Humans aren't apes... but biologically how?

sfs said:

You don't need to posit a supernatural event, just a fusion that occurred early in the history of humans, after their creation. This is one of many areas where creationism makes no prediction, while common descent makes a prediction that turns out to be correct.

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The supernatural event I was referring to was the separate special creation of humans and great apes.

hecd2 said:

The scientific conclusion is that humans and both species of chimpanzees are more closely related to each other than chimpanzees are to gorillas or orangutans, so your assertion that humans stand out is wrong.

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That is because today's science is "willingly ignorant" that Humans (descendants of Adam) was made on an Earth which was "totally destroyed" in the flood.ll Peter 3:3-7 The Ark brought Humanity to our planet of Apes. That's God's Truth.

hecd2 said:

However, I am not aware of any case in which an ERV has been co-opted to provide a fuction which is essential to the survival of the host - perhaps you could cite such a case?

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Syncytins are derived from retroviral envelope protein genes.

hecd2 said:

The supernatural event I was referring to was the separate special creation of humans and great apes.

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Yes, I know. I was pointing out that there is no reason to be introducing supernatural events to the discussion of chromosome 2, even for a creationist.

sfs said:

Syncytins are derived from retroviral envelope protein genes.

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Ah yes, thanks for that. In following that up I found some other HERVs expressed in normal tissue, (and also implicated in neurodegeneration, MS and some cancers). Obviously with regard to my discussion with xianghua, these are retroviral insertions co-opted for host function. The syncytins are structurally similar to the glycoproteins of active retroviruses and the idea that they were inserted by the creator in the original human genome makes no sense.

mindlight said:

My point was that the evidence that points to a common ancestor can actually be reinterpreted in a creationist understanding by simply asserting that our Common Designer differentiated his ongoing code with each new species. The tree of life is thus verified without verifying evolution. Also that the differences which do exist make all the difference whether observed or on the DNA level. Which is why the apes do not have a developed language ability, have built no pyramids and run around naked without the ability to adapt to extreme cold for instance.

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The presence of pseudogenes alone debunks "common design".

Aman777 said:

That is because today's science is "willingly ignorant" that Humans (descendants of Adam) was made on an Earth which was "totally destroyed" in the flood.ll Peter 3:3-7 The Ark brought Humanity to our planet of Apes. That's God's Truth.

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If this was true we’d find verifiable physical evidence and we don’t . The noachian flood was deliberately looked for all thru the 1700s-1800s. Not one shred or iota was found. Instead the geological record gave definitive evidence that the earth was very old and the Flood never occurred Hutton might have been the most famous but he wasn’t the last.

Wet Squirrel said:

Creationism is not bad logic , evolution is disproven by mutations simple as that .

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Please, do go on. Give us some examples of these supposed mutations that "disproved" evolution.

In fact one of Darwin’s contemporaries, Asa Grey resigned as a cleric rather than continue to lie to people about Noah’s Flood being real. I wish modern day creationists had as much integrity

Wet Squirrel said:

Creationism is not bad logic , evolution is disproven by mutations simple as that .

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Seeing as how this isn't true in the slightest, it doesn't appear to be as "simple as that".

Lily of Valleys said:

Considering there are more similarities between the other apes from each other, while human stands out from the rest of the apes, it wouldn't be a good fit to put human in the same family.

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Which of these characteristics, which are shared by all apes, do humans lack?

hecd2 said:

The supernatural event I was referring to was the separate special creation of humans and great apes.

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Love the old school Slartibartfast avatar.

hecd2 said:

Now what about the broken GULO gene in simians including humans?

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It extends beyond Simiformes and includes all Haplorhines.

xianghua said:

what is the problem actually? why those cars are so similar to each other?:

this is because a common designer- ferrari company in this case. so a common similarity can point to a common designer.

(image from Ferrari Auto: Official Site - Ferrari.com)

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The cars are a counter-example for an intelligent creator of life, because the cars will re-use design when it's logical and sensible to do so. The cars design is an efficient re-use of information, the examples of life are not so. Unless you wish to claim that Ferrari engineers are far superior as 'creators' than your God, the analogy simply doesn't work.

