We are no longer 99% similar to chimps

[Alpine]

Apparently we are only 96% similar to chimps now.

Another implication of the finding is that we are more different to our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, than previously assumed from earlier studies. Instead of being 99 per cent similar, we are more likely to be about 96 per cent similar.

 

[shernren]

You know, we had a lot of useful discussion on the thread you started on the same issue 2 months ago. Maybe you could go and read up from it and then if you have any questions ask away!

http://www.christianforums.com/t3068160

 

[busterdog]

That's pretty funny. Let's do a little test. Dr. Allele is required to go home and tell his wife or significant other that she is 96% a chimp.

And while we are spouting meaningless stats, I am so proud to announce that I graduated in the top 96% of my class!

And think of all the guys in New York who will no longer need to have there backs waxed out of fear of a simian resemblance!

 

[christianmomof3]

I wonder how similar we are to styrofoam?

 

[busterdog]

I wonder how similar we are to styrofoam?

Haha! Good one.

Or a bag of rocks.

Other studies put our ability to read this code into question.

My phone number may have all the same digits as someone else and may mostly be in the same order, but if you flip two digits in the area code, you no longer have any real similarity.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article2007490.ece

Scientists have discovered a dramatic variation in the genetic make-up of humans that could lead to a fundamental reappraisal of what causes incurable diseases and could provide a greater understanding of mankind.

The discovery has astonished scientists studying the human genome - the genetic recipe of man. Until now it was believed the variation between people was due largely to differences in the sequences of the individual " letters" of the genome.

It now appears much of the variation is explained instead by people having multiple copies of some key genes that make up the human genome.

Until now it was assumed that the human genome, or "book of life", is largely the same for everyone, save for a few spelling differences in some of the words. Instead, the findings suggest that the book contains entire sentences, paragraphs or even whole pages that are repeated any number of times.

The findings mean that instead of humanity being 99.9 per cent identical, as previously believed, we are at least 10 times more different between one another than once thought - which could explain why some people are prone to serious diseases.

The studies published today have found that instead of having just two copies of each gene - one from each parent - people can carry many copies, but just how many can vary between one person and the next.

 

[Mallon]

I guess all this throws every paternity test ever done into question.

 

[Alpine]

You know, we had a lot of useful discussion on the thread you started on the same issue 2 months ago. Maybe you could go and read up from it and then if you have any questions ask away!

http://www.christianforums.com/t3068160

Right. I am aware of that. But before it was 99.9% we were related to chimps. Now apparently it must be 96%. What next? 85%?

 

[mark kennedy]

Apparently we are only 96% similar to chimps now.

I couldn't make heads or tails of your link, this is one of a number of studies that found 95% simularitiy. As it turns out the two genomes are not lining up due to indels.

"Five chimpanzee bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) sequences (described in GenBank) have been compared with the best matching regions of the human genome sequence to assay the amount and kind of DNA divergence. The conclusion is the old saw that we share 98.5% of our DNA sequence with chimpanzee is probably in error. For this sample, a better estimate would be that 95% of the base pairs are exactly shared between chimpanzee and human DNA. In this sample of 779 kb, the divergence due to base substitution is 1.4%, and there is an additional 3.4% difference due to the presence of indels."

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/99/21/13633.pdf

Creationists are beginning to wonder if even that's right, some are saying it's more like 90%:

The homology frequently reported for the human/chimpanzee genomes excluded "indels," which are areas with zero sequence homology. In a recent analysis by Britten et al., inclusion of "indels" in human and chimpanzee sequences reduced the human/chimpanzee homology to 95%.3 However, preliminary research at ICR using genomic databases and the current literature indicates that the sequence homology between humans and chimpanzees may be less than 90%, as more genomic regions, such as heterochromatin (regions of condensed noncoding DNA) and unresolved alignment gaps are included in homology studies.

http://www.icr.org/article/2324/

 

[shernren]

Right. I am aware of that. But before it was 99.9% we were related to chimps. Now apparently it must be 96%. What next? 85%?

I doubt so. The sequencing this time took into account every difference you can think of - indels, single-base substitutions, pericentric inversions, the lot. I don't see any indication that this "heterochromatin" was not sequenced by the group.

In other words, AFAIK, there's simply nothing left lurking in either genome that could cause the divergence measurable to increase, other than possibly that new copy-number variation thing.

