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The Way it Was

The Way It Was by Kelly L. Segraves

 More on Mutations

Dr. Lammerts also refers to the experiments performed on the fruit fly. Scientists have taken this fly and bombarded it with gamma rays, X-rays, and the like, producing numerous mutant forms of flies. They have developed a little fruit fly with no wings. with wrinkled wings, with half wings, with eight legs, with six legs, with red eyes, black eyes, no eyes. But the have never turned a fruit fly into a mosquito or anything else. The experiment began with fruit flies and ended with weaker forms of fruit flies. In the experiments most of the mutations were leather. Causing a mutation is like trying to improve your television set by throwing rocks at it with the hope that one of 1000 rocks ill improve it and change a black and white set into a color set. What is not considered in mutations is that 999 steps are working in the wrong direction. One could walk from America to China by taking one step forward and 999 backwards. He may get there, but he will be going the wrong direction. That is no progress. Mutations always take away. In fact, no single favorable mutation has ever been found.

Kettlewell's research with moths is taught in biology as "an excellent evidence of evolution" -- a supposed example of evolution in progress. There are dark moths and white moths. At the beginning of Kettlewell’s research, he found that in England there were more white moths than dark moths. The trees in the area were light-colored; the white moths blended into the trees very well, whereas the darker ones were easily seen by the birds who picked them up for food. Because of the Industrial Revolution, smoke and soot began to fill the trees, and now the dark moths blended in better and the birds found the white moths. He reported that he had observed evolution. To the contrary: he had white moths and dark moths in the beginning and white and dark moths in the end. He had perhaps demonstrated survival of the fittest -- that one is a little more fit to survive because it blends in with the protective environment -- but he had not demonstrated evolution because the moths had not really changed.

Scientists speak about the fly becoming resistant to DDT as evidence of evolution. However, the fly was a fly before and is a fly now. No one has ever demonstrated or proved that a fly more resistant to DDT has evolved. All that can really be said is that a number of flies were sprayed, and those not resistant to DDT died. Are we observing evolution when we take a fly that is now supposedly resistant to DDT and note that it produces fewer offspring and its life span is shorter than flies that were not sprayed? Is that favorable to the fly as a whole? He has adapted, perhaps, but the process does not explain how flies could change into mosquitoes or whatever is higher than flies. for it was a fly before and remains a fly after.

Mutations do not explain anything new appearing, but instead show degeneration. The merely tell us that if there were a time on earth when nothing lived but fish. By mutations alone one could never find anything but different forms of fish. Horses could never be produced because horses have characteristics that fish do not.

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