Well I'll be a Monkey's Uncle!

[Athanasius]

First, we were told that human DNA is 98.5% homologous with chimp DNA. Later, that figure was revised to a less simian 95%. Not to worry though, because all humans, we were told, are 99.9 % genetically identical.

Now, according to an article in Voice of America News (http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-11-22-voa80.cfm), researchers have drastically revised the map of the human genome. "The genes of any given individual" researchers say, "are at least 10 to 12 percent different from those of another human."

That means, I am sorry to say, that chimps are more more closely related to us than we are to each other! :lol:

[neocon_voter]

First, we were told that human DNA is 98.5% homologous with chimp DNA. Later, that figure was revised to a less simian 95%. Not to worry though, because all humans, we were told, are 99.9 % genetically identical.

Now, according to a article in Voice of America News (http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-11-22-voa80.cfm), researchers have drastically revised the map of the human genome. "The genes of any given individual" researchers say, "are at least 10 to 12 percent different from those of another human."

That means, I am sorry to say, that chimps are more more closely related to us than we are to each other! :lol:
Hi there
The link didn't work, but I found the article here
http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-11-22-voa80.cfm

Interesting.

Neocon_Voter

[wattsr1]

First, we were told that human DNA is 98.5% homologous with chimp DNA. Later, that figure was revised to a less simian 95%. Not to worry though, because all humans, we were told, are 99.9 % genetically identical.

Now, according to an article in Voice of America News (http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-11-22-voa80.cfm), researchers have drastically revised the map of the human genome. "The genes of any given individual" researchers say, "are at least 10 to 12 percent different from those of another human."

That means, I am sorry to say, that chimps are more more closely related to us than we are to each other! :lol:Neat post Athanasius and a great punch line. :smile:

Nevertheless, to those YECs who insist that it is noble to disregard evidence, but now suddenly think "Oh some evidence", be careful.

I suspect two different kinds of measurement were being done here. Thus the 95%-98% human/chimp comparison was done comparing gene with gene. The 10-12% human difference was done comparing huge blocks of DNA which incorporated both gene and non-gene regions. Most of human DNA is non-gene. Such regions also appear to undergo more rapid change than the genes.

Thus it is quite reasonable that human and chimps differ by a couple of percent whereas humans differ by ten percent between themselves.


Regards, Roland


Edited to add:- But then on a read on NV's link, I am not sure about my argument. It is not clear exactly what was measured, despite the quotes.

[Barry Desborough]

Neat post Athanasius and a great punch line. :smile:

Nevertheless, to those YECs who insist that it is noble to disregard evidence, but now suddenly think "Oh some evidence", be careful.

I suspect two different kinds of measurement were being done here. Thus the 95%-98% human/chimp comparison was done comparing gene with gene. The 10-12% human difference was done comparing huge blocks of DNA which incorporated both gene and non-gene regions. Most of human DNA is non-gene. Such regions also appear to undergo more rapid change than the genes.

Thus it is quite reasonable that human and chimps differ by a couple of percent whereas humans differ by ten percent between themselves.


Regards, Roland


Edited to add:- But then on a read on NV's link, I am not sure about my argument. It is not clear exactly what was measured, despite the quotes.

It seems they're deriving a %age difference in copy number variations (CNVs) of certain genes. It's not clear to me how this %age difference is calculated, so it is not clear what they mean by %age difference in genes. It's certainly not that human individuals vary by such an amount in their DNA.

It's often said that siblings share 50% of their genes. This could be interpreted as saying that they differ by 50% too. Both of these statements are incorrect unless you are aware if the implicit meaning. Siblings share 50% and differ by 50% of the gene variations within the general population.

Comparing one genetic similarity/difference measure within one species, with a different measure between species is meaningless.

[sylas]

First, we were told that human DNA is 98.5% homologous with chimp DNA. Later, that figure was revised to a less simian 95%. Not to worry though, because all humans, we were told, are 99.9 % genetically identical.

