Creation Moment 10/22/2012 - Oops....

For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.

For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness.

1 Corinthians 3:19

"In “Turning Back the Clock: Slowing the Pace of Prehistory,” Ann Gibbons reported in Science Magazine Oct 12 the bad news: “New work suggests that mutations arise more slowly in humans than previously thought, raising questions about the timetable of evolutionary events.” Since “timing is everything” in the scenario of human evolution, this clock reset has ripple effects throughout the whole story.
Now it seems that the molecular clock ticks more slowly than anyone had thought, and many dates may need to be adjusted. Over the past 3 years, researchers have used new methods to sequence whole human genomes, allowing them to measure directly, for the first time, the average rate at which new mutations arise in a newborn baby. Most of these studies conclude that the mutation rate in humans today is roughly half the rate that has been used in many evolutionary studies since 2000. “Together, these papers make a convincing case that the human sequence mutation rate is substantially less than the one previously used,” says Harvard University population geneticist David Reich, co-author of one recent study. “As a result, genetic estimates of dates for ancient events are going to be older than previously reported.”


Creation Vs. Evolution

Gibbons mentioned other drawbacks with dates in human evolution: (1) the first appearance of a fossil may not represent the first appearance of the species; (2) “there are no fossils of our closest living relatives: chimps and gorillas”; (3) genes might diverge long before species do; and (4) mutation rates can differ between apes due to other factors, like generation time (years between generations). Mutation rate is important to evolutionists, because “It is the raw material for all human evolution—for better or worse, because most new mutations are deleterious.”
New studies have shown about 36 mutations between generations in Icelandic families. The rates seem to be converging on “1.2 × 10⁻⁸ mutations per generation at any given nucleotide site,” or “1 in 2.4 billion mutations per site per year,” which is less than half the previous estimate.
What’s more, the new rate slows the pace of evolution in apes to a downright crawl… It puts the split of humans and chimpanzees, for example, at between 8.3 million years ago and 10.1 million years ago—far too early, given current fossil dates. The split of the lineages leading to orangutans and the African apes, including humans, goes back to 34 million to 46 million years ago, Reich says. “A human-orangutan split at 40 million years is absolutely crazy,” says paleoanthropologist David Begun of the University of Toronto, St. George, in Canada, who notes that fossils of likely orangutan ancestors date from 9 million to 13.9 million years ago.
Spin doctors went to work with a fix, proposing that the “mutation rate was faster early in primate evolution, then slowed in the African apes, and perhaps slowed even more in human evolution.” They even gave the fix a name:”—the so-called hominoid slowdown.” A critic said, “the magnitude of slowdown required to reconcile these dates is extreme.” 

 

Evolutionists are kidding themselves. The only empirical pieces in this conflict are: 1. mutation rates of particular humans in a certain part of the world right now, and 2. some fossil bones with no dates on them. The rest is storytelling. In vain they look into mutations as sources of novelty, “the raw material for all human evolution,” knowing full well that “most new mutations are deleterious.” But as they sift through the damage for hoped-for beneficial mutations, none of which have been confirmed without controversy, they ignore the millions of neutral or nearly-neutral mutations that cause code decay over time." CEH