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







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