Chapter 6. Evolutionists' Confessions Stating that Mutations Have No Evolutionary Power

Along with natural selection, the second supposed mechanism proposed by the theory of evolution is mutations. Radiation and chemical effects result in breakages and dislocations in the DNA molecule, carrying genetic data, that's located in the cell nucleus. Mutations are accidental and either damage the nucleotides that make up DNA or else dislocate them. They typically give rise to irreparable damage and alterations in the cell.

For that reason, the mutations that evolutionists depend on for biological development are not, as is popularly thought, some magic wand that transports living things to a more advanced and perfect state. Mutations' net effects are harmful. The only changes caused by mutations are similar to those suffered by humans in Hiroshima, Nagasaki or Chernobyl: in other words, birth defects, illness, or death.

For the sake of proving evolution, the results obtained from subjects exposed to radiation in the laboratory go no further than fruit flies with legs protruding from their heads. No instance of a beneficial mutation has ever been observed. All the mutations observed to date have been harmful. During an interview, Richard Dawkins-one of the best-known evolutionists of our time-was asked if any mutations were known to be beneficial. He could not answer the question, but openly showed his discomfort in not being able to give any facts to support evolution.74

Confessions by some other evolutionists stating that mutations constitute a dilemma for evolution are as follows.

Both pictures show the damage in living bodies caused by the negative impact of mutations.

Prof. Richard Goldschmidt is a zoologist at the University of California:

It is true that nobody thus far has produced a new species or genus, etc., by macro-mutation [a combination of many mutations]; it is equally true that nobody has produced even a species by the selection of micro-mutations [one or only a few mutations]. In the best-known organisms, like Drosophila, innumerable mutants are known. If we were able to combine a thousand or more of such mutants in a single individual, this still would have no resemblance whatsoever to any type known as a [new] species in nature.75

Kevin Padian is professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at University of California, Berkeley and curator of paleontology at UC Museum of Paleontology:

How do major evolutionary changes get started? Does anyone still believe that populations sit around for tens of thousands of years, waiting for favorable mutations to occur (and just how does that happen, by the way?), then anxiously guard them until enough accumulate for selection to push the population toward new and useful change? There you have the mathematical arguments of Neo-Darwinism that Waddington and others rightly characterized as "vacuous."76

Pierre-Paul Grassé is a French biologist and former president at the French Academy of Sciences:

No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution.77

The opportune appearance of mutations permitting animals and plants to meet their needs seems hard to believe. Yet the Darwinian theory is even more demanding: A single plant, a single animal would require thousands and thousands of … appropriate events. Thus, miracles would become the rule: events with an infinitesimal probability could not fail to occur... There is no law against daydreaming, but science must not indulge in it.78

Francisco J. Ayala is university professor of Biological Sciences, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at University of California:

High-energy radiations, such as X-rays, increase the rate of mutation. Mutations induced by radiation are random, in the sense that they arise independently of their effects on the fitness of the individuals which carry the m. Randomly induced mutations are usually deleterious. In a precisely organized and complex system like the genome of an organism, a random change will most frequently decrease, rather than increase, the orderliness or useful information of the system.79

James F. Crow is president of the Wisconsin University Medical Genetics Department and an expert on radiation and mutation:

Almost every mutation is harmful, and it is the individual who pays the price. Any human activity that tends to increase the mutation rate must therefore raise serious health and moral problems for man.80

A random change in the highly integrated system of chemical processes which constitute life is certain to impair-just as a random interchange of connections [wires] in a television set is not likely to improve the picture.81

Frederick Seymour Hulse is professor emeritus at the University of Arizona and a member of the National Academy of Sciences:

Mutations occur at random, not because it would be convenient to have one. Any chance alteration in the composition and properties of a highly complex operating system is not likely to improve its manner of operation, and most mutations are disadvantageous for this reason. There is a delicate balance between an organism and its environment which a mutation can easily upset. One could as well expect that altering the position of the foot brake or the gas pedal at random would improve the operation of an automobile.82

David L. Stern is an evolutionist zoologist at the University of Cambridge:

One of the oldest problems in evolutionary biology remains largely unsolved. Which mutations generate evolutionarily relevant phenotypic variation? What kinds of molecular changes do they entail? 83

Stephen Jay Gould

The late Stephen Jay Gould was a professor of geology and paleoanthropology at Harvard University and the main spokesman for evolution in the second half of the 20th century:

You don't make new species by mutating the species... A mutation is not the cause of evolutionary change.84

Hoimar Von Ditfurth is a German professor of neurology and a well-known evolutionist science writer:

