Evolution isn't Supported with Scientific Evidence

My contention is that evolution can’t happen and there is no evidence supporting the idea that it ever happened in the past. Unfortunately, Con has violated the debate structure I set in round 1. He was supposed to explain the process of evolution and provide evidence for it happening. This has left me with nothing from Con to rebut. So instead of doing nothing with my argument, I shall show some problems with evolution. Con’s job, in his next argument, is to explain and provide evidence for evolution, as he was supposed to in round 1. In round 3, I will attack his evidence and he will defend it. The way evolution supposedly occurs is that mutations add new, useful information to the genome, and by way of “survival of the fittest”, they are selected out of the population to reproduce. “Evolution is, to put it simply, the result of natural selection working on random mutations. ”—*M. Ruse, Philosophy of Biology (1973), p. 96. This sounds simple, but the problem is that mutations are never beneficial and never add anything new. If they have any effect, mutations will only weaken or severely damage the organism. Mutations are random mistakes or “typos” that occur during DNA replication. No one has ever observed a mutation add new, useful information to the genome. Genes and traits are carefully interlocked with each other, such that one gene could affect many traits and one trait could be coded for by many genes. They all work together like one complex machine. Mutations, which are random, confused errors in this machine, are never helpful. “An accident, a random change, in any delicate mechanism can hardly be expected to improve it. Poking a stick into the machinery of one’s watch or one’s radio set will seldom make it work better. ”—Theodosius Dobzhansky, Heredity and the Nature of Man (1964), p. 126. [Dobzhansky is a geneticist. ] (. http://www.icr.org......) In the 1900’s, many scientists spent years, some even their entire lives, irradiating fruit flies, simulating mutations that would only be seen from many millions of years of mammalian generations. The x-rays caused translocations, deletions, inversions, etc, (what would normally be seen in naturally occurring mutations) in the DNA code. The scientists observed hundreds of different mutations with hundreds of different effects on the poor flies. Not one mutation was beneficial. Flies that didn’t die from the mutations had all kinds of abnormal deformities and impairments. Here is a partial list of the results: . http://cgslab.com...... “Out of 400 mutations that have been provided by Drosophila melanogaster, there is not one that can be called a new species. It does not seem, therefore, that the central problem of evolution can be solved by mutations. ”—Maurice Caulery, Genetics and Heredity (1964), p. 119. Similar experiments have been done with other plants, and animals all showing that mutations are not unhelpful 99% of the time, they are unhelpful 100% of the time. As we have seen, a mutation will never improve an organism. Yet Con wants to suggest that billions upon billions of beneficial mutations, all working together, could “evolve” a macromolecule into a human. I would like for Con, in the next round, to give an example of an overall beneficial mutation that has been observed to add new, useful genetic information. Commonly used to support evolution is the fossil record and the increase in complexity of organisms found from the bottom to the top of the strata. But the strata and fossils could also be explained by a worldwide flood and any ordering that occurred would be due to habitat, mobility, and intelligence. What I would like to discuss though is the problem of fossil gaps or missing links. This quote summarizes the issue quite well. “If this view of evolution is true, the fossil record should produce an enormous number of transitional forms. Natural history museums should be overflowing with undoubted intermediate forms. About 250,000 fossil species have been collected and classified. These fossils have been collected at random from rocks that are supposed to represent all of the geological periods of earth’s history. Applying evolution theory and the laws of probability, most of these 250,000 species should represent transitional forms. ”—Duane T. Gish, “The Origin of Mammals” in Creation: the Cutting Edge (1982), p. 76. If evolution were true and certain animals changed into different kinds of animals over millions of years (e. g. dinosaurs to birds), we would expect to find countless fossils of animals in the process of evolving. Yet we find none. No intermediate forms exist. All that is found in the fossil record are fixed kinds and extinct animals, none of which show a smooth evolutionary transformation. For example, the bat has remained the same ever since it first appeared in the fossil record. No transitional forms led up to it, and it didn’t change into anything else. Dr. Colin Patterson, who was a senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History wrote a book several decades ago titled “Evolution”. Luther Sunderland, a Creationist, asked Dr. Patterson why he had not included any photos of a transitional fossils in his book. Patterson replied “I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them… I will lay it on the line—there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. ” (. http://creation.com...) I ask Con to, in the next round, give an example of a fossil that shows evolutionary transition from one kind of animal to another. Most of the commonly used “missing link” fossils are misinterpretations or fakes. Sources: Listed throughout argument.