by Bill Nugent
Article #89
The illustrious evolutionist Dr. Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) once lamented that virtually all debates between evolutionists and creationists were won by the creationists. In fact I understand that it is hard to arrange creation vs evolution debates because of the reluctance of scholarly evolutionists to stand behind their crumbling theory.
Though evolutionist scholars prefer not to engage in public debate they are apparently not reluctant to attack creationism in books and articles where immediate rebuttal from creationists is not possible. It is in these forums that some very clever bending of the truth occurs. An amusing case of this occurred recently when some Australian evolutionists put some of their arguments in a book entitled Creationism, an Australian Perspective (edited byBridgstock and Smith).
In this book, evolutionist, zoologist Dr. Tony Thulborn referred to an experiment in which scales on chicken embryos were made to grow into feathers by the addition of one simple chemical which happened to be vitamin A. This was apparently an attempt to try to prove that scales could turn into feathers not by a complex recoding of the DNA but by simply adding one chemical.
Creationist Dr. Carl Wieland wrote an article entitled Putting Feathers on Reptiles (Creation magazine Vol. 11, No. 1) in which he pointed out the absurdity of Thulborn’s claim. The scales were on chicken embryos and one must remember that chicken embryos already have the DNA coding to produce either feathers or scales on various parts of their bodies. The legs of a chicken have scales while most of the rest of the body has feathers. The vitamin A which was added to the skin cells acted merely as a chemical trigger to turn on the genes to grow feathers. The vitamin A itself did not contain the complex DNA coding to turn a scale nub into the complex aerodynamic structure of a feather!
The casual reader of the book written by the Australian evolutionists, not having access to Dr. Wieland’s rebuttal, might have been swayed by Dr. Thulborn’s unsound presentation. Such a reader would be led to believe that evolutionists had surmounted the problem of how genetic information to design feathers could be added to the DNA. Thulborn’s claim that adding vitamin A could do this is, as we have seen, manifestly absurd.
The standard evolutionist claim, which is that random genetic mutations add sufficient information to the DNA to add new organs or limbs to animals is also demonstrably absurd.
Geneticists now know that random genetic mutations are detrimental or neutral in the vast majority of cases. Genetic mutations are typically destructive errors. Mutations virtually never add even the slightest amount of information to the genes. Large amounts of information consisting of properly sequenced chemical base pairs are needed to form feathers or any other anatomical structures. Thousands of new base pairs not only have to be added but also sequenced in such a way as to give proper design instructions to form a complex aerodynamically efficient feather. Probability analysis proves that such a favorable addition and proper sequencing of base pairs could not happen in a trillion years.
Mutations, whether induced by radiation or chemicals change the genetic information by scrambling or deleting chemical base pairs. Even genetic splicing doesn’t cause a net gain in genetic information in the total gene pool because the spliced genetic material had to be taken from preexisting genes in another organism and hence even this was not new, randomly formed genetic material.
Evolutionists have not yet been able to surmount this problem of a lack of mechanism to add information to DNA. This problem is fatal to their theory.