In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood

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Discussion

The lunar surface is composed of a powdery soil, an inch or so thick, below which are 4–10 meters of regolith.6 The Moon’s regolith consists of a range of particle sizes from fine dust up to blocks several meters wide. Meteoritic impacts overturn and mix this soil-regolith, each time coating the outer surfaces with very thin layers of condensed meteoritic material.

The expected thickness of the soil-regolith, as shown in Table 27 where we assumed 4.5 billion years of bombardment at only today’s rate, exceeds by about 50 times its actual thickness. Most of this calculated thickness comes from Region D—meteorites larger than 106 grams but smaller than meteorites that can form craters 100 km in diameter. Why are the contributions from Regions A, B, and C so much smaller?

We made two faulty assumptions. First, we assumed that the influx of meteoritic material, for Regions A, B, and C, has always been what it is today. Obviously, as time has passed, the influx has decreased enormously because moons and planets sweep meteoritic material up or expel it beyond the Earth-Moon neighborhood. Only Point E, which strongly influenced Region D, did not have that assumption. Point E is based on rocks that we know struck the Moon sometime in the past. Removing this assumption increases the expected thickness even more in all regions7 and would partly explain why Region D contributes so much to our total expected thickness.

Second, Table 27 assumes that the impactors fell steadily from outer space as they do today. However, the caption to Heat flow measurements on the Moon are also consistent with a recent cratering event. [See “Hot Moon” on page page 36 and the corresponding endnote on page 95.]What if all lunar impactors were of two types: primary and secondary? The primary impactors were large, extremely high-velocity rocks fired from Earth by the fountains of the great deep. Those impacts formed the giant multiringed basins that dominate the Moon’s near side. The resulting debris and other space debris were secondary impactors. Consequently, primary impactors account for Point E, and secondary impactors account for much smaller and slower impactors. Therefore, Region D requires less impactor mass than our interpolation assumed.

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Conclusion

The relative small amount of debris on the Moon is inconsistent with what we would expect if the solar system and Moon evolved over 4.6 x 109 years. It appears that two types of impacts have occurred:

a. a brief and recent interval of very high-velocity impacts from Earth, many of which were large, and

b. a diminishing number of smaller impacts, distributed today as shown in Regions A–C.

Several people have published attempts to answer the question of this technical note. Those efforts have usually (1) neglected the factor of 67, (2) ignored the large impacts shown by Point E, (3) assumed that the influx rate has always been what it is today, and (4) overlooked the relatively recent event that produced the meteorites, pummeled the Moon, and provided secondary impactors.

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128.   Water above Mountains?

Is there enough water to cover all the earth’s preflood mountains in a global flood? Most people do not realize that the volume of water on earth is ten times greater than the volume of all land above sea level.

Most of the earth’s mountains consist of tipped and buckled sedimentary layers. Because these sediments were initially laid down through water as nearly horizontal layers, those mountains must have been pushed up after the sediments were deposited.  [See pages 102–131.]

If the effects of compressing the continents and buckling up mountains were reversed, the oceans would again flood the entire earth. Therefore, the earth has enough water to cover the smaller mountains that existed before the flood. (If the solid earth were perfectly smooth, the water depth would be about 9,000 feet everywhere.)

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129.   Shells on Mountains

Every major mountain range on earth contains fossilized sea life—far above sea level and usually far from the nearest body of water.  Attempts to explain “shells on mountain tops” have generated controversy for centuries.a

An early explanation was that a global flood covered these mountains, allowing clams and other sea life to “crawl” far and high. However, under the best conditions, clams move too slowly to reach such heights, even if the flood lasted thousands of years; besides, the earth does not have enough water to cover these mountains. Others said that some sea bottoms sank, leaving adjacent sea bottoms (loaded with sea creatures) relatively high—what we today call mountains. How such large subterranean voids formed to allow this sinking was never explained. Still others proposed that sea bottoms rose to become mountains. Mechanisms for pushing up mountains were also never satisfactorily explained. Because elevations on earth change slowly, some wondered if sea bottoms could rise miles into the air, perhaps over millions of years. However, mountain tops erode relatively rapidly—and so should fossils slowly lifted by them. Furthermore, mountain tops accumulate few sediments that might protect such fossils. Some early authorities, in frustration, said the animals grew inside rocks—or the rocks simply look like clams, corals, fish, and ammonites. Some denied the evidence even existed.