Now, according to an article in Voice of America News (http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-11-22-voa80.cfm), researchers have drastically revised the map of the human genome. "The genes of any given individual" researchers say, "are at least 10 to 12 percent different from those of another human."

That means, I am sorry to say, that chimps are more more closely related to us than we are to each other! :lol:

This means, I'm sorry to say, that you don't understand what any of these reports are saying. There's no shame in this; though perhaps you should be embarassed at making such a public display of lack of understanding without even recognizing that there might be something lacking in your own biological knowledge.

If you stop and think, you might expect that there's got to be something wrong with your inference that two humans are more different from each other than is a human and a chimpanzee. And of course, there is. All the above numbers are correct, and all of them are measuring different things.

The 98.5% figure (it's actually a little higher than this) is a measure of point differences between two genome maps that have been aligned to bring together corresponding sections.

The 95% figure is adding to this "indels" (insertions/deletions), which are segments that are missing or duplicated in one or the other genomes. This is for the most part in non-coding regions of the genome.

The 10 to 12% figure is the count of genes that are different. That is, take genes from a human and a chimpanzee. They will tend to have different bases in around 1.5% of locations along the gene. Between two humans, this is more like 0.1% of locations. Of course the humans tend to be much closer to each other than either is to a chimpanzee.

To understand what this means, consider three genes; which have the same basic function for each individual. Get one from a chimpanzee, one from a human, and one from another human.

The 98.5% figure is (on average) the number of places in which you expect the corresponding genes from a human and a chimpanzee to be different. (Actually, it is more than 98.5%, since genes tend to be more conserved that other parts of the genome.) Between the two humans, this is more like 99.9% similar. So two humans are indeed much closer.

What about the 95%? Forget it... it's a figure that is more about parts of the genome not covering genes.

What about the 10 to 12%? That is the chance that there is SOME difference in the two human genes. If a gene has 100 bases, and each one is 99.9% likely to be a match, then there is about 0.999100, or about 90.5% chance all 100 bases are the same. There's about a 10% chance there's some difference somewhere in the gene.

This is back of the envelope stuff; not a detailed and fully correct biological exposition. I'm just trying to show what the different things being measured actually are. Some genes are more different than others; most are longer than 100 bases; and genes actually tend to have a small number of variants (alleles) in any population.

Are we following this? Your laughter is the kind of thing that makes real scientists tear out their hair in frustration at the difficulty of educating in the face of determined confusion, and leads to a growing perception that Christian in particular are especially susceptible to making really really ignorant mistakes about biology, and mistaking this for some kind of cogent criticism of basic biology.

Cheers -- Sylas

Postscript, added in edit. The cited author of the work which speaks of drastic revisions to the human genome map is Dr Stephen Scherer. He has been actively involved in the genome mapping work, and is also actively involved in locating genetic causes of various diseases. He has an interest also in autism. He is a very active scientist. To get an idea of the kind of work he does, see Walking the Jungles and Deserts of Chromosome 7 (http://www.tcag.ca/scherer/documents/HMMI_Sep_03_Chr7.pdf); a popular article describing some of his research. Very interesting, and important work.

Apparently he has been looking especially at large scale variations in genomes within human populations; caused not by point mutations by more drastic rearrangements of chromosomes. I find it interesting how much his work depends on evolution. You can call it "microevolution" if you like; it's about changes that take place within human populations.

[Jorge]

First, we were told that human DNA is 98.5% homologous with chimp DNA. Later, that figure was revised to a less simian 95%. Not to worry though, because all humans, we were told, are 99.9 % genetically identical.

Now, according to an article in Voice of America News (http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-11-22-voa80.cfm) (http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-11-22-voa80.cfm%29), researchers have drastically revised the map of the human genome. "The genes of any given individual" researchers say, "are at least 10 to 12 percent different from those of another human."

That means, I am sorry to say, that chimps are more more closely related to us than we are to each other! :lol:
You scooped me, Athanasius!

Anyway, I was going to start a thread when I saw that article. The gist of my thread was to illustrate with this finding how truly vacuous the claim of "common ancestry" based on "similarities" is.

