Mutation, evolution's mechanism?

Mutations are defined as random changes in cellular DNA. They change the genetic code for amino acid sequence in proteins, thus introducing biochemical errors of varying degrees of severity. Mutations have been classified as deletions (loss of DNA bases), insertions (gain of DNA bases), and missense or nonsense (substitution of a DNA base). If the mutations affect germ cells (female ova and male spermatozoa), they will be passed to all the cells of the offspring, and affect future generations. Such mutations are called "germline mutations", and are the cause of inherited diseases. Mutations also occur in other populations of body cells and will accumulate throughout a lifetime without being passed to the offspring. These are called "somatic mutations", and are important in the genesis of cancers and other degenerative disease processes. Some scientists strongly support the idea that mutation is the moving force behind evolution. According to them, the random changes in DNA eventually leads to the formation of complete new species. If so, we would have to believe that mutation is a POSITIVE process, that only benefits the organism and strongly increases the chances of survival of a certain species. But is this really so? Let's see what various sources have to say about this:

It is mathematically impossible

It would be impossible for chance to produce enough beneficial mutations—and just the right ones—to accomplish anything worthwhile. "Based on probability factors . . any viable DNA strand having over 84 nucleotides cannot be the result of haphazard mutations. At that stage, the probabilities are 1 in 4.80 x 1050. Such a number, if written out, would read 480,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000." "Mathematicians agree that any requisite number beyond 1050 has, statistically, a zero probability of occurrence."—I.L. Cohen, Darwin Was Wrong (1984), p. 205. "As a generation principle, providing the raw material for natural selection, random mutation is inadequate, both in scope and theoretical grounding."—*Jeffrey S. Wicken, "The Generation of Complexity in Evolution: A Thermodynamic and Information-Theoretical Discussion," Journal of Theoretical Biology, April 1979, p. 349. "If evolution is to occur . . living things must be capable of acquiring new information or alteration of their stored information."—*George Gaylord Simpson, "The Nonprevalence of Humanoids," in Science, 143, (1964), p. 772. "There is no single instance where it can be maintained that any of the mutants studied has a higher vitality than the mother species . . It is, therefore, absolutely impossible to build a current evolution on mutations or on recombinations."—*N. Herbert Nilsson, Synthetische Artbildung [Synthetic Speciation] (1953), p. 1157 [italics his].

Mutations do not produce evolution

Cross-species changes are not resulting from them. "No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution."—*Pierre-Paul de Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms (1977), p. 88. "It is true that nobody thus far has produced a new species or genus, etc., by macromutation [a combination of many mutations]; it is equally true that nobody has produced even a species by the selection of micromutation [one or only a few mutations]."—*Richard Goldschmidt, "Evolution, As Viewed by One Geneticist," American Scientist, January 1952, p. 94. "Do we, therefore, ever see mutations going about the business of producing new structures for selection to work on? No nascent organ has ever been observed emerging, though their origin in pre-functional form is basic to evolutionary theory. Some should be visible today, occurring in organisms at various stages up to integration of a functional new system, but we don't see them: There is no sign at all of this kind of radical novelty. Neither observation nor controlled experiments has shown natural selection manipulating mutations so as to produce a new gene, hormone, enzyme system, or organ."—*Michael Pitman, Adam and Evolution (1984), pp. 67-68. "Obviously, such a process [species change through mutations] has played no part whatever in evolution."—*Julian Huxley, Major Features of Evolution, p. 7. "Accordingly, mutations are more than just sudden changes in heredity; they also affect viability, and, to the best of our knowledge, invariably affect it adversely."—*C.P. Martin, "A Non-Geneticist Looks at Evolution," American Scientist, January 1953, p. 102. "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."—*Edouard Kellenberger, "The Genetic Control of the Shape of a Virus," in Scientific American, December 1966, p. 32. "If complex computer programs cannot be changed by random mechanisms, then surely the same must apply to the genetic programs of living organisms. "The fact that systems [such as advanced computers], in every way analogous to the living organism, cannot undergo evolution by pure trial and error [by mutation and natural selection] and that their functional distribution invariably conforms to an improbable discontinuum comes, in my opinion, very close to a formal disproof of the whole Darwinian paradigm of nature. By what strange capacity do living organisms defy the laws of chance which are apparently obeyed by all analogous complex systems?"—*Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985), p. 342. ". . I took a little trouble to find whether a single amino acid change in a hemoglobin mutation is known that doesn't affect seriously the function of that hemoglobin. One is hard put to find such an instance."—*George Wald, in *Paul S. Moorehead and *Martin M. Kaplan, Mathematical Challenges to the Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, pp. 18-19.

