Well you see, Realist, the Young-Earth Creationist community does boast of members with degrees from such high-falootin' institutions. The eminent creation scientist Walter Brown of the Center for Scientific Creation in Phoenix, Arizona, for example, has a Ph.D in mechanical engineering. This qualifies him to expound on the mechanics of Noah's Flood and many other Bible truths.
Most YECs these days do believe in the existence of mutations. However, they dispute that mutations working in conjunction with natural selection or any other mechanism has the necessary creative force to create life.
Hooberus, Michael Denton has pretty much given up on the arguments he made in the 1986 book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. But even when he wrote that book he accepted that Darwinian natural selection operates at an intermediate scale, such as in the evolution of three-toed to one-toed horses. He rejected the claim that Darwinian natural selection can account for the broad picture of life, though. According to a review ( http://home.planet.nl/~gkorthof/kortho29.htm ) of Denton's 1998 book Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology reveal Purpose in the Universe, recent DNA studies have caused Denton to accept a completely different idea of how evolution works, namely, that the universe was created in such a way as to make the evolution of life inevitable (this has overtones of the ideas of the quack Rupert Sheldrake). This of course is completely consistent with what scientists call "the fact of evolution" (i.e., the observation in the fossil record that life has evolved over time) although it differs in mechanism, and is completely inconsistent with the creationist claim of direct creation of every kind of life. So, Hooberus, Denton no longer provides any comfort to YECs, or "Intelligent Design Creationists".
AlanF