Part Nine: WHY MUTATIONS FAIL TO SUPPORT EVOLUTION

When the structure of DNA was unraveled during the mid-twentieth century, Darwin’s theory of natural selection received renewed support. Evolutionists believed they had finally discovered the fuel that powered the slow and gradual evolution of new species—mutations. Here’s how this supposedly worked.

Random changes in DNA molecules (mutations), which carry hereditary information, benefit an organism. This new genetic material gives the creature a slight advantage in the struggle to survive, allowing it to propagate and pass on the trait to its descendants through natural selection. Supposedly, over eons of time and countless beneficial mutations, a new genetically distinct species eventually evolved. There are two insurmountable problems with this scenario.

First, beneficial mutations are rare. Almost all mutations are harmful and either kills the organism or reduces its chance for survival. In other words, a deformity weakens, not increases, an animal’s survival potential.

Experiments, such as those with fruit flies, have confirmed this.  Scientists have produced all kinds of weird fruit flies in laboratories, but never a new species of fly. For example, scientists have bred a four-winged fruit fly (normal fruit flies have two wings), but instead of a faster-flying, more agile fruit flies, the extra wings lacked flight muscles. The mutated flies could not survive in nature.

The second insurmountable problem with the assumption that organisms can accumulate enough beneficial mutations to evolve into entirely new species is the time factor. The time required for a primitive animal to evolve into a higher animal through random mutations and natural selection does not exist—even on an evolutionary timetable. Not just Earth but the universe itself is not old enough for today’s complex living organisms to have evolved from single-celled organisms through random mutational change. Evolutionary change does not occur in a few generations, nor do a few new traits result in an entirely new species. There must be a continuous sequence of complementary mutations over eons of time.

In the past, when confronted with the necessity of countless multiple and subsequent mutations, evolutionists fell back on the claim that Earth is about five billion years old. There was plenty of time, they insisted, for higher life forms to evolve from primitive ancestors. This ruse is no longer available. With the advent of “super (high-speed) computers,” scientists have simulated the random, trial-and-error processes promulgated by evolutionists. “The outcome was jolting: The computers showed that the probability of evolution by chance processes is essentially zero, no matter how long the time scale.” (How Now Shall We Live? p. 73.)

Biologist Dr. Gary Parker explained that the chance of getting three related mutations in a row is one in a billion trillion (10²¹). To illustrate the odds of this, he stated that “the ocean isn’t big enough to hold enough bacteria to make it likely for you to find a bacterium with three simultaneous or sequential related mutations. . . .  What about trying for four related mutations? 10²⁸ All of a sudden, the earth itself isn’t big enough to hold enough organisms to make that very likely. . . .  At this point some evolutionists have given up the classic idea of evolution, because it just plainly doesn’t work.” (What is Creation Science? p. 63) ©

Next week we’ll explore evolution’s unsolved mystery: Where are the transitional fossils in the fossil record?