The means by which mountains were pushed up in hours during a global flood will soon be presented. The mechanism is simple, the energy and forces are sufficient, and supporting evidence (pages 99–255) is voluminous—not just sea shells on mountains.

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130.   Flood Legends

A gigantic flood may be the most common of all legends—ever. Practically every ancient culture has legends telling of a traumatic flood in which only a few humans survived in a large boat.a,b This cannot be said for other types of catastrophes, such as earthquakes, fires, volcanic eruptions, disease, famines, or drought. More than 230 flood legends contain many common elements, suggesting they have a common historical source that left a vivid impression on survivors of that catastrophe.

Figure 38: Chinese Word for Boat. Classical Chinese, dating to about 2500 B.C., is one of the oldest languages known. Its “words,” called pictographs, are often composed of smaller symbols that themselves have meaning and together tell a story. For example, the classical Chinese word for boat, shown above, is composed of the symbols for “vessel,” “eight,” and “mouth” or “person.” Why would the ancient Chinese refer to a boat as “eight-person-vessel”?  How many people were on the Ark?

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131.   Was There Room?

Could the Ark have held all the animals? Easily. [See Figure 39.] A few humans, some perhaps hired by others, could build a boata large enough to hold representatives of every air-breathing land animal—perhaps 16,000 animals in all. (Of course, sea creatures did not need to be on the Ark. Nor did insects or amphibians. Only mammals, birds, reptiles, and humans. Much plant life survived the flood in a surprisingly simple way.)b The Ark, having at least 1,500,000 cubic feet of space, was adequate to hold these animals, their provisions, and all their other needs for one year.c

Since the flood, many offspring of those on the Ark would have become reproductively isolated to some degree due to mutations, natural genetic variations, and geographic dispersion. Thus, variations within a kind have proliferated. Each variation or species we see today did not have to be on the Ark. For example, a pair of wolflike animals were probably ancestors of the coyotes, dingoes, jackals, and hundreds of varieties of domestic dogs. (This is microevolution, not macroevolution, because each member of the dog kind can interbreed and has the same organs and genetic structure.) Could the Ark have held dinosaurs and elephants?  Certainly, if they were young.

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Figure 39: Ark in Football Stadium. This sketch shows how the Ark would fit into a football stadium. The Ark is frequently depicted as a small boat by those who have not bothered to check its dimensions. It was 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits tall. While there were several ancient cubits (generally the distance from a man’s elbow to the extended fingers), a cubit was typically 1.5 feet or slightly longer. The 450-foot-long Ark would snugly fit in a football stadium and would be taller than a four-story building.

This sketch of the Ark is based on George Hagopian’s credible account (page 42). The Ark did not look like a boat. It had a flat bottom, was not streamlined, and had windows in its top. The flat bottom would have made loading on dry land possible. Streamlined shapes are important only for ships designed for speed and fuel efficiency—neither of which applied to the Ark. Windows in the side might be nice for the passengers (or for the proverbial giraffes to stick their necks out), but side windows limit the depth of submergence and the maximum load. Riding low in the water gives a boat great stability. Actually, the Hebrew word for Ark does not mean boat; it means box, coffin, or chest—an apt description unknown to Hagopian.

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1.   The Law of Biogenesis

a
   

. And yet, leading evolutionists are forced to accept some form of spontaneous generation. For example, a former Harvard University professor and Nobel Prize winner in physiology and medicine acknowledged the dilemma.
        

The reasonable view [during the two centuries before Louis Pasteur] was to believe in spontaneous generation; the only alternative, to believe in a single, primary act of supernatural creation. There is no third position. George Wald, “The Origin of Life,” Scientific American, Vol. 190, August 1954, p. 46.
    

