Subject: Chapter 9: Do Mutations Produce New Life Forms?
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Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 21:13:16 -0500

The Evolution of a
Creationist

9   DO MUTATIONS PRODUCE
NEW LIFE FORMS?

When I began to feel the pressure of having no
experimentally testable facts to substantiate my position as a theistic
evolutionist, I turned to what I thought was my ace in the hole:
Genetics. Didn't everyone know that the science of genetics had
irrevocably shown evolution in progress?  Without mutations (changes in
the genes and chromosomes), there is no evolutionary change. The
question my students asked was, "Do mutations produce new life forms or
improvements in present life forms?" Naturally I assumed they produce
new forms and I thought I could prove it from the scientific literature.
I was due for another rude awakening!

Many creationists[1] and
evolutionists study the phenomenon of genetic mutation. The predominant
view of evolutionists was expressed by Dr. Ernst Mayr
of Harvard: "Ultimately, all variation is, of course, due to
mutation." [2] Dr.
Mayr instructs us that all variation (different types of plants and
animals) observable in life is due to changes in the genes and
chromosomes. These mutations occur in the make-up of DNA.

DNA: LANGUAGE OF THE
CELL

DNA, the basic information system of the cell, contains
the blue prints needed to manufacture twenty or more different proteins.
Each of these proteins is manufactured in little "cell-factories" at the
direction of the DNA and is essential for the maintenance of life. So,
which came first? If DNA is essential in the manufacturing process of
proteins, and the manufacturing process produces the proteins essential
to DNA, then you can't have one without the other. This means they both
must have been created fully functional and at exactly the same point in
time. In other words, God must have created the information system of
all cells at a point in time and fully functional. DNA is needed
to make DNA! DNA provides the instructions to the chemical factories
inside the cell for making itself.

Scientists call DNA the "language of the cell." All
scientists agree that language requires intelligence. Could there be an
implication here that DNA, the "language of the cell" required
intelligence to create it? Could it be that DNA was created fully
functional in all the different kinds of life by an intelligent
Designer, the God of the Bible! Evolution offers no answers to this
weighty problem. Yet the God of Creation proclaims through His Holy
Scriptures, "I created, created, created!"

The genetic information of DNA cannot be improved upon in
any normal, healthy organism. Natural selection or "survival of the
fittest" does not produce new genes, it merely selects the best suited
animal or plant life for a specific niche or environment. This is
adaptation to a specific environment and not mutation. Yet mutation is
the only mechanism scientists have proposed to generate the "new"
genetic information needed for evolutionary change in the
molecules-to-man model. This presents an enormous problem for the
evolution model, especially when we learn that mutation in a gene is a
rare event.[3]

How could life have evolved into all its millions of forms
if the very mechanism that causes it to evolve (mutation) is a rare
event? When mutations do occur, geneticists tell us that mutations are
99.9% harmful.

"The process
of mutation is the only source of the raw materials of genetic
variability, and hence, of evolution....The mutants which arise are,
with rare exceptions, deleterious to their carriers, at least in the
environments which the species normally encounters." (Theodosius
Dobzhansky) [4]

Dobzhansky spent his professional life breeding and
mutating fruit flies. In the end, he had somewhat strange fruit flies,
but fruit flies nonetheless. Some of those flies were not even able to
reproduce because they had become sterile. Dobzhansky writes that
mutations are the only source of evolution, but that they are almost
always harmful (which means the mutation makes the life-form that gets
it less able to survive where it lives). If "survival of the
fittest" is true, then mutations should, cause extinctions, not new and
better life forms. Of course what we observe in nature are
extinctions of plants and animals rather than emerging, new life
forms. There are millions of living things from plants to insects, but
we hear almost weekly of more extinctions. How many newly evolved
creatures have you heard about in your lifetime? With all the millions
of living things in the world surely mutations are happening and
something is or has evolved into something else. The evolutionists are
frantically searching for the smallest hint that something will evolve
and prove their theory to be true.

A few years ago the evolutionary community presented to
the public their best example of evolution in progress. It was a guppy
family that had been separated from their old friends for several years.
When the guppies were reunited they would not mate. Evolutionists
consider a life-form to be a new species when it will no longer mate
with its old friends. Maybe the guppy didn't smell good when it came
back from its temporary environment. Or maybe its old friends didn't
recognize it, or maybe the researchers didn't wait long enough to see if
the guppy would be accepted again. The fact is that both populations of
guppies were still unmistakably identifiable to scientists and laymen as
guppies. Where is the evidence for the evolution of one creature into
another when after more than eleven years of breeding guppies they are
still guppies.

