Some of the Genetic Evidence for the Evolution of Man

"Mutation is NOT evolution ..."

It is one of the processes that leads to evolution. You said that the processes are "FATAL to LIFE." Mutation is not.

"Evolution is not supportable."

Yes it is. Through the list I provided you on the other thread. THings link the twin nested heirarchy. The agrement between phylogenies from different sources. Shared pseudogenes. Shareed retroviral inserts. Shared transposons. Atavisms. Past biogeography. Present biogeography. Genetic vestiges. Etc.

"If evolution is real then Abiogenesis must be able to occur continually."

Nope.

First, evolution is how life changes with time. Abiogenesis is not a part of evolution though there may be some overlap.

Second, there is no reason to propose continuing abiogenesis. The known processes of evolution are sufficient to explain thediversity of life we see today.

"Unfortunately, the atmosphere of our planet is corrosive to the processes necessary for evolution ..."

What about our current atmosphere is "corrosive" to mutation, gene flow, recombination, genetic drift, natural selection, or any of the other processes of evolution?

"I am reading 5 major scientific works about the beginning and evolution."

Cool. Could you name them for me? I would like to get a sense of what you have read and what you know or should know.

"I am amazed at how many scientists state that evolution is a LONG way from being proven ..."

Then you are not reading closely enough. There is no doubt in biology that evolution has and does happen. What is debated are the mechanisms, processes and paths of evolution.

"Instead, you deny the basic tenets of science to support your theology ... "

What tenets?

You have asserted much and offered little.

"When you find those martians you are looking for ... let us know ..."

Why would I be searching for martians? Though I think it will be cool if life is found on Mars or Europa or anywhere else off earth?

 

I'd really be interested in that reading list of yours...

 

"As I have read your comments, I noticed a tendency to use words within the same semantic domain as if they were synonyms.

When you start writing professional papers, I would hope your references would appropriately reflect the subject being cited. And I hope that your use of the English language would become more standard.

For example, "natural selection" and "mutation" do not denote the same meaning as evolution does. While they might connote similar meaning, use of connotation when you are stating denotation is misleading."

I have written several professional papers. All published in conference procedings in my field and not in professional journals. Last one was the Western Fuels Symposium in Billings in October.

http://www.undeerc.org/aboutus/pastevents/conferences/wfs19th/index.asp

I disagree about your charge of equivocation. You said that the processes of evolution were fatal to life. I mentioned several mechanisms, including natural selection and mutation, that are key to how evolution proceeds and showed that they are not actually fatal to all life. Evolution itself is the change in allele frequenct in a population with time. The mechanisms are how these changes come about. I never said that they were the same thing only that they are the means through which it acts. I find it hardto believe that you really missed that not so subtle detail.

"I sought the exchange of ideas with some evolutionists that use scientific method, and standard English."

I believe I outlined for you how evolution follows the scientific method.

http://www.baptistboard.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php/topic/28/2794/16.html#000228

You did not raise any objections. I assume that that means that you accept now that evolution really does follow the scientific method.

Now, what are the titles and authors of those five books you are reading?

 

"I have written several professional papers. All published in conference procedings in my field and not in professional journals."

I thought I should complete this thought for accuracy. I am only speaking of papers where I am the lead author. There are additional papers in both conference proceedings and peer reviewed journals where I am not the lead author. One example of the latter would be

"Characterization of Chromite and Forsterite Surfaces Using Electron Paramagnetic Resonance Spectroscopy" Murphy et al, Fluid/Particle Separation Journal, 12, 60 (1999).

I hate to be incomplete on such things.

 

Bumping this thread due to a request not to let another thread go off track. The issues here came up in that thread. This way that thread can continue and those issues can be discussed here.

In the other thread, Helen made the claim

"2. There is NO evidence for human evolution. There is only the declarations with each fossil that is found. Take out the hot spots and Neandertals were identical to us, for instance. Fully human. It just doesn't sit too well with evolutionists to admit that."

Two responses were given.

#1

#2

The list of links in the second response are some of the more relevant posts on this thread. This thread was taken way off topic at some point, so it may be easier to find the main claims using the links instead of wading through.

In addition to the general claims of the support for human evolution provided by all of the independent lines of evidence, there is buried in there a challenge unique to YE to be explained.

 

Does anyone want to tackle just why all these separate lines of evidence point to human evolution without being arbitrary and capricious about it? Including the retroviral insert dilemma for YEers?

Please tell us what "kind" the various ape species fall into when you give your answer. If you do not, that will be the first question directed towards you so please answer so we can save a round of back and forth. One kind? Multiple kinds divided how? Including extant apes such as chimps and gorillas and also fossil apes.

 

So when you do not have an answer, you attempt to just post off topic material and hope no one notices. (If copy and pasting can really be considered "posting.")