Conclusion

It is hopeless to expect mutations to produce evolutionary change. "The one systematic effect of mutation seems to be a tendency towards degeneration."—*Sewall Wright, in Julian Huxley, "The Statistical Consequences of Mendelian Heredity in relation to Speciation," The New Systematics (1949), p. 174. "The process of mutation is the only known source of the raw materials of genetic variability, and hence of evolution . . The mutants which arise are, with rare exceptions, deleterious to their carriers, at least in the environments which the species normally encounters."—*Theodosious Dobzhansky, "On Methods of Evolutionary Biology and Anthropology," American Scientist, Winter, December 1957, p. 385. "Like radiation-induced mutations, nearly all spontaneous mutations with detectable effects are harmful."—Arthur Custance, Longevity in Antiquity (1957), p. 1160. " `Creatures with shriveled-up wings and defective vision, or no eyes, offer poor material for evolutionary progress.' "—*E.W. Macbride, Quoted in H. Enoch, Evolution or Creation (1966), p. 75. "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 mutations seem to be destructive rather than a constructive process."—*Encyclopedia Americana, Vol. 10, p. 742 (1977 edition). " `It must be admitted that the direct and complete proof of the utilization of mutation in evolution under natural conditions has not yet been given.' "—*Julian Huxley, quoted in H. Enoch, Evolution or Creation (1966), p. 78. "This is really the theory that [says] if you start with 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."—*C.H. Waddington [a geneticist], "Evolution," in Science Today, p. 38. "Upon rigorous examination and analysis, any dogmatic assertion . . that gene mutations are the raw material for an evolutionary process involving natural selection is an utterance of a myth."—*John N. Moore, On Chromosomes, Mutations, and Phylogeny, p. 5.

One example: Drosophila

In 1904, Walter S. Sutton, an American cytologist, decided there might be some connection between Gregor Mendel's 1860s research and the newly discovered chromosomes with their genes. A major breakthrough came in 1906, when Thomas Hunt Morgan, a Columbia University zoologist, conceived the idea of using fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) for genetic research. This was due to the fact that they breed so very rapidly, require little food, have scores of easily observed characteristics and only a few chromosomes per cell.

Drosophila

"The fly could be bred by the thousands in milk bottles. It cost nothing but a few bananas to feed all the experimental animals; their entire life cycle lasts 10 days and they have only four chromosomes."—*R. Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution (1990), p. 169. Later still, fruit flies began to be used in mutational research. What that research revealed—settled the question for all time as to whether evolution could successfully result from mutations. And those little creatures should be able to settle the matter, for it takes only 12 days for a fruit fly to reach maturity; after that it steadily reproduces young. Each of its offspring matures in 12 days, and the generations multiply rapidly. What it would take mammals tens of thousands of years to accomplish, the humble fruit flies can do within a very short time.

Speeding up the evolutionary process?

