Page 108 - The Errors the American National Academy of Sciences

The Errors of the American National Academy of Sciences

Darwin agreed that common structures were the
work of a common design.
Darwinists of the past and present regard
evolution from a common ancestor as the
cause of homology; at the same time, they

also portray homology as the strongest evi-
dence for descent from a common ances-
tor. However, advances in such fields as
anatomy, biochemistry, and microbiol-
ogy over the last 50 years have shown
Richard Milton's book Shattering that homology does not constitute evi-
the Myths of Darwinism
dence for the theory of evolution, and
that descent from a common ancestor is not the cause of homology. In
his book Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, the well-known science

writer Richard Milton states that homology had been one of evolu-
tionists' most important pieces of evidence, but that as science ad-
vanced over the course of the twentieth century, homology came to
represent one of the most important difficulties facing Darwinism:
In the past hundred years, biology has undergone successive revo-
lutions—in embryology, in microbiology, in molecular biology, and
in genetics, revolutions which have laid open on the laboratory
bench the most minute detail of how plants and animals are con-
structed. If the Darwinian interpretation of homology is correct,
then you would expect to find at the microscopic level the same ho-
mologies that are found at the macroscopic level. In fact that is not
what has been found. 1

This chapter examines the NAS's claims on the subject of homol-
ogy and why it represents such a major problem for the theory of evo-
lution. The questions that will be dealt with in more detail in the
pages which follow are, in summary:

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