What Would We Expect If Humans And Chimps Shared A Common Ancestor

[Loudmouth]

yes, i've heard of such things.
OTOH, i've also heard of lie detectors which isn't legally admissible as evidence,and urine tests which isn't infallible.

What does one have to do with the other?

 

[whois]

And your point is...what? That lie detectors and urine tests aren't reliable doesn't mean that DNA testing isn't That's a non sequitor..

i'm reasonably confident that DNA testing is reliable for determining paternity, and for determining if someone is your brother/sister.
i'm less confident DNA testing can determine your great great grandfather.

 

[The Cadet]

yes, i've heard of such things.
OTOH, i've also heard of lie detectors which isn't legally admissible as evidence,and urine tests which isn't infallible.

Right. And I've heard of real science and fake science too! Look, I'm sorry, but you're making no sense, and this has nothing to do with my argument. Can we or can we not use DNA to determine close relations and/or paternity?

 

[Loudmouth]

i'm reasonably confident that DNA testing is reliable for determining paternity, and for determining if someone is your brother/sister.
i'm less confident DNA testing can determine your great great grandfather.

Do you think that you and your 2nd cousins will not share any DNA because of HGT?

 

[whois]

Right. And I've heard of real science and fake science too! Look, I'm sorry, but you're making no sense, and this has nothing to do with my argument. Can we or can we not use DNA to determine close relations and/or paternity?

i am unsure of the reliability of this sort of thing.
if DNA is unique to the individual, like fingerprints, then no, DNA cannot identify someone "close" to you.
OTOH, i've heard DNA can be used to determine paternity, which negates the fingerprint scenario.
i am unsure how this type of identification works, so i'm the wrong person to be asking.

 

[The Cadet]

i am unsure of the reliability of this sort of thing.
if DNA is unique to the individual, like fingerprints, then no, DNA cannot identify someone "close" to you.
OTOH, i've heard DNA can be used to determine paternity, which negates the fingerprint scenario.
i am unsure how this type of identification works, so i'm the wrong person to be asking.

Well that's sort of the point, isn't it? You really don't.

I'm no expert on genetics either. But you know who we could ask? Actual experts on genetics. And if you ask them, you'll almost universally come back with answers like "yes, we can use genetics to firmly establish common ancestry between humans and chimpanzees". Far from being unable to establish your grandfather, genetics can trace the ancestry of almost every human alive today back to some individual in recent memory. That is, in recorded history.

I mean, a few pages ago, you brought up all sorts of different effects that you seemed to imply made such genetic data fairly useless, and made it impossible to make such predictions... But now here you are, a page later, admitting that you really don't know how testing for heritage and genetic homology works. Do you even know what the science has to say on issues like epigenetics? What effect gene duplication has, and how common it is? These guys, the ones saying "evolution is true"? They know the answers to these questions. That's a big part of why they are saying that evolution is true.

And the commonality between chimps and humans in genetics is actually really, really cool. See, as I was saying before, chimps have 48 chromosomes (24 pairs); humans have 46 (23 pairs). That actually could present a serious problem. So we have to look to see where that extra chromosome pair went. And the answer? Well, when we examine human chromosome 2, we see something odd - there are two telomeres (repetitive structures used to protect the end of a gene from deterioration or merging) stuck right in the middle of the chromosome, and we also find vestigial remnants of a second centromere (a structure used to link two halves of a chromosome pair; in this case, it's not being used). The actual contents of the chromosome pair match up nearly perfectly with two different chromosome pairs from chimpanzees laid end-to-end.

This is absolutely something we would expect and need to find if humans and chimps shared a common ancestor. If they didn't, I'm not sure why we would see this, or indeed any number of the countless other clear parallels between chimp and human genomes.

 

[lasthero]

i'm reasonably confident that DNA testing is reliable for determining paternity, and for determining if someone is your brother/sister.
i'm less confident DNA testing can determine your great great grandfather.

And do you have any specific reason for this incredulity?

 

[whois]

Well that's sort of the point, isn't it? You really don't.

I'm no expert on genetics either. But you know who we could ask? Actual experts on genetics. And if you ask them, you'll almost universally come back with answers like "yes, we can use genetics to firmly establish common ancestry between humans and chimpanzees". Far from being unable to establish your grandfather, genetics can trace the ancestry of almost every human alive today back to some individual in recent memory. That is, in recorded history.

