The Center for Creation Science has an online edition of Walt Brown’s In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood (7th Edition). In a section called “Genetic Distances” Brown says:
One computer-based study, using cytochrome c, a protein used in energy production, compared 47 different forms of life. If evolution happened, this study should have found that, for example, the rattlesnake was most closely related to other reptiles. Instead, based on this one protein, the rattlesnake was most similar to man. Since this study, experts have discovered hundreds of similar contradictions.
If you like go to the original and check Brown’s reference ( d). He has the nerve to cite his son’s two decades old student project as a source. And as we will see the only way he could make this claim is with deceptions.
“The Bullfrog Affair” was written by David C. Wise in 1990. He debunked a wide variety of creationists falsely claiming biochemical similarities that are contrary to evolutionary expectations. On this particular claim Wise wrote:
Frank Arduini encountered a similar protein claim by Walter T. Brown Jr. of the Chicago area; his Center for Scientific Creation used to be ICR Midwest Center. Arduini had had many dealings with Brown, whose response to Arduini’s many requests for documentation was that he didn't need to supply evidence supporting his claims, rather it was responsibility of the evolutionists to disprove them.
One of Brown's claims that Arduini was especially interested in was that the rattlesnake's closest biochemical relative is humans. However, Brown demanded $70 from Arduini to provide that documentation.
…
Brown claimed that on the basis of data from a 1978 study by Margaret Dayhoff, comparisons of cytochrome c show that the rattlesnake is more closely related to humans that to any other organism. When [Robert] Kenney asked Brown to provide the name of the scientific journal and the page number in which Dayhoff had reached this conclusion, Brown stated that he couldn't. Dayhoff had never reached such a conclusion, but rather Brown’s son had used Dayhoff’s data to reach that conclusion for a science fair project. It was Brown’s son who had concluded that rattlesnakes are more closely related to humans by cytochrome c than to any other organism.
For fifteen dollars, Brown sent Kenney photocopies of his son’s project (apparently, Brown’s price depends on who you are). Kenney wrote:
“In the project I quickly found that the rattlesnake and humans differed by only fourteen amino acids. Humans and rhesus monkeys differed by one amino acid. Later, Brown called me again and then explained that of the forty-seven organisms in the study, the one closest to the RATTLESNAKE was the human, not that the one closest to the human was the rattlesnake. You see, among the forty-seven there were no other snakes.” (CEN Vol.4 No.5 Sep/Oct 84, pg 16)Most of the other organisms in the study were as distantly related to the rattlesnake as were humans; it is coincidence that human cytochrome c was just barely less different than the others. Obviously, this is just semantic sleight-of-hand which can serve no other purpose than to mislead and it is so blatant that Brown had to know what he was doing.
Later after a debate, Kenney found Brown telling a small group about rattlesnakes being more closely related to humans than to any other organism. When Kenney started explaining to the group how misleading that was, Brown quickly changed the subject.
For those who like to see real data, I have added the rattlesnake and the monitor to a list of cytochrome c sequences that I created for “Kent Hovind’s Cytochrome Lie.” There you can see for yourself that humans do not have the closest cytochrome c sequence to rattlesnakes.
So Mr. Brown, why did you ever make this claim? And more importantly, why do you still do? And why do so many of your fellow creationists invent similar lies? Could it be that creation “science” does not have a real evidence?
Also see:
“Human Lysozyme Closest to a
Chicken?” - I debunk a similar claim
“Fossil
Hominids: Response to In the Beginning” -
Brown’s false human evolution claims
“Walt
Brown’s Pseudochallenge” - Brown’s
phony offer to debate.