This just in: We are 99.5% gorilla …

_{Denyse O'Leary

March 7, 2012

Genetics, Human evolution, News}

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Well, we must be. From “What Have We Got in Common With a Gorilla? Insight Into Human Evolution from Gorilla Genome Sequence” (ScienceDaily, Mar. 7, 2012), we learn,

Researchers have just completed the genome sequence for the gorilla — the last genus of the living great apes to have its genome decoded. While confirming that our closest relative is the chimpanzee, the team show that much of the human genome more closely resembles the gorilla than it does the chimpanzee genome.

Before we were 99% chimpanzee, so … Hey, wait a minute … Don’t sign anything …

Comments

We strain at genetic 'gnat' like similarities while swallowing with great ease, genetic like 'elephants'. We do not look or behave 99% or so the same as tree swinging, knuckle dragging and grunting simians. Therefore, any such comparative figures clearly mean something else: the same basic building blocks were used by an intelligent designer, throughout. Why such an obsessive focus? Surely, it is because the now 'almighty' Darwin said in his autobiography, those who believed in miracles were "ignorant" to an incredible degree; including the Gospels. Clearly, on that 'teaching' Jesus was an ignorant insane 'miracle' worker. Ref, pp. 85-96, http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=text&itemID=F1497&pageseq=1 "Ignorant"; well let's see. Create any life form from lifeless dirt. Then create the mating life form in the next test tube using provable, observational science. Repeat for all life forms, out of the original life form not using any intelligence whatsoever; using only chance, errors and no preformed equipment, and without boiling away all common sense. But really; what Judaeo-Christians have now to put up with: God created in six days, and wrote it on the same stone that he created on day one; an irreversible, unbendable divine law (Matt 5:17-19): otherwise, shillyshallowing about with divine law is worthless worship (Matt 15:3-9); Jesus said on both accounts. Where is the evidence for such "truth." Well, it stares us in the face, reported and recorded by people who would rather face death than dismiss what they had seen. Ah, but that is not scientific; no, it is super scientific in essence, and based on intelligent word; at least from Yahweh/Jesus.mw_{March 10, 2016
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Joe, yes 10% difference would need a different explation. But that is not observed.
How do you know? Read the article I linked to in comment 9- I know it is a creation website but if they are right then some evo will have to step up and either try to refute it or explain it (away).Joe_{March 9, 2012
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Indium, thanks for the link to the paper. I don't believe the paper says what you may think it says about what we have been discussing, namely demonstrating an evolutionary history. For one thing, the authors assume that humans and chimps are related and then use that assumption to calculate the rate of mutation. In other words, the cause-effect chain is precisely backwards of what we are discussing here. Second, they looked at pseudogenes, because pseudogenes, in the Darwinian storyline, are thought to be functionless. Yet we now know that many pseudogenes do indeed have function. Finally, even with all that they acknowledge that:
This high rate is difficult to reconcile with multiplicative fitness effects of individual mutations and suggests that synergistic epistasis among harmful mutations may be common.
