ch are regarded as evolutionarily far removed from one another is something evolutionists cannot account for.47 A new example of this is the SINE sequences, a particularly surprising discovery. These pseudogene sequences are shared among living things far removed from each other in evolutionary terms, such as trout48, rodents, and inkfish.49
Some pseudogene sequences are shared by such very different creatures as rodents and ink fish. This is just one of the many examples demonstrating that pseudogenes represent no evidence for evolution.
The contradictions seen in the phylogenetic trees constructed using other molecules can also be seen in those built on the basis of pseudogenes. These facts are quite sufficient to show that pseudogenes do not represent evidence of descent from a common ancestor.50
The Molecular Clock Error and Still More Circular Reasoning
Another phenomenon that the NAS puts forward as proof of evolution is the so-called "molecular clock" (Science and Creationism, p. 19), which was first suggested in the mid-1960s. This hypothesis assumed that a comparison of genetic differences between living species regarded as being close evolutionary relatives, together with the "divergence" periods among living things identified from the fossil record, could be used to calculate a definite "rate of evolution." For example, assuming that all mammals descended from a common ancestor, as well as that the common ancestor of the horse and the kangaroo lived some 70 million years ago, the "rate of evolution" could be calculated by dividing the genetic difference between the two species by 70 million years.
In this way, the average speed of the evolutionary change in a gene or protein became known as the "molecular clock." Evolutionists maintain that the molecular clock reveals when living things began to diverge from one another, thus helping to establish a time frame for such events, as well as evolutionary relationships.
When it was first proposed, this hypothesis was greeted by evolutionists with great enthusiasm 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 r