Edited to add : I read and understood your post, Sylas. I'll change nothing in mine.

Jorge

[sylas]

Edited to add : I read and understood your post, Sylas. I'll change nothing in mine.

Imagine my surprise. You've never let any understanding of what evidence is actually saying impact your posts, if a distortion will help your case better.

[Roy]

Edited to add : I read and understood your post, Sylas. I'll change nothing in mine.

So you know that the figures referred to are for different measurements, yet you're still prepared to invoke them to cast doubt on common ancestry.

Apparently being a lying scumbag is no longer sufficient; now you brag about it too.

Roy

[Roy]

You've never let any actual understanding of what evidence is actually saying if a distortion will help your case.

:huh: This sentence no verb. Are you channelling JM?

Roy

[Jorge]

Imagine my surprise. You've never let any understanding of what evidence is actually saying impact your posts, if a distortion will help your case better.
Must you all be so dense? A neutron star would be ever so envious!

The reason I wouldn't change my post is because the essence remains valid regardless of the 'evidence' you provided. Since things need to be spelled out c-a-t to you guys, what I mean by that is that using similarities (even when appropriately employed) is a very weak argument for concluding common ancestry to the point that you guys do (the point of saying that bananas, whales, beetles, palm trees, snakes, fish, birds, apes, humans, and all living creatures have a common, one-celled creature that they may all call 'grandpa'). Geesh ... as the good Capt. Kirk would say, "Beam me up, Scotty, there's no intelligent life down here." :lol:

Jorge

[Jorge]

So you know that the figures referred to are for different measurements, yet you're still prepared to invoke them to cast doubt on common ancestry.
Read my post # 10 and chew on it.


Apparently being a lying scumbag is no longer sufficient; now you brag about it too.

Roy
Being that it's Thanksgiving, I'll be extra nice here and just tell you to go and stuff some turkey or ... stuff yourself with some turkey (or maybe what I really mean is to go and stuff yourself). :lol:

Jorge

[Barry Desborough]

This article (http://www.the-scientist.com/news/daily/36731/) in The Scientist shows where Jessica Berman's hopelessly confused sentence, "The discovery means that the genes of any given individual are at least 10 to 12 percent different from those of another human." might have come from.

"]
Regions where large segments of DNA are gained or lost cover at least 12 percent of the human genome, far more than previously thought, an international consortium of scientists report in four papers in three journals this week. The findings could help scientists identify new traits with medical or other phenotypic relevance and understand human evolution, Wan Lam at the British Columbia Cancer Research Center in Vancouver, who did not participate in the studies, told The Scientist.

...

The consortium found that only about 10 to 15 percent of copy number variation occurred between populations. "This is as a result of our recent common ancestry in Africa," Hurles said. The researchers suggest these differences could explain the increased prevalence of some diseases in certain populations. For instance, prior studies have shown that one CNV the consortium confirmed, UGT2B17, is a gene linked to an increased risk of prostate cancer in populations of African and European descent. The consortium is now expanding its studies to thousands of healthy individuals from populations outside the HapMap collection.



So these results, apart from helping us understand disease, will provide more detailed information on the history of human evolution.

The YEC reaction is like a bunch of chimps trying to understand a hi-tec gadget such as a mobile phone by bashing it with a rock.

[Athanasius]

Thanks for the posts. I did a Google and realized that different techniques were used to measure these differences before I made my post. The intended point of my humour was that there is more than meets the eye to these figures that have been so casually tossed about, as Silas, so ever-vigilent to defend naturalism, pointed out.

I think I will try taking my jokes to the Chimps instead. Perhaps I will find them to have a sense of humour that, disregarding indels, is over 98.5% as good as ours! :wink:

Filled with much thankfulness for my Creator's great mercy and kindness, and His many undeserved blessings, including metaphysical naturalists who keep me on my toes,

Athanasius

[wattsr1]

Thanks for the posts. I did a Google and realized that different techniques were used to measure these differences before I made my post. The intended point of my humour was that there is more than meets the eye to these figures that have been so casually tossed about, as Silas, so ever-vigilent to defend naturalism, pointed out.