EDIT: To expand on this a bit: Ferrari cars don't have the remnants of earlier propulsion systems as part of their design. You don't find that there are 'primitive' Ferraris with headlights that only produce a dull glow which slightly reduces the risk of accidents in cities, but are of no use for driving in the countryside in the dark. We don't find Ferraris where the fuel lines take an unreasonably long route to get from the fuel tank to the injectors because that was a much shorter route in an earlier car.

We don't see any of these things because the Ferrari engineers are competent at their job. Are you suggesting that God is not?

DogmaHunter said:

I know the points they raised. I'm familiar with the intellectually dishonest approach of the discovery institute.

Their arguments are religiously motivated.
That's the only reason they talk about "design". Because they have an a priori belief that a "designer" exists. Their particular religious beliefs, demand that this "designer" was responsible for the 'creation' of humans (and other living things).

So it's not that they have scientific reasons that push them towards "design", or away from mainstream evolution theory. It's religious belief that demands this of them. Any argument they might give, is just an attempt at rationalization of that a priori belief. They don't have any scientific underpinnings.

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You could argue that they have two primary sources of evidence from scientific facts and from limits set by eye witness testimony. The rest is explanation. Evolutionists by contrast use the same facts but with no firm boundaries relating to the original context

Tom Farebrother said:

Personally I think that the conflicts usually arise when attempts are made to interpret or reinterpret the scriptures in terms of one or another scientific theory, and then accept or reject the theory based on that interpretation. That’s my view. Based on the writings of several scholars writing from Christian, Judaic and secular perspectives I’ve become convinced that it is necessary to have some idea of the original cultural, intellectual context in order to understand what information, values, meaning and so on the text is meant to convey, and what it isn’t.

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I definitely agree with this; we need to understand the motivations of the original authors of the religious texts which became The Bible to understand The Bible itself.

Regarding the creation texts relevant to perspectives on evolution this would mean understanding that the original writer and audience were concerned not with material creation but with the creation of order, boundaries, roles and so on.

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This to me sounds plausible, but we should consider it in light of many (most?) religions having a creation story. This could be due for many reasons (e.g. communication in the far prehistoric world spreading memes), but is something we need to consider when talking about religion. It certainly is common, so is it a fundamental role of religion in human understanding?

The modern preoccupation with ‘what is all this stuff, where did it come from and how does it work’ was, according to a lot of research into shared conceptions in the Ancient Near East, a completely alien concept at the time. That wasn’t how people thought about creation.

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Do you have a reference so some of this research?

Although I’m sure other people will disagree with me on this I tend to think that YEC arguments reduce God to the role of some old duffer for whom all of this ‘science-y stuff’ is too complicated. On the other hand, I don’t get the argument that having some ideas about how parts of the physical universe work has some bearing on whether or not God exists.

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It makes a difference in providing a reason to believe that God exists. If we see something where the only plausible explanation is the action of an all-powerful being. In the past, thunder and lightning was attributed to God. As was the weather. We still have 'act of God' to describe earthquakes and similar, except that we now have good explanations for all of these that don't require a God.

It also makes a difference if we look into why we have religion. If religion arose due to a need to explain the world, and we find another explanation for the world, then we can see that religion was started for incorrect reasons.

Arguments like those of Richard Dawkins etc are, I think, far to reliant on supposed ‘metaphors’ about ‘the appearance of purpose’ (as opposed to actual purpose) and life ‘finding a way’ etc in a completely blind fashion. My own study of the bible in relation to what is known about the physical world leads me to believe that God is as fascinated with all of this stuff as we are, and that it is the complexity of it all that can make the purpose behind it difficult to grasp, in a wood vs trees fashion.

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Dawkins will use metaphors in explaining science to people, and this is a reasonable way to explain concepts. However, the real evidence that evolution (e.g.) is based on is not metaphors, but rigorously collected and analysed physical evidence. That includes Dawkins' work when he was an active evolutionary biologist.

Note my emphasis of 'in a completely blind fashion'. Evolution is far from blind, as it is highly guided by feedback from the physical environment of the evolving population. E.g. I can predict that if I take a vial of bacteria, and start exposing them to low levels of an antibiotic, that the population of bacteria will develop a resistance to that antibiotic. To describe evolution as 'blind' is a complete straw man position, which I think contrasts poorly with the more thoughtful nature of the rest of your post.