Fruit fly generations have been studied longer than the presumed time man has been on earth. According to evolution, man has lived on the earth for a little over a million years. Yet experiments on fruit flies have already exceeded the equivalent of a million years of people living on earth. Here is a clear statement of the problem: "The fruit fly has long been the favorite object of mutational experiments because of its fast gestation period [twelve days]. X rays have been used to increase the mutation rate in the fruit fly by 15,000 percent. All in all, scientists have been able to "catalyze the fruit fly evolutionary process, such that what has been seen to occur in Drosophila is the equivalent of the many millions of years of normal mutations and evolution." "Even with this tremendous speedup of mutations, scientists have not been able to come up with anything other than another fruit fly. Most important, what all these experiments demonstrate is that the fruit fly can vary within certain upper and lower limits but will never go beyond them. For example, Ernst Mayr reported on two experiments performed on the fruit fly back in 1948." "In the first experiment, the fly was selected for a decrease in bristles and, in the second experiment, for an increase in bristles. Starting with a parent stock averaging 36 bristles, it is possible after thirty generations to lower the average to 25 bristles, "but then the line became sterile and died out." In the second experiment, the average number of bristles was increased from 36 to 56; then sterility set in. Mayr concluded with the following observation: Obviously any drastic improvement under selection must seriously deplete the store of genetic variability . . The most frequent correlated response of one-sided selection is a drop in general fitness. This plagues virtually every breeding experiment."—*Jeremy Rifkin, Algeny (1983), p. 134.

A new species is never produced

The fruit flies always remain fruit flies. After decades of study, without immediately killing or sterilizing them, 400 different mutational features have been identified in fruit flies. But none of these changes the fruit fly to a different species. "Out of 400 mutations that have been provided by Drosophila melanogaster, there is not one that can be called a new species. It does not seem, therefore, that the central problem of evolution can be solved by mutations."—*Maurice Caullery, Genetics and Heredity (1964), p. 119. "Richard Goldschmidt fell into despair. The changes, he lamented, were so hopelessly micro [insignificant] that if a thousand mutations were combined in one specimen, there would still be no new species."—Norman Macbeth, Darwin Retried (1971), p. 33. A thousand known fruit-fly mutations placed in one individual—would still not produce a new species! "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."—*Richard B. Goldschmidt, "Evolution, As Viewed by One Geneticist," American Scientist, January 1952, p. 94. The obstinate, stubborn little creatures! "Fruit flies refuse to become anything but fruit flies under any circumstances yet devised."—*Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong (1982), p. 61.

What happens to the mutated fruit flies?

We have had opportunity to clearly learn what mutations do to a physical organism. Fruit flies which receive mutations are always weakened in one way or another. "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."—*Theodosius Dobzhansky, Heredity and the Nature of Man (1964), p. 126. The mutated creatures die out, when placed out in nature with normal hardy specimens. "A review of known facts about their ability to survive has led to no other conclusion than that they [the mutated offspring] are always constitutionally weaker than their parent form or species, and in a population with free competition they are eliminated . . Therefore they are never found in nature (e.g. not a single one of the several hundred [types] of Drosophila mutation), and therefore, they are able to appear only in the favorable environment of the experimental field or laboratory."—*H. Nilsson, Synthetische Artbildng (1957), p. 1186. The classical example of the damaging effects of mutations is to be found in what scientists have done to fruit flies by inducing mutations in them. "Most mutants which arise in any organism are more or less disadvantageous to their possessors. The classical mutants obtained in Drosophila usually show deterioration, breakdown, or disappearance of some organs. Mutants are known which diminish the quantity or destroy the pigment in the eyes, and in the body reduce the wings, eyes, bristles, legs. Many mutants 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."—*Theodosius Dobzhansky, Evolution, Genetics, and Man (1955), p. 105. No new-species fruit flies have ever resulted from sixty years of irradiation the poor creatures. "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 round 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."—*Gordon R. Taylor, The Great Evolution Mystery (1983), p. 48. Pitman says the experiments have only produced geneticists' monsters. "Take the example of fruit flies (Drosophila). 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."—*Michael Pitman, Adam and Evolution (1984), p. 70.

Mutated fruit flies: normal, wrinkled wing, no wing, compound eye. Mutations cause radical changes in appearance, but whatever happens, a fruitfly will always remain a fruitfly. The mutations are negative...