Why I believe Genesis 1 teaches evolutiion

[InnerPhyre]

Man and woman were created in God's image.

So you think that God really has eyes and ears and feet and a belly button? That's not what it means to be created in His image. God is spirit. Creating us in His image means He gave us a soul.

 

[grmorton]

Your conclusions are derived from one phrase in Genesis 1 , and the unproven idea that human and ape DNA are similar.

Have another look at the whole chapter of Genesis 1.





Scripture plainly asserts the following:

Plants and animals were to reproduce according to their own kind.
All that God made was good.
Man and woman were created in God's image.

All of these truths demonstrate that God did not use evolution in Creation.

Show me one sentence where is says that animals [subject] reproduce animals [object] after their kind. It has the earth bringing forth animals after their kind. That is a totally different concept.

The other posters are correct. Our DNA is practically identical with that of the chimpanzee. We can deny it but it won't change that fact any more than denying that the sky is blue. Christian apologetics simply has to deal with the world as it is, not as they wish it to be.

 

[Micaiah]

Agree, the Scriptures do not state that animals reproduce offspring after their kind. But Scriture plainly asserts that plants produce seed according to their own kind.

11Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the earth"; and it was so. 12And the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields seed according to its kind, and the tree that yields fruit, whose seed is in itself according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 13So the evening and the morning were the third day.

It would have been pedantic to repeat that each animal bird and fish reproduced offspring after their own kind. The statement about the plant blows evolution out of the water right from the start. Each plant produces seed which is the same kind as the parent plant. Period.

I'm glad God gave us a simple description of creation.
If it was written by a an astrophysicist or scientist, it would have been so technically complicated it would be incomprehensible.

If it were written by lawyers, it would have been technically simple but so obfuscated and pedantic, again it would be incomprehensible.

If written by a theologian, it would have been so profound and oblique we would be none the wiser.

Don't even think about a description by a mathematician.

Probably the best description would have come from and enjinere, butt no wun wood taik it seryowsly.

 

[Micaiah]

Can I have a number on the correlation between human DNA and that of a chimp, with a reference please. So farwe have 99% which is most impressive, but not accurate.

Also Glenn, could you advise where you carried out your studies in Hebrew.

 

[InnerPhyre]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/05/030521092615.htm

 

[InnerPhyre]

So farwe have 99% which is most impressive, but not accurate.

You're right. My mistake. It's actually 99.4%

 

[Micaiah]

Actually, lastest estimates were 95%, which is significantly less than the previously thought 98.5%.

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. The gaps in alignment are present in about equal amounts in the chimp and human sequences. They occur equally in repeated and nonrepeated sequences, as detected by [size=-1]REPEATMASKER[/size] (http://ftp.genome.washington.edu/RM/RepeatMasker.html).

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/99/21/13633?hits=10&FIRSTINDEX=0&FULLTEXT=chimp+dna&SEARCHID=1097187422888_2584&gca=pnas%3B99%2F21%2F13633&

 

[Vance]

Actually, lastest estimates were 95%, which is significantly less than the previously thought 98.5%.

Which is one scientist's conclusion, compared to those based on an even more recent study (cited by Phyre) that showed that there was actually a 99.4% correspondence of the functionally important DNA, and consistent with the previously determined 98.5% for all DNA. I am sure the 2002 study you cited is still undergoing peer review, however, and if it is considered valid, it will be given weight in the overall analysis.

Right now, we have multiple studies which were consistent with the 98.5% number, including one just last year, and we have one that says 95%. While the scientific community will be open to review this new study, and would be open to revising the general consensus, one study alone reaching a different conclusion won't do it. That works at AiG and ICR (which will take whatever they can get!), but not in real science.

The point is that chimps are still genetically closer to humans than to other apes.

 

[grmorton]

Agree, the Scriptures do not state that animals reproduce offspring after their kind.

that is progress.

But Scriture plainly asserts that plants produce seed according to their own kind.

No it doesn't say according to their OWN kind. The word "OWN" is not in the quotation of scripture you provide, and I think that is significant. It says

"fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind"

What does the 'its' refer to? The tree. It means the trees kind of fruit. But that doesn't necessitate that the trees kind of fruit is static, unchanging, never able to be altered. Clearly mankind has altered the fruit of many plants, so we know that fruit can change. Corn used to be tiny little cobs with just a few kernals. Today the cobs are gargantuan.

It would have been pedantic to repeat that each animal bird and fish reproduced offspring after their own kind. The statement about the plant blows evolution out of the water right from the start. Each plant produces seed which is the same kind as the parent plant. Period.

Can you tell me where in the bible the phrase "Each plant produces seed which is the same kind as the parent plant' occurs?

That is your interpretation, not Scriptural data.

I'm glad God gave us a simple description of creation.
If it was written by a an astrophysicist or scientist, it would have been so technically complicated it would be incomprehensible.

No it doesn't have to be incomprehensible. Stephen Hawkings wrote a book, The Brief History of Time which was a best seller. People understood that book and it was about the origin of the universe.