Even if these fish refuse to breed with each other and are
therefore categorized as a new species of guppy, does this prove
evolution of one kind into another kind of creature. People have devised
their definitions of and limits to species, but God refers to "kinds" in
the Genesis account. Biblically, there are certain boundaries that no
living form can cross. A specific "kind" of creature will never evolve
into another "kind" of creature. Guppies are fish. Within the fish-kind
there is a lot of room for change, even "evolutionary" change, but fish
will forever be fish, big ones, little ones, fresh water and salt water,
but still fish.

It doesn't seem right for scientists to tell us in school
and college that the chief mechanism in our ever upward and onward
evolutionary process is mutation in the genes when they say in the
scientific literature mutations are harmful or deadly:  "Mutations
are more than just sudden changes in heredity; they also affect
viability, and, to the best of our knowledge, invariably affect it
adversely." (C.P. Martin)  [5],[6],[7]

So we learn that mutations in a healthy life-form
invariably cause harmful changes or death (lethal) to the organism. How
does evolution from molecules-to-man occur if the very process that
supposedly causes it to happen, in truth, harms or kills the organism?
To put this another way, why did the evolutionary scientists evacuate
the area when the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania
destroyed itself? Why didn't these scientists move their families into
the area to be irradiated so mutations might develop and they could
evolve into the next higher life form? The scientists knew that their
offspring would inherit unhealthy characteristics from the Three Mile
Island irradiation. They got away from the mutation-causing radiation as
fast as they could!

Professor of Genetics at the University
of Wisconsin, James Crow writes:

"...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
connections in a television set is not likely to improve the
picture." [8]

Dr. Crow's analogy is accurate. All of us know that
stirring up and haphazardly reattaching wires in the back of a T.V. set
will not improve the picture. In the same way random changes in the
genes do not improve our ability to live and function. As a matter of
fact no scientist has yet observed a random mutation produce a new
hormone, enzyme, or simple organ.[9]
Nevertheless they teach us and our children the lie that we are here
because our primeval ancestors had mutations occur in their genes that
caused them to evolve higher and higher until here we are. Magic!!
Listen to the words of the famous evolutionist from
the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Loren Eiseley:

"With the failure of these
many efforts (to prove evolution to be true), science was left in the
somewhat embarrassing position of having to postulate theories of
living origins which it could not demonstrate. After having chided the
theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in
the unenviable position of having to create a mythology of its own:
namely, the assumption that what, after long effort could not be proved
to take place today had in truth, taken place in the primeval
past." [10]
(Emphasis added)

PLANT EVOLUTION

One of the world's leading experts on plant evolution and
fossil plants, Dr. E. J. H. Corner of Cambridge
University dogmatically states:

"The theory of evolution is
not merely the theory of the origin of species, but the only explanation
of the fact that organisms can be classified into this hierarchy of
natural affinity. Much evidence can be adduced in favour of the theory
of evolution -- from biology, bio-geography and paleontology, but I
still think that, to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is
in favour of special creation." [11]
(Emphasis added)

According to expert Corner, there is no evidence for the
evolution of plants. In fact, when plants are studied closely they
appear to be a special creation! The field of botany (plants) does not
prove evolution, and yet Dr. Corner still believes in an evolutionary
mythological system. He is trusting his compatriots in "biology,
bio-geography and paleontology" to prove evolution to be true. In
Corner's field (plants), special creation appears to be the best
option.

If there is no evidence for the evolution of people or
plants, then how about evidence for the evolution of fish?

EVOLUTION OF
FISH

"The
geological record has so far provided no evidence as to the origin of
the fishes,...[J.R. Norman (British Museum of Natural
History)] [12]

According to these experts, there is no evidence for the
evolution of plants, and no evidence for the evolution of fish. What
about amphibians?

EVOLUTION OF
AMPHIBIANS

"...none
of the known fishes is thought to be directly ancestral to the earliest
land vertebrates. Most of them lived after the first amphibians
appeared, and those that came before show no evidence of developing the
stout limbs and ribs that characterized the primitive tetrapods...

Since the fossil material
provides no evidence of other aspects of the transformation from fish to
tetrapod, paleontologists have had to speculate how legs and
aerial breathing evolved..." (Barbara J. Stahl) [13]
(Emphasis added).

No evidence for the evolution of plants and no evidence
for fish. What's more, the only evidence for amphibians is the
"speculations" of the fossil experts. The evidence, then, for evolution
of creatures as they supposedly developed the ability to crawl out of
water and live as land animals is in the imagination of the
evolutionist. There are no fossils and no facts to support belief in the
evolution of amphibians. How about birds?