You mention 'purpose' as if there has to be a strong purpose behind life, and us being here. I don't agree with that. How do you know that life has to have a purpose; how do you know that it isn't just a consequence of the laws of physics?

hecd2 said:

And did the developer arrange for that common vulnerability to result in the insertion of the same ERVs in syntenic genomic locations in related taxa? Did the developer create and then break the L-gulonolactone-oxidase gene in the same way in all simians (monkeys and apes) including humans? Did the developer create two chromosomes for humans that look very like chromosomes 2a and 2b in the other great apes, and then stick them end to end to make the human chromosome 2?

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The answer would be either a common vulnerability in changed conditions from original allowed this virus to exploit the common vulnerability inserting itself and doing its thing with the genes.

Or this is a part of the original design process.

mindlight said:

The answer would be either a common vulnerability in changed conditions from original allowed this virus to exploit the common vulnerability inserting itself and doing its thing with the genes.

Or this is a part of the original design process.

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There were three questions in the post you were responding to. Are you genuinely putting forward the same answer to all three?

How can ERVs result from a common vulnerability to infection if the locus of the insertions is the same in related taxa? What would be the precise natural mechanism that would result in that? Are you genuinely suggesting that the creator inserted viral DNA into the genome at the point of creation?

There weere two other questions in the post you were quoting, one about the broken L-gulonolactone-oxidase (GULO) gene in monkeys, apes and humans and the other about the fusion of human chromosome 2.

AnotherAtheist said:

This to me sounds plausible, but we should consider it in light of many (most?) religions having a creation story. This could be due for many reasons (e.g. communication in the far prehistoric world spreading memes), but is something we need to consider when talking about religion. It certainly is common, so is it a fundamental role of religion in human understanding?

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As far as I know all world religions have some kind of creation story, usually involving some transition from chaos to order. For those that originated in the Ancient Near East there seems to be a correlation between the development of urban civilisation and (later) a priest class and (later still) ruling class, and the notion of moving from chaos to order. There are similarities and differences between them - to put some of it very basically Sumerians, as builders of cities and industrial agricultural systems, had it that the Gods built the first cities and irrigation canals and then created man to do all the work. Then followed a process whereby the Sumerian gods jostled for position and power and various different gods came into being that represented different trades and physical things. David Rosenberg has some interesting ideas about the development of religion and religious theatre in Sumerian culture that fills some of it out a bit. In Egypt questions of creation tended to reinforce religious and royal hierarchies, e.g there’s a foundational text that asks the question ‘who (when there was only chaos) performed the rituals? There was no-one to perform the rituals’ and so on, with the idea that creation (as order) came into being with/through the performance of ritual and the establishing of ‘proper’ social hierarchies. Obviously there’s more to it but that’s a general theme.
Where I think Judaism differs and is distinct is in the relational nature of the stories and teachings. It’s all about relationships. Not that other religions don’t address that, but none do so as deeply as Judaism/Christianity. The continual failures of Israel/Christians are transgressions of relationship.

AnotherAtheist said:

Do you have a reference so some of this research?

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Most directly relevant is John H Walton’s ‘The Lost World of Genesis 1’. Eliade’s tome ‘a history of religion’ is relevant in a more general and speculative sense, speculative in that he went back beyond writing systems to earlier foundational beliefs there’s not much data about. As above David Rosenberg’s Abraham - the first historical biography, also the relevant sections of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis - on Abraham in particular. These 2 don’t address the creation account as such but do provide well researched approaches to the text. Jordan Peterson seems to have a lot to say on meaning in the OT stories also, but I’ve only just started reading his stuff.

AnotherAtheist said:

It makes a difference in providing a reason to believe that God exists.

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I suppose. The study of science seems to lead some people to faith, and others away from it. I think maybe it’s more about perception than proof. I don’t know. My grandad was a scientist who believed in God, that’s my only personal link. The idea of taking ‘is god necessary for the universe to exist’ as the or a reason for faith is probably a modern one that we’ve read into ancient texts.