I mean, a few pages ago, you brought up all sorts of different effects that you seemed to imply made such genetic data fairly useless, and made it impossible to make such predictions... But now here you are, a page later, admitting that you really don't know how testing for heritage and genetic homology works. Do you even know what the science has to say on issues like epigenetics? What effect gene duplication has, and how common it is? These guys, the ones saying "evolution is true"? They know the answers to these questions. That's a big part of why they are saying that evolution is true.

And the commonality between chimps and humans in genetics is actually really, really cool. See, as I was saying before, chimps have 48 chromosomes (24 pairs); humans have 46 (23 pairs). That actually could present a serious problem. So we have to look to see where that extra chromosome pair went. And the answer? Well, when we examine human chromosome 2, we see something odd - there are two telomeres (repetitive structures used to protect the end of a gene from deterioration or merging) stuck right in the middle of the chromosome, and we also find vestigial remnants of a second centromere (a structure used to link two halves of a chromosome pair; in this case, it's not being used). The actual contents of the chromosome pair match up nearly perfectly with two different chromosome pairs from chimpanzees laid end-to-end.

This is absolutely something we would expect and need to find if humans and chimps shared a common ancestor. If they didn't, I'm not sure why we would see this, or indeed any number of the countless other clear parallels between chimp and human genomes.

one example isn't proof.
you have presented nothing from the scientific community which supports your explanation.

 

[The Cadet]

one example isn't proof.
you have presented nothing from the scientific community which supports your explanation.

Well...

http://www.pnas.org/content/88/20/9051.short
http://genome.cshlp.org/content/12/11/1651.short
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7055/abs/nature04072.html (although this one is slightly less useful as it is both far more technical and not available to either of us)
http://genome.cshlp.org/content/22/6/1036.full
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12421751

None of this was really that hard to find.

And outside of the peer-reviewed literature:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/07/3/l_073_47.html
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/l...ance-from-facebook-creationists/#.VXhFB0aBp6I (this one in particular has a pretty layman-friendly look at how we use genetics to determine heritage among the great apes and debunks a particularly nasty quotemine with regards to the subject).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome_2_(human)

I'm sure someone well-experienced in the topic could find more.

Also, you asked earlier about gene duplication...

http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0020207

Check out that paper. It might offer some insight.

 

[Shemjaza]

I'm honestly curious as to what whois's axe to grind against evolution is.
I guess the internet has made me cynical, but
"Creationist talking point. Creationist talking point. Creationist talking point. Oh, no I'm not a creationist, I just have questions. Hmm, interesting, but how do you know it isn't Creationist talking point?."
is making me suspicious.

 

[lifepsyop]

Here's an interesting question. Imagine humans shared a common ancestor with Chimpanzees. What would we expect to find? What predictions could be made and tested for this hypothesis?

You might expect to find the common ancestor.

 

[lifepsyop]

Here's an interesting question. Imagine humans shared a common ancestor with Chimpanzees. What would we expect to find? What predictions could be made and tested for this hypothesis?

Here is a failed molecular prediction regarding human "evolution" from an ape-like ancestor. (Not that failed predictions really matter when it comes to the gelatinous theory of Evolution)

"A slower molecular clock worked well to harmonize genetic and archaeological estimates for dates of key events in human evolution, such as migrations out of Africa and around the rest of the world1. But calculations using the slow clock gave nonsensical results when extended further back in time — positing, for example, that the most recent common ancestor of apes and monkeys could have encountered dinosaurs.

Reluctant to abandon the older numbers completely, many researchers have started hedging their bets in papers, presenting multiple dates for evolutionary events depending on whether mutation is assumed to be fast, slow or somewhere in between."

http://www.nature.com/news/dna-mutation-clock-proves-tough-to-set-1.17079

 

[lifepsyop]

You know what I've always found interesting about Miller's presentation. At around :50 and also the 2:00 minute mark he stresses the point that if the fusion pattern of Human Chromosome #2 had not been found, then Evolution/Common Ancestry would have been disproven.

However, strangely I've never been able to find any evolutionists actually announcing this prediction before the Chromosome #2 discovery. If evolutionists were so confident, why wouldn't they publicize this clear prediction and potential falsification of evolution for all to see before the results came in? Why do they only wait till after the fact, to safely announce that it (allegedly) would have disproven evolution?

Could the truth be that they were hedging their bets in case they had to adjust evolutionary models to accommodate unexpected data?

 

[The Cadet]

You know what I've always found interesting about Miller's presentation. At around :50 and also the 2:00 minute mark he stresses the point that if the fusion pattern of Human Chromosome #2 had not been found, then Evolution/Common Ancestry would have been disproven.