 

[busterdog]

I doubt so. The sequencing this time took into account every difference you can think of - indels, single-base substitutions, pericentric inversions, the lot. I don't see any indication that this "heterochromatin" was not sequenced by the group.

In other words, AFAIK, there's simply nothing left lurking in either genome that could cause the divergence measurable to increase, other than possibly that new copy-number variation thing.

Apart from the information that Mark is talking about, which is over my head, it seems the study suggests errors in the way we read "similarity." A monkey arm may look alot like a human arm, but the evidence of common features at least shows a common origin -- whether it is common creator or common ancestory requires a lot more. To take the most simplistic analogy, the fact that they all use adenine, guanine, etc. does not prove a common hominid ancestor.

The study does suggest that reading similarities is over-rated, since slight inversion or repetition of common strings of code make huge differences.

That begs the question about what more we are missing simply in the complexity of how this equation works. Obviously I am prejudiced in my YEC views, but I do question your conclusion about the extent to which the problem has been comprehended.

And if arguing against YEC or TE, does a 6%, 10% or 20% swing really mean much when you can't read the whole code and figure out how we go from amino acid sequences to the ability to see a fast ball or get saved?

However, if one were to find mere similarity persuasive, the TE's would still have the high ground here.

 

[mark kennedy]

Apart from the information that Mark is talking about, which is over my head, it seems the study suggests errors in the way we read "similarity." A monkey arm may look alot like a human arm, but the evidence of common features at least shows a common origin -- whether it is common creator or common ancestory requires a lot more. To take the most simplistic analogy, the fact that they all use adenine, guanine, etc. does not prove a common hominid ancestor.

It's not really all the complicated, at least the principles aren't. Most of the DNA doesn't do anything but the parts that do are just as vulnurable to mutations and the effects are almost allways bad.

image credit: U.S. Department of Energy Human Genome Program, http://www.ornl.gov/hgmis.

DNA Genetic Code Dictates Amino Acid Identity and Order

Evolutionists would have you believe that mutations that are benficial are preserved while the bad ones are purged. That all sounds good in the abstract but the reality is that when there is a change in the sequence variation it creates serious diseases and disorders:

Health or Disease?

The thing is, if these mutations are happening in the so called 'junk DNA' then they are happening in the genes. For every percentage point you are looking at 3 million base pairs. When you take into account the indels the number of base pairs jumps up 100 million base pairs. It is also know that there are a lot of differences in the brain and liver, way more then could be explained by random mutations. It was no big deal when they thought it was 1% because you are talking about a couple of choice mutations here and there. The closer I look at this the more I am seeing that it would have taken a massive overhaul of the neural genes to pull this off. Nothing like this happens in nature but we are supposed to assume it happened in history.

Darwin admitted that the gradual development of the eye seemed unlikely in the extreme. When it came to the brain he just said the smallest human brain is about the same size of the largest ape brain. We now know that brains are built by highly specific and conserved genes that do not respond well to mutations.

Dispite their dramatic arguements to the contrary they don't have a clue how it could have happened.

 

[shernren]

Apart from the information that Mark is talking about, which is over my head, it seems the study suggests errors in the way we read "similarity." A monkey arm may look alot like a human arm, but the evidence of common features at least shows a common origin -- whether it is common creator or common ancestory requires a lot more. To take the most simplistic analogy, the fact that they all use adenine, guanine, etc. does not prove a common hominid ancestor.

The study does suggest that reading similarities is over-rated, since slight inversion or repetition of common strings of code make huge differences.

That begs the question about what more we are missing simply in the complexity of how this equation works. Obviously I am prejudiced in my YEC views, but I do question your conclusion about the extent to which the problem has been comprehended.

And if arguing against YEC or TE, does a 6%, 10% or 20% swing really mean much when you can't read the whole code and figure out how we go from amino acid sequences to the ability to see a fast ball or get saved?

However, if one were to find mere similarity persuasive, the TE's would still have the high ground here.

Firstly, mark's argument thus far has been from mere dissimilarity. Mark has three major lines of argument:

"Indels make divergence jump, therefore evolutionary researchers are hiding something";
"Human-chimp speciation needs changes in brain and liver genes and they can't happen because I don't believe they can";
"Fossil humans are all human or all ape".

out of which the first one is the most discussed at the moment and is the one he draws the most flak for due to repeated arguments over units If you look properly his first argument is an argument from mere dissimilarity - and if I point out how similar the genomes actually are, that argument goes away.