Come on, Gup. Tell us how a few percent of our genome was filled in with retroviral inserts in only ten generations from Adam to Noah yet there have been essentially no new inserts since Noah. What happened? And why do the other apes share almost the exact same set of retroviral inserts?

Tell us why you get the same pattern over and over when studying the phylogeny of the apes from genetics? It does not seem to matter if you use coding genes, psuedogenes, paralogs, ERVs, LINEs, SINEs, ALUs, chimeric genes or waht. Always the same pattern. Why is this? How are the extant and fossil apes divided into "kinds" and how did you determine this?

 

"The new dates for Hahnöfersand Man (7,500 years old (yo)), Paderborn (Sande) Man (255 yo) and Binshof (Speyer) Woman (3,300 yo) put pre-human species contemporary with modern humans and as part of the gene pool. "

Let's go to the archives, shall we.

Henke W, Protsch RR, "The Paderborn calvaria--a diluvial Homo sapiens," Anthropol Anz. 1978 Feb;36(2):85-108.

Our little fraudulent scientists says "The morphological comparison shows strong affinities to comparative material from the Upper Pleistocene like Cro-Magnon." Cromagnon man is fully modern man. You assertions are incorrect about this being some supposedly primitive man. He claimed fully modern, just lied about the date.

This just means that the fully modern humans he found were not as old as he had claimed these fully modern humans were.

And, again, science exposed the mistake. It is self correcting and anyone trying to pass off bad science will eventually be exposed. That is one reason that it is such a trustworthy source.

"Admit it - apes simply happen be the most human-like of the animal kind. "

That is a strange statement from a YEer. They usually claim that the image of God is physical and that those who accept on old earth are such bad people for suggesting the God is just an ape or some other similar misstatement. Now here you are claiming apes ARE human like. Do you disagree with your other YEers on this point.

"There is no physical evidence of ancestry..."

THen you should have no problem actually addressing the issues on this htread.

"...and the Bible rules out the possibility entirely."

Well, your view does. But the creation confirms that your view is incorrect.

"As Professor Werner Gitt has stated, “No information can exist without an initial mental source. No information can exist in purely statistical processes.”"

And then you hop back on your information horse again. Too bad it is a dead horse.

Remember way back the first time you brought up Gitt? If you remember, this quote come from one of his theorems. Except that he never derives his theorems, he merely asserts them. Which makes hiw whole argument circular and therefore useless. Let's see what all I had to say that time.

Besides, you have never committed to a definition of "information" nor have you given a concrete and logical reason why process such as exon shuffling or duplication and mutation that lead to new genes with new functions without destroying existing genes should not count as new information.

Please try to address the actual issues on the thread with your next post. Please.

 

Are you going to adress these issues, Gup?

 

"So you assert that you have found Noah and have done a DNA test on his remains? Wow."

So, then tell us who the last common ancestor of man was in your world if not Noah. These inserts are shared. That means they must have been inserted by the time of our last common ancestor. I would have thought that you would have ascribed this to Noah, no? A few percent of our DNA gets filled with ERVs and NONE since. Wow indeed!

"This is no different from 5 years ago assuming that there was all this Junk DNA in the human genome."

Most junk is still junk. Where are you going?

 

And then we get to the coup de grace. You finally after all this time, attempt to respond. Of course it is a link to AIG, but luckily this time you give just a snippet instead of spamming the whole article on us.

This reminded me once again of what a pathetic and disgusting organization I think AIG is.

Reading through the article, I must admit it sounds good. I'll even admit that it had me doubting there for a while.

But then I remembered that I am dealing with young earth leaders, a group who seems to think that the commandment against bearing false witness does not apply to them. So I start investigating the article by looking up the references.

Let's just stick to the part you pasted.

AIG says that "primate phylogenies are in a mess as a result of major contradictions between molecular and morphological data." Wow that sounds strong. Let's follow there references for this.

The first one is reference 57. They list it as

Revolo, Molecular phylogeny of the hominoids, Molecular Biology and Evolution 14(3):248–265, 1997.

Unfortunately, they cannot even spell Ruvolo's name correctly.

But let's look at her paper and see what she has to say. Right in the abstract she says

Do you see the problem? AIG claims that the phylogenies are in a huge "mess" and then cites an article that says that the phylogenies "can be confidently considered solved" and that there is no need for "additional DNA data sets need to be generated for the purpose of estimating hominoid phylogeny" because the data are "overwhelming."

They did not even attempt to accurately portray what was listed in the article.

The next reference is

Satta, Y. et al., DNA archives and our nearest relative, Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 14(2):259–275, 2000.