With no rationale given, Wald goes on to accept the impossible odds of spontaneous generation rather than creation.
        

One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are—as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation.  Ibid.

b
   

. “The beginning of the evolutionary process raises a question which is as yet unanswerable. What was the origin of life on this planet? Until fairly recent times there was a pretty general belief in the occurrence of ‘spontaneous generation.’ It was supposed that lowly forms of life developed spontaneously from, for example, putrefying meat. But careful experiments, notably those of Pasteur, showed that this conclusion was due to imperfect observation, and it became an accepted doctrine [the law of biogenesis] that life never arises except from life. So far as actual evidence goes, this is still the only possible conclusion. But since it is a conclusion that seems to lead back to some supernatural creative act, it is a conclusion that scientific men find very difficult of acceptance. It carries with it what are felt to be, in the present mental climate, undesirable philosophic implications, and it is opposed to the scientific desire for continuity. It introduces an unaccountable break in the chain of causation, and therefore cannot be admitted as part of science unless it is quite impossible to reject it. For that reason most scientific men prefer to believe that life arose, in some way not yet understood, from inorganic matter in accordance with the laws of physics and chemistry.”  J. W. N. Sullivan, The Limitations of Science (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1933), p. 94.

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2.   Acquired Characteristics

a
   

. The false belief that acquired characteristics can be inherited, called Lamarckism, would mean that the environment can directly and beneficially change egg and sperm cells. Only a few biologists try to justify Lamarckism. The minor acquired characteristics they cite have no real significance for any present theory of organic evolution. For example, see “Lamarck, Dr. Steel and Plagiarism,” Nature, Vol. 337, 12 January 1989, pp. 101–102.

b
   

. “This hypothesis [called “pangenesis” which Darwin proposed] maintained the idea of inheritance of acquired characteristics.” A. M. Winchester, Genetics, 5th edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1977), p. 24.

c
   

“... it is a perplexing evolutionary question how a population might move to a different local optimum without an intervening period of reduced fitness (adaptive valley).” Christine Queitsch et al., “Hsp90 as a Capacitor of Phenotypic Variation,” Nature, Vol. 417, 6 June 2002, p. 623.

d
   

. “... genes that were switched on in the parent to generate the defensive response are also switched on in the offspring.” Erkki Haukioja, “Bite the Mother, Fight the Daughter,” Nature, Vol. 401, 2 September 1999, p. 23.
u    

“... non-lethal exposure of an animal to carnivores, and a plant to a herbivore, not only induces a defence, but causes the attacked organisms to produce offspring that are better defended than offspring from unthreatened parents.” Anurag A. Agrawal et al., “Transgenerational Induction of Defences in Animals and Plants,” Nature, Vol. 401, 2 September 1999, p. 60.
u    

“... hidden genetic diversity exists within species and can erupt when [environmental] conditions change.” John Travis, “Evolutionary Shocker?: Stressful Conditions May Trigger Plants and Animals to Unleash New Forms Quickly,” Science News, Vol. 161, 22 June 2002, p. 394.
u    

“Environmental stress can reveal genetic variants, presumably because it compromises buffering systems. If selected for, these uncovered phenotypes can lead to heritable changes in plants and animals (assimilation).” Queitsch et al., p. 618.

e
   

. Marina Chicurel, “Can Organisms Speed Their Own Evolution?” Science, Vol. 292, 8 June 2001, pp. 1824–1827.

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3.   Mendel’s Laws

a
   

. Monroe W. Strickberger, Genetics, 2nd edition (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1976), p. 812.
u    

Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently proposed the theory of organic evolution slightly before Charles Darwin, was opposed to Mendel’s laws of genetics. Wallace knew Mendel’s experiments showed that the general characteristics of an organism remained within distinct boundaries. In a letter to Dr. Archdall Reid on 28 December 1909, Wallace wrote:
        

