Page 165 - The Errors the American National Academy of Sciences
P. 165
The NAS's Error in Portraying Molecular Biology as
Evidence of Evolution
cleus in the cell, from yeasts to human beings, are known as eukary-
otes. If all eukaryotes evolved from bacteria, as evolutionists would
have us believe, then one would expect to see a graduated divergence
in their proteins such as cytochrome c. Yet, what we actually find is
this: the cytochrome c of all the main classes—from human beings to
kangaroo, from the fruit fly to the chicken, from the sunflower to the
rattlesnake, and from the penguin to baker's yeast—all exhibit the
same degree of divergence from the cytochrome c molecules of bacte-
ria (varying between 65 and 69%).
Michael Denton offers the following comment:
Eucaryotic cytochromes, from organisms as diverse as man, lam-
prey, fruit fly, wheat and yeast, all exhibit a sequence divergence of
between sixty four per cent and sixty seven per cent from this par-
ticular bacterial cytochrome. Considering the enormous variation of
eucaryotic species from unicellular organisms like yeasts to multi-
cellular organisms such as mammals, and considering that eucary-
otic cytochromes vary among themselves by up to forty-five per
cent, this must be considered one of the most astonishing findings
of modern science. 27
What is even more extraordinary is that there is no evidence in
biochemistry of the most fundamental evolutionary scheme—the
transitions from fish to amphibians, from amphibians to reptiles, and
from reptiles to mammals. The protein divergence of land vertebrates
like amphibians, reptiles, and mammals, when compared to those of
fish, all appear isolated to exactly the same degree. The gradual di-
vergence envisaged by evolutionary sequence is not observed.
From the point of view of their cytochrome c, horses, rabbits,
frogs, and turtles are 13% divergent from the carp. Denton says:
At a molecular level, there is no trace of the evolutionary transition
from fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal. So amphibia, always
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