In terms of the portion that actually codes for proteins (coding genes), chimp and human sequences are 99.4% identical. That's a lot of similarity that supposedly can't be explained by random mutation + natural selection. Furthermore, what are shared between the species are not just "design features" but also genetic features which are neutral or even deleterious. For example, in both chimps and humans, the GULOP gene is broken in the same way, causing both chimps and humans (as well as other primates, all with the same genetic defect) not to be able to synthesize vitamin C enzymatically. If a shared design feature indicates a common designer, does a shared design flaw indicate a common Un-designer?

The thing is, if these mutations are happening in the so called 'junk DNA' then they are happening in the genes. For every percentage point you are looking at 3 million base pairs. When you take into account the indels the number of base pairs jumps up 100 million base pairs. It is also know that there are a lot of differences in the brain and liver, way more then could be explained by random mutations.

Please back your assertions. In particular, why do you keep acting like the indels are a big deal, or too much for evolution to handle, or more than scientists predicted? Scientists see indels contribute 4-5 times, and even more, nucleotide variation than single-base substitutions routinely, across the phylogenetic tree. There is nothing amazing about seeing indels "dwarf" single-base substitutions by 4-5 times. It happens with other organisms and yet you never raise any complaints about those:

It was recently shown that indels are responsible for more than twice as many unmatched nucleotides as are base substitutions between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA. A larger sample has now been examined and the result is similar. The number of indels is

1/12th of the number of base substitutions and the average length of the indels is 36 nt, including indels up to 10 kb. The ratio (Ru) of unpaired nucleotides attributable to indels to those attributable to substitutions is 3.0 for this 2 million-nt chimp DNA sample compared with human. There is similar evidence of a large value of Ru for sea urchins from the polymorphism of a sample of Strongylocentrotus purpuratus DNA (Ru = 3-4). Other work indicates that similarly, per nucleotide affected, large differences are seen for indels in the DNA polymorphism of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana (Ru = 51). For the insect Drosophila melanogaster a high value of Ru (4.5) has been determined. For the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans the polymorphism data are incomplete but high values of Ru are likely. Comparison of two strains of Escherichia coli O157:H7 shows a preponderance of indels. Because these six examples are from very distant systematic groups the implication is that in general, for alignments of closely related DNA, indels are responsible for many more unmatched nucleotides than are base substitutions. Human genetic evidence suggests that indels are a major source of gene defects, indicating that indels are a significant source of evolutionary change.
​

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full...urcetype=HWCIT

Darwin admitted that the gradual development of the eye seemed unlikely in the extreme. When it came to the brain he just said the smallest human brain is about the same size of the largest ape brain. We now know that brains are built by highly specific and conserved genes that do not respond well to mutations.

Dispite their dramatic arguements to the contrary they don't have a clue how it could have happened.

I'd expect a quotemine like this from a less experienced creationist but from you? Are you grasping at straws now?

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.
​

http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-origin-of-species/chapter-06.html

(emphasis added)

This only shows that he was a good rhetoricist and understood well both the emotional power and the logical vacuity of the argument from incredulity.

 

[Mallon]

I guess my question for Mark is why don't you accept the sort of "hyperevolution" of the human brain?
I ask because, assuming you believe the Ark story, you too believe in hyperevolution. After all, all life we see on earth today diversified from but a handful of surviving animals on Noah's Ark. That's a MAJOR adaptive radiation in just a few thousand years. Why bark up this particular tree when it fits within the hyperevolutionary framework that YEC forces you to believe?

 

[mark kennedy]

Firstly, mark's argument thus far has been from mere dissimilarity. Mark has three major lines of argument:

"Indels make divergence jump, therefore evolutionary researchers are hiding something";

That's not even an argument, it's a glaring fact. The indels laid undiscovered for a half a century while we were told or DNA was virtually identical to apes. Then the indels are discovered and they represent 3x more diversity. It's as simple as that.

"Human-chimp speciation needs changes in brain and liver genes and they can't happen because I don't believe they can";

My contention is that it doesn't happen and this whole myth of random mutations plus natural selection is highly presumptive. The genetic mechanism for the human accelerated regions remains a mystery despite extensive research in the field. Nevertheless it is tauted as an indisputable fact which begs the question of proof.