However, strangely I've never been able to find any evolutionists actually announcing this prediction before the Chromosome #2 discovery. If evolutionists were so confident, why wouldn't they publicize this clear prediction and potential falsification of evolution for all to see before the results came in? Why do they only wait till after the fact, to safely announce that it (allegedly) would have disproven evolution?

Could the truth be that they were hedging their bets in case they had to adjust evolutionary models to accommodate unexpected data?

You know, I don't know the answer to this. So I went and asked Ken Miller himself.

So basically your understanding of the history of our understanding of DNA in chimps and humans is more than a little backwards (to be fair, so was mine).

 

[Loudmouth]

one example isn't proof.
you have presented nothing from the scientific community which supports your explanation.

"Given the size of vertebrate genomes (>1 × 10^9 bp) and the random nature of retroviral integration (22, 23), multiple integrations (and subsequent fixation) of ERV loci at precisely the same location are highly unlikely (24). Therefore, an ERV locus shared by two or more species is descended from a single integration event and is proof that the species share a common ancestor into whose germ line the original integration took place (14)."
http://www.pnas.org/content/96/18/10254.full

That is from a peer reviewed publication in a scientific journal. Those scientists are saying that they can detect common ancestry by comparing the location of endogenous retroviruses in the genomes of species. Endogenous retroviruses produced by HGT would be at different locations in the genome, not the same locus. That is how scientists are able to differentiate between HGT and VGT.

What do you think happens when we compare ERV's in the human and chimp genome? What do you think the pattern of shared ERV's should look like if those ERV's were passed down from a common ancestor?

 

[Loudmouth]

You know what I've always found interesting about Miller's presentation. At around :50 and also the 2:00 minute mark he stresses the point that if the fusion pattern of Human Chromosome #2 had not been found, then Evolution/Common Ancestry would have been disproven.

However, strangely I've never been able to find any evolutionists actually announcing this prediction before the Chromosome #2 discovery.

Why wouldn't that be predicted by the theory? It is a rather obvious prediction, so why would they need to announce it ahead of time?

If you disagree, please describe how the placement of those chromosomal features should be different if common ancestry really were true, in your eyes.

 

[Loudmouth]

i am unsure of the reliability of this sort of thing.
if DNA is unique to the individual, like fingerprints, then no, DNA cannot identify someone "close" to you.
OTOH, i've heard DNA can be used to determine paternity, which negates the fingerprint scenario.
i am unsure how this type of identification works, so i'm the wrong person to be asking.

The use of short tandem repeats (STR's) to link DNA to a single person in forensics would probably not be used to determine if two people shared a common great-great-great grandparent since the STR's from other lineages have mixed with the alleles from those distant grandparents. This technique works by looking at multiple short sequences of DNA that have different alleles in the population. Let's say STR #1 has two alleles that are evenly mixed in the population, one STR with 10 bases and one with 20 bases. If the DNA from the crime scene matches the suspects DNA, then you have narrowed down the suspect to the remaining 50% of the population. If you do this with many, many STR's you can reach the point where probability says that the suspect could be the only person in the human population with those combinations of STR alleles. However, this wouldn't work well for determining ancestry since for any two people you will have distant uncommon ancestors that would be contributing STR alleles to your genomes. Even siblings will have different STR patterns because those alleles are shuffled around during meiosis.

However, you can use hypervariable regions to see if people have a strong probability of sharing a common ancestor, a technique that is not used in DNA forensic labs since that could not rule out close relatives as being the source of the DNA. At the population level, it is much easier to show that two gene pools share a common gene pool because that takes the shuffling of alleles during meiosis out of the problem.

 

[PsychoSarah]

i'm reasonably confident that DNA testing is reliable for determining paternity, and for determining if someone is your brother/sister.
i'm less confident DNA testing can determine your great great grandfather.

That is totally testable. Not only are there a number of people fortunate enough to live to be great great grandfathers, but one could also preserve some of their hair or a straight up DNA sample for later testing. The thing is, tests like that have already been done countless times. It is done for plants of uncertain parentage, for horticultural reasons.

 

[whois]

i think what we are looking at here is mere coincidence.
in one of the links the cadet presented it was stated that this type of fusion between chromosomes is quite common but yet they never persue these other common occurrences.
i believe that if this was indeed some type of prediction then these other fusions would have been studied to confirm it.

 

[PsychoSarah]

i think what we are looking at here is mere coincidence.
in one of the links the cadet presented it was stated that this type of fusion between chromosomes is quite common but yet they never persue these other common occurrences.
i believe that if this was indeed some type of prediction then these other fusions would have been studied to confirm it.

What other common occurrences, do not be vague.