In other words, the mutation rates only make sense if they further assume that "each additional mutation leads to a larger decrease in relative fitness," which they later acknowledge isn't water tight, but politely offer that "the results presented here indicate that some form of positive epistasis among deleterious mutations is likely." So unfortunately I can't be too excited about this paper offering much in the way of evidence of an evolutionary relationship or history. There are lots of other papers in the same category. ----- That said, as I said above, these are interesting questions and there is some interesting data that deserves attention, including by critics of traditional evolutionary theory. ID does not object to common descent and some ID proponents feel that there is decent evidence for an ape-to-human scenario. Others are much more skeptical of the evidence. Personally, I don't have a philosophical or theological stake in either outcome so I am purely interested from a scientific standpoint (just like most ID proponents) and am open to being convinced if the evidence is there. I'm not convinced yet, partly because so often when I look at the evidence people put forth (like the paper you cited), on closer inspection it either doesn't address the issue directly or simply assumes it away. Thus all I can confidently say for now, as I said above, is it is interesting.Eric Anderson_{March 9, 2012
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Joe, yes 10% difference would need a different explation. But that is not observed.Indium_{March 9, 2012
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Darwinists need to realize that the genetic "evidence" is only as good as how far you're willing to interpret & extrapolate. So what if humans have genetic similarity to chimps & apes? On what grounds do you draw arrows to connect them? And what about the layers upon layers of "epigenetic" information that control which genes to express, when and where, and how often, let alone what happens to a protein and where it would go. Exaggerating percentages of similarity between humans and primates proves nothing (except for the speculative swordmanship of Darwinists).Shogun_{March 9, 2012
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Indium, That paper came out in 1999/ 2000, well before the chimp genome was published- meaning well before we could get a handle on the real % of genetic variance. What happens if that difference reaches 10%, or more? Also there still needs to be a connection from the genetic changes to the anatomical and physiological changes.Joe_{March 9, 2012
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Genetic Entropy - Dr. John Sanford - Evolution vs. Reality - video http://vimeo.com/35088933
bornagain77_{March 9, 2012
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Sonfaro, I am sorry! Next try: Link This seems to work in the preview at least.Indium_{March 9, 2012
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@ Indium, Your link isn't working for some reson. At least not for me. :(Sonfaro_{March 9, 2012
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Actually the people saying that changes to the genome can account for all the other changes are making the unsupportable bold claim. The difference between humans/gorillas/chimps seem to be of an acceptable order for evolutionary processes.Indium_{March 9, 2012
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as well wd400 you say 'quantum mysticism' as if quantum mechanics is some kind of weird pseudo-science like neo-Darwinism is. Yet far from a 'mystical' pseudo-science, quantum mechanics has far more predictive power than any other foundational description of reality to date (especially exceeding the predictive power of General Relativity). In fact the foundation of quantum mechanics within science is so solid that researchers were able to bring forth this following proof;
An experimental test of all theories with predictive power beyond quantum theory - May 2011 Excerpt: Hence, we can immediately refute any already considered or yet-to-be-proposed alternative model with more predictive power than this. (Quantum Theory) http://arxiv.org/pdf/1105.0133.pdf
Now wd400 this is completely unheard of in science as far as I know. i.e. That a mathematical description of reality would advance to the point that one can actually perform a experiment showing that your current theory will not be exceeded in predictive power by another theory is simply unprecedented in science! Moreover as to establishing the 'non-mystical' reality of quantum mechanics: It is important to note that the following experiment actually encoded information into a photon while it was in its quantum wave state, thus destroying the notion, held by many, that the wave function was not 'physically real' but was merely 'abstract'. i.e. How can information possibly be encoded into something that is not physically real but merely abstract?
Ultra-Dense Optical Storage - on One Photon Excerpt: Researchers at the University of Rochester have made an optics breakthrough that allows them to encode an entire image's worth of data into a photon, slow the image down for storage, and then retrieve the image intact.,,, As a wave, it passed through all parts of the stencil at once,,, http://www.physorg.com/news88439430.html
The following paper mathematically corroborated the preceding experiment and cleaned up some pretty nasty probabilistic incongruities that arose from a purely statistical interpretation, i.e. it seems that stacking a ‘random infinity', (parallel universes to explain quantum wave collapse), on top of another ‘random infinity', to explain quantum entanglement, leads to irreconcilable mathematical absurdities within quantum mechanics:
Quantum Theory's 'Wavefunction' Found to Be Real Physical Entity: Scientific American - November 2011 Excerpt: David Wallace, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford, UK, says that the theorem is the most important result in the foundations of quantum mechanics that he has seen in his 15-year professional career. "This strips away obscurity and shows you can't have an interpretation of a quantum state as probabilistic," he says. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=quantum-theorys-wavefunction The quantum (wave) state cannot be interpreted statistically - November 2011 http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/1111.3328
as well, as long as we are on the subject of quantum mechanics:
“I’m going to talk about the Bell inequality, and more importantly a new inequality that you might not have heard of called the Leggett inequality, that was recently measured. It was actually formulated almost 30 years ago by Professor Leggett, who is a Nobel Prize winner, but it wasn’t tested until about a year and a half ago (in 2007), when an article appeared in Nature, that the measurement was made by this prominent quantum group in Vienna led by Anton Zeilinger, which they measured the Leggett inequality, which actually goes a step deeper than the Bell inequality and rules out any possible interpretation other than consciousness creates reality when the measurement is made.” – Bernard Haisch, Ph.D., Calphysics Institute, is an astrophysicist and author of over 130 scientific publications.