But on the general relation of Mendelism to Evolution I have come to a very definite conclusion. This is, that it has no relation whatever to the evolution of species or higher groups, but is really antagonistic to such evolution! The essential basis of evolution, involving as it does the most minute and all-pervading adaptation to the whole environment, is extreme and ever-present plasticity, as a condition of survival and adaptation. But the essence of Mendelian characters is their rigidity. They are transmitted without variation, and therefore, except by the rarest of accidents, can never become adapted to ever varying conditions. James Marchant, Letters and Reminiscences (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1916), p. 340.

b
   

. “Every series of breeding experiments that has ever taken place has established a finite limit to breeding possibilities.” Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong (New Haven, Connecticut: Ticknor and Fields, 1982), p. 55.
u    

“All competent biologists acknowledge the limited nature of the variation breeders can produce, although they do not like to discuss it much when grinding the evolutionary ax.” William R. Fix, The Bone Peddlers: Selling Evolution (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1984), pp. 184–185.
u    

“A rule that all breeders recognize, is that there are fixed limits to the amount of change that can be produced.” Lane P. Lester and Raymond G. Bohlin, The Natural Limits to Biological Change (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1984), p. 96.
u    

Norman Macbeth, Darwin Retried: An Appeal to Reason (Ipswich, Massachusetts: Gambit, 1971), p. 36.
u    

William J. Tinkle, Heredity (Houston: St. Thomas Press, 1967), pp. 55–56.

c
   

. “... the distinctions of specific forms and their not being blended together by innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty.” Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 6th edition (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1927), p. 322.
u    

“Indeed, the isolation and distinctness of different types of organisms and the existence of clear discontinuities in nature have been self-evident for centuries, even to non-biologists.” Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (London: Burnett Books, 1985), p. 105.

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4.   Bounded Variations

a
   

. “... the discovery of the Danish scientist W. L. Johannsen that the more or less constant somatic variations upon which Darwin and Wallace had placed their emphasis in species change cannot be selectively pushed beyond a certain point, that such variability does not contain the secret of ‘indefinite departure.’ ” Loren Eiseley, Darwin’s Century (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1958), p. 227.

b
   

. “The awesome morphological complexity of organisms such as vertebrates that have far fewer individuals on which selection can act therefore remains somewhat puzzling (for me at least), despite the geological time scales available ...” Peter R. Sheldon, “Complexity Still Running,” Nature, Vol. 350, 14 March 1991, p. 104.

c
   

. Bland J. Finlay, “Global Dispersal of Free-Living Microbial Eukaryote Species,” Science, Vol. 296, 10 May 2002, pp. 1061–1063.

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5.   Natural Selection

a
   

. In 1835 and again in 1837, Edward Blyth, a creationist, published an explanation of natural selection. Later, Charles Darwin adopted it as the foundation for his theory, evolution by natural selection. Darwin failed to credit Blyth for his important insight. [See evolutionist Loren C. Eiseley, Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), pp. 45–80.]
    

Darwin also largely ignored Alfred Russel Wallace, who had independently proposed the theory that is usually credited solely to Darwin. In 1855, Wallace published the theory of evolution in a brief note in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, a note that Darwin read. Again, on 9 March 1858, Wallace explained the theory in a letter to Darwin, 20 months before Darwin finally published his more detailed theory of evolution.
    

Edward Blyth also showed why natural selection would limit an organism’s characteristics to only slight deviations from those of all its ancestors. Twenty-four years later, Darwin tried to refute Blyth’s explanation in a chapter in The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (24 November 1859).
    

Darwin felt that, with enough time, gradual changes could accumulate. Charles Lyell’s writings (1830) had persuaded Darwin that the earth was at least hundreds of thousands of years old. James Hutton’s writings (1788) had convinced Lyell that the earth was extremely old. Hutton felt that certain geological formations supported an old earth. Those geological formations are explained, not by time, but by a global flood.  [See pages 100–255.]
u    

“Darwin was confronted by a genuinely unusual problem. The mechanism, natural selection, by which he hoped to prove the reality of evolution, had been written about most intelligently by a nonevolutionist [Edward Blyth]. Geology, the time world which it was necessary to attach to natural selection in order to produce [hopefully] the mechanism of organic change, had been beautifully written upon by a man [Charles Lyell] who had publicly repudiated the evolutionary position.”  Eiseley, p. 76.
u    

