in of the whale conflict with morphological and paleontological findings. The NAS, on the other hand, adopts the opposite point of view, despite that fact that the truth of the matter is well known. It is evident that this is not a question of lack of knowledge, because the NAS claims to be one of the world's foremost scientific institutions. It appears that the NAS is deliberately making groundless claims to convince people with no knowledge of the subject, who have no means of checking the veracity of what they read, or feel no need to, that evolution is true.
We have already examined the invalidity of the evolutionist theses on the subject of the origin of whales in our article "A Whale Fantasy From National Geographic."
(www.harunyahya.com/70national_geographic_sci29.html) As we have explained there in some detail, the thesis that whales evolved from terrestrial mammals is a tale devoid of any scientific foundation. There are considerable morphological differences between the oldest whales and such extinct land mammals as Pakicetus and Ambulocetus, which are suggested as the whale's terrestrial ancestors. On the other hand, the "adaptive processes" proposed by evolutionists for "the evolution of the whale" constitute an unscientific scenario based on Lamarckian reasoning.
Sea mammals possess exceedingly distinct features. To claim that these creatures underwent the dozens of different adaptations necessary for the transition from land to sea as the result of morphological deformities brought about by random mutations is itself a major problem for the theory of evolution. The theory is quite unable to explain how such a transition might have come about. In 1982, the evolutionist science writer Francis Hitching said this on the subject:
The problem for Darwinians is in trying to find an explanation for the immense number of adaptations and mutations needed to change a small and primitive earthbound mammal, living alongside and dominated by dinosaurs, into a huge animal with a body uniquely shaped so as to be able to swim deep in the oceans, a vast environment previously unknown to mammals . . . all this had to evolve in at most five to ten million years—about the same time as the relatively trivial evolution of the first upright walking apes into ourselves.64
Any creature which is suggested as having undergone such a transition would be disadvantaged both in the sea and on land during that process and would be eliminated. The NAS's claims regarding the origin of marine mammals and molecular comparisons are totally based on speculation, and are far from being scientific and rational.
Molecular biology offers no evidence to support the theory of evolution's claim that all the different living categories on earth descended from a single common ancestor by means of random mutations and natural selection. The gradual divergence expected by the theory appears nowhere in the fossil record or molecular analyses.
Michael Denton makes the following comment based on the findings in the field of molecular biology:
Each class at a molecular level is unique, isolated and unlinked by intermediates. Thus molecules, like fossils, have failed to provide the elusive intermediates so long sought by evolutionary biology… At molecular level, no organism is "ancestral" or "primitive" or "advanced" compared with its relatives… There is little doubt that if this molecular evidence had been available one century ago… the idea of organic evolution might never have been accepted. 65
The Nas’s Confessions
Even though the NAS blindly defends the theory of evolution in its booklet Science and Creationism and suggests that there is definitive evidence for the theory in all fields, it has also admitted in its publication Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that the theory contains a number of contradictions. An essay entitled "The New Animal Phylogeny: Reliability and Implications," published in the April 25, 2000 issue of PNAS, is just one of many articles full of such confessions.
Another essay, prepared by scientists from France'