I think I will try taking my jokes to the Chimps instead. Perhaps I will find them to have a sense of humour that, disregarding indels, is over 98.5% as good as ours! :wink:

Filled with much thankfulness for my Creator's great mercy and kindness, and His many undeserved blessings, including metaphysical naturalists who keep me on my toes,

Athanasius

Well Jorge seemed to find some serious message (about the futility of naturalism) in those numbers too. :smile:

[sylas]

Thanks for the posts. I did a Google and realized that different techniques were used to measure these differences before I made my post. The intended point of my humour was that there is more than meets the eye to these figures that have been so casually tossed about, as Silas, so ever-vigilent to defend naturalism, pointed out.

I think I will try taking my jokes to the Chimps instead. Perhaps I will find them to have a sense of humour that, disregarding indels, is over 98.5% as good as ours! :wink:

Filled with much thankfulness for my Creator's great mercy and kindness, and His many undeserved blessings, including metaphysical naturalists who keep me on my toes,


No problem; thanks for a generous response.

My own perception is that I am not actually much about defending "naturalism" at all. Mainly I am trying to help people get a basic education in what we have learned about details of the natural world; whether you are a philosophical naturalist or a Christian or something else entirely.

That's the case here. The various numbers are not any kind of criticism of evolutionary models. They are obtained by evolutionists and reflect different measurements. You don't have to be a "naturalist" to recognize this. I do think that there is a serious problem within Christianity with basic scientific education being undermined by a lot of irrational refusal to learn or deal with scientific discoveries; but that is not intrinsic to Christianity. In fact some of the most effective educators around in trying to help people get a more genuine understanding of the data are themselves Christians as well.

I don't recall actually making strong defences of naturalism as a philosophy; but I do recall have pointed out frequently that it is not a position able to be proved scientificially, and that I don't have any problem letting my own education include knowledge gained from scientists who don't share my philosophical position. And in particular, I know of a number of active scientists who believe that all the natural world was created by God and works according to his plan -- including the processes of evolution by which genomes diversify.

Cheers -- Sylas

[NeilUnreal]

Technically, monkeys are our uncles.

-Neil

[sylas]

Technically, monkeys are our uncles.


There are fewer generations in the human lineage. We've got the better claim to be uncles to a monkey.

300

Background for relational terminology. Siblings share a parent. Cousins share a grandparent. Second cousins share a great-grandparent. Third cousins share a great-great-grandparent; etc.

Your sibling's children are your nieces and nephews. Your cousin's children are your first cousins once removed. Your cousin's grandchildren are your first cousins twice removed. Your second cousin's children are your second cousins once removed. Your second cousin's great-grandchildren are your second cousins three times removed. Etc.

nth cousins have that many generations back (plus one) to a common ancestor (from the cousin closest to that ancestor). The number of times removed is the extra generations in the longer lineage.

You can think of a sibling as a 0th cousin, and an uncle or a niece as 0th cousin once removed.


(…thinks…)

Divergence from chimpanzees, about 6 Mya. Generation time about 15 y. Thus about 400,000 generations back. Human generation time about 20y; but this evolved comparatively recently -- say 0.6 Mya. In this time, 40,000 chimp generations; 30,000 human generations.

Divergence from old world monkeys: about 23 Mya. Monkey generation time about 4 y. Say: 6,000,000 generations. A bit less in the linage leading to apes. There would be about 1,000,000 extra generations for monkeys than chimpanzees over the last 6 Mya; boost this to 1,500,000 to account for lineages prior to 6 Mya. Figures are highly approximate anyway since there are so many different species of monkey.

Numbers for back of this envelope from research by Professor Soojin Yi (http://www.biology.gatech.edu/faculty/soojin-yi/); and also from the paper Body Size, Metabolic Rate, Generation Time, and the Molecular Clock (http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/90/9/4087.pdf) by AP Martin, and SR Palumbi in PNAS 1993;90;4087-4091.