Charles Darwin also plagiarized in other instances. [See Jerry Bergman, “Did Darwin Plagiarize His Evolution Theory?” Technical Journal, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2002, pp. 58–63.]

b
   

. “[Natural selection] may have a stabilizing effect, but it does not promote speciation. It is not a creative force as many people have suggested.” Daniel Brooks, as quoted by Roger Lewin, “A Downward Slope to Greater Diversity,” Science, Vol. 217, 24 September 1982, p. 1240.
u    

“The essence of Darwinism lies in a single phrase: natural selection is the creative force of evolutionary change. No one denies that natural selection will play a negative role in eliminating the unfit. Darwinian theories require that it create the fit as well.” Stephen Jay Gould, “The Return of Hopeful Monsters,” Natural History, Vol. 86, June–July 1977, p. 28.

c
   

. G. Z. Opadia-Kadima, “How the Slot Machine Led Biologists Astray,” Journal of Theoretical Biology, Vol. 124, 1987, pp. 127–135.

d
   

. Eric Penrose, “Bacterial Resistance to Antibiotics—A Case of Un-Natural Selection,” Creation Research Society Quarterly, Vol. 35, September 1998, pp. 76–83.

e
   

. Well-preserved bodies of members of the Franklin expedition, frozen in the Canadian Arctic in 1845, contain bacteria resistant to antibiotics. Because the first antibiotics were developed in the early 1940s, these resistant bacteria could not have evolved in response to antibiotics. Contamination has been eliminated as a possibility. [See Rick McGuire, “Eerie: Human Arctic Fossils Yield Resistant Bacteria,” Medical Tribune, 29 December 1988, p. 1.]
u    

“The genetic variants required for resistance to the most diverse kinds of pesticides were apparently present in every one of the populations exposed to these man-made compounds.” Francisco J. Ayala, “The Mechanisms of Evolution,” Scientific American, Vol. 239, September 1978, p. 65.

f
   

. “Darwin complained his critics did not understand him, but he did not seem to realize that almost everybody, friends, supporters and critics, agreed on one point, his natural selection cannot account for the origin of the variations, only for their possible survival. And the reasons for rejecting Darwin’s proposal were many, but first of all that many innovations cannot possibly come into existence through accumulation of many small steps, and even if they can, natural selection cannot accomplish it, because incipient and intermediate stages are not advantageous.” Søren Løvtrup, Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth (New York: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 274–275.
u    

“It was a shock to the people of the 19th century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection. It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover, from observations science has made, that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on. The theory of undirected evolution is already dead, but the work of science continues.” Michael J. Behe, “Molecular Machines,” Cosmic Pursuit, Spring 1998, p. 35.

g
   

. In 1980, the “Macroevolution Conference” was held in Chicago. Roger Lewin, writing for Science, described it as a “turning point in the history of evolutionary theory.” He went on to say:
        

The central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macroevolution. At the risk of doing violence to the positions of some of the people at the meeting, the answer can be given as a clear, No. Roger Lewin, “Evolution Theory under Fire,” Science, Vol. 210, 21 November 1980, p. 883.
    

“In a generous admission Francisco Ayala, a major figure in propounding the Modern Synthesis [neo-Darwinism] in the United States, said ‘We would not have predicted stasis [the stability of species over time] from population genetics, but I am now convinced from what the paleontologists say that small changes do not accumulate.’ ”  Ibid., p. 884.
    

As stated earlier, micro + time  ≠  macro.
u    

“One could argue at this point that such ‘minor’ changes [microevolution], extrapolated over millions of years, could result in macroevolutionary change. But the observational evidence will not support this argument ... [examples given] Thus, the changes observed in the laboratory are not analogous to the sort of changes needed for macroevolution. Those who argue from microevolution to macroevolution may be guilty, then, of employing a false analogy—especially when one considers that microevolution may be a force of stasis [stability], not transformation. ... For those who must describe the history of life as a purely natural phenomenon, the winnowing action of natural selection is truly a difficult problem to overcome. For scientists who are content to describe accurately those processes and phenomena which occur in nature (in particular, stasis), natural selection acts to prevent major evolutionary change.” Michael Thomas, “Stasis Considered,” Origins Research, Vol. 12, Fall/Winter 1989, p. 11.