EVOLUTION OF
BIRDS

"The
[evolutionary] origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There
is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the remarkable change
from reptile to bird was achieved." (W.E. Swinton) [14]

The evolution of birds is a "matter of deduction".
"Deduction" in this case is a polite synonym for imagination. There is
not a single, undisputed fossil that shows the evolutionary transitions
of reptiles into birds.

According to the above evolutionary
experts, evolution is grossly lacking in hard evidence! Although we are
told that mutations are good because they generate new life and produce
evolution, we do not see this "good" happening in reality. Genetic
mutations cannot be the driving force behind evolution. Nor do the
evolutionists provide evidence to prove the evolution of any
creature.

TIME GENERATES MIRACLES

But what if earth history was counted in billions of
years? The old argument always comes along at this point that
anything can happen in a random-chance system if it is given
enough time. The miracle of life can come from dead chemicals if given
enough time. We will discuss the "billions of years" argument in Chapter
10. But before leaving Chapter 9, let us not forget that changes in the
genes (random mutations) do not improve present life forms, nor is there
any solid factual evidence that they generate new plants or animals. The
evacuation of Three Mile Island spoke volumes! (If, indeed, mutations
are helpful then we should gladly and willingly expose ourselves to them
to "improve" our evolutionary opportunities!)

[1] Dr. Walter Brown
wrote a paper several years ago on the evidences for creation. In his
footnotes was a selection of quotes from the pro-evolutionary literature
dealing with genetics. For this valuable information, please contact Dr.
Walter Brown, The Center for Scientific Creation, 5612 North 20th Place,
Phoenix, AZ 85016.

[2] Ernst Mayr, Mathematical Challenges to the
Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Philadelphia: Wister
Institute Press, 1967), p. 50.

[3] "Although mutation is the ultimate source of all genetic
variation, it is a relatively rare event..." , Francisco Ayala, "The
Mechanics of Evolution," Scientific American, September
1978, p. 63.

[4] Theodosius
Dobzhansky, "On Methods of Evolutionary Biology and Anthropology," American Scientist, Winter,
December 1957, p. 385.

[5] C. P. Martin, "A
Non-Geneticist Looks at Evolution," American Scientist, January
1953, p. 162.

[6] "If we say that it is only by chance that they (mutations)
are useful, we are still speaking too leniently. In general, they are
useless, detrimental, or lethal." W. R. Thompson, Introduction to the Origin of
Species, by Charles Darwin (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1956), p.
10.

[7] "Lethal mutations outnumber visibles (Albinism,
Dwarfism, Hemophilism) by about 20 to 1. Mutations that have harmful
effects are even more frequent than lethal ones." A. M. Winchester, Genetics, 5th ed. (Boston:
Houghton Mufflin Co., 1977), p. 356.

[8] James Crow, "Genetic
Effects of Radiation," Bulletin
of Atomic Sciences, 14 (1958), 19-20.

[9]
"Do we, therefore, ever see mutations going about the
business of producing new structures for selection to work on? No
nascent organ has ever been observed emerging, though their origin in
prefunctional form is basic to evolutionary theory. Some should be
visible today, occurring in organisms at various stages up to
integration of a functional new system, but we don't see them: there is
no sign at all of this kind of radical novelty. Neither observation or
controlled experiment has shown natural selection manipulating mutations
so as to produce a new gene, hormone, enzyme system or organ." Michael
Pitman, Adam and Evolution
(London: Rider Press, 1981), pp. 67,68.

[10] Dr. Loren Eiseley,
The Immense Journey (New
York: Random House, 1957), p. 199.

[11] E. J. H. Corner, 'Evolution' in Contemporary
Botanical Thought, eds. Anna M.
Macleod and L. S. Cobley, Oliver and Boyd, for the Botanical Society of
Edinburg, 1961, p. 97. As quoted (partially) from The Quote Book, p.
11.

[12] J. R. Norman,
"Classification and Pedigrees: Fossils," in A History of Fishes, 3rd ed.,
ed. Dr. P. H. Greenwood, British Museum of Natural
History, London, 1975, p. 343. As quoted (partially) from The Quote Book, p.
11.

[13]
Barbara J.
Stahl, Vertebrate History:
Problems in Evolution (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), pp. 148,195. As
quoted in The Quote Book, p.
11.

[14] Wo. E. Swinton, "The
Origin of Birds," Chapter 1 in Biology and Comparative Physiology
of Birds, A. J. Marshall, ed., Vol. I (New York: Academic Press,
1960), p. 1. As quoted in The
Quote Book, p. 11.

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