-geographic-is-wrong-and-so-was-darwin

In the scenario above the organism with the mutation has indeed – to use evolutionary language – gained an advantage over the other H. pylori in an environment with the antibiotic present. So has the H. pylori evolved? Well that depends on what you mean by evolution. Is the change that occurred in the organism in the direction for the bacterium to develop new body parts or body plans; is it on it’s way to becoming a baboon, a bird, or a badger? Most certainly the answer is NO. The information change is a negative one, not a positive one. In fact in this example not only is no new information created but the mutation destroyed the information in the bacterium’s genome that would normally have allowed it to produce an enzyme. So the non-evolved H. pylori can make the enzyme and the so-called evolved ones cannot; a damaging mutation with a beneficial side effect. Yet examples just like this (information-destroying changes) are often used to provide support for macro evolution, which requires observable information-gaining changes.

If it makes it any easier to understand, believing that these kinds of changes support the evolutionary theory is analogous to believing that your bank balance will steadily increase the more money you take out. Wish I had a bank account like that!

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