Page 527 - Atlas of Creation Volume 3

Harun Yahya

the wrong deductions from these instances. Loren Eisley, one of the
world's most prominent anthropologists, explains:

It would appear that careful domestic breeding, whatever it may do to im-
prove the quality of race horses or cabbages, is not actually in itself the road
to the endless biological deviation which is evolution. There is great irony

in this situation, for more than almost any other single factor, domestic
breeding has been used as an argument for . . . evolution. 104

And Edward S. Deevey, a biologist and ecologist at the
University of Florida, points out that there is a limitation to varia-
tion in nature: "Wheat is still wheat, and not, for instance, grapefruit;
and we can no more grow wings on pigs than hens can make cylindri-

cal eggs." 105
Experiments conducted on fruit flies also struck the wall of Loren Eisley
"genetic limitation." In all of these experiments, fruit flies under-

went changes to a certain extent, but beyond that limit, no change was
observed. Ernst Mayr, a well-known neo-Darwinist, reports from two experi-
ments done on fruit flies:

In the starting stock, the combined average bristle number of males and females on these segments was about
36. Selection for low bristle number was able to lower this average after 30 generations to 25 chaetae, after

which the line soon died out owing to sterility. . . In the "high line" (selection for high bristle number),
progress was at first rapid and steady. Within 20 generations bristle number had risen from 36 to an average
56, without marked spurts or plateaus. At this stage sterility became severe. 106

After these experiments, Mayr reached the following conclusion:

Obviously any drastic improvement under selection must seriously deplete the store of genetic variability. . .
The most frequent correlated response of one-sided selection is a drop in general fitness. This plagues virtu-

ally every breeding experiment. 107

One of the most important texts dealing with this subject is Natural Limits to Biological Change written
by biology professor Lane P. Lester and molecular biologist Raymond G. Bohlin. In their book's intro-
duction, they write:

That populations of living organisms may change in their anatomy, physiology, genetic structure, etc., over a
period of time is beyond question. What remains elusive is the answer to the question, How much change is

possible, and by what genetic mechanism will these changes take place? Plant
and animal breeders can marshal an impressive array of examples to demon-
strate the extent to which living systems can be altered. But when a breeder be-
gins with a dog, he ends up with a dog—a rather strange looking one perhaps,
but a dog nonetheless. A fruit fly remains a fruit fly; a rose, a rose, and so on. 108

The authors studied this subject with scientific observations and ex-

periments and arrived at two basic conclusions:
1) No new genetic data can be obtained without external inter-
ference in the genes of organisms. Without such interference, new
biological data cannot appear in nature. That is, new species,

new organs, and new structures cannot come into being. It is
only "genetic variation" that occurs naturally in a given
species. These limited alterations include the development
Ernst Mayr of, for example, shorter, larger, short-haired or long-haired

breeds of dogs. Even given a million years, these variations

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