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6.   Mutations

a
   

. “Ultimately, all variation is, of course, due to mutation.” Ernst Mayr, “Evolutionary Challenges to the Mathematical Interpretation of Evolution,” Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, editors Paul S. Moorhead and Martin M. Kaplan, proceedings of a symposium held at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology, 25–26 April, 1966 (Philadelphia: The Wistar Institute Press, 1967), p. 50.
u    

“Although mutation is the ultimate source of all genetic variation, it is a relatively rare event, ...” Ayala, p. 63.

b
   

. “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.” Theodosius Dobzhansky, “On Methods of Evolutionary Biology and Anthropology,” American Scientist, December 1957, p. 385.
u    

“In molecular biology, various kinds of mutations introduce the equivalent of noise pollution of the original instructive message. Communication theory goes to extraordinary lengths to prevent noise pollution of signals of all kinds. Given this longstanding struggle against noise contamination of meaningful algorithmic messages, it seems curious that the central paradigm of biology today attributes genomic messages themselves solely to noise.” David L. Abel and Jack T. Trevors, “Three Subsets of Sequence Complexity and Their Relevance to Biopolymeric Information,” Theoretical Biology & Medical Modelling, Vol. 2, 11 August 2005, p. 10. (Also available at www.tbiomed.com/content/2/1/29.)
u    

“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.
    

“Mutation does produce hereditary changes, but the mass of evidence shows that all, or almost all, known mutations are unmistakably pathological and the few remaining ones are highly suspect.”  Ibid., p. 103.
    

“[Although mutations have produced some desirable breeds of animals and plants,] all mutations seem to be in the nature of injuries that, to some extent, impair the fertility and viability of the affected organisms. I doubt if among the many thousands of known mutant types one can be found which is superior to the wild type in its normal environment, only very few can be named which are superior to the wild type in a strange environment.”  Ibid., p. 100.
u    

“If we say that it is only by chance that they [mutations] are useful, we are still speaking too leniently. In general, they are useless, detrimental, or lethal.”  W. R. Thompson, “Introduction to The Origin of Species,” Everyman Library No. 811 (New York: E. P. Dutton & Sons, 1956; reprint, Sussex, England: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1967), p. 10.
u    

Visible mutations are easily detectable genetic changes such as albinism, dwarfism, and hemophilia. Winchester quantifies the relative frequency of several types of mutations.
        

Lethal mutations outnumber visibles by about 20 to 1. Mutations that have small harmful effects, the detrimental mutations, are even more frequent than the lethal ones.  Winchester, p. 356.
u    

John W. Klotz, Genes, Genesis, and Evolution, 2nd edition, revised (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1972), pp. 262–265.
u    

“... 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, Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, editors Paul S. Moorhead and Martin M. Kaplan, pp. 18–19.
    

However, evolutionists have taught for years that hemoglobin alpha changed through mutations into hemoglobin beta. This would require, at a minimum, 120 point mutations. In other words, the improbability Wald refers to above must be raised to the 120th power to produce just this one protein!
u    

“Even if we didn’t have a great deal of data on this point, we could still be quite sure on theoretical grounds that mutants would usually be detrimental. For a mutation is a random change of a highly organized, reasonably smoothly functioning living body. A random change in the highly integrated system of chemical processes which constitute life is almost certain to impair it—just as a random interchange of connections in a television set is not likely to improve the picture.” James F. Crow (Professor of Genetics, University of Wisconsin), “Genetic Effects of Radiation,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 14, January 1958, pp. 19–20.
u    

“The one systematic effect of mutation seems to be a tendency towards degeneration ...” [emphasis in original] Sewall Wright, “The Statistical Consequences of Mendelian Heredity in Relation to Speciation,” The New Systematics, editor Julian Huxley (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 174.
    