Preceding quote taken from this following video;
Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness - A New Measurement - Bernard Haisch, Ph.D (Shortened version of entire video with notes in description of video) http://vimeo.com/37517080
Moreover, the argument for God from consciousness can be framed like this:
1. Consciousness either preceded all of material reality or is a 'epi-phenomena' of material reality. 2. If consciousness is a 'epi-phenomena' of material reality then consciousness will be found to have no special position within material reality. Whereas conversely, if consciousness precedes material reality then consciousness will be found to have a special position within material reality. 3. Consciousness is found to have a special, even central, position within material reality. 4. Therefore, consciousness is found to precede material reality. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kpDwWetu66fBRlPM7zjA5BpHzcu5wBY7AdB7gOz51OQ/edit
Music and verse:
Storyside B - Be Still http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxwhjPF28NM Psalm 46:10 He says, “Be still, and know that I am God;
bornagain77_{March 9, 2012
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So wd400, if you are not even sure 'transcendent information' exists (even though you just wrote a paragraph of transcendent information) then that would safely put you in the neo-Darwinian camp now wouldn't it?!?bornagain77_{March 9, 2012
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What if no amount of genetic change can account for all the other changes required?
Well, that would be a very bold claim which someone would need some evidence for, wouldn’t it?
Actually the people saying that changes to the genome can account for all the other changes are making the unsupportable bold claim. IOW you have it all backwards.Joe_{March 9, 2012
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Well, in this thread all I've said is that humans and chimps share a common ancestor, as to humans, chimps and gorillas. And the junk DNA stuff, which I probably shouldn't have been drawn into. "Transcended information" sounds quite a lot like quantum mysticism, as does the text in your "notes". So I'm not sure I believe it exists, let alone know where it comes from. And no, I wouldn't describe myself as a neo-darwinistwd400_{March 9, 2012
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wd400 you ask;
Where did I say I was a neo-darwinist?
What you are not a neo-Darwinist? Well what exactly do you believe? Do you believe that purely material processes can generate transcendent information? If not why in blue blazes are you defending your position? Please do elaborate your beliefs. notes:
"Nonphysical formalism (prescriptive information) not only describes, but preceded physicality and the Big Bang Formalism prescribed, organized and continues to govern physicodynamics." http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/2/1/106/ag The Law of Physicodynamic Insufficiency - Dr David L. Abel - November 2010 Excerpt: “If decision-node programming selections are made randomly or by law rather than with purposeful intent, no non-trivial (sophisticated) function will spontaneously arise.”,,, After ten years of continual republication of the null hypothesis with appeals for falsification, no falsification has been provided. The time has come to extend this null hypothesis into a formal scientific prediction: “No non trivial algorithmic/computational utility will ever arise from chance and/or necessity alone.” http://www-qa.scitopics.com/The_Law_of_Physicodynamic_Insufficiency.html The Law of Physicodynamic Incompleteness - David L. Abel - August 2011 Summary: “The Law of Physicodynamic Incompleteness” states that inanimate physicodynamics is completely inadequate to generate, or even explain, the mathematical nature of physical interactions (the purely formal laws of physics and chemistry). The Law further states that physicodynamic factors cannot cause formal processes and procedures leading to sophisticated function. Chance and necessity alone cannot steer, program or optimize algorithmic/computational success to provide desired non-trivial utility. http://www.scitopics.com/The_Law_of_Physicodynamic_Incompleteness.html Falsification Of Neo-Darwinism by (Transcendent) Quantum Entanglement/Information https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p8AQgqFqiRQwyaF8t1_CKTPQ9duN8FHU9-pV4oBDOVs/edit?hl=en_US
bornagain77_{March 9, 2012
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Where did I say I was a neo-darwinist?wd400_{March 9, 2012
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wd400, after my post in #26, laying out the fact that you have no empirical evidence, you state;
As to the rest of the Gish Gallop, I’m not engaging in any of that because (a) it’s not what I’m talking about (b) it’s evident you don’t understand much of it (c) that many exclamation marks is really not created the impression of someone who is doing any thinking between the typing and the linking.
