Mutations:

 There is another difficulty facing the theory of evolution. Just how is it supposed to have happened? What is a basic mechanism that is presumed to have enabled one type of living thing to evolve into another type? Evolutionists say that various changes inside the nucleus of the cell play their part. And foremost among these are the "accidental" changes known as mutations. It is believed that the particular parts involved in these mutational changes are the genes and chromosomes in sex cells, since mutations in them can be passed along to one's descendants.

"Mutations ... are the basis of evolution," states The Word Book Encyclopedia

Similarly, paleontologist Steven Stanley called mutations "the raw materials" for evolution.

Geneticist Peo Koller declared that mutations "are necessary for evolutionary progress."

However, it is not just any kind of mutation that evolution requires. Robert Jastrow pointed to the need for "a slow accumulation of favorable mutations."

Carl Sagan added: "Mutations -sudden changes in heredity- breed true. They provide the raw material of evolution. The environment selects those few mutations that enhance survival, resulting in a series of slow transformations of one life-form into another, the origin of new Species."

EVOLUTION OR CREATION?
It also has been said that mutations may be a key to the rapid change called for by the "punctuated equilibrium" theory. Writing in Science Digest, John Gliedman stated: "Evolutionary revisionists believe mutations in key regulatory genes may be just the genetic jackhammers their quantum-leap theory requires." However, British zoologist Colin Patterson observed: "Speculation is free. We know nothing about these regulatory master genes." But aside from such speculations, it is generally accepted that the mutations supposedly involved in evolution are small accidental changes that accumulate over a long period of time.

How do mutations originate?
It is thought that most of them occur in the normal process of cell reproduction. But experiments have shown that they also can be caused by external agents such as radiation and chemicals. And how often do they happen? The reproduction of genetic material in the cell is remarkably consistent. Relatively speaking, considering the number of cells that divide in a living thing, mutations do not occur very often. As the Encyclopedia Americana commented, the reproducing "of the DNA chains composing a gene is remarkably accurate. Misprints or miscopying are infrequent accidents."

Are They Helpful or Harmful?
If beneficial mutations are a basis of evolution, what proportion of them are beneficial? There is overwhelming agreement on this point among evolutionists.
For example, Carl Sagan declares: "Most of them are harmful or lethal."
Peo Koller states: "The greatest proportion of mutations are deleterious 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".

Excluding any "neutral" mutations, then, harmful ones outnumber those that are supposedly beneficial by thousands to one. "Such results are to be expected of accidental changes occurring in any complicated organization," states the Encyclopedia Britannica. That is why mutations are said to be responsible for hundreds of diseases that are genetically determined.

Because of the harmful nature of mutations, the Encyclopedia Americana acknowledged: "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. Mutants illustrated in biology textbooks are a collection of freaks and monstrosities and mutation seems to be a destructive rather than a constructive process."

When mutated insects were placed in competition with normal ones, the result was always the same. As Ledyard Stebbins observed: "After a greater or lesser number of generations the mutants are eliminated." They could not compete because they were not improved but were degenerate and at a disadvantage.

In his book The Wellsprings of Life, science writer Isaac Asimov admitted: "Most mutations are for the worse." However, he then asserted: "In the long run, to be sure, mutations make the course of evolution move onward and upward." But do they?

Would any process that resulted in harm more than 999 times out of 1,000 be considered beneficial? If you wanted a house built, would you hire a builder who turned out thousands that were defective? If a driver of an automobile made thousands of bad decisions when driving, would you want to ride with him? If a surgeon made thousands of wrong moves when operating, would you want him to operate on you?

Geneticist Dobzhansky once said: "An accident, a random change, in any delicate mechanism can hardly be expected to improve it. Poking a stick into the machinery of one's watch or one's radio set will seldom make it work better.Thus, ask yourself: Does it seem reasonable that all the amazingly complex cells, organs, limbs and processes that exist in living things were built up by a procedure that tears down?"

Do Mutations Produce Anything New?
Even if all mutations were beneficial, could they produce anything new? No, they could not. A mutation could only result in a variation of a trait that is already there. It provides variety but never anything new. The World Book Encyclopedia gives an example of what might happen with a beneficial mutation: "A plant in a dry area might have a mutant gene that causes it to grow larger and stronger roots. The plant would have a better chance of survival than others of its species because its roots could absorb more water." But has anything new appeared? No, it is still the same plant. It is not evolving into something else.
Mutations may change the color or texture of a person's hair. But the hair will always be hair. It will never turn into feathers. A person's hand may be changed by mutations. It may have fingers that are abnormal. At times there may even be a hand with six fingers or with some other malformation. But it is always a hand. It never changes into something else. Nothing new is coming into existence, nor can it ever.

