Page 157 - The Errors the American National Academy of Sciences
P. 157
The NAS's Error in Portraying Molecular Biology as
Evidence of Evolution
confess several times that at
no point has he been able to
obtain any evidence for
evolution. In an article
published in the journal
Science, he states:
Molecular evolution is
about to be accepted as a
method superior to pale-
ontology for the discovery of
evolutionary relationships. As a
molecular evolutionist I should
Cytochrome c
be elated. Instead it seems dis-
concerting that many exceptions exist to the orderly
progression of species as determined by molecular homologies;
so many in fact that I think the exception, the quirks, may carry the
more important message. 19
Professor Donald Boulter, of Durham University's Biological
Sciences Department, announced in 1980 that the results of his com-
parisons of amino-acid sequences conflicted with the assumptions of
the theory of evolution:
Initial results obtained by using amino acid sequences of vertebrate
cytochrome c led to an outline of the phylogeny of the vertebrates
which was similar to that derived from fossil evidence. This very en-
couraging start was soon to change to a less satisfactory one as the
results from other proteins were assembled. Amino acid sequence
data sets of different proteins did not always lend themselves to the
same phylogenetic interpretation or agree with the accepted phy-
logeny obtained mainly from fossil or morphological characters. 20
An article headed "Genome Data Shake the Tree of Life," written
155