Mutations: "Raw Materials" for Evolution?
Do they really produce new organisms?
Mutations — radical changes to living organisms at the genetic level — are said to be the “source of raw materials for evolution.”
Regarding these, molecular biologist Jacques Monod once said: “With that, the mechanism of Darwinism is at last securely founded, and man has to realize that he is a mere accident.”
But is this mechanism really "securely founded"?
Scientists hold conflicting views on this.
The late Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould, a defender of evolution, once extolled Theodosius Dobzhansky as “the greatest evolutionist of our century.” However, Dobzhansky said regarding mutations that they “usually show deterioration, breakdown, or disappearance of some organs. . . . " He continued: "Many mutations are, in fact, lethal to their possessors. Mutants which equal the normal fly in vigor are a minority, and mutants that would make a major improvement of the normal organization in the normal environments are unknown.” (From his book Mankind Evolving, published in 1970.)
This fly was engineered in a laboratory experiment to grow a leg instead of an antenna.
The considerable lengths of time claimed by evolutionists that were involved in multiple gradual evolutionary changes, ought to have left behind in the fossil record sufficient evidence of these changes, if meaningful mutations were as common as its supporters indicate. But this does not appear to be the case. Mutations are not only rare, they are mainly "lethal," and required major changes are "unknown."
By far the majority of mutations are undesirable.
Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, a scientist from the Max Planck Institute, said regarding the study of mutations:
“By the 1980’s, the hopes and euphoria among scientists had ended in worldwide failure. Mutation breeding as a separate branch of research was abandoned in Western countries. Almost all the mutants exhibited ‘negative selection values,’ that is, they died or were weaker than wild varieties.”
Note that the above reference is to "mutation breeding." This means intentional, deliberate changes to organisms. Evolution is based on the selection of superior changes that occur naturally. If mutations that are purposely designed fail to support evolution, where is the empirical evidence for effective and prolific accidental advantageous mutations?
In 1977, The Encyclopedia Americana said:
“The fact that most mutations are damaging to the organism seems hard to reconcile with the view that mutation is the source of raw materials for evolution. Indeed, mutants illustrated in biology textbooks are a collection of freaks and monstrosities and mutation seems to be a destructive rather than a constructive process.”—1977, Volume 10, page 742.
Mutations in science textbooks are "a collection of freaks and monstrosities."
Quotations that cast doubt on the validity of mutations in supporting evolution are plentiful.
If mutations are the "foundation" of the material required for evolution to produce the wealth and breadth of life forms on earth, how truly stable is that foundation?
Note this selection from reputable scientists:
New York University professor, Irving Kristol (quoted in Evolution News and Science Today, September 23, 2009) said the following:
- “Laboratory experiments reveal how close to impossible it is for one species to evolve into another, even allowing for selective breeding and some genetic mutation. There is unquestionably evolution within species: every animal breeder is engaged in exemplifying this enterprise. But the gradual transformation of the population of one species into another is a biological hypothesis, not a biological fact.”
Breeders are merely amplifying existing characteristics, not creating new ones.
Note carefully the statement by Professor Kristol that "there is unquestionably evolution within species": This statement is then followed up by a reference to the work of animal breeders. However, breeders are managing changes by selective and deliberate effort. By breeding animals that possess specific attributes or traits that are common among the chosen species, these are amplified by further selective breeding — a conscious choice. But note especially that these changes do not produce anything new. Existing characteristics are merely amplified.
Professor Kristol then states that there is no evidence for changes of one species into another. Evolutionists are aware that the theory of evolution cannot effectively explain the existence of the enormous quantity of animal and insect varieties that we see on earth. For example, did you know that there are over 350,000 documented species of beetles? Some scientists estimate that there could be millions more yet to be discovered!
The sheer quantity of ant species is not far behind that of beetles. However, they make up for that in the vast numbers of individual ants. Experts reckon they number in excess of 20 quadrillion (20,000,000,000,000,000)!
Regarding mutations, the late Carl Sagan once declared (from his book Cosmos, page 31):
- “Most of them are harmful or lethal.”
Genetecist Peo Koller stated, in his book Chromosomes and Genes (p. 127):
- “The greatest proportion of mutations are deleterious [harmful] to the individual who carries the mutated gene. It was found in experiments that, for every successful or useful mutation, there are many thousands which are harmful.”
(Would this fact not affect the quantity of available examples in the fossil record, i.e. the existence of many thousands of failed samples for each successful one? So why are these findings missing from the evidence?)
In his book The Wellsprings of Life, science writer Isaac Asimov admitted:
- “Most mutations are for the worse.”
In the book Darwin Retried — An Appeal to Reason, the author Norman Macbeth related the following about the respected geneticist, the late Richard Goldschmidt:
- “After observing mutations in fruit flies for many years, Goldschmidt fell into despair. The changes, he lamented, were so hopelessly micro [small] that if a thousand mutations were combined in one specimen, there would still be no new species.”
The book Molecules to Living Cells made the following statement:
- “The cells from a carrot or from the liver of a mouse consistently retain their respective tissue and organism identities after countless cycles of reproduction.”
In agreement with the above, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, a book by Lynn Margulis, said:
- “All life . . . reproduces with incredible fidelity.”
Additionally, Scientific American observed (quoting “The Genetic Control of the Shape of a Virus,” by Edouard Kellenberger, December 1966, p. 32):
- “Living things are enormously diverse in form, but form is remarkably constant within any given line of descent: pigs remain pigs and oak trees remain oak trees generation after generation.”
In support of the conclusion that no amount of accidental genetic change can cause one kind of life to transform into another kind, French biologist Jean Rostand said (in The Orion Book of Evolution, p. 79):
- “I cannot make myself think that these ‘slips’ of heredity have been able, even with the cooperation of natural selection, even with the advantage of the immense periods of time in which evolution works on life, to build the entire world, with its structural prodigality [great quantities] and refinements, its astounding ‘adaptations’.”
Similarly, geneticist C. H. Waddington (quoted in Science Today, 1961, p. 38) stated regarding the belief in mutations:
- “This is really the theory that if you start with any fourteen lines of coherent English and change it one letter at a time, keeping only those things that still make sense, you will eventually finish up with one of the sonnets of Shakespeare. . . . it strikes me as a lunatic sort of logic, and I think we should be able to do better.”
Professor John Moore (quoted from On Chromosomes, Mutations, and Phylogeny, p. 5) declared:
- “Upon rigorous examination and analysis, any dogmatic assertion . . . that gene mutations are the raw material for any evolutionary process involving natural selection is an utterance of a myth.”
Evolutionist Irving S. Bengelsdorf said (quoted in the Los Angeles Times, November 2, 1967):
- “Mutations, involving base changes in genes, can account for differences between two men . . . But, for various reasons, they cannot account for overall evolution — why there are fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals.”
The magazine Science of November 21, 1980, stated:
- “Species do indeed have a capacity to undergo minor modifications in their physical and other characteristics, but this is limited and with a longer perspective it is reflected in an oscillation about a mean.”
And finally: The aforementioned proponent of evolutionary theory, Theodosius Dobzhansky, wrote in his book Mankind Evolving, that the subject of mutations “is shot through with uncertainties; authorities are often at odds, both about fundamentals and about details.”
Would you not agree that meaningful mutations — proposed by evolutionary scientists as the "cornerstone of the theory" — are lacking in empirical evidence? And the argument that "considerable time" enables viable mutation examples to finally arrive, does not agree with the evidence, that is, the lack of examples in the fossil record!
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