Thet say that "In the present study most of these difficulties are overcome by identifying evolutionary causes that might potentially provide misleading information. Altogether, 45 loci consisting of 46, 855 bp are analyzed. About 60% of the loci and approximately the same proportion of phylogenetically informative sites support the human-chimpanzee clade. The remaining 40% of loci and sites support the two alternatives equally. It is demonstrated that, while incompatibility between loci can be explained by random sorting of allelic lineages, incompatibility within loci must be attributed largely to the joint effect of recombination and genetic drift. The trichotomy problem can be properly addressed only within this framework."

Do you read that? They find that 80% (60 + 20) of the sequences support the theory while the other 20% can be explained by recombination and drift. Where is the big problem AIG is screaming about.

Then AIG says "Consider some recent craniodental data, which is very robust, statistically speaking. In a virtual mockery of pseudogene-based phylogenies (Fig. 2, Table 2), humans branch off first, followed by chimps, and finally a gorilla-orang clade."

Again, let's go to the reference. It is the third of the three listed in this snippet.

Collard, M. and Wood, B., How reliable are human phylogenetic hypotheses? Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 97:5003–5006, 2000.

They say "We found that the phylogenetic hypotheses based on the craniodental data were incompatible with the molecular phylogenies for the groups. Given the robustness of the molecular phylogenies, these results indicate that little confidence can be placed in phylogenies generated solely from higher primate craniodental evidence."

So what the authors say they have "little confidence" in is claimed by AIG to be "very robust."

So in typical YE fashion, AIG is unable to accurately portray what the scientists in their refeences are saying. They must twist and distort in order to attempt to make a point. But this is so typical for YE work that it should not be surprising. They have been doing this for so long it has become second nature and they may not even realize what they are doing at this point. You do evil long enough and you eventually harden your heart to it.

The hard part to believe is that someone like you, who seems to be an intelligent and reasonable person, still accepts what these guys have to say afterso many time getting their material being shown to not just be wrong, but to be deliberate and purposefully twisted and misrepresented. How many times must their lies be exposed before you start to doubt them?

 

And I almost forgot. COuld you please tell us how to divide the extant and fossil apes into knids and the basis for this division?

 

"This is simply another example of assumptions without a shred of empirical evidence. The whole of evolution is based upon assumptions without empirical evidence."

Let's see. We can observe that at least a few percent of our DNA is made up of ERVs. We can observe that all humans share the same set of these inserts. That is fairly empirical in my eyes. It does not even require any assumptions.

The assumption is that since ERV insertion is a very random process, that for everyone to share the same ERVs, they must have been present in out last common ancestor. Can you spell out a problem with this assumption?

Now, in a YE paradigm, everyone is an ancestor of Noah. His sons and their descendants dispersed and populated the world. Do you have a problem with this? Maybe you think that this part of the Bible should not be taken literally and the last common ancestor was much later. If you have an objection, spell it out.

Now, in a YE paradigm, there were ten generations between Adam and Noah.

The conclusion is that the few percent of our DNA that is made of ERVs must have been inserted in those ten generations and NONE since.

Please spell out your objections if you find a fatal flaw. If you do not find a fatal flaw in the logic, then tell us the answer to the riddle.

Hint: The answer is that you are making a mistake by taking the creation as a literal, recent creation. The few percent of ERVs were inserted through the course of evolution of all our ancestors.

"Actually most "junk" is ignored .... not junk."

Most junk IS junk, though there have been uses found for a good bit of it. But leftovers like paralogs, pseudogenes, ERVs, various long repeats and such are junk.

"So abscent your look at the evidence you attacked YE ad hominem to discredit it in your mind? "

No, I start checking their references to see if they really say what tehy claim they say. They do not.

"Instead, AiG looked at the data and made a different interpretaton. You are always asking for alternate interpretations based on Biblical presuppositions - well here is an example of precisely what we are talking about. "

Absolutely 100% not true.

They said that the state of the science was a "mess" and gafe this as a reference. That means that they claimed that the reference supported the assertion. It clearly did not.

To have done what you said was done, they would have needed to have taken the data and analysis section of her paper and drawn new conclusions and explained why these conclusions fit the data better. They did not such thing. They claimed that she supported their assertion when the opposite was true. They lied.

"This is why the 'evidence' for evolution is so weak. It can so easily be explained another way."

Then get to it.

 

Have you yet come up with a plausible set of facts and logic to explain the ERV dilemma above?

Or have you yet come up with how your AIG claim above? You know, the one where they cite a reference as supporting a certain claim of theirs. THen when you check the reference, the authors made the opposite claim. Then you say that they were just drawing a differnt conclusion. This dispite there not being any indication in the text that they were drawing a different conclusion or any sort of re-analysis of the data section of the paper. Every indication is that they claimed that the paper supported a conclusion that it does not support. Have you got that worked out yet? Can you point us to where they examine the data set and explain what their alterante conclusion is and how they arrived at it. Or maybe they just lied about the claims of the paper.