AnotherAtheist said:

It also makes a difference if we look into why we have religion. If religion arose due to a need to explain the world, and we find another explanation for the world, then we can see that religion was started for incorrect reasons.

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Yes although that’s a tricky one to argue. On the face of it for example the Sumerian religions with their gods for everything approach and explanations sort of like Aesop’s fables about how this or that thing came to be, seem to be about explaining the world. Put in their original context however from the point of view of a Sumerian those tales may have been perceived more as a way of defining his or her role and place in the world, rather than as an explanation of how the world works. JH Walton argues pretty convincingly I think that in the ANE material creation was not something people were concerned with, that it was perhaps just an unconscious backdrop to their preoccupation with significance, order and relationship. Balanced with that though is the whole ‘the gods are angry’ bit, e.g there’s plenty of evidence that the Sumerians, like other cultures, saw the gods as being capricious and behind natural or personal disasters etc. It’s not a straightforward picture of God’s being thought up to provide explanations. It’s ages since I waded through most of Eliade’s work but I think he tends towards that view, but Rosenberg, who is a poet and writer as well as a translator of ancient Hebrew, compares existing religious texts with literature from the same period and comes out with what I think is a broader and more credible view.
The Biblical account might seem to be an attempt to explain the physical universe, but only if interpreted through the lens of our modern preoccupation with material creation. I don’t think that was the original intent.

AnotherAtheist said:

Note my emphasis of 'in a completely blind fashion'. Evolution is far from blind, as it is highly guided by feedback from the physical environment of the evolving population. E.g. I can predict that if I take a vial of bacteria, and start exposing them to low levels of an antibiotic, that the population of bacteria will develop a resistance to that antibiotic. To describe evolution as 'blind' is a complete straw man position, which I think contrasts poorly with the more thoughtful nature of the rest of your post.

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Yes I suppose I should learn more about evolution, if only for the sake of these discussions. I’m not attempting to argue against evolution, as far as I know it is an accurate explanation of the data. I’ll check any comments I make on it. What I was vaguely referring to there is the idea of separating belief from established fact, i.e. I believe that in some sense life and the universe is sustained and driven by God, although I have no idea what the mechanism for that is, and that could be described as a kind of teleological belief. The opposite of that would be the ‘dis-teleological’ idea that, whatever the mechanisms are, they have their origin in some kind of completely material event in which no creator or initiator played any part. The other option is of course ‘I don’t know’ but I just find holding that view as a practical position difficult to get my head around.

AnotherAtheist said:

You mention 'purpose' as if there has to be a strong purpose behind life, and us being here. I don't agree with that. How do you know that life has to have a purpose; how do you know that it isn't just a consequence of the laws of physics?

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Well, of course I don’t ‘know’ that in the sense of being able to prove it empirically. I believe it to be the case, for other reasons (bear with me). Overall I think that the scientific method is perhaps the least useful way of trying to evaluate anything about the bible. I’ve read some articles in the past that indicate that some of the dietary regulations in the OT have sound nutritional principles behind them (I don’t know if that’s true or not), but, apart from that I’m not aware of anything that is in any way intentionally scientific in the bible. The physical universe is simply a backdrop to what the bible is concerned with, which is relationships. That is what the bible is all about. And not in any woolly sense, but in a real, visceral, everyday fashion. I think the latter chapters of Job put this really clearly. Putting aside the very personally/emotionally challenging nature of the material, these passages show man looking up and trying to impose his understanding on God, who then goes from the general to the specific to starkly put man in his place, finishing with a return to what is essential - relationship. There are other approaches such as establishing what might constitute proof in a legal setting etc that some authors have used well I think when examining some aspects of faith, but I think that ultimately the proof is in the living of it. Academic studies like those I’ve cited above are invaluable in understanding the how and why of it, but the bible is a book for living, and it’s only in the living of it that it can be properly understood I think. There’s a lot to that idea though I think, I mean in terms of trying to explain it, there are so many possible tangents and related ideas.

Tom Farebrother said:

As far as I know all world religions have some kind of creation story, usually involving some transition from chaos to order. .

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I will give a detailed and researched reply to your post when I have time; which is not now. Maybe this evening.