Page 120 - The Errors the American National Academy of Sciences

The Errors of the American National Academy of Sciences

very different. In other words, they are not homol-
ogous.
Biologists studying these similarities an-
nounced in 1997 that it was astonishing that the ap-

pendages of these animals should be so different,
and that their anatomies and "evolutionary pasts"
must be totally different. In 1999, Professor Gregory
Wray of Duke University's Zoology Department
found "surprising" the association between the gene
Distal-less and "what are superficially similar, but
non-homologous structures." Wray's conclusions

were;
This association between a regulatory gene and
several non-homologous structures seems to be
the rule rather than the exception. 13
In his book Homology: An Unsolved Problem,

published as far back as 1971, the evolutionary bi-
ologist De Beer put forward a wide-ranging analy-
sis of the subject and summarized why homology
represented a serious difficulty for the theory of
evolution:
What mechanism can it be that results in the pro-
duction of homologous organs, the same "pat-
terns," in spite of their not being controlled by the
same genes? I asked this question in 1938, and it

has not been answered. 14
The question put by De Beer in 1938, to which
he was unable to find an answer in 1971, is still
unanswered today.

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