In seeking an answer to the question of whether an infinitely complex biological process, an organic order, can emerge as the result of aimless, purposeless and random mutations, our power of judgment will remain fairly pedestrian. . .Indeed, would we not be going much too far and corrupting those who think otherwise to claim that even if evolution had sufficient time for the emergence of new orders, new mechanisms of the kind we are discussing, and that new organization and order was the product of coincidences? If it is not inappropriate to say so, these strange entities were like a deformed neonate. They were the result of a mutation. The results of mutation have almost always given birth to a catastrophe. 85

At this point, objectors tend to propose a counter-thesis to the idea that the number of mutations will not be sufficiently large from the point of view of providing a sufficient quantity of significant and fit for purpose characteristics by entirely coincidental means. In fact, according to the laws of probability, not even large numbers of mutations can avoid being harmful and even deadly, let alone support development.86

Dr. Mahlon B. Hoagland is faculty member at Harvard Medical School and former president and scientific director of the Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research:

The information that resides in organisms that are alive today... is far more refined than the work of all the world's great poets combined. The chance that a random change of a letter or word or phrase would improve the reading is remote; on the other hand, it is very likely that a random hit would be harmful. It is for this reason that many biologists view with dismay the proliferation of nuclear weapons, nuclear power plants, and industrially generated mutagenic (mutation-producing) chemicals.87

You'll recall we learned that almost always, a change in an organism's DNA is detrimental to it; that is, it leads to a reduced capacity to survive. By way of analogy, random additions of sentences to the plays of Shakespeare are not likely to improve them!.. The principle that DNA changes are harmful by virtue of reducing survival chances applies whether a change in DNA is caused by a mutation or by some foreign genes we deliberately add to it.88

I. Antennae II. Eyes	III. Mouth IV. Leg
The head of a normal fruit fly.	The head of a fruit fly exposed to radiation; the legs protruding from above the eyes.	To the side is a side view photograph of a fruit fly suffering from mutations.

Warren Weaver, an evolutionist scientist, wrote the following in a report prepared by the Committee on Genetic Effects of Atomic Radiation, established in the wake of the Second World War, to investigate the mutations arising as the result of the use of nuclear weapons:

Many will be puzzled about the statement that practically all known mutant genes are harmful. For mutations are necessary parts of the process of evolution. How can a good effect-evolution to higher forms of life-result from mutations practically all of which are harmful?89

Moreover, the mutant genes, in the vast majority of cases, and in all the species so far studied, lead to some kind of harmful effect. In extreme cases the harmful effect is death itself, or loss of the ability to produce offspring, or some other serious abnormality.90

Michael Pitman is chief scientist of Australia and foreign secretary of the Australian Academy of Science:

Morgan, Goldschmidt, Muller, and other geneticists have subjected generations of fruit flies to extreme conditions of heat, cold, light, dark, and treatment by chemicals and radiation. All sorts of mutations, practically all trivial or positively deleterious, have been produced. Man-made evolution? Not really: Few of the geneticists' monsters could have survived outside the bottles they were bred in. In practice, mutants die, are sterile, or tend to revert to the wild type.91

Gordon Rattray Taylor is an evolutionist author and chief science advisor for the BBC:

It is a striking, but not much mentioned fact that, though geneticists have been breeding fruit-flies for sixty years or more in labs all around the world-flies which produce a new generation every eleven days-they have never yet seen the emergence of a new species or even a new enzyme.92

Lynn Margulis is an American biologist and professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts:

New mutations don’t create a new species; they create offspring that are impaired.93

In a statement in New Scientist in 2003 the evolutionary biologist George Turner said:

Not long ago, we thought we knew how species formed. We believed that the process almost always started with complete isolation of populations. It often occurred after a population had gone through a severe "genetic bottleneck", as might happen after a pregnant female was swept off to a remote island and her offspring mated with each other. The beauty of this so-called "founder effect" model was that it could be tested in the lab. In reality, it just didn't hold up. Despite evolutionary biologists' best efforts, nobody has even got close to creating a new species from a founder population. What's more, as far as we know, no new species has formed as a result of humans releasing small numbers of organisms into alien environments.94

The Darwinist French zoologist, Pierre Paul Grassé:

As soon as some disorder, even slight, appears in an organized being, sickness, then death follow. THERE IS NO POSSIBLE COMPROMISE BETWEEN THE PHENOMENON OF LIFE AND ANARCHY.95

Pierre Paul Grassé makes this confession regarding the impossibility of the immaculate perfection in living things emerging by way of mutations:

What is the use of their unceasing mutations, if they do not [produce evolutionary] change? In sum, the mutations of bacteria and viruses are merely hereditary fluctuations around a median position; a swing to the right, a swing to the left, but no final evolutionary effect.96

The opportune appearance of mutations permitting animals and plants to meet their needs seems hard to believe. Yet the Darwinian theory is even more demanding: a single plant, a single animal would require thousands and thousands of lucky, appropriate events. Thus, miracles would become the rule: events with an infinitesimal probability could not fail to occur ... There is no law against day dreaming, but science must not indulge in it.97