Technically, monkeys are (roughly) our 4,500,000th cousin 1,500,000 times removed. Chimpanzees are our 400,000th cousin 10,000 times removed.

Yours in pedantry -- Sylas

300

Postscript added in edit: Just thought. I am, of course, refering to living monkeys. You can have an uncle who has died, so we ought to consider uncles in the past. And the human lineage is comparatively short; a couple of Mya only, depending on what you mean by human. Monkeys have a much longer lineage that is still recognizably monkey.

So yes, I revise my stand. Neil is correct; monkeys have the better claim to be our uncles, if we consider the monkeys of the past.

[Tickle Me Mercury]

First, we were told that human DNA is 98.5% homologous with chimp DNA. Later, that figure was revised to a less simian 95%. Not to worry though, because all humans, we were told, are 99.9 % genetically identical.

Now, according to an article in Voice of America News (http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-11-22-voa80.cfm), researchers have drastically revised the map of the human genome. "The genes of any given individual" researchers say, "are at least 10 to 12 percent different from those of another human."

That means, I am sorry to say, that chimps are more more closely related to us than we are to each other! :lol:

Wouldn't the evolutionary claim make you a monkey's nephew?

Anyway, if this is a comment on how scientific claims, being deduced from empirical evidence, change when new evidence is found current evidence clarified/refuted, then you aren't telling us anything new.

[NeilUnreal]

I've always thought the whole monkey thing was proof of the honesty of Darwin and Huxley. Had they been dishonest, they would have initially sold evolution to the public based on the implication that we were descended from something really cool like sharks or tigers. Only after everyone took the bait would they have worked their way around to the part about monkeys. :lol:

-Neil

[Jorge]

I've always thought the whole monkey thing was proof of the honesty of Darwin and Huxley. Had they been dishonest, they would have initially sold evolution to the public based on the implication that we were descended from something really cool like sharks or tigers. Only after everyone took the bait would they have worked their way around to the part about monkeys. :lol:

-Neil
Nahhh ... Darwin/Huxley knew exactly what they were doing. Sharks may be "cool" but they can't walk on land. Tigers walk on land but lots of people hate cats (of any size). Monkeys, OTOH, have this "human" aspect about them that made them the perfect 'bait'. It was easy pickins' after that. People swallowed the bait, the hook, line, sinker, pole and pier and the result was people like ... well ... like you. :rofl:

Jorge

[wattsr1]

Nahhh ... Darwin/Huxley knew exactly what they were doing. Sharks may be "cool" but they can't walk on land. Tigers walk on land but lots of people hate cats (of any size). Monkeys, OTOH, have this "human" aspect about them that made them the perfect 'bait'. It was easy pickins' after that. People swallowed the bait, the hook, line, sinker, pole and pier and the result was people like ... well ... like you. :rofl:

Jorge

Gidday Jorge,

There are two ways of looking at this. NeilUnreal, GlennMorton, Oxmixmudd, ... etc., can all look at evidence and make their own minds up.

It would seem that, in your case, you are unable to do this.


With NeilUnreal there are two possibilities:-

1) he did swallow it hook-line-and-sinker and is therefore wrong and you are right.

2) he saw sense and is correct and you are wrong.

However, number 2) can never enter your mind.

You have this humungous feed back loop which says that anything to show that you could be wrong is proof that it must be wrong and not you.

I suspect you get this from your interpretation of the Bible. If people call you names, it is done because they are "persecuting" you which therefore means you must be correct.

But is could just mean that you are called names because you are indeed wrong and am wilfully blind and refuse to see it.

That latter thought can never enter your mind. Only the former can.

And of course a huge irony exists here, for you call people names yourself. But then, the argument swaps. You do so, not because you are "persecuting" them. You only do so because you are correct.

Your universe is one of utter self affirmation - where you can never be wrong. Any indication of this, is simply proof that you are correct.

What is more, you cannot justify your implicit claim that God only "talks" to you and not Glenn, NeilUnreal or Oxmixmudd. You simply live on hope, but call it fact.


Am I possibly correct in all of this?


Regards, Roland