[/QUOTE]That's not true. It's creationist propaganda.
Most mutations are neutral, they have no obvious effect. Some are harmful, and natural selection suppresses their proliferation. Some are clearly beneficial. I can cite examples if you're skeptical.
Huh?
First off, "kind" is a vague, creationist term. Contemporary evolution of new species has been observed.
Observed Instances of Speciation Scroll to 5.0 for observed examples.
Evidence. Browse, if you dare:29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent
Natural selection doesn't make most mutations beneficial. Beneficial mutations real or imaginary part 1 - creation.com
Randomly occurring beneficial mutations lie at the heart of Darwinian evolution. Without them there is no mechanism by which a single originating cell could have diversified into the myriad species that we see on Earth and in the fossil record today. But according to recent reports on the human genome, mutations are being classified into just two categories—‘deleterious’ and ‘functional’. Beneficial mutations are not being catalogued. This surprising result turns out to be in accord with the history of the beneficial mutation concept. The theory was originally developed by R.A. Fisher in his 1930 book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection in an attempt to salvage Darwinism because the only evidence he had was for deleterious mutations. Until recently genetic theorists have perpetuated his practice. Beneficial mutations are simply assumed to exist because Darwinian theory demands that they exist. The first experiments to characterize the properties of beneficial mutations were published in 2011 and the result contradicted Fisher’s theory. This outcome is analyzed in part 2 of this article.
Having been a student of biology for more than 50 years I have never had a problem with the concept of beneficial mutations. I was therefore shocked to discover in recent reports on the human genome that beneficial mutations have not been found. Only ‘deleterious’ and ‘functional’ mutations have been documented. On doing some research into the ways that genetic theorists have treated beneficial mutations, and the data they have worked from, I was even more shocked to discover that they have had no data to work from either.
Today’s educated atheists grew up believing evolution as fact, the media made an industry out of it, and (almost) everybody believed it.
The theory of beneficial mutations was originally developed by English statistician R.A. Fisher, the founding father of neo-Darwinism, in his 1930 book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection.The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, Oxford University Press, London, 1930." style="box-sizing: inherit; color: rgb(34, 139, 246); background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none; margin-bottom: 4px; cursor: pointer;">1 But he had only deleterious mutations to work with and so he came up with his theory of beneficial mutations out of a belief that they must exist. Genetic theorists have followed his example ever since. The stranglehold that neo-Darwinian evolution has achieved over academia and the media today was thus built upon nothing more than imagination and evolutionary necessity.
Darwin’s Origin of Species started the ball rolling, but while it was widely praised it met fierce opposition from professional scientists.Darwin And His Critics: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community, University of Chicago Press, 1973." style="box-sizing: inherit; color: rgb(34, 139, 246); background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none; margin-bottom: 4px; cursor: pointer;">2 By the beginning of the 20th century the discovery of Mendelian genes and the fact that they could mutate had largely pushed Darwin’s ideas aside. By the end of the 1920s the science of genetics and the discovery that known mutations were all deleterious posed a seemingly fatal challenge to Darwinism. But in 1930 a new revolution began. Fisher published his book and he and fellow English mathematician J.B.S. Haldane, together with American geneticist Sewall Wright, then compiled during the 1930s and 1940s a body of mathematics that became known as the ‘Modern Synthesis’, or neo-Darwinian theory.
This body of theory remained largely academic until a convergence of three further events took place in 1953. Watson and Crick published the double-helix structure of DNA, giving biology its first ever grounding in the hard physical sciences. Bernard Kettlewell, a Research Fellow at Oxford University, began experiments on industrial melanism in the peppered moth. These produced the first ever example of natural selection in the wild3 and it became textbook orthodoxy as ‘evolution in action’. And American geochemist Clair Patterson announced at a conference what was to become a ‘universal constant’ in the evolutionary worldview—the 4.55-billion-year ‘age’ of the earth.
Mutations became synonymous with nucleotide changes in DNA. Natural selection re-emerged as all-conquering hero, promoting beneficial mutations, and removing deleterious ones. And the official oodles of time allowed chance to magically transform anything into anything else. Today’s educated atheists grew up believing evolution as fact, the media made an industry out of it, and (almost) everybody believed it. But at the IUPS Congress in Birmingham in July 2013, the President, Oxford University Emeritus Professor Denis Noble, announced that “all the central assumptions of the Modern Synthesis … have been disproven”.Exp Physiol. 98(8):1235–1243, 2013 | doi:10.1113/expphysiol.2012.071134." style="box-sizing: inherit; color: rgb(34, 139, 246); background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none; margin-bottom: 4px; cursor: pointer;">4
Darwin’s desire to ‘get something for nothing’ lies at the heart of the beneficial mutation concept and also at the heart of the world’s embrace of evolution.
Beneficial mutations
Despite Noble’s critique (and those of others e.g. ReMine,The Biotic Message: Evolution vs Message Theory, St Paul Science, St Paul, MN, 1993." style="box-sizing: inherit; color: rgb(34, 139, 246); background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none; margin-bottom: 4px; cursor: pointer;">5 SanfordGenetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome, 3rd edn, FMS Publications, New York, 2008." style="box-sizing: inherit; color: rgb(34, 139, 246); background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none; margin-bottom: 4px; cursor: pointer;">6) the concept of the beneficial mutation remains the centrepiece of evolutionary thinking. The underlying idea has been around since Darwin’s time. On p. 63 of the final 1876 edition of The Origin, Darwin said this:
“Natural Selection … implies only the preservation of such variations as arise and are beneficial to the being under its conditions of life.”
No-one could object to that. Darwin defined what he meant by ‘variation’ in chapter 2 of The Origin as things that could be observed by a careful study of many individuals of the varieties, species, and genera of interest. In other words, natural selection worked on those ‘variations’ that were already present if one looked closely and systematically enough. But when Mendel’s particulate theory of inheritance overtook Darwin’s blending theory of inheritance a dramatic change took place in the meaning of the word ‘variation’. Mendel’s particles (genes) were found to be able to mutate—to change spontaneously into something that had not existed previously. In the new era of genetics a ‘variation’ was no longer necessarily something that already existed and could be observed by a careful scientist. Mutations gave evolutionists the first solid evidence that something new could arise which had not existed previously. Darwin’s definition of ‘variation’ was no longer in charge!
When genetics came of age in 1953 in DNA’s double helix, with its interchangeable information-carrying bases, another change to the meaning of ‘variation’ took place. Natural variations of Darwin’s kind were already known to be produced during the crossing-over stage of meiosis. But when it was discovered that ‘random errors’ could occur in DNA copying of individual nucleotides these became the factories for the ‘something new that had not existed previously’. The neo-Darwinian mantra of ‘mutations and natural selection’ had now to depend entirely upon random copying errors to produce the new information that microbes-to-mankind evolution required. The ‘beneficial mutation’ of the early geneticists had turned into a ‘beneficial’ random DNA copying error.