Wright then concludes that other factors must also have been involved, because he believes evolution happened.
u    

In discussing the many mutations needed to produce a new organ, Koestler says:
        

Each mutation occurring alone would be wiped out before it could be combined with the others. They are all interdependent. The doctrine that their coming together was due to a series of blind coincidences is an affront not only to common sense but to the basic principles of scientific explanation.  Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1968), p. 129.

c
   

. “There is no single instance where it can be maintained that any of the mutants studied has a higher vitality than the mother species.” N. Heribert Nilsson, Synthetische Artbildung (Lund, Sweden: Verlag CWK Gleerup, 1953), p. 1157.
    

“It is, therefore, absolutely impossible to build a current evolution on mutations or on recombinations.” [emphasis in original]  Ibid., p. 1186.
u    

“No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution.”  Pierre-Paul Grassé, Evolution of Living Organisms (New York: Academic Press, 1977), p. 88.
u    

“I have seen no evidence whatsoever that these [evolutionary] changes can occur through the accumulation of gradual mutations.” Lynn Margulis, as quoted by Charles Mann, “Lynn Margulis: Science’s Unruly Earth Mother,” Science, Vol. 252, 19 April 1991, p. 379.
u    

“It is true that nobody thus far has produced a new species or genus, etc., by macromutation. It is equally true that nobody has produced even a species by the selection of micromutations.” Richard B. Goldschmidt, “Evolution, As Viewed by One Geneticist,” American Scientist, Vol. 40, January 1952, p. 94.
u    

“If life really depends on each gene being as unique as it appears to be, then it is too unique to come into being by chance mutations.” Frank B. Salisbury, “Natural Selection and the Complexity of the Gene,” Nature, Vol. 224, 25 October 1969, p. 342.
u    

“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 experiment has shown natural selection manipulating mutations so as to produce a new gene, hormone, enzyme system or organ.”  Michael Pitman, Adam and Evolution (London: Rider, 1984), pp. 67–68.

[Soldier4Christ]

7.   Fruit Flies

a
   

. “Most mutants which arise in any organism are more or less disadvantageous to their possessors. The classical mutants obtained in Drosophila [the fruit fly] 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 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1955), p. 105.
u    

“A review of known facts about their [mutated fruit flies’] ability to survive has led to no other conclusion than that they 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 hundreds of Drosophila mutations), and therefore they are able to appear only in the favourable environment of the experimental field or laboratory ...” Nilsson, p. 1186.
u    

“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.” Goldschmidt, p. 94.
u    

“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 Rattray Taylor (former Chief Science Advisor, BBC Television), The Great Evolution Mystery (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 48.
u    

“Fruit flies refuse to become anything but fruit flies under any circumstances yet devised.”  Hitching, p. 61.
u    

“The fruitfly (Drosophila melanogaster), the favorite pet insect of the geneticists, whose geographical, biotopical, urban, and rural genotypes are now known inside out, seems not to have changed since the remotest times.” Grassé, p. 130.

[Soldier4Christ]

8.   Complex Molecules and Organs

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. “There has never been a meeting, or a book, or a paper on details of the evolution of complex biochemical systems.” Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (New York: The Free Press, 1996), p. 179.
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“Molecular evolution is not based on scientific authority. There is no publication in the scientific literature—in prestigious journals, speciality journals, or book—that describes how molecular evolution of any real, complex, biochemical system either did occur or even might have occurred. There are assertions that such evolution occurred, but absolutely none are supported by pertinent experiments or calculations. Since no one knows molecular evolution by direct experience, and since there is no authority on which to base claims of knowledge, it can truly be said that—like the contention that the Eagles will win the Super Bowl this year—the assertion of Darwinian molecular evolution is merely bluster.”  Behe, p. 186.

b
   

. “While today’s digital hardware is extremely impressive, it is clear that the human retina’s real-time performance goes unchallenged. Actually, to simulate 10 milliseconds (ms) of the complete processing of even a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution of about 500 simultaneous nonlinear differential equations 100 times and would take at least several minutes of processing time on a Cray supercomputer. Keeping in mind that there are 10 million or more such cells interacting with each other in complex ways, it would take a minimum of 100 years of [1985] Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye many times every second.”  John K. Stevens, “Reverse Engineering the Brain,” Byte, April 1985, p. 287.
u    