"Fossil humans are all human or all ape".

This is 100% consistent with the Creationist position that the fossils are either ape or human. No one is suggesting that neither the apes nor humans have not or do not evolve, their alleles do change over time. It just seems odd that every fossil dug up in Africa is immediately identified as one of our ancestors. Some look more like chimpanzee and gorilla ancestors but that possibility is never explored apart from being a common ancestor. It's an a priori assumption that is distorting our understanding of the fossil record.

out of which the first one is the most discussed at the moment and is the one he draws the most flak for due to repeated arguments over units

Most of which are bogus, you guys are trying to make the indels go away and it isn't going to happen. The mutations would still have to accumulate at either a constant rate or show marks of punctuated equilibrium and you have yet to do either. The debate has been over mutation rates and you missed the obvious fact that they don't have one for indels. I saw no reason to point that out while you ran in circles trying to refute something that did not exist.

If you look properly his first argument is an argument from mere dissimilarity - and if I point out how similar the genomes actually are, that argument goes away.

I was not making an argument, I was offering quotes and links because I couldn't make heads or tails of the one in the OP. Then you bust in here trying to be confrontational which is an exercise in futility since all I did was present commonly understood facts.

In terms of the portion that actually codes for proteins (coding genes), chimp and human sequences are 99.4% identical. That's a lot of similarity that supposedly can't be explained by random mutation + natural selection. Furthermore, what are shared between the species are not just "design features" but also genetic features which are neutral or even deleterious. For example, in both chimps and humans, the GULOP gene is broken in the same way, causing both chimps and humans (as well as other primates, all with the same genetic defect) not to be able to synthesize vitamin C enzymatically. If a shared design feature indicates a common designer, does a shared design flaw indicate a common Un-designer?

First of all we were told and are currently being told that the DNA of Chimpanzees and Humans is 99% the same. This was found to be false and the protein coding genes may or may not be 99%, I would have to compare specific genes since I really don't trust evolutionists and their jacked up homology arguments. The GULOP gene is a psuedo gene that would produce vitamin C if it were functioning properly. Since it doesn't have any discernible selective pressure preserving it it is subject to random mutations. The mutations are not identical they are random and sometimes you find the same ones in the same place but not always. Check it out in a gene browser and you will see what I mean.

Please back your assertions. In particular, why do you keep acting like the indels are a big deal, or too much for evolution to handle, or more than scientists predicted?

They have to determine the rate at which they occur in human populations, currently estimated to be close to the point mutation rate. This will happen in time but until then the indels are of considerable length and are not easily dismissed the way you are trying to do.

Scientists see indels contribute 4-5 times, and even more, nucleotide variation than single-base substitutions routinely, across the phylogenetic tree. There is nothing amazing about seeing indels "dwarf" single-base substitutions by 4-5 times. It happens with other organisms and yet you never raise any complaints about those:

It was recently shown that indels are responsible for more than twice as many unmatched nucleotides as are base substitutions between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA. A larger sample has now been examined and the result is similar. The number of indels is

1/12th of the number of base substitutions and the average length of the indels is 36 nt, including indels up to 10 kb. The ratio (Ru) of unpaired nucleotides attributable to indels to those attributable to substitutions is 3.0 for this 2 million-nt chimp DNA sample compared with human. There is similar evidence of a large value of Ru for sea urchins from the polymorphism of a sample of Strongylocentrotus purpuratus DNA (Ru = 3-4). Other work indicates that similarly, per nucleotide affected, large differences are seen for indels in the DNA polymorphism of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana (Ru = 51). For the insect Drosophila melanogaster a high value of Ru (4.5) has been determined. For the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans the polymorphism data are incomplete but high values of Ru are likely. Comparison of two strains of Escherichia coli O157:H7 shows a preponderance of indels. Because these six examples are from very distant systematic groups the implication is that in general, for alignments of closely related DNA, indels are responsible for many more unmatched nucleotides than are base substitutions. Human genetic evidence suggests that indels are a major source of gene defects, indicating that indels are a significant source of evolutionary change.
​

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full...urcetype=HWCIT

You missed the bottom line:

"Human genetic evidence suggests that indels are a major source of gene defects, indicating that indels are a significant source of evolutionary change."

