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 instance, paleontologists believe that human beings and apes split apart from one another at least 15 million years ago. According to the molecular 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 mitochondrial 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 indications that the molecular clock method is unreliable was reported in an article in Science in 1996. The article described how the biochemist Russell Doolittle and his team had used the molecular clock method to propose that single-cell creatures with a nucleus (eukaryotes) split off from those without a nucleus, such as bacteria (prokaryotes), some 2 billion years ago. However, using a different clock, the evolutionist microbiologist Norman Pace suggested that this event took place 3 to 4 billion years ago (even though it is generally accepted that life on Earth goes back no further than 3.7 billion years). On the other hand, the microfossil expert William Schopf rejected both results and claimed that the oldest fossils of bacteria are 1.5 billion years older than the date given by Doolittle. In the face of this claim, Doolittle expressed his doubts as to whether these fossils were real.53 As we can see, the use of the molecular clock produces results that not only are internally inconsistent, but also openly conflict with the fossil record.
In addition, the biochemists C. Schwabe and G. W. Warr state that their analyses of relaxin (a hormone secreted in the final days of pregnancy) are not compatible with the "evolutionary clock model."54
The DNA analyses by the researchers L. Vawter and W. M. Brown produced results that were totally outside evolutionists' expectations; as a result, these researchers call for the molecular clock hypothesis to be totally abandoned:
[The] disparity in relative rates of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA divergence suggests that the controls and constraints under which the mitochondrial and nuclear genomes operate are evolving independently, and provides evidence that is independent of fossil dating for a robust rejection of a generalized molecular clock hypothesis of DNA evolution. 55
Even evolutionist researchers thus accept that the results obtained from the molecular clock are not trustworthy.
Another reason why the molecular clock hypothesis is not to be trusted is that the techniques used to measure the molecular distance between living species are not accurate. Professor James S. Farris of the Swedish Museum of Natural History states:
It seems that the only general conclusion one can draw is that nothing about present techniques for analyzing molecular distance data is satisfactory . . . None of the known measures of genetic distance seems able to provide a logically defensible method, and it appears that some altogether different approach will have to be adopted for analyzing electrophoretic data.56
Farris's criticisms of the techniques in question are widely respected because he himself developed one of the most frequently employed techniques for measuring genetic distance.
Professor Siegfried Scherer, director of the Institute of Microbiology at the Technical University of Munich, emphasizes the unreliability of the molecular clock in these terms:
Considering the strong demands usually applied in experimental biology, it is hard to understand why the [molecular clock] concept survived such a long period at 