Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

John Harshman wrote:
[snip]

The problem is that deliberate design doesn't explain it. You have yet
to confront the nested hierarchy of life, and you never will.

Yes, I've responsed to it. You see similarities as evidence of common
ancestry. I asked for evidence since it doesn't appear to be in the
fossil record, as admitted by prominant evolutionists themselves.
You responded with assertions of DNA evidence and I responded
with some difficulties with. If it was a slam dunk there would be
no debate, that includes within the evolutionist camp. So I believe
you are exaggerating your view while downplaying any objections.

There you go again, claiming that prominent evolutionsts agree that the
fossil record doesn't support evolution. Exactly what Gould was
complaining about. Now, that's chutzpah. Your difficulties with DNA
evidence were not real difficulties, as I explained. And you appear not
to know what a nested hierarchy is.

By itself, this is pretty good evidence for the African ape connection.
But if I did this little exercise with any other gene I would get the
same result too. (If you don't believe me I would be glad to do that.)
Why? I say it's because all the genes evolved on the same tree, the true
tree of evolutionary relationships. That's the multiple nested hierarchy
for you.

So what's your alternative explanation for all this? You say...what?

Sounds like more smoke and mirrors. Have you examined this objectively?

Yes. Like many, it confuses multiple questions, notably common descent
and natural selection. We can investigate common descent, as I did
above, without knowing the mechanism by which the differences we
consider important arose. So that whole spiel is irrelevant to the
question I asked.

If the mechanism is in doubt and lineage is still being debated then the
assertion that it happened can't be considered a scientific fact.

So according to you, before we knew about fusion we couldn't have known
for sure that the sun is hot. I can't agree with that. At any rate, the
lineage is not being debated. The details of relationships among some
hominid fossils are debated, but not the relationships of the living
species. It's universally agreed (among scientists, that is) that humans
are a species of African ape. Has been for years.

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/vie...20News&id=2477

At this point, the sympathetic reader eager to secure Darwin's narrative
might resort to searching the "biochemical record." Surely the molecular
structures of DNA, RNA, and proteins contain the long-sought evidence.
Again, though, molecular biology helps in some ways in that it shows
commonalities across species--just as other aspects of anatomical structures
show commonalities--but again it's the distinctions--and the means by which
they are generated--rather than the similarities that must be explained to
support the theory.

Perhaps it's enough for the friendly guardian of the Darwinian narrative to
propose that the genes that control the switching on and off of other genes
simply changed in some random way, allowing humans to branch off the
primate line. And maybe they did. But again, notice, this is a molecular
narrative, not a proposition demonstrable by experiment. It's a story that
fits the facts--but so might another.

http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/2070
Marks went on to concede:


Hardly conceding. Simply a bit of the obvious. Most of the differences
between human and chimp don't matter, and a few matter
disproportionately. That article is wrong from start to end, by the way.
As a useful corrective, you can download this recent comparison of the
human and chimp genomes:

I like the way that all my sources are fraudulent and useless and
yours are above reproach. That's pretty much what happpens
in public education, which is what got this thread going.

But your sources are fraudulent. They're massaging the primary
literature to say things that the authors themselves never did. I'm
citing that primary literature itself.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal...ture04072.html

Read some of that literature for yourself rather than getting it
filtered through creationist web sites. Make your own decision.

Moreover, the genetic comparison is misleading because it ignores qualitative
differences among genomes.... Thus, even among such close relatives as human
and chimpanzee, we find that the chimp’s genome is estimated to be about 10
percent larger than the human’s; that one human chromosome contains a fusion
of two small chimpanzee chromosomes; and that the tips of each chimpanzee
chromosome contain a DNA sequence that is not present in humans (B-7, emp. added).

However do you explain one human chromosome being a fused version of two
chimp chromosomes without common descent?

I believe the point was that two chimp chromosomes resemble a
particular human chromosome. To me that isn't evidence of decent.
If it happened that way I don't see evidence for a natural mechanism
at work.

The term used is "fusion", not "resemble". And there is excellent
evidence for this fusion in the detailed structure of the region of
joining. Further, fusions of this sort happen frequently in the wild,
and there are many populations of mammals in which such fusions are
polymorphic. The natural mechanism is well known and observable in the
present.

It's because of a necessary similarity between similar organisms? But
out of these 76 sites with informative differences, only 18 involve
differences that change the amino acid composition of the protein; the
rest can have no effect on phenotype. Further, many of those amino acid
changes are to similar amino acids that have no real effect on protein
function. In fact, ND4 and ND5 do exactly the same thing in all
organisms. These nested similarities have nothing to do with function,
so similar design is not a credible explanation.

There has been many times that scientists did not see evidence
for function only later to realize their error.


Less than you would imagine. But your defense is that I must be wrong
because some unspecified people have been wrong before? That's it? But
that's a universal defense; it works on anything anyone says, if it
works at all.

Nice spin but what I actually said was just because you don't
see any evidence for a particular function that doesn't mean
that one will never be found. You are being unscientific with
that kind of reasoning.

