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100 Reasons to Choose Biblical Creation Over Evolution
26. Mutations and Evolution
All living things consist of incredibly complex, highly organized systems and structures. These systems and structures operate in harmony with one another, like cogs in a machine, in order to maintain the organism's life functions. To fully understand just how ordered and complex even a simple living system must be to survive, note that an amoeba (an organism consisting of only one cell) is said to be more complex than the space shuttle!
According to the evolution story, mutations (random changes) to animal and plant DNA (the "blueprint") caused animals and plants to change over time into totally different kinds. These random changes, it is believed, were responsible for changing fish into amphibians, amphibians into reptiles, reptiles into mammals and birds, and so on. The problem is that random change to a complex, highly ordered system, never makes it operate betterA. Your stereo at home, for example, is an example of such a system, and a random change to it, say by dropping it or poking a stick into it, cannot be expected to make it function better.
Likewise, random changes to living systems cannot be expected to improve them. Experimental science has demonstrated undeniably, that mutations cannot be the mechanism by which animals evolvedB. Without a mechanism, the evolution story falls apart, and the only reasonable explanation for the various animal and plant kinds we see in the world today is special creation.
26.Mutations and Evolution - Notes and References
A. "The vast number of genetic experiments with plants and animals carried on since DeVries studies have shown that mutations do occur constantly and that the changes in phenotype produced by such mutations may rarely be of adaptive value and contribute to the survival of the organism. Instead, such mutations are more likely to have a deleterious or even disastrous effect. A random change in a computer chip or even a computer program is hardly likely to improve it. Mutations are random changes in nucleic acids and usually represent not merely alteration but an actual loss in genetic information. When we consider the complexity of living things, the wonder is not that mutations are usually harmful, but that any mutation is ever advantageous." "Biology", Claude A. Villee, Eldr Pearl, P. William Davis, Saunders College Publishing, 1985, p.988 [Emphasis mine, J.F.]
"Even if we didn't have a great deal of data on this point, we could still be quite sure on theoretical grounds that mutants would usually be detrimental. For a mutation is a random change of a highly organized, reasonably smoothly functioning living body. A random change in the highly integrated system of chemical processes which constitute life is almost certain to impair it - just as a random interchange of connection in a television set is not likely to improve the picture." James Crow, (Professor of Genetics, University of Wisconson), "Genetic Effects of Radiation", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 14, January, 1958, pp. 19-20
"The one systematic effect of mutation seems to be a tendency toward degeneration." Sewall Wright, "the Statistical Consequences of Mendelian Heredity in Relation to Speciation", The Systematics, editor Julian Huxley, 1949, p. 174
"There is no single instance where it can be maintained that any of the mutants studied has a higher vitality than the mother species…It is therefore impossible to build a current evolution on mutations or on recombination's." N. Heribert Nilsson, Synthetische Artbildung, (Lund Sweden: Verlag CWK Gleerp, 1953), pp. 1157, 1186
"It is a striking, but not much mentioned fact that, though geneticists have been breeding fruit flies for sixty years or more in labs all around the world - flies which produce a new generation every eleven days - they have never yet seen the emergence of a new species or even a new enzyme." Gordon Rattray Taylor (Former Chief Science Advisor, BBC Television), The Great Evolution Mystery (New York; Harper & Row, 1983) p.48
B. "We found that there's just no way it could happen. If you start with a simple micro organism, no matter how it arose on earth, primordial soup or otherwise, then if you just have that single organizational, informational unit and you said that you copied this sequentially time and time again, the question is does that accumulate enough copying errors, enough mistakes in copying, and do these accumulations of copying errors lead to the diversity of living forms that one sees on the earth. That's the general, usual formulation of the theory of evolution…We looked at this quite systematically, quite carefully, in numerical terms. Checking all the numbers, rates of mutation and so on, we decided that there is no way in which that could even marginally approach the truth:" Roy Abraham Varghese, "The Intellectuals Speak Out About God", 1984, quotes Chandra Wickramisinghe, internationally recognized authority on interstellar matter, head of the Dept. of Applied Mathematics and astronomy, University College, Cardiff, Wales
"No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution." Pierre-Payl Grasse, "Evolution of Living Organisms", New York: Academic Press, 1977, p.88
'I have seen no evidence whatsoever that these [evolutionary] changes can occur through the accumulation of gradual mutations.' Lynn Margulis, as quoted by Charles Mann, "Lynn Margulis: Science's Unruly Earth Mother", Science, vol. 252, April 19, 1991, p.379
Biologist Gary Parker "Creation The Facts of Life", CLP Publishers, 1980, pp.63-64, states that mutations occur about once every 10 million duplications of the DNA molecule. For evolution to occur, a series of related mutations must occur. The odds of only two favourable mutations occurring is the sum of their separate probabilities, or about 1 in 100 trillion. Against three mutations, about 1 in a billion trillion (1021). Against 4 mutations, 1 in 1028.
Parker notes (p.64): "All of a sudden, the earth isn't big enough to hold enough organisms to make that very likely. And we're only talking about four mutations. It would take many more than that to change a fish into a philosopher, or even a fish into a frog. Four mutations don't even make a start toward real evolution. But even at this point some evolutionists have given up the classic idea of evolution, because it just plainly doesn't work."