The Fruit Fly Experiments
   Few mutation experiments can equal the extensive ones conducted on the common fruit fly, Drosophila meaanogaster. Since the early 1900's, scientists have exposed millions of these flies to X rays. This increased the frequency of mutations to more than a hundred times what was normal.
After all those decades, what did the experiments show? Dobzhansky revealed one result: "The clear-cut mutants of Drosophila, with which so much of the classical research in genetics was done, are almost without exception inferior to wild-type flies in viability, fertility, longevity."
   Another result was that the mutations never produced anything new. The fruit flies had malformed wings, legs and bodies, and other distortions, but they always remained fruit flies. And when mutated flies were mated with each other, it was found that after a number of generations, some normal fruit flies began to hatch. If left in their natural state, these normal flies would eventually have been the survivors over the weaker mutants, preserving the fruit fly in the form in which it had originally existed.

The hereditary code, the DNA, has a remarkable ability to repair genetic damage to itself. This helps to preserve the kind of organism it is coded for. Scientific American relates how "the life of every organism and its continuity from generation to generation" are preserved "by enzymes that continually repair" genetic damage. The journal states:
"In particular, significant damage to DNA molecules can induce an emergency response in which increased quantities of the repair enzymes are synthesized."
Thus, in the book Darwin Retried the author relates 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."

In the first place we have the laws of Mendel which are basic to the science of genetics. It has been said that Darwin would never have won the world to his position if Mendel's discoveries had received the recognition they deserved. These laws explain how variations can normally occur only within fixed limits, in harmony with "after its kind" creation. In the second place, abnormaI changes, or "mutations," are practically all ha rm ful or deadly to an organism, as abundantly illustrated in the experiments upon Drosophila fruit flies.

George Gaylord Simpson has written:
If the mutation rate were .00001 (1 in 100,000-an average mutation rate ) and if the occurence of each mutation doubled the chance of another mutation occurring in the same cell, the probability that five simultaneous mutations would occur in any one individual would be 1 x 1022 (.0000000000000000000001). This means that if the population averaged 100,000,000 individuaIs and if the average generationlasted but one day, such an event as the appearance of five simultaneous mutations in one individual, would be expected once in every 274 bilIion years.

Evidence for the evolution of plants is just as lacking as that for animals. C. A. Amold stated:
It must freely be admitted that this aspiration (of finding evidence for plant evolution) has been fulfilled to a very slight extent, even though paleobotanical research has been in progress for more than one hundred years."

And what about insects? "We are in the dark concerning the origin of insects," says Pierre P. Grasse, renowned French zoologist,who is a former President of the Acadamie des Sciences and editor of the thirty-five volume Traitede Zoologie (1948-72).

A third very serious limitation to the potential for variation in the living world is the presence of highly complex organs and structures that cannot function effectively unless they are complete. "They are either perfect or perfectly useless.'' For example, the human ear: ... . is intricate beyond imagination. . . .
...........The organ of Corti alone, a spiralling 3mm diameter ridge of cells in the inner ear that plays a crucial part in the way we hear pitch and direction of sound, contains some 20,000 rods and more than 30,000 nerve endings.
How could the ear function at all if the separate parts had to come together by chance through millions of years?
And what about the human eye, with its 130,000,000 light-sensitive rods and cones? These "... cause photochemical reactions which transform the light into electrical impulses." Every second, one billion of these impulses are transmitted to the brain!

Now it is quite evident that if the sIightest thing goes wrong enroure- if the cornea is fuzzy, or the pupil fails to dilate, or the lens becomes opaque, or the focussing goes wrong--then a recognizable image is not formed. The eye either functions as a whole, or not at all. So how did it come to evolve by slow steady, infinite simally small Darwinian improvements? Is it really possible that thousands upon thousands of lucky chance mutations happened coincidentally so that the lens and the retina, which cannot work without each other, evolved in synchrony? What survival value can there be in an eye that doesn't see? Small wonder that it troubled Darwin.'To this day the eye makes me shudder,' he wrote to his botanist friend Asa Gray in February 1860.*

*excerpt taken from "The Early Earth" by John C. Whitcomb