Evolution Makes No Sense on This Molecular Clock Problem

This One is a Mess

Evolutionary thought did not begin nor end with Charles Darwin. To be sure Darwin was its most important exponent, but evolutionary thinking goes back centuries before 1859 when Darwin first published his book on evolution, and it continued to develop long after Darwin. For example, for all his theorizing Darwin had little idea how biological variation—a crucial, fundamental component of evolutionary theory—actually occurs. How do species change to begin with? About half a century later evolutionists constructed neoDarwinism which added to Darwin’s theory the idea that random genetic mutations provided the needed biological variation which occasionally hit upon improvements and would be preserved via natural selection. Indeed, according to evolution, whales, oak trees, and humans all must have been created by an incredibly long series of random mutations. The theory did not work very well for a number of reasons. For example, mutations don’t slowly add up to arrive at complex biological structures and mechanisms, and biological change is rapid and directed, not slow and random. Those are merely two of a great many false predictions generated by evolutionary theory. One of them is the concept of a molecular clock.

Given the evolutionary (neoDarwinian) hypothesis that evolution is driven by a steady diet of random mutations, evolutionists believed that they could compute evolutionary time by counting mutations. In other words, the number of DNA differences, for example in a particular gene, between two different species could be used to compute how long it has been since they diverged from a common ancestor.

This notion of a molecular clock became extremely popular and certain amongst evolutionists. Study after study used genetic differences to map out the supposed evolutionary tree. But this area of work eventually ran into substantial contradictions and other problems which you can read about here. Simply put, the data did not fit the theory.

A recent article entitled “DNA mutation clock proves tough to set” in the top science publication in the world, continued to reinforce the dramatic failure of this evolutionary notion. The article focuses on the mutation rate—a fundamental parameter in the molecular clock—in humans. Simply put, the mutation rate can be estimated (i) from theory-neutral measurements or (ii) from theory-laden measurements, and the two don’t match. In fact, they’re not even close. They differ by a factor of two.

The theory-laden measurements are based on evolutionary theory. The theory-neutral measurements do not entail evolutionary thinking. In other words, making measurements based on evolutionary theory leads to problems. The resulting DNA mutation rates are not even close to what we can measure more directly, free from theoretical assumptions.

As is often the case, these discrepancies between the evidence and the theory leave evolutionists unsure and of differing opinions. As one evolutionist admitted:

The fact that the clock is so uncertain is very problematic for us, It means that the dates we get out of genetics are really quite embarrassingly bad and uncertain.

Given problems such as this, evolutionists’ insistence that their idea is a fact beyond all reasonable doubt reveals that is isn’t about the science.