“Was the eye contrived without skill in opticks [optics], and the ear without knowledge of sounds?” Isaac Newton, Opticks (England: 1704; reprint, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931), pp. 369–370.
u    

“Certainly there are those who argue that the universe evolved out of a random process, but what random process could produce the brain of a man or the system of the human eye?” Wernher von Braun (probably the rocket scientist most responsible for the United States’ success in placing men on the Moon) from a letter written by Dr. Wernher von Braun and read to the California State Board of Education by Dr. John Ford on 14 September 1972.
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“What random process could possibly explain the simultaneous evolution of the eye’s optical system, the nervous conductors of the optical signals from the eye to the brain, and the optical nerve center in the brain itself where the incoming light impulses are converted to an image the conscious mind can comprehend?” Wernher von Braun, foreword to From Goo to You by Way of the Zoo by Harold Hill (Plainfield, New Jersey: Logos International, 1976), p. xi.
u    

“The probability of dust carried by the wind reproducing Dürer’s ‘Melancholia’ is less infinitesimal than the probability of copy errors in the DNA molecule leading to the formation of the eye; besides, these errors had no relationship whatsoever with the function that the eye would have to perform or was starting to perform. There is no law against daydreaming, but science must not indulge in it.” [emphasis in original] Grassé, p. 104.
u    

“It must be admitted, however, that it is a considerable strain on one’s credulity to assume that finely balanced systems such as certain sense organs (the eye of vertebrates, or the bird’s feather) could be improved by random mutations. This is even more true for some of the ecological chain relationships (the famous yucca moth case, and so forth). However, the objectors to random mutations have so far been unable to advance any alternative explanation that was supported by substantial evidence.”  Ernst Mayr, Systematics and the Origin of Species (New York: Dover Publications, 1942), p. 296.
u    

Although Robert Jastrow generally accepts Darwinian evolution, he acknowledges that:
        

It is hard to accept the evolution of the human eye as a product of chance; it is even harder to accept the evolution of human intelligence as the product of random disruptions in the brain cells of our ancestors. Robert Jastrow, “Evolution: Selection for Perfection,” Science Digest, December 1981, p. 87.
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Many leading scientists have commented on the staggering complexity of the human eye. What some do not appreciate is how many diverse types of eyes there are, each of which adds to the problem for evolution.
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One of the strangest is a multiple-lensed, compound eye found in fossilized worms! [See Donald G. Mikulic et al., “A Silurian Soft-Bodied Biota,” Science, Vol. 228, 10 May 1985, pp. 715–717.]
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Another type of eye belonged to some trilobites, a thumb-size, extinct, sea-bottom creature. Evolutionists claim they were very early forms of life. Trilobite eyes had compound lenses, sophisticated designs for eliminating image distortion (spherical aberration). Only the best cameras and telescopes contain compound lenses. Some trilobite eyes contained 280 lenses, allowing vision in all directions, day and night. [See Richard Fortey and Brian Chatterton, “A Devonian Trilobite with an Eyeshade,” Science, Vol. 301, 19 September 2003, p. 1689.] Trilobite eyes “represent an all-time feat of function optimization.” [Riccardo Levi-Setti, Trilobites, 2nd edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 29–74.] Shawver described trilobite eyes as having “the most sophisticated eye lenses ever produced by nature.”  [Lisa J. Shawver, “Trilobite Eyes: An Impressive Feat of Early Evolution,” Science News, Vol. 105, 2 February 1974, p. 72.] Gould admitted that “The eyes of early trilobites, for example, have never been exceeded for complexity or acuity by later arthropods. ... I regard the failure to find a clear ‘vector of progress’ in life’s history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record.”  [Stephen Jay Gould, “The Ediacaran Experiment,” Natural History, February 1984, pp. 22–23.]
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