They are a major source for the evolution of disease and disorder not the accumulation of adaptive traits. This is precisely why it is vital to understand that genes involved in neural development do not respond well to random mutations. You can dance around this fact as much as you like but adaptive evolution is the prize.

I'd expect a quotemine like this from a less experienced creationist but from you? Are you grasping at straws now?

I responded to an OP with a link I thought I could improve on, so I offered a couple of sources. Then someone mentioned that it was a little complicated so I tried to boil it down to basic genetics. Those were general information posts only, not the elaborate arguments I aim at evolutionist zealots.

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.
​

http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-origin-of-species/chapter-06.html

Notice that Ole Flycatcher was openly admitting that natural selection was not much of an explanation for the neural system. He was at least honest about that and didn't consider natural selection to be how life originated. The Creationist knows how life was originated and the Naturalist has not explanation other then some nebulous random accumulation of beneficial traits.

Thanks for the quote, I always enjoy revisiting Darwin's well written prose.

(emphasis added)

This only shows that he was a good rhetoricist and understood well both the emotional power and the logical vacuity of the argument from incredulity.

Is an argument from credulity any better, Sir Francis Bacon would seem to have thought otherwise:

Lastly, there are idols which have immigrated into men's minds from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration. These I call Idols of the Theater; because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion. Nor is it only of the systems now in vogue, or only of the ancient sects and philosophies, that I speak: for many more plays of the same kind may yet be composed and in like artificial manner set forth; seeing that errors the most widely different have nevertheless causes for the most part alike. Neither again do I mean this only of entire systems, but also of many principles and axioms in science, which by tradition, credulity, and negligence have come to be received.​

FRANCIS BACON, "The Idols of the Mind" From Novum Organum

 

[mark kennedy]

Firstly, mark's argument thus far has been from mere dissimilarity. Mark has three major lines of argument:

"Indels make divergence jump, therefore evolutionary researchers are hiding something";

That's not even an argument, it's a glaring fact. The indels laid undiscovered for a half a century while we were told or DNA was virtually identical to apes. Then the indels are discovered and they represent 3x more diversity. It's as simple as that.

"Human-chimp speciation needs changes in brain and liver genes and they can't happen because I don't believe they can";

My contention is that it doesn't happen and this whole myth of random mutations plus natural selection is highly presumptive. The genetic mechanism for the human accelerated regions remains a mystery despite extensive research in the field. Nevertheless it is tauted as an indisputable fact which begs the question of proof.

"Fossil humans are all human or all ape".

This is 100% consistent with the Creationist position that the fossils are either ape or human. No one is suggesting that neither the apes nor humans have not or do not evolve, their alleles do change over time. It just seems odd that every fossil dug up in Africa is immediately identified as one of our ancestors. Some look more like chimpanzee and gorilla ancestors but that possibility is never explored apart from being a common ancestor. It's an a priori assumption that is distorting our understanding of the fossil record.

out of which the first one is the most discussed at the moment and is the one he draws the most flak for due to repeated arguments over units

Most of which are bogus, you guys are trying to make the indels go away and it isn't going to happen. The mutations would still have to accumulate at either a constant rate or show marks of punctuated equilibrium and you have yet to do either. The debate has been over mutation rates and you missed the obvious fact that they don't have one for indels. I saw no reason to point that out while you ran in circles trying to refute something that did not exist.

If you look properly his first argument is an argument from mere dissimilarity - and if I point out how similar the genomes actually are, that argument goes away.

I was not making an argument, I was offering quotes and links because I couldn't make heads or tails of the one in the OP. Then you bust in here trying to be confrontational which is an exercise in futility since all I did was present commonly understood facts.

In terms of the portion that actually codes for proteins (coding genes), chimp and human sequences are 99.4% identical. That's a lot of similarity that supposedly can't be explained by random mutation + natural selection. Furthermore, what are shared between the species are not just "design features" but also genetic features which are neutral or even deleterious. For example, in both chimps and humans, the GULOP gene is broken in the same way, causing both chimps and humans (as well as other primates, all with the same genetic defect) not to be able to synthesize vitamin C enzymatically. If a shared design feature indicates a common designer, does a shared design flaw indicate a common Un-designer?

