Perhaps the most prominent example in this category is the hypothesis that mutation and natural selection produce continuous genetic improvement in a population of higher plants or animals. For the past 90 years, scientists in the field of population genetics have developed sophisticated mathematical models to describe and investigate these processes and how they affect the genetic makeup of populations of various categories of organisms. The work of R. A. Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, and Sewall Wright between 1918 and 1932 laid the foundation for the field of population genetics. This work in turn, over a period of about a decade (1936-1947), led to the formulation of what is referred to as the neo-Darwinian synthesis or the modern evolutionary synthesis. This so-called modern synthesis integrated the concept of natural selection with Mendelian genetics to produce the unified theory of evolution that has been accepted by most professional biologists.

Most professional biologists have assumed the belief that the theoretical foundation of the neo-Darwinian synthesis is secure when, in reality, the foundation has not been validated. The neo-Darwinian mechanism can readily be shown to produce exactly the opposite consequences to those that are believed and claimed.^3,4,5 The reason for this state of affairs is that the scientists involved have allowed their personal biases (or assumptions) to interfere with and to “short circuit” the usual hypothesis-testing step of the scientific method.

Perhaps even more surprising, natural selection does not deliver the sort of upward genetic improvement that is generally believed and claimed.³ The reason is that natural selection is “blind” to the vast majority of mutations – it cannot act upon a favorable mutation to accentuate it or a deleterious mutation to eliminate it unless the mutation has a sufficiently large effect on the fitness of the organism in its environment. Because the vast majority of mutations are below the threshold for natural selection to detect, most bad mutations accumulate unhindered by the selection process, resulting in a downward decline in fitness from one generation to the next.^4,5 Because bad mutations outnumber favorable ones by such a large factor, their cumulative effect utterly overwhelms that of the few favorable mutations that may arise along the way.

For more than 30 years, professional population geneticists have been aware of the profound difficulties these realities present to the theory of evolution.^6,7 These problems were treated as “trade secrets” to be researched within their own ranks but not to be publicized outside in the broader biology community. Thus, the crucial step of hypothesis testing has been “postponed.”

Most professional biologists have therefore been misled into believing that the theoretical foundation of the neo-Darwinian synthesis is secure when, in reality, the foundation is a sham. The neo-Darwinian mechanism can readily be shown to produce exactly the opposite consequences to those that are believed and claimed.^3,4,5 The reason for this state of affairs is that the scientists involved have allowed their personal biases to interfere with and to short circuit the usual hypothesis-testing step of the scientific method.

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The following ten-minute video is a presentation by Dr. John Stanford, a Cornell University Geneticist, in which he shows how the issue of Genetic Entropy has been problematic for scientists in his field.