Page 174 - The Errors the American National Academy of Sciences

The Errors of the American National Academy of Sciences

posed, this hypothesis was greeted by evolutionists with great enthu-
siasm as a major trump card to be used against creationists. However,
soon afterwards it emerged that it clashed with the data, especially
with molecular evolutionary theories and paleontological findings.
Both the numbers and the family trees produced by using the

molecular clock are at wide variance with the fossil record. For in-
stance, paleontologists believe that human beings and apes split apart
from one another at least 15 million years ago. According to the mole-
cular clock, however, this split should have taken place only 5 to 10
million years ago. 51
In more recent periods, as a result of analyses of mitochondr-
ial DNA, which can only be passed down in the female line, it
was proposed that modern man was descended from
a woman who had lived in Africa as early as

200,000 years ago. Anthropologists rejected
this finding, however, because they would
then have had to discount all Homo erectus
and older fossils that were dated at more
than 200,000 years. 52
One of the clearest indi-
cations that the molecular

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