First of all we were told and are currently being told that the DNA of Chimpanzees and Humans is 99% the same. This was found to be false and the protein coding genes may or may not be 99%, I would have to compare specific genes since I really don't trust evolutionists and their jacked up homology arguments. The GULOP gene is a psuedo gene that would produce vitamin C if it were functioning properly. Since it doesn't have any discernible selective pressure preserving it it is subject to random mutations. The mutations are not identical they are random and sometimes you find the same ones in the same place but not always. Check it out in a gene browser and you will see what I mean.

Please back your assertions. In particular, why do you keep acting like the indels are a big deal, or too much for evolution to handle, or more than scientists predicted?

They have to determine the rate at which they occur in human populations, currently estimated to be close to the point mutation rate. This will happen in time but until then the indels are of considerable length and are not easily dismissed the way you are trying to do.

Scientists see indels contribute 4-5 times, and even more, nucleotide variation than single-base substitutions routinely, across the phylogenetic tree. There is nothing amazing about seeing indels "dwarf" single-base substitutions by 4-5 times. It happens with other organisms and yet you never raise any complaints about those:

It was recently shown that indels are responsible for more than twice as many unmatched nucleotides as are base substitutions between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA. A larger sample has now been examined and the result is similar. The number of indels is

1/12th of the number of base substitutions and the average length of the indels is 36 nt, including indels up to 10 kb. The ratio (Ru) of unpaired nucleotides attributable to indels to those attributable to substitutions is 3.0 for this 2 million-nt chimp DNA sample compared with human. There is similar evidence of a large value of Ru for sea urchins from the polymorphism of a sample of Strongylocentrotus purpuratus DNA (Ru = 3-4). Other work indicates that similarly, per nucleotide affected, large differences are seen for indels in the DNA polymorphism of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana (Ru = 51). For the insect Drosophila melanogaster a high value of Ru (4.5) has been determined. For the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans the polymorphism data are incomplete but high values of Ru are likely. Comparison of two strains of Escherichia coli O157:H7 shows a preponderance of indels. Because these six examples are from very distant systematic groups the implication is that in general, for alignments of closely related DNA, indels are responsible for many more unmatched nucleotides than are base substitutions. Human genetic evidence suggests that indels are a major source of gene defects, indicating that indels are a significant source of evolutionary change.
​

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full...urcetype=HWCIT

You missed the bottom line:

"Human genetic evidence suggests that indels are a major source of gene defects, indicating that indels are a significant source of evolutionary change."

They are a major source for the evolution of disease and disorder not the accumulation of adaptive traits. This is precisely why it is vital to understand that genes involved in neural development do not respond well to random mutations. You can dance around this fact as much as you like but adaptive evolution is the prize.

I'd expect a quotemine like this from a less experienced creationist but from you? Are you grasping at straws now?

I responded to an OP with a link I thought I could improve on, so I offered a couple of sources. Then someone mentioned that it was a little complicated so I tried to boil it down to basic genetics. Those were general information posts only, not the elaborate arguments I aim at evolutionist zealots.

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.
​

http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-origin-of-species/chapter-06.html

Notice that Ole Flycatcher was openly admitting that natural selection was not much of an explanation for the neural system. He was at least honest about that and didn't consider natural selection to be how life originated. The Creationist knows how life was originated and the Naturalist has not explanation other then some nebulous random accumulation of beneficial traits.

Thanks for the quote, I always enjoy revisiting Darwin's well written prose.

(emphasis added)

This only shows that he was a good rhetoricist and understood well both the emotional power and the logical vacuity of the argument from incredulity.

Is an argument from credulity any better, Sir Francis Bacon would seem to have thought otherwise:

Lastly, there are idols which have immigrated into men's minds from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration. These I call Idols of the Theater; because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion. Nor is it only of the systems now in vogue, or only of the ancient sects and philosophies, that I speak: for many more plays of the same kind may yet be composed and in like artificial manner set forth; seeing that errors the most widely different have nevertheless causes for the most part alike. Neither again do I mean this only of entire systems, but also of many principles and axioms in science, which by tradition, credulity, and negligence have come to be received.​

FRANCIS BACON, "The Idols of the Mind" From Novum Organum

 

[mark kennedy]

I guess my question for Mark is why don't you accept the sort of "hyperevolution" of the human brain?

