uded that they were mistaken. That was because although the appearance of the soil dwelling salamander they had found was identical to known salamanders, genetically it was very different. The National Science Foundation announced the following conclusion:
The soil dwelling salamander looks identical to one living in mountain foothills several hundred miles away. But DNA analysis by NSF-funded zoologists at the University of California at Berkeley shows them to be a distinct species.4
This led to an astonishing conclusion: despite being identical to each another, the two creatures had to be classified as different species at the genetic level. David Wake of the University of California at Berkeley, the biologist in charge of the research, openly stated the conclusion he had reached: They are not one another's closest relatives.
External similarity does not therefore imply genetic similarity. This outcome is surprising to the experts, because the fact that two species are genetically very different certainly means that they did not evolve from a common ancestor, and that there is no phylogenetic relationship between them.
In the light of these evaluations, the so-called evolutionary relationships assumed by evolutionists based on morphological or genetic similarities have been shown to be invalid. Therefore, all the family trees so far drawn up are without scientific foundation and rest solely on evolutionist preconceptions.
1. Cheryl Dybas, Genes of Aquatic Birds Reveal Surprising Evolutionary History, National Science Foundation – News Tip, August 1, 2001
The Cytochrome C/Hemoglobin Error
It is claimed in the NAS booklet that the family trees obtained from comparing molecules such as cytochrome c and hemoglobin provide proof of the theory of evolution. According to this claim, the similarities between the amino-acid sequences of these molecules in living things show that they evolved from one another. This claim is totally false. The fact that there are some similarities between molecules like cytochrome c or hemoglobin in some species is no proof that the creatures in question evolved from one another.
First and foremost, it needs to be made clear that, as we have just seen, comparisons performed on other molecules give very different and conflicting results, incompatible with any evolutionist picture.
What biochemists have found with their comparisons of certain proteins like cytochrome c and hemoglobin is this: It is possible to classify species into groups according to their molecular structure. These groups are compatible with the groups produced by comparative anatomy. However, the interesting thing in such a protein "atlas" is that these groups or subclasses are totally isolated from one another. No intermediate forms are to be found between groups—just as there are no transitional forms either in the fossil record or among living groups today. Species are always separated from one another by definitive lines of division.
The Australian biochemist Michael Denton draws attention to the fact that tables such as the Dayhoff Atlas of Protein Structure and Function, which show divergence of the cytochromes, reveal the absence of any such transitional forms in the clearest way possible.25
Here is another noteworthy point in this connection: According to evolutionists, the most primitive organisms—those lacking a cell nucleus—are prokaryotes, or bacteria. Higher organisms with a nucleus in the cell, from yeasts to human beings, are known as eukaryotes. 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 bacteria (varying between 65 and 69%).
A table listing thirty-three comparisons between bacterial cytochrome