What you are claiming is that we can never know whether anything at all
lacks a function. This in itself is bizarre, but it can be generalized
with equal (lack of) validity. Just because I have no evidence that my
cat is the reincarnation of Bertrand Russell doesn't mean that we won't
someday find that he is. And so on.

There are excellent reasons to believe that silent mutations have no
function, because of the rate at which they change and the degree of
polymorphism within populations. Not just that we don't know their function.

God did it that way because he felt like it? Fine, but this explains any
possible result. It's not science. We have to ask why god just happened
to feel like doing it in a way that matches the unique expectations of
common descent.

No, you assume common decent so your theory fits your conclusion.

You weren't paying attention. I assumed (in my statistical test) that
there was no common descent, and I falsified that hypothesis. You just
blipped over the data and analysis, didn't you? As long as your
creationist web sites give you a fig leaf of rejection, you can be happy.

I blipped by your assertions because I asked for evidence. I'm suspicious
of your data and analysis since it isn't evident elsewhere. If what you
said was so readily accepted where is it?

I gave you a citation to the original data and paper, and the chimpanzee
genome paper is on the web. But where have you been? Human relationship
to chimpanzees and gorillas has been accepted ever since Darwin. For a
popular account, try Jared Diamond's book The Third Chimpanzee. (Guess
who that is.)

By the way, if you want to see the full data set I pulled this from, go
he

http://www.treebase.org/treebase/console.html

Then search on Author, keyword Hayasaka. Click Submit. You will find
Hayasaka, Kenji. Then click on Search. This brings up one study, in the
frame at middle left. Click on Matrix Fig. 1 to download the sequences.
You can also use this site to view their tree. The publication from
which all this was drawn is Hayasaka, K., T. Gojobori, and S. Horai.
1988. Molecular phylogeny and evolution of primate mitochondrial DNA.
Mol. Biol. Evol., 5:626-644.

1988? They haven't nailed it down any better since then?

Not any better, no. Just more and more data all pointing to the same
thing.

That wouldn't be better? I'm not a biologist or a professional
poker player but I know a bluff when I see one.

The difference between 99.999999% certain and 99.9999999999999% certain
doesn't strike me as any better. So sue me. Look at any scientific paper
that includes DNA sequences for human, some African ape (chimp or
gorilla), and any other organism. You will find a tree uniting the human
and ape. Really, that's the only thing you can possibly get from any
genetic data.

Really, this particular relationship is a no-brainer. That's why
I picked it. So you can't do any better than to note that 1988 was a
long time ago?

Seems like a good question since you've based most of your
argument on brand spanking new DNA research.

Here's another. Despite the title, it has the requisite species:
Miyamoto, M. M., C. A. Porter, and M. Goodman. 2000. c-Myc gene
sequences and the phylogeny of bats and other eutherian mammals. Syst.
Biol. 49:501-514. The reason I have to pick papers that aren't
specifically about the question of human relationships is that nobody is
publishing on that any more, because it was settled years ago. So I have
to pick papers that just happen to have the required data in them, but
are really about something else that is in question. Also, just about
any paper on primate or all-mammal phylogeny will have something of the
sort.

Nobody publishes papers talking about human relationships
these days, just as nbody publishes papers showing that heavy objects
don't fall any faster than light ones. Been there, done that. But if you
want recent stuff, you can go to GenBank, the genetic sequence database,
and pull up hundreds of priimate DNA sequences of all sorts, more every
week. They'll all tell you the same thing, like I said. But none of this
matters to you, does it? You are secure in your world. Your requests for
data were a sham.

No, my requests were ignored.

Hardly ignored. What you mean is you don't like my evidence.

I asked for evidence for macro-evolution
between man and ape since you said it was the best documented one.
Looking at chimpanzee DNA sequences doesn't do it for me, sorrry.
Since humans resemble apes in many ways I don't see why the DNA
would be vastly different.

Strangely, many species that resemble each other, physically, much more
closely than humans and chimpanzees have much more different DNA. Two
species of frogs that you couldn't tell apart are much more genetically
distinct than humans and apes. So your understanding is not borne out.
At any rate, you mistake the argument. This is not just about
similarity. It's about nested hierarchy. And I will also point out that
the similarities in question are mostly silent, meaning they have no
effect on phenotype. There is no linkage between these silent
similarities and any you can see. So why should they both be there?

I understand that recent genome research on
rats has us about at a 2.5% difference. Even though some humans
resemble rats figuratively I don't see that as evidence of any lineage.

You understand wrong. We are much more than 2.5% different from rats.
And of course we are related to rats too, just not as closely as we are
to chimpanzees and gorillas. (I imagine there might be some way to
measure genetic differences that does put us only 2.5% from rats, though
I can't think of one right now. But any such measure, if applied to
apes, would have them being much closer to us than the rats were. There
are many ways of measuring similarity. Don't confuse feet with
centimeters and come out with the notion that cats are bigger than
elephants.)

Well, it's been fun visiting rec.woodworking, but my work here is done.

Sorry you feel that way, I hope you'll visit and maybe jump on
some wood someday.

Perhaps I was premature. Or perhaps I don't know when to quit. But here
I am. I realize it's futile, though.