Mostly due to the commonly known affect of mutations on the human brain.

I ask because, assuming you believe the Ark story, you too believe in hyperevolution. After all, all life we see on earth today diversified from but a handful of surviving animals on Noah's Ark. That's a MAJOR adaptive radiation in just a few thousand years. Why bark up this particular tree when it fits within the hyperevolutionary framework that YEC forces you to believe?[/QUOTE]

I dare say that most of the changes surronding adaptation do not incude random mutations. That major adaptive radiation probably was the result of a much larger gene pool and far fewer psuedo genes that now are disfunctional because of random mutations.

 

[Paul-martin]

Apparently we are only 96% similar to chimps now.

It are so annoying that the media world swallow every word they say, if they would be smart they would take to notice to how many times they ahve changed there mind .... I mean if you keep on changing your mind what trustworthiness will you end up with ...

 

[Mallon]

Mostly due to the commonly known affect of mutations on the human brain.

What "commonly known effect"? If it's common, I must be out of the loop.

I dare say that most of the changes surronding adaptation do not incude random mutations.

No "random mutations"? Are you suggesting God-directed mutations instead?

That major adaptive radiation probably was the result of a much larger gene pool and far fewer psuedo genes that now are disfunctional because of random mutations.

With only two individuals of each "kind" surviving the Flood, I don't see how your gene pool could be considered large at all.
Also, your usage of the term "random mutations" confuses me. Here you say that post-Flood "random mutations" were rampant. But above, you imply that post-Flood "random mutations" were non-existent. Which is it?

 

[notto]

Right. I am aware of that. But before it was 99.9% we were related to chimps. Now apparently it must be 96%. What next? 85%?

I guarantee it will be higher than any other living organism.

That is really the point.

Our genetic relatedness corresponds to other independent lines of evidence such as the fossil record to produce a nested hierarchy that leads us to the conclusion of common ancestry.

Minor changes in the accuracy of our comparison don't change the fact that we have far more in common with chimps than anything else. A prediction of the theory of evolution that is confirmed by the evidence.

 

[shernren]

That's not even an argument, it's a glaring fact. The indels laid undiscovered for a half a century while we were told or DNA was virtually identical to apes. Then the indels are discovered and they represent 3x more diversity. It's as simple as that.

And they not only represent 3x more divergence between humans and chimps, but within sea urchins, thale cress, fruit flies, nematodes, and E. coli. In other words, once ways to closely investigate indels were developed, indels were found to make up a lot more mutational changes in base pairs than single-base substitutions - across the whole tree of life, not just in our own peculiar branch. Your mistake is to act as if it is something particular to human-chimp divergence. It isn't, everywhere there is DNA you see indels contributing a lot of change.

My contention is that it doesn't happen and this whole myth of random mutations plus natural selection is highly presumptive. The genetic mechanism for the human accelerated regions remains a mystery despite extensive research in the field. Nevertheless it is tauted as an indisputable fact which begs the question of proof.

Want to explain why the evolution we see in HARs is physically impossible and get your Nobel? Hint: a physical argument of impossibility would be helpful here, not just some hasty probability calculations and your say-so that it doesn't make sense.

This is 100% consistent with the Creationist position that the fossils are either ape or human. No one is suggesting that neither the apes nor humans have not or do not evolve, their alleles do change over time. It just seems odd that every fossil dug up in Africa is immediately identified as one of our ancestors. Some look more like chimpanzee and gorilla ancestors but that possibility is never explored apart from being a common ancestor. It's an a priori assumption that is distorting our understanding of the fossil record.

You've got to be kidding. I brought this up the last time you made this erroneous claim and you didn't address it:

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7917

Early humans, on the other hand, lived in areas more arid areas conducive to fossil preservation but relatively hostile to chimp survival, such as the East Africa Rift Valley. “It’s the last place you’d expect to find chimps,” says anthropologist Jay Kelley of the University of Illinois at Chicago, US.
But in a sediment of the Kapthurin Formation in the Eastern Rift Valley, Sally McBrearty of the University of Connecticut and Nina Jablonski of the California Academy of Sciences did find three fossils with the unambiguous characteristics of chimp teeth.
​

Not only do we have chimp fossils, we have a physical argument as to why they are rare (because they lived in places with acidic soils).