Well no wd400, contrary to what you say, (a) it has everything to do with what you and every other neo-Darwinists claims can happen (b) The evidence I presented doesn't need to be 'understood' by some elite neo-Darwinists like you but it needs to be countermanded with some extraordinary proof, (c) you do not respond to any of it, not because you think ill of my 'thinking', but because you have ZERO empirical evidence to offer in response to the crushing evidence. And that is the whole point wd400! You are a religious materialistic dogmatist trying to highjack science without ever paying the price that science requires for proof. Namely providing actual empirical evidence to justify your outlandish claims!!!bornagain77_{March 9, 2012
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Go back and read the literature from 10 years ago. That was absolutely not the storyline then why don't we go back 25 years, to when Incomplete lineage sorting was a "well known" problem. Moreoever, the point is that based on what we know about population genetics you expect to see unsorted lineages quite a long time after speciation (or, indeed, after more ancient but rapid bursts of speciation).wd400_{March 9, 2012
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Eric, the effect of incomplete lineage sorting has been known for a very long time (certainly longer than 10 years), and it is not a problem that prohibits the reconstruction of the history of the human/chimp/gorilla lineages. The fact that we observe more or less exactly the amount of incongruence that is expected in an evolutionar scenario further strengthens the theory. Maybe you could have a look at this article from BioLogos? What are your thoughts on this?Indium_{March 9, 2012
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Wow, lots of comments, which I haven't fully waded through, but this last one #27 caught my eye. "We can use pop. gen. to infer species trees from gene trees even when they are (as expected) incongruous." Good, so now we acknowledge that we are "inferring." Just earlier today we were told that this was all very clear from the DNA itself and that there was nothing "interpretive" about it. This is good. We're making progress. I have to laugh, though, at the idea that we should expect species trees and gene trees to be incongruous. Go back and read the literature from 10 years ago. That was absolutely not the storyline then. No, genetics was supposed to be the great confirmer of the traditional tree of life and there are still lots of folks clinging to that storyline even today. So, no, you don't get to now do a 180 degree turn and claim that incongruity is evidence for the evolutionary narrative because that is what was "expected." Hogwash. It was absolutely not expected or predicted by evolutionary theory. If it is expected now, it is only because we have more experience and now realize that things are in fact quite different from what evolutionary theory was misleading us to expect.Eric Anderson_{March 9, 2012
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As I've said repeatedly, similarity is a red herring. We can use pop. gen. to infer species trees from gene trees even when they are (as expected) incongruous. As to the rest of the Gish Gallop, I'm not engaging in any of that because (a) it's not what I'm talking about (b) it's evident you don't understand much of it (c) that many exclamation marks is really not created the impression of someone who is doing any thinking between the typing and the linking.wd400_{March 8, 2012
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wd400, I think more than enough evidence has been presented severely undermining your claim to '90%' junk DNA, indeed undermining your very credibility to being forthright and honest with the evidence in the first place!,,, whether you agree or not I really don't care! But to move on, you now claim, as a 'fact', that 'humans and chimps share a recent common ancestor',,, all from supposed genetic similarity evidence which you have not established to any compelling degree, Yet I have already listed, in post #1, studies that have severely undercut the entire similarity line of reasoning. But what the hey it's all you got to work with so I guess your going to keep repeating the same inconsequential stuff hoping that anything sticks. But let's get down to some nitty gritty experimental evidence and let's see what the all mighty power of neo-Darwinism can do when put to the test shall we wd4000? I mean you really want to show us IDiots what neo-Darwinism can do don't you??? So let's look at actual empirics!!! Where's the substantiating evidence for neo-Darwinism?
