Are genetic mutations random in humans? Israeli study says no

A study by the University of Haifa researchers claims not all genetic mutations of human genes are randomized, challenging neo-Darwinism.

Is the view by neo-Darwinists, that genetic mutations in human genes are inherently randomized, true? A study by a team of researchers from Israel and Ghana seemingly refutes this argument.

For the past century, an assumption central to Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory is that mutations are random and accidental and that natural selection favors such accidents. In an article published in the scientific peer-reviewed journal Genome Research, researchers have found the first evidence of non-random mutations in human genes.

The Malaria proof

Using a new and innovative method, the researchers - led by the University of Haifa's Prof. Adi Livnat - have managed to prove that the rate of generation of the human hemoglobin S (HbS) mutation which protects one from malaria is higher in people from Africa in contrast to people from Europe. In other words, the mutation is not random but rather exists preferentially within the population of Africa where it is more needed.

Malaria is endemic in Africa, highly common around the entire continent; the more common development of a malaria-resistant mutation specific to the region where it is most needed cannot be explained by the traditional neo-Darwinist theories.

"We hypothesize that evolution is influenced by two sources of information: external information that is natural selection, and internal information that is accumulated in the genome through the generations and impacts the origination of mutations," explained Livnat.

While the theory of evolution is widely accepted in the scientific community, the small details have been put under a microscope for quite some time. For example, there are some impressively quick adaptations of wildlife to their changing surroundings and conditions that suggest that, if natural selection were fully true, the random accidents mentioned earlier were happening at an astonishingly fast pace.

Until now, the only response to this proposed problem was Lamarckism, which claims that the physical changes in organisms which occur during their lifetimes can be passed along genetically to offspring. Since this was not proven to work, the random mutation was maintained as the prominently held belief.

Livnat, alongside lab manager Dr. Daniel Melamed, managed to develop a new record-breakingly accurate method of detecting random mutations which they applied in their research to track the development of the HbS mutation. If random, the mutation should appear relatively equally throughout both Europe and Africa.

Refuting Darwinists' random mutation belief

"Contrary to the widely accepted expectations, the results supported the nonrandom pattern," the University of Haifa announced. "The HbS mutation originated de novo not only much faster than expected from random mutation but also much faster in the population (in sub-Saharan Africans as opposed to Europeans) and in the gene (in the beta-globin as opposed to the control delta-globin gene) where it is of adaptive significance."

These results effectively contradicted the commonly-held random mutation belief held by Darwinists.

“The results suggest that complex information that is accumulated in the genome through the generations impacts mutation, and therefore mutation-specific origination rates can respond in the long-term to specific environmental pressures,” said Prof. Livnat, whose study was funded by a grant given by the  John Templeton Foundation. “Mutations may be generated nonrandomly in evolution after all, but not in the way previously conceived. We must study the internal information and how it affects mutation, as it opens the door to evolution being a far bigger process than previously conceived.”

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