A physically defective mutant lamb. |
Mutant is the name given to any living thing, cell or gene that has undergone obvious changes in its DNA. Mutations are breaks and shifts that occur as a result of physical (for example, radiation) or chemical effects in the DNA molecule, found in the cell nucleus that carries genetic data. Mutations damage the nucleotides that make up DNA. The components making up genetic information are either detached from their locations, damaged or else transported to different sites in the DNA. They cause damage and other changes that are usually too severe for the cell to repair. Cells or living things subjected to such mutations-99% of which are harmful and the other 1% neutral or silent- are known as mutants. (See Mutation: An Imaginary Mechanism)
Although mutations have clearly destructive effects, evolutionists regard random mutations occurring in living things' genetic structures as the source of the positive evolutionary changes that they assume took place. Yet mutations can never bestow a new organ or new characteristic on a living thing by adding new information to its DNA. They merely cause abnormalities, such as (on a fruit fly) a leg emerging from the back of the insect.
Can new information emerge as the result of mutations? Professor Werner Gitt responds to the question:
This idea is central in representations of evolution, but mutations can only cause changes in existing information. There can be no increase in information, and in general the results are injurious. New blueprints for new functions or new organs cannot arise; mutations cannot be the source of new (creative) information.63
63. Werner Gitt, In the Beginning was Information, Master Books, 2006, p. 126.
