One of the ID blogs says Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go study over­turns con­ven­tion­al the­o­ry in evo­lu­tion:

EurekAlert posts a pub­lic release from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go which announces that an impor­tant com­po­nent of Dar­win­ism is not exact­ly spot on. New data sug­gest that the accu­mu­la­tion of genet­ic changes is not sole­ly deter­mined by nat­ur­al selec­tion. It turns out that the rate of muta­tions deter­mines how many are incor­po­rat­ed into the genome. While this cer­tain­ly does not scream that ID is true, it does show that “things ain’t often as they are advertised.”

The release is here. Did you see how a con­ven­tion­al the­o­ry in evo­lu­tion mor­phed into a cri­tique of “Dar­win­ism.” All the study says is that high­er muta­tion rates can cause more rapid entry of pro­tein changes into the population.

That’s not what peo­ple assumed. They assumed that selec­tion was all that might con­trol the rate at which pro­tein-chang­ing muta­tions would enter the population. 

But most muta­tions, even pro­tein-chang­ing muta­tions, will have a rel­a­tive­ly small effect on pro­tein struc­ture. A new struc­ture may be slight­ly dis­ad­van­ta­geous, but day to day that dif­fer­ence will be swamped by all the oth­er dif­fer­ences between individuals.

If muta­tions accu­mu­late slow­ly, even small dif­fer­ences in fit­ness will get ham­mered out pret­ty fast. But if the muta­tions are more fre­quent but the time to elim­i­nate them is longer, you expect to see exact­ly this pattern.

The press release is a bit ambigu­ous about what exact­ly they found, but if I read it right, this is the sort of thing that is obvi­ous­ly true, but may not have been obvi­ous before some­one point­ed it out.

Does it do any harm to “Dar­win­ism” (“evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy” as we call it here on Earth)? No. This is a dif­fer­ent mod­el of how muta­tions and genet­ic diver­si­ty is main­tained in a pop­u­la­tion. Not only does­n’t it scream that IDC is true, it puts anoth­er nail in the cof­fin. The more we under­stand about life, the less rel­e­vant a mag­i­cal design­er seems.

If I’m mis­read­ing the release and what the researchers found, let me know.