Or does he just create the genetic code that leads to new species, but does not tinker with other variations in genetic code? Do creationists allow for an understanding of mutation as long as it does not lead to a new species? Or does God create each mutation?
....all good questions and the Bible account in Genesis answers them! By the way, if you go further in the General Discussion threads you will find we discussed thoroughly for many months the subject of evolution vs. creation and all of it's aspects.
Myth 1. Mutations provide the raw materials needed to create new species. The teaching of macroevolution is built on the claim that mutations—random changes in the genetic code of plants and animals—can produce not only new species but also entirely new families of plants and animals.
The facts. Many characteristics of a plant or an animal are determined by the instructions contained in its genetic code, the blueprints that are wrapped up in the nucleus of each cell. Researchers have discovered that mutations can produce alterations in the descendants of plants and animals. But do mutations really produce entirely new species? What has a century of study in the field of genetic research revealed?
In the late 1930’s, scientists enthusiastically embraced a new idea. They already thought that natural selection—the process in which the organism best suited to its environment is most likely to survive and breed—could produce new species of plants from random mutations. Therefore, they now assumed that artificial, or human-guided, selection of mutations should be able to do the same thing but more efficiently. “Euphoria spread among biologists in general and geneticists and breeders in particular,” said Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, a scientist from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Germany. Why the euphoria? Lönnig, who has spent some 30 years studying mutation genetics in plants, said: “These researchers thought that the time had come to revolutionize the traditional method of breeding plants and animals. They thought that by inducing and selecting favorable mutations, they could produce new and better plants and animals.
Scientists in the United States, Asia, and Europe launched well-funded research programs using methods that promised to speed up evolution. After more than 40 years of intensive research, what were the results? “In spite of an enormous financial expenditure,” says researcher Peter von Sengbusch, “the attempt to cultivate increasingly productive varieties by irradiation [to cause mutations], widely proved to be a failure.” And Lönnig said: “By the 1980’s, the hopes and euphoria among scientists had ended in worldwide failure. Mutation breeding as a separate branch of research was abandoned in Western countries. Almost all the mutants .*.*. died or were weaker than wild varieties.” So, can mutations cause one species to evolve into a completely new kind of creature? The evidence answers no! Lönnig’s research has led him to the conclusion that “properly defined species
have real boundaries that cannot be abolished or transgressed by accidental mutations.
.....which brings us to your first question: are there "genetic codes" in the animal kingdom that prevent the change from one specie to another specie or one "kind" to another "kind?"
Genesis chapter*1: Living things reproduce only “according to their kinds.” The reason is that the genetic code stops a plant or an animal from moving too far from the average. There can be great variety (as can be seen, for example, among humans, cats or dogs) but not so much that one living thing could change into another. Every experiment ever conducted with mutations proves this. Also proved is the law of biogenesis, that life comes only from preexisting life, and that the parent organism and its offspring are of the same “kind.”
Breeding experiments also confirm this. Scientists have tried to keep changing various animals and plants indefinitely by crossbreeding. They wanted to see if, in time, they could develop new forms of life. With what result? On Call reports: “Breeders usually find that after a few generations, an optimum is reached beyond which further improvement is impossible, and there has been no new species formed .*.*. Breeding procedures, therefore, would seem to refute, rather than support evolution.”
Much the same observation is made in Science magazine: “Species do indeed have a capacity to undergo minor modifications in their physical and other characteristics, but this is limited and with a longer perspective it is reflected in an oscillation about a mean [average].” So, then, what is inherited by living things is not the possibility of continued change but instead
(1)*stability and (2)*limited ranges of variation.
The conclusion is clear. No amount of accidental genetic change can cause one kind of life to turn into another kind!
The truth is upon rigorous examination and analysis, any dogmatic assertion that gene mutations are the raw material for any evolutionary process involving natural selection is an utterance of a myth.