Most of which are bogus, you guys are trying to make the indels go away and it isn't going to happen. The mutations would still have to accumulate at either a constant rate or show marks of punctuated equilibrium and you have yet to do either. The debate has been over mutation rates and you missed the obvious fact that they don't have one for indels. I saw no reason to point that out while you ran in circles trying to refute something that did not exist.

No, we've been facing up to the indels and showing that this indel thing isn't unique to humans as you insinuate, in fact it happens all across the tree of life. The entire reason we didn't have a good rate for indels is because indels were difficult to study before this. But now we roughly know that indels happen roughly 1/10 as often as single-base substitutions and guess what, the indels we see in chimp-human divergence are right up this alley.

I was not making an argument, I was offering quotes and links because I couldn't make heads or tails of the one in the OP. Then you bust in here trying to be confrontational which is an exercise in futility since all I did was present commonly understood facts.

I was responding quite specifically to busterdog's question of why mere similarity was being emphasized, and also to your quotemines of Darwin, as well as the same oversimplifications that you've been pushing elsewhere. I have too much time on my hands, live with it.

First of all we were told and are currently being told that the DNA of Chimpanzees and Humans is 99% the same. This was found to be false and the protein coding genes may or may not be 99%, I would have to compare specific genes since I really don't trust evolutionists and their jacked up homology arguments. The GULOP gene is a psuedo gene that would produce vitamin C if it were functioning properly. Since it doesn't have any discernible selective pressure preserving it it is subject to random mutations. The mutations are not identical they are random and sometimes you find the same ones in the same place but not always. Check it out in a gene browser and you will see what I mean.

Coding segments: 99.4% similarity. There's a statistic that hasn't changed throughout this hustle.

As for GULOP, not only do all the copies of the genes harbor the exact same deletion at the exact same site, but all-but-two of the single-base substitutions also follow phylogeny (whatever phylogeny you can construct from a single gene fragment over merely four species). The discussion is here: http://www.christianforums.com/t4109582&page=2

They have to determine the rate at which they occur in human populations, currently estimated to be close to the point mutation rate. This will happen in time but until then the indels are of considerable length and are not easily dismissed the way you are trying to do.

Please cite for "currently estimated to be close to the point mutation rate" - as far as the sources we've seen go, it's more like one-tenth the point mutation rate.

You missed the bottom line:

"Human genetic evidence suggests that indels are a major source of gene defects, indicating that indels are a significant source of evolutionary change."

They are a major source for the evolution of disease and disorder not the accumulation of adaptive traits. This is precisely why it is vital to understand that genes involved in neural development do not respond well to random mutations. You can dance around this fact as much as you like but adaptive evolution is the prize.

Mere semantics. If indels are a major source of gene defects, that does not preclude indels also being a major source of adaptive changes in genes as well. It's a little like saying the Middle East is a major source of terrorism - that doesn't disprove that the Middle East is also a major source of oil.

I responded to an OP with a link I thought I could improve on, so I offered a couple of sources. Then someone mentioned that it was a little complicated so I tried to boil it down to basic genetics. Those were general information posts only, not the elaborate arguments I aim at evolutionist zealots.

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.
​

http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-origin-of-species/chapter-06.html

Notice that Ole Flycatcher was openly admitting that natural selection was not much of an explanation for the neural system. He was at least honest about that and didn't consider natural selection to be how life originated. The Creationist knows how life was originated and the Naturalist has not explanation other then some nebulous random accumulation of beneficial traits.

I simply don't get how you read "natural selection was not much of an explanation for the neural system" out of this. He clearly stated how natural selection could act to form the eye and exactly what we would expect to see in living organisms today as a result. That's miles away from what you're trying to make him say.

Is an argument from credulity any better, Sir Francis Bacon would seem to have thought otherwise:

Lastly, there are idols which have immigrated into men's minds from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration. These I call Idols of the Theater; because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion. Nor is it only of the systems now in vogue, or only of the ancient sects and philosophies, that I speak: for many more plays of the same kind may yet be composed and in like artificial manner set forth; seeing that errors the most widely different have nevertheless causes for the most part alike. Neither again do I mean this only of entire systems, but also of many principles and axioms in science, which by tradition, credulity, and negligence have come to be received.​

FRANCIS BACON, "The Idols of the Mind" From Novum Organum

Not argument from credulity, argument from evidence.