Mutation - natural selection

Here is how the imaginary part is supposed to happen: On rare occasions a mutation in DNA improves a creature's ability to survive, so it is more likely to reproduce (natural selection).  That is evolution's only tool for making new creatures.  It might even work if it took just one gene to make and control one part.  But parts of living creatures are constructed of intricate components with connections that all need to be in place for the thing to work, controlled by many genes that have to act in the proper sequence.  Natural selection would not choose parts that did not have all their components existing, in place, connected, and regulated because the parts would not work.  Thus all the right mutations (and none of the destructive ones) must happen at the same time by pure chance.  That is physically impossible.  To illustrate just how hopeless it is, imagine this: on the ground are all the materials needed to build a house (nails, boards, shingles, windows, etc.).  We tie a hammer to the wagging tail of a dog and let him wander about the work site for as long as you please, even millions of years.  The swinging hammer on the dog is as likely to build a house as mutation-natural selection is to make a single new working part in an animal, let alone a new creature.

Only mutations in the reproductive (germ) cells of an animal or plant would be passed on.  Mutations in the eye or skin of an animal would not matter.  Mutations in DNA happen fairly often, but most are repaired or destroyed by mechanisms in animals and plants.  All knownmutations in animal and plant germ cells are neutral, harmful, or fatal.  But evolutionists are eternally optimistic.  They believe that millions of beneficial mutations built every type of creature that ever existed.

Believing in beneficial mutations is like believing a short-circuit in the motherboard of your computer could improve its performance.  To make any lasting change, a beneficial mutation would have to spread ("sweep") through a population and stay (become "fixed").  To evolutionists, this idea has been essential for so long that it is called a "classic sweep", "in which a new, strongly beneficial mutation increases in frequency to fixation in the population."  Some evolutionist researchers went looking for classic sweeps in humans, and reported their findings in the journal Science.  "To evaluate the importance of classic sweeps in shaping human diversity, we analyzed resequencing data for 179 human genomes from four populations".  "In humans, the effects of sweeps are expected to persist for approximately 10,000 generations or about 250,000 years."  Evolutionists had identified "more than 2000 genes as potential targets of positive selection in the human genome", and they expected that "diversity patterns in about 10% of the human genome have been affected by linkage to recent sweeps."  So what did they find?  "In contrast to expectation," their test detected nothing, but they could not quite bring themselves to say it.  They said there was a "paucity of classic sweeps revealed by our findings".  Sweeps "were too infrequent within the past 250,000 years to have had discernible effects on genomic diversity."  "Classic sweeps were not a dominant mode of human adaptation over the past 250,000 years." --Hernandez, Ryan D., Joanna L. Kelley, Eyal Elyashiv, S. Cord Melton, Adam Auton, Gilean McVean, 1000 Genomes Project, Guy Sella, Molly Przeworski. 18 February 2011. Classic Selective Sweeps Were Rare in Recent Human Evolution. Science, Vol. 331, no. 6019, pp. 920-924.

A 35-year experiment by evolutionists shows how things really work.  Instead of waiting for natural selection, researchers forced selection on hundreds of generations of fruit flies.  They used variation to breed fruit flies that develop from egg to adult 20% faster than normal.  But, as usual when breeding plants and animals, there was a down side.  In this case the fruit flies weighed less, lived shorter lives, and were less resistant to starvation.  There were many mutations, but none caught on, and the experiment ran into the limits of variation.  They wrote that "forward experimental evolution can often be completely reversed with these populations".  "Despite decades of sustained selection in relatively small, sexually reproducing laboratory populations, selection did not lead to the fixation of newly arising unconditionally advantageous alleles."  "The probability of fixation in wild populations should be even lower than its likelihood in these experiments." --Burke, Molly K., Joseph P. Dunham, Parvin Shahrestani, Kevin R. Thornton, Michael R. Rose, Anthony D. Long. 30 September 2010. Genome-wide analysis of a long-term evolution experiment with Drosophila. Nature, Vol. 467, pp. 587-590.