Article #281
by Bill Nugent
Darwinists claim that the accumulation of favorable genetic mutations is how humans evolved from “goo to you by way of the zoo.” Recent advances in the science of genetics, especially the mapping of the human genome (DNA) and the mapping of animal genomes, has exposed the impossibility of mutations being a Darwinian change mechanism.
You may remember from biology class that the DNA of humans and animals is composed of long chains of nucleotide base pairs. The base pairs are like the letters of an alphabet that contain information and the information is the design or body plan of the organism. A mutation is a change in the order or “sequence” of the base pairs or an elimination of base pairs or a duplication of base pairs.
All sides agree that mutations are rare and the large majority of mutations are either unfavorable or neutral. I recently did an internet search and found that reliable sources estimate that less than one in four thousand genetic mutations are favorable. The overwhelming odds are that any particular mutation will be unfavorable or neutral.
Of extreme importance to note is that mutations don’t add new information to the DNA. Mutations simply shuffle or delete pre-existing information. Mutations garble information. You’ve heard on the news that a virus has mutated but they often neglect to say that the mutation of the virus DNA resulted in a net loss of information in the virus DNA. No mutation has been shown to result in a net addition of information. No mutation adds base pairs except in cases of duplication of genes. Genetic duplication is simply giving the DNA an extra copy of the gene. It is not new information.
Some Darwinian scientists may be so bold as to claim that in rare instances mutations add new information to the DNA. However, the evidence furnished by real operational genetic science is against them.
Now let’s look at a simple illustration. In the jungle of East Africa there is an australopithecine ape. Evolutionists would call it a proto-human or prehuman. It walks on all fours and is just starting to leave the jungle and hunt in the surrounding fields. According to Darwinism it’s on its way to evolving into a human. Let’s say that a genetic mutation involving just 52 base pairs is about to happen to a gamete cell (reproductive cell, such as egg or sperm) in the ape that will affect the design of the knee in the future offspring of the ape. The knee is the most complex and finely tuned joint in the ape’s body.
The design of an ape’s knee is likely determined by the sequence of thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of base pairs in the DNA. For simplicity let’s say that a reshuffling of just 52 base pairs can substantially alter knee structure in this ape’s offspring that will enable it to walk slightly more upright. But those 52 base pairs have to be shuffled into just the right sequence to affect the design of the knee in this advantageous way.
Fifty two happens to be the number of cards in a deck of ordinary playing cards. Let’s say that the reshuffling of the 52 base pairs to put the base pairs in a precise advantageous sequence is like shuffling a deck of cards and getting all four suits of cards in straight flush. Imagine shuffling cards and getting the hearts all in order: 2 of hearts, 3 of hearts, 4 of hearts all the way up to queen, king and ace of hearts and then the same for diamonds, clubs and spades.
Let’s say that radiation hits the gamete, causing a mutation involving 52 base pairs and the base pairs are reshuffled. The DNA doesn’t gain information but the preexisting information is garbled and it affects the design of the knee in a way that enables the ape offspring to walk slightly more upright. What is the probability of this actually happening in nature? This is a very big and important question!
Darwinism says that evolution is an unguided process involving genetic mutations that happen by blind chance. Natural selection then sorts out the products of blind chance and eliminates the weak. Natural selection is not a guiding mechanism but is a sorting mechanism.
Get out a deck of cards and start shuffling. Did you shuffle and get all four suits in straight flush? No? Let’s try again and again. Let’s calculate the odds of getting a 52 card straight flush. What is the chance that the first card in a newly shuffled deck comes out to be a 2 of hearts? That’s easy, it’s 1 in 52. You shuffle your deck 52 times and on average the 2 of hearts would be on top only once in that 52 shufflings. And once you’ve gotten that card to come up first what’s the chance of the second card being the 3 of hearts? That too is easy, it’s 1 in 51. The chance of getting just the first two cards in the right order would be 1 in 52 x 51 which would equal 1 in 2,652. Imagine sitting at your desk and shuffling a deck of cards 2,652 times just to have the top two cards be a 2 of hearts and a 3 of hearts one time during all that shuffling!
You then realize that the number of possible combinations of 52 cards is expressed by what your math teacher called “factorial 52” which is 52 x 51 x 50 x 49 x 48 x 47 x 46 . . . x 3 x 2 x 1. You get out your calculator and find that factorial 52 is equal to a sum greater than 8.07 x 10 to the 67th power! Think about how huge that number is. Scientists have estimated that the number of atoms in the Milky Way Galaxy is only 1 x 10 to the 65th power. The number of possible combinations of cards in an ordinary 52 card deck is nearly a thousand times greater than the number of atoms in the Milky Way Galaxy!
Now let’s see if we can get a 52 card straight flush by randomly shuffling decks of cards. If we were to put six and a half billion people to work shuffling decks of cards and they shuffled the card decks at the rate of one million decks per second and we employed them for fifteen billion years you would have less than a tenth of one percent chance of coming up with a 52 card hearts to spades straight flush in any of those decks at the end of fifteen billion years!!!
Now imagine a mutation that shuffles 52 base pairs in an ape’s DNA. If even one base pair is in the wrong sequence that could make the mutation disadvantageous. Even one base pair out of order could make the knee joint of the ape dysfunctional. Our card illustration showed that even if there were a million mutations per second there would be less than a tenth of one percent chance of getting that one properly sequenced 52 base pair favorable mutation in 15 billion years!
According to the results of the prodigious effort to map the human genome, human DNA contains well over one billion nucleotide base pairs arranged in precise sequence. If even one is out of sequence it can be disadvantageous or even in some cases fatal to the human body. For perspective, consider that cystic fibrosis is caused by the disordered sequence of just three nucleotides. Sickle cell anemia is caused by just one nucleotide out of order in a gene that codes for hemoglobin.
Chimpanzee DNA has also been mapped. Geneticists have determined that there are more than 30 million differences in nucleotide base pair sequences between chimpanzee DNA and human DNA. Evolutionists claim that chimps are our closest “cousins” and that chimps and humans supposedly evolved from the same apelike ancestor. Imagine the sheer number of favorable mutations and the number of base pairs involved that the Darwinist claims to have occurred during the alleged evolution from apelike creature to human!
German information scientist Dr. Werner Gitt and microbiologist Dr. Harold Morowitz are among many researchers who have analyzed the mutational information changes required for evolution and the probabilities of favorable mutations occurring by natural processes. The possibility of even one simple cell forming by evolution is so vanishingly small that it would simply never happen.
The bottom line is that Darwinian blind chance shuffling of DNA base pairs caused by radiation or chemical mutagens is not even remotely capable of causing uphill macro-evolutionary change in plants, animals or humans! The genetic evidence clearly points to the inadequacy of mutations as being the mechanism of evolution. This is just one of many fatal flaws in the theory of Darwinian evolution. Since secularists have no backup theory of materialistic origins they have to defend evolution tooth and nail or abandon secularism altogether and become theists.
All of the secularists, atheists and agnostics are surrounded by evidence that points to the necessity of God as Creator. As Romans 1:20 says: “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse” (NASB).
God has provided for our redemption by sending Jesus of Nazareth, the promised Messiah of Israel. Jesus came in fulfillment of over 300 Old Testament prophecies. No other figure in all of world history can make this claim! Jesus died for our sins which means that when He suffered and died He took the penalty of our sins upon Himself. He rose from the dead to offer forgiveness to all who call upon Him. Turn to Christ today to receive forgiveness of sins!