 

[Micaiah]

Here is an extract from the article sited by InnerPhyre

Proposed changes in the primate order are stirring up evolutionary debate. Humans and chimpanzees should be grouped in the same genus, Homo, according to WSU researchers in a May 19 article (#2172) published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Although WSU’s Morris Goodman, PhD, has already proven with non-coding DNA sequences that chimpanzees are closest in kinship to humans rather than to gorillas, evolutionary traditionalists say chimps and humans are functionally markedly different and therefore belong on different branches of the family tree.

New analyses show humans and chimpanzees to be 99.4 percent identical in the functionally-important DNA, which codes for proteins and is shaped by natural selection. This provides further evidence for revisions in our genus classification. Dr. Goodman proposes that all living apes should occupy the family Hominidae (which currently contains only humans), and that both humans and chimpanzees should occupy the genus Homo.

You should be aware of the restrictions of the testing done in this case. It was *not* a comparison of the whole human/chimp DNA. It was done on what was considered to be functionally important DNA, and the amount of DNA tested was 90 kb. Compare this with the 779 kb from the study I referred to previously. The sample was limited, and was selected according to a preset criteria:

Data Sources. Sequences are primarily from GenBank. The genes representing chimpanzees are, in most cases, from the species Homo (Pan) troglodytes, but in a few cases are from Homo (Pan) paniscus. If a gene appeared from its sequence to be nonfunctional, i.e., a pseudogene, it was discarded. In choosing the nonhuman genes to compare with a human gene and to one another, we also discarded any suspected of being paralogously related to the human gene, i.e., in this case, suspected of being related by a last common gene ancestor that duplicated long before the most recent common species ancestor. Our aim was to compare functional coding sequences that are orthologously related; i.e., each interspecies pair traces back to a single last common gene ancestor that existed in the most recent common species ancestor. However, without transcriptional data on many of the loci it is possible that some pseudogenes and/or paralogs were inadvertently compared. Our dataset of inferred orthologous functional coding sequences encompasses 97 loci for both humans and chimpanzees, and, among the 97, 67 were available for gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), 69 for orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus), 58 for at least one OWM, and 49 for mouse (Mus musculus; chosen because they were represented by at least four primate taxa). Sequences were aligned with the clustal algorithm as implemented in MACVECTOR 7.0 (Accelrys, Burlington, MA) and verified by eye. Putative orthologous sequences were first aligned on a gene-by-gene basis and subsequently concatenated for further analysis into a single coding "supergene" alignment that represented 93,045 nucleotide positions including indels (insertions/deletions). Human RefSeq numbers for each individual locus examined and GenBank accession numbers for nonhuman sequences can be found in Table 6, which is published as supporting information on the PNAS web, site www.pnas.org, and at www.genetics.wayne.edu/lgross/primates.htm. Previously unpublished sequences from the cytochrome c locus (CYCS) were obtained by using standard PCR-based procedures and f luorescence-based automated sequencing protocols. Primer sequences and cycling conditions are presented in Supporting Text, which is published as supporting information on the PNAS web site.

The above was from an article written by Dr Goodman and friends referred to in the magazine mentioned by InnerPhyre.

 

[Micaiah]

These researchers have a strong evolutionary bias:

Looking to the future, once the DNA sequences of complete genomes from chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and some other primates are known, it will be relatively straightforward to identify among the 20,000–30,000 or more genes of each genome those coding sequences that evolved under the force of positive selection. Eventually it should also be possible to similarly identify the positively selected changes in cis-acting regulatory DNA elements. As such molecular genetic data are integrated with organismal phenotypic data, humans will continue to gain a much better understanding of their place in evolution.

From the same article above.

 

[Micaiah]

I understand from the ICR article given below that the number of nucleotides in the human DNA is around 2.5-3 billion. Assuming 2.5 billion, then 90 000 *base pairs* of DNA tested represents 90 000/2500 000 000 x 100 = 0.0036 %. That is a very small part of the total DNA.

http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-335.htm

 

[Micaiah]

The Britten2 study looked at 779 kilobase pairs to carefully examine differences between chimpanzees and humans. He found that 1.4% of the bases had been substituted, which was in agreement with previous studies (98.6% similarity). However, he found a much larger number of indels. Most of these were only 1 to 4 nucleotides in length, although there were a few that were > 1000 base pairs long. Surprisingly, the indels added an additional 3.4 % of base pairs that were different.

While previous studies have focused on base substitutions, they have missed perhaps the greatest contribution to the genetic differences between chimps and humans. Missing nucleotides from one or the other appear to account for more than twice the number of substituted nucleotides. Although the number of substitutions is about ten times higher than the number of indels, the number of nucleotides involved in indels is greater. These indels were reported to be equally represented in the chimp and human sequences. Therefore, the insertions or deletions were not occurring only in the chimp or only in the human and could also be interpreted as intrinsic differences.

Will evolution be called into question now that the similarity of chimpanzee and human DNA has been reduced from >98.5% to ~95%? Probably not. Regardless of whether the similarity was reduced even below 90%, evolutionists would still believe that humans and apes shared a common ancestor. Moreover, using percentages hides an important fact. If 5% of the DNA is different, this amounts to 150,000,000 DNA base pairs that are different between them!

This is from the following AIG article.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2002/1125dna.asp

It is clear that the author believes that leaving indels out of the estimates of similarity is an omission that should not occur.