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The program on The Discovery Channel carries various pieces of speculation about when the first Americans might have reached the continent. This migration was first thought to have taken place 15,000 years ago. The program describes how following mtDNA analyses, the date was put back by another 5,000 years, to 20,000 years ago. One researcher whose views were reported says that a mutational difference had been identified between those people who crossed the Bering Strait to America and those who remained in Asia. He then goes on to comment on the "molecular clock," something that is frequently cited by evolutionist researchers, using the expression "if we assume that a mutation takes place once every 20,000 years …" Yet this interpretation is nothing but an evolutionist castle in the air, based on no scientific foundation: The concept of the molecular clock used in the identification of genetic mutations is a completely hollow concept, the result of prejudiced views.
It will now be useful to consider this concept, so frequently resorted to in the evolutionists' distortions of the genetic facts, in more depth.
The so-called molecular clock hypothesis assumes that the amino acids in the proteins of living things, or the nucleotides in their genes, change at a particular rate. The claim put forward on The Discovery Channel that human beings undergo a mutation once every 20,000 years is based on that hypothesis. Evolutionists examine the mitochondria of chimpanzees and human beings, who are assumed to have descended from a common ancestor, and identify different nucleotides within the analogous regions of the DNA. Assuming man and chimpanzees to have split apart some 6 million years ago, they divide that 6 million by the number of their different nucleotides, thus coming up with a kind of timetable of imaginary mutations.
Naturally, these claims are based on nothing more than evolutionist prejudice, and have no meaning whatsoever in the face of the scientific facts.
The "winding up" of this molecular clock rests entirely on evolutionist prejudice. In fact, the "clock" in question is not synchronized for that very reason: It was claimed in one article in the well-known journal Science that according to one new molecular clock "mitochondrial Eve" must have lived no more than 6,000 years ago.4
All this shows that the "mitochondrial Eve" thesis expressed on The Discovery Channel is actually quite meaningless. The essence of the theory is that evolutionists dazzled by the illusion of Darwinism naturally look at genes under the influence of that illusion, and see exactly what they want to see.
References
- Ann Gibbons, "Calibrating the Mitochondrial Clock," Science, vol. 279, 2 January, 1998, p. 29. ↩