Penguins have always been a problem for evolution. Their flippers, for instance, are supposed to be the vestiges of wings. "Say again ...?" you say? That's right, according to evolution penguins are supposed to have evolved from an earlier bird with wings. The bird morphed into a penguin and the wings morphed into the penguin's flippers. Anyone who has seen a penguin swim knows its flippers are not just a happenstance design. The penguin is an incredible swimmer and the last thing that comes to mind is that its flippers somehow evolved from a wing. Of course for evolutionists this transition is a fact, even though they don't know how it happened.
Now penguins have been discovered to defy the much touted molecular clock. The molecular clock is simply a measure of the time that two species diverged from their common ancestor, as determined by their genetic differences. In other words, like the ticking of a clock, the steady stream of mutations, which help drive evolutionary change, accumulate and can be measured. Sometimes evolutionists have an idea of the supposed time since divergence from the fossil record. They use such cases to compute the rate at which the mutations accumulate, and once they know the rate they can use it in cases in which only the genetic data are available.
Evolutionists have been using this concept of the molecular clock for almost fifty years. But the clock is consistently wrong and the concept is becoming increasingly suspect. As with the steady ticking of a clock, problems with the molecular clock concept have slowly but surely continued to mount. Indeed, molecular clock predictions have been falsified many times over. Here's one example of many.
Early on it was found that the molecular clock varies dramatically depending on context. It would be like the clock in the kitchen running twice as fast as the clock in the living room. For instance, if evolution is true then we must believe that this molecular clock varies dramatically for different types of proteins. The histone IV protein, for example, shows only a few changes
Evolutionists concluded that histone IV must have a highly constrained design. Histone IV is involved in DNA packing, and surely that role is too important to monkey with. As evolutionist Thomas Jukes wrote:
... the histones are a class of proteins that are bound to DNA in cells that possess a nucleus. They take part in the formation of nucleosomes. Any change in histones could therefore have a destructive effect on the integrity of the cell.
Jukes had no empirical evidence for this claim. It was based solely on the assumption that evolution is true. It is one example of many of how evolution corrupts science. In this case, laboratory research showed that cells sustain histone IV changes with fewer problems than expected. And the other histones sustain changes even more readily.
It was yet another example of evolution interfering with scientific progress in general, and of a molecular clock failure in particular. Now we are learning of dramatic failures of the molecular clock in penguins. These data are interesting because they are from penguin remains as old as 44,000 years. These remains allow for empirical comparison of old and current genomes (mitochondrial in this case), and the differences are several times off the molecular clock prediction.
Religion drives science and it matters.
