Do Chimps and Humans Share a Common Ancestor?

Then you need to look at the title of this thread. The focus of the debate is whether or not humans and chimps share a common ancestor.

I am going to be gone this weekend and intend to have a post ready either monday or tuesday. I, too, am looking forward to this debate.

It does not automatically mean that God did it, it just means that the a priori assumption the God didn't do it is unfair and ill founded.

How many chimpanzee ancestors do we have from about 2 million years ago? The answer is none, every time an ape fossil is dug up it is automatically considered one of our ancestors.

Homo habilis is an ape with a cranial capacity and other anatomical features that are far more ape then human. The Homo erectus explodes on the scene with a cranial capacity twice what it is for African and Asian apes. All other physical characteristics are absolutly human except for a couple of small brained individuals that have cranial capacities well within human limits.

Neanderthals actually had a cranial capacity 10% larger then our own. Just like Homo habilis had a cranial capacity that was 10% larger then the chimpanzee. Neanderthals burst on the scene some 130,000 years ago with a cranial capacity of 1600cc.

That means that in just over a million years the cranial capacity had tripled. That would all be well and good if they had a clue what the molecular mechanism was for a large scale adaptive evolutionary trend like that was.

My thesis is pretty simple really, the deleterious affects of mutations prevent evolution on the scale required for humans to evolve from apes.

Evolution of the Human ASPM Gene, a Major Determinant of Brain Size
Jianzhi Zhang, Genetics, December 2003

"Here I provide evidence suggesting that human ASPM went through an episode of accelerated sequence evolution by positive Darwinian selection after the split of humans and chimpanzees ... my results suggest that adaptive functional modifications occurred in human ASPM and that it may be a major genetic component underlying the evolution of the human brain.

... Signatures of accelerated evolution of ASPM under positive selection during human origins would strongly support my hypothesis, because the action of positive selection indicates a modification in gene function resulting in elevated organismal fitness (ZHANG et al. 2002 Down). Below I provide population genetic and molecular evolutionary evidence for the operation of such adaptive selection on ASPM."

lso, debate is not a mechanism for settling truth. Debate is a sport. Its purpose is to decide the best debator.

Boy, are you misinformed. At Oldovae in Africa there is a series of transitional individuals between H. habilis and H. erectus. That is, as you go up the sediments at the same location, fossils of H. habilis were found at the bottom, then intermediates getting more and more erectus-like as they went up the sediments, and then H. erectus on top.

Also, H. erectus is not "absolutely human" outside the cranium. The Bouri individual, for instance, has a mosaic of sapiens and erectus skeletal features: Bouri http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...iesthuman.html
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/r...ckground.shtml
actual paper: http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPa...re01669_r.html

Again, they didn't "burst". Instead, there are transitional individuals linking H. erectus to H. neandertal.
Stenheim and Swanscombe, 250 Kya: called H. heidelbergensis but have characteristics of both erectus and neandertalis. Large brows and small cranium ( ~1200cc) but otherwise looks like neandertalis
Ehrendorf in Germany and Saccopestore in Italy: mixture erectus and early neandertals,

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Are you saying that natural selection won't produce that? Or are you saying we don't know specifically which genes altered during the transition?

We can continue discussing here but it won't be a debate.

That's just fine, I have no problem with that approach. All I ask is the the inverse logic be allowed, when the differences cannot be accounted for it opens up special creation as at least a possibility. They are not really as close as they are telling you and what is more the molecular mechanism for the evolution of the human brain is a complete mystery to the researchers. It does not automatically mean that God did it, it just means that the a priori assumption the God didn't do it is unfair and ill founded.

How many chimpanzee ancestors do we have from about 2 million years ago? The answer is none, every time an ape fossil is dug up it is automatically considered one of our ancestors. This is the same desperate bias that made the Piltdown hoax so appealing for half a century and it's still distorting the evidence.

Homo habilis is an ape with a cranial capacity and other anatomical features that are far more ape then human. The Homo erectus explodes on the scene with a cranial capacity twice what it is for African and Asian apes. All other physical characteristics are absolutly human except for a couple of small brained individuals that have cranial capacities well within human limits.

Homo erectus was human, Homo habilis was not. Notice, there is nothing in the middle.

Neanderthals actually had a cranial capacity 10% larger then our own. Just like Homo habilis had a cranial capacity that was 10% larger then the chimpanzee. Neanderthals burst on the scene some 130,000 years ago with a cranial capacity of 1600cc. That means that in just over a million years the cranial capacity had tripled. That would all be well and good if they had a clue what the molecular mechanism was for a large scale adaptive evolutionary trend like that was.

Some are human, many others are the missing links between the original chimpanzees and modern ones. If you go far enough back in the mythical natural history gorillas have their ancestors represented.
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