Many of these researchers also raise the question (among others), why — even after inducing literally billions of induced mutations and (further) chromosome rearrangements — all the important mutation breeding programs have come to an end in the Western World instead of eliciting a revolution in plant breeding, either by successive rounds of selective “micromutations” (cumulative selection in the sense of the modern synthesis), or by “larger mutations” … and why the law of recurrent variation is endlessly corroborated by the almost infinite repetition of the spectra of mutant phenotypes in each and any new extensive mutagenesis experiment (as predicted) instead of regularly producing a range of new systematic species… (Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, “Mutagenesis in Physalis pubescens L. ssp. floridana: Some Further Research on Dollo’s Law and the Law of Recurrent Variation,” Floriculture and Ornamental Biotechnology Vol. 4 (Special Issue 1): 1-21 (December 2010).)
Four decades worth of lab work is surveyed here:
“The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution”: Break or blunt any functional coded element whose loss would yield a net fitness gain – Michael Behe – December 2010 Excerpt: In its most recent issue The Quarterly Review of Biology has published a review by myself of laboratory evolution experiments of microbes going back four decades.,,, The gist of the paper is that so far the overwhelming number of adaptive (that is, helpful) mutations seen in laboratory evolution experiments are either loss or modification of function. Of course we had already known that the great majority of mutations that have a visible effect on an organism are deleterious. Now, surprisingly, it seems that even the great majority of helpful mutations degrade the genome to a greater or lesser extent.,,, I dub it “The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution”: Break or blunt any functional coded element whose loss would yield a net fitness gain. http://behe.uncommondescent.com/2010/12/the-first-rule-of-adaptive-evolution/
Michael Behe talks about the preceding paper in this following podcast:
Michael Behe: Challenging Darwin, One Peer-Reviewed Paper at a Time – December 2010 http://intelligentdesign.podomatic.com/player/web/2010-12-23T11_53_46-08_00
How about the oft cited example for neo-Darwinism of antibiotic resistance?
List Of Degraded Molecular Abilities Of Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria: Excerpt: Resistance to antibiotics and other antimicrobials is often claimed to be a clear demonstration of “evolution in a Petri dish.” ,,, all known examples of antibiotic resistance via mutation are inconsistent with the genetic requirements of evolution. These mutations result in the loss of pre-existing cellular systems/activities, such as porins and other transport systems, regulatory systems, enzyme activity, and protein binding. http://www.trueorigin.org/bacteria01.asp
That doesn't seem to be helping! How about we look really, really, close at very sensitive growth rates and see if we can catch almighty evolution in action???
Unexpectedly small effects of mutations in bacteria bring new perspectives – November 2010 Excerpt: Most mutations in the genes of the Salmonella bacterium have a surprisingly small negative impact on bacterial fitness. And this is the case regardless whether they lead to changes in the bacterial proteins or not.,,, using extremely sensitive growth measurements, doctoral candidate Peter Lind showed that most mutations reduced the rate of growth of bacteria by only 0.500 percent. No mutations completely disabled the function of the proteins, and very few had no impact at all. Even more surprising was the fact that mutations that do not change the protein sequence had negative effects similar to those of mutations that led to substitution of amino acids. A possible explanation is that most mutations may have their negative effect by altering mRNA structure, not proteins, as is commonly assumed. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-unexpectedly-small-effects-mutations-bacteria.html
Shoot that doesn't seem to be helping either! Perhaps we just got to give the almighty power of neo-Darwinism ‘room to breathe’? How about we ‘open the floodgates’ to the almighty power of Darwinian Evolution and look at Lenski’s Long Term Evolution Experiment and see what we can find after 50,000 generations, which is equivalent to somewhere around 1,000,000 years of human evolution???
Richard Lenski’s Long-Term Evolution Experiments with E. coli and the Origin of New Biological Information – September 2011 Excerpt: The results of future work aside, so far, during the course of the longest, most open-ended, and most extensive laboratory investigation of bacterial evolution, a number of adaptive mutations have been identified that endow the bacterial strain with greater fitness compared to that of the ancestral strain in the particular growth medium. The goal of Lenski’s research was not to analyze adaptive mutations in terms of gain or loss of function, as is the focus here, but rather to address other longstanding evolutionary questions. Nonetheless, all of the mutations identified to date can readily be classified as either modification-of-function or loss-of-FCT. (Michael J. Behe, “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution’,” Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 85(4) (December, 2010).) http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/09/richard_lenskis_long_term_evol051051.html
Now that just can’t be right!! Man we should really start to be seeing some neo-Darwinian fireworks by 50,000 generations!?! Hey I know what we can do! How about we see what happened when the ‘top five’ mutations from Lenski’s experiment were combined??? Surely now the Darwinian magic will start flowing!!!
Mutations : when benefits level off – June 2011 – (Lenski’s e-coli after 50,000 generations) Excerpt: After having identified the first five beneficial mutations combined successively and spontaneously in the bacterial population, the scientists generated, from the ancestral bacterial strain, 32 mutant strains exhibiting all of the possible combinations of each of these five mutations. They then noted that the benefit linked to the simultaneous presence of five mutations was less than the sum of the individual benefits conferred by each mutation individually. http://www2.cnrs.fr/en/1867.htm?theme1=7
Now something is going terribly wrong here!!! Tell you what, let’s just forget trying to observe evolution in the lab, I mean it really is kind of cramped in the lab you know, and now let’s REALLY open the floodgates and let’s see what the almighty power of neo-Darwinian evolution can do with the ENTIRE WORLD at its disposal??? Surely now almighty neo-Darwinian evolution will flex its awesomely powerful muscles and forever make those IDiots, who believe in Intelligent Design, cower in terror!!!
A review of The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism The numbers of Plasmodium and HIV in the last 50 years greatly exceeds the total number of mammals since their supposed evolutionary origin (several hundred million years ago), yet little has been achieved by evolution. This suggests that mammals could have “invented” little in their time frame. Behe: ‘Our experience with HIV gives good reason to think that Darwinism doesn’t do much—even with billions of years and all the cells in that world at its disposal’ (p. 155). http://creation.com/review-michael-behe-edge-of-evolution Michael Behe, The Edge of Evolution, pg. 162 Swine Flu, Viruses, and the Edge of Evolution “Indeed, the work on malaria and AIDS demonstrates that after all possible unintelligent processes in the cell–both ones we’ve discovered so far and ones we haven’t–at best extremely limited benefit, since no such process was able to do much of anything. It’s critical to notice that no artificial limitations were placed on the kinds of mutations or processes the microorganisms could undergo in nature. Nothing–neither point mutation, deletion, insertion, gene duplication, transposition, genome duplication, self-organization nor any other process yet undiscovered–was of much use.” http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/05/swine_flu_viruses_and_the_edge020071.html
Now, there is something terribly wrong here! After looking high and low and everywhere in between, we can’t seem to find the almighty power of neo-Darwinism anywhere!! Shoot we can’t even find ANY power of neo-Darwinism whatsoever!!! It is as if the whole neo-Darwinian theory, relentlessly sold to the general public as it was the gospel truth, is nothing but a big fat lie!!! ====
A. L. Hughes's New Non-Darwinian Mechanism of Adaption Was Discovered and Published in Detail by an ID Geneticist 25 Years Ago - Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig - December 2011 Excerpt: The original species had a greater genetic potential to adapt to all possible environments. In the course of time this broad capacity for adaptation has been steadily reduced in the respective habitats by the accumulation of slightly deleterious alleles (as well as total losses of genetic functions redundant for a habitat), with the exception, of course, of that part which was necessary for coping with a species' particular environment....By mutative reduction of the genetic potential, modifications became "heritable". -- As strange as it may at first sound, however, this has nothing to do with the inheritance of acquired characteristics. For the characteristics were not acquired evolutionarily, but existed from the very beginning due to the greater adaptability. In many species only the genetic functions necessary for coping with the corresponding environment have been preserved from this adaptability potential. The "remainder" has been lost by mutations (accumulation of slightly disadvantageous alleles) -- in the formation of secondary species.
bornagain77_{March 8, 2012
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BA, If you keep reading "news" from one source you are always going to get a slanted view about reality. Of course there are a few cases in which pseudogenes, viruses and transposable elements have been repurposed into something helpful - but that doesn't explain why there are millions of copies of them which aren't modified into other roles. And I'm not playing stupid games, I'm supporting one very small point - the result that ~15% of genes in the human genome are more closely related to gorilla genes than chimp genes doesn't undercut the fact humans and chimps share a recent common ancestor (more recent, in fact, than the human-chimp-gorilla ancestor)wd400_{March 8, 2012
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wd400, you say that 90% of the genome is useless junk. OK PROVE IT!!! Show the studies in which 90% of the genome has been removed. Tell you what I'll save you the trouble:
Jonathan Wells on Darwinism, Science, and Junk DNA - November 2011 Excerpt: Mice without “junk” DNA. In 2004, Edward Rubin?] and a team of scientists at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California reported that they had engineered mice missing over a million base pairs of non-protein-coding (“junk”) DNA—about 1% of the mouse genome—and that they could “see no effect in them.” But molecular biologist Barbara Knowles (who reported the same month that other regions of non-protein-coding mouse DNA were functional) cautioned that the Lawrence Berkeley study didn’t prove that non-protein-coding DNA has no function. “Those mice were alive, that’s what we know about them,” she said. “We don’t know if they have abnormalities that we don’t test for.”And University of California biomolecular engineer David Haussler? said that the deleted non-protein-coding DNA could have effects that the study missed. “Survival in the laboratory for a generation or two is not the same as successful competition in the wild for millions of years,” he argued. In 2010, Rubin was part of another team of scientists that engineered mice missing a 58,000-base stretch of so-called “junk” DNA. The team found that the DNA-deficient mice appeared normal until they (along with a control group of normal mice) were fed a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet for 20 weeks. By the end of the study, a substantially higher proportion of the DNA-deficient mice had died from heart disease. Clearly, removing so-called “junk” DNA can have effects that appear only later or under other circumstances. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/jonathan-wells-on-darwinism-science-and-junk-dna/
Hmm wd400, once again you are either completely unaware of the facts or are being severely misleading, my bet is on the later!!! Notes:
Astonishing DNA complexity update Excerpt: The untranslated regions (now called UTRs, rather than ‘junk’) are far more important than the translated regions (the genes), as measured by the number of DNA bases appearing in RNA transcripts. Genic regions are transcribed on average in five different overlapping and interleaved ways, while UTRs are transcribed on average in seven different overlapping and interleaved ways. Since there are about 33 times as many bases in UTRs than in genic regions, that makes the ‘junk’ about 50 times more active than the genes. http://creation.com/astonishing-dna-complexity-update Reference Notes For Jonathan Wells' Book - The Myth Of Junk DNA - Hundreds of Studies Outlining Function for 'Junk' DNA http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:zGp3gRRDmA0J:www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php%3Fcommand%3Ddownload%26id%3D7651+Sequence-dependent+and+sequence-independent+functions+of+%E2%80%9Cjunk%E2%80%9D+DNA:+do+we+need+an+expanded+concept+of+biological+information%3F+Jonathan+Wells&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiCq0TQUSKYlr0KNNIDgaGKMM7b3z0iEGiKe_faSd0646SzaYSoCCcNavm523X5TgaGbdQPtDFmN6Yw8IexI44RokfsMKs6q-EEeM_vyYw-zaMB-h_7wKu8JjGREn_JF-CPlkSq&sig=AHIEtbRfG8rv_5eur2oifBsWxHdM_e731g Refutation Of Endogenous Retrovirus - ERVs - Richard Sternberg, PhD Evolutionary Biology - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4094119 Endogenous retroviruses regulate periimplantation placental growth and differentiation http://www.pnas.org/content/103/39/14390.abstract Pseudogenes are key regulators in health and disease, not junk - April 2011 Excerpt: Far from being silent relics, many pseudogenes are transcribed into RNA, some exhibiting a tissue-specific pattern of activation. Pseudogene transcripts can be processed into short interfering RNAs that regulate coding genes through the RNAi pathway. In another remarkable discovery, it has been shown that pseudogenes are capable of regulating tumor suppressors and oncogenes by acting as microRNA decoys. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/pseudogenes-are-key-regulators-in-health-and-disease-not-junk/ Functional Pseudogenes Are Everywhere! - Fazale Rana - June 2011 http://www.reasons.org/functional-pseudogenes-are-everywhere etc.. etc.. etc..
But hey wd400, let's cut to the chase and why don't you actually provide substantiating evidence for neo-Darwinism instead of playing stupid games?bornagain77_{March 8, 2012
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This is getting a bit silly. Woesse is specifically talking finding the root of tree of life. And gene-tree species-tree incongruence doesn't meant we can't find a species tree - the gorilla genome being an example of exactly that! I said to start with that "magic number" of nucleotide identity is meaningless (Casey Lusking doesn't seem to get this, so is on some sort of mad scramble to find a lower magic number, so far as I can tell). But I've not been talking about similarity at any stage in this conversation so why you are I can't imagine. And no, there is no dogmatism in saying that ~90% of the genome is junk. That's a pretty average estimate. Add up the viruses, broken transposons, psuedogenes and non-conserved intergenic space and that's about what you'll get. There is also the genetic load argument which makes it clear most of the genome can't be essential. If you evidence that much more than 10% of the genome is useful I'll happily bump my estimate up to suit.wd400_{March 8, 2012
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wd400 you state:
About 90% of the genome is junk,
Oh yeah no dogmatism here!,,, Care to show us the studies in which 90% of the genome has been removed with no ill effect???bornagain77_{March 8, 2012
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wd400, you state:
That’s just silly, you’re talking about studies on trying to recreate the patterns at the very base of the tree of all life. We are talking about recovering signal from the last 10 million years.
Really??
The universal ancestor - Carl Woese Excerpt: No consistent organismal phylogeny has emerged from the many individual protein phylogenies so far produced. Phylogenetic incongruities can be seen everywhere in the universal tree, from its root to the major branchings within and among the various taxa to the makeup of the primary groupings themselves. http://www.pnas.org/content/95/12/6854.full
Well wd400 seems you are either completely unaware of the the severe problems with this line of evidence or you are being deliberately misleading; Further note as to how much unwarranted trust you seem to placed into this 'cherry picked' genetic similarity evidence:
Human/Ape Common Ancestry: Following the Evidence - Casey Luskin - June 2011 So the researchers constructed an evolutionary tree based on 129 skull and tooth measurements for living hominoids, including gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans and humans, and did the same with 62 measurements recorded on Old World monkeys, including baboons, mangabeys and macaques. They also drew upon published molecular phylogenies. At the outset, Wood and Collard assumed the molecular evidence was correct. “There were so many different lines of genetic evidence pointing in one direction,” Collard explains. But no matter how the computer analysis was run, the molecular and morphological trees could not be made to match15 (see figure, below). Collard says this casts grave doubt on the reliability of using morphological evidence to determine the fine details of evolutionary trees for higher primates. “It is saying it is positively misleading,” he says. The abstract of the pair’s paper stated provocatively that “existing phylogenetic hypotheses about human evolution are unlikely to be reliable”.[10] http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/06/following_the_evidence_where_i047161.html#comment-9266481
And regardless of what you believe, the truth is that the similarity between chimps and humans is far larger than what you imagine it to be:
Human/Ape Common Ancestry: Following the Evidence - Casey Luskin - June 2011 Excerpt: To compare the two [human and chimpanzee] genomes, the first thing we must do is to line up the parts of each genome that are similar. When we do this alignment, we discover that only 2400 million of the human genome's 3164.7 million 'letters' align with the chimpanzee genome - that is, 76% of the human genome. Some scientists have argued that the 24% of the human genome that does not line up with the chimpanzee genome is useless "junk DNA". However, it now seems that this DNA could contain over 600 protein-coding genes, and also code for functional RNA molecules. Looking closely at the chimpanzee-like 76% of the human genome, we find that to make an exact alignment, we often have to introduce artificial gaps in either the human or the chimp genome. These gaps give another 3% difference. So now we have a 73% similarity between the two genomes. In the neatly aligned sequences we now find another form of difference, where a single