Tazi said:
Who on earth is Mitochondrial Eve? That sounds a little strange..How do you know categorically there was a mitochondria named Eve? Did she introduce herself?
Mitochondria are organelles in each cell of your body that contain a little bit of their own DNA. sections of this DNA do nothing, and mutate at the standard background rate. Now the interesting thing about mitochondria, is that they are only inherited along the female line i.e. all of your children will have only your mitochondria, and none of my children will have mitochondria since I am male, they will all have my partner's mitochondria. now what this means is that all people alive will have their mitochondria from the one woman somewhere in the past who had an unbroken female line (statistically there will only be one, I'm not going to go into the maths here) and by looking at all the slight differences in the mitochondria in the people today, we can work out how long ago she lived. We cannot do this with most of the nuclear DNA, since it is all mixed up between parents as a result of sex - with the exception of the Y chromosome which is only inherited along the male line. we can do a similar analysis with the Y chromosome and find a "y chromosome adam") incidentally these two are not contemporaries - the lived thousands of years apart. Granted Mt Eve will have had children with a human male, but none of his genetic legacy is "obvious" anymore, since the only thing that we can actually determine that we got from eve, is her mitochondria.
For the record, I dont believe man evolved from apes.
Apes are mammals with forward pointing eyes, opposable thumbs, flexible fingers, no tails and so on. so we are by definition apes.
Im sure some things evolved and changed but isn't ape DNA a little different from humans?
That means they aren't of the same family...
only slightly, there are a couple of percent difference between us and the most similar of the other apes - the chimpanzees. Gorillas are a bit more different, and Orang Utan are more different still. What is interesting are many of the similarities between humans and the other great apes, such as we all share broken genes that are broken in exactly the same way, i.e. the vitamin-c-synthesis gene is broken in all great apes in the same way (though there are additional mutations on top) and we share many olfactory (smell) genes that are broken in the same way, and in a pattern that matches the raw percentage genetic similarities. The banding patterns of the chromosomes has also changes slightly, and again, the differences match the raw percentages. we share Endogenous retroviral sequences (this is when a virus enters your DNA, breaks and remains there) in the same loci as the other great apes (the same position is very important, as the odds of two organisms having an ERV inserted in the same place is billions to one) and again, in a pattern that matches the similarities. While we are different to chimps, both chimps and sumans are equally as different to Gorillas. and while the three of us are different, we are all equally as different as to Orang Utan - again this matches the percentage difference.
sorry if this is all alot of info, and sorry if you don't understand it all - please don't feel overwhelmed by it, and if you have any questions, just ask. I don't mind answering
for a more detailed look at some of this stuff, here is a longer post I made on this:
http://www.christianforums.com/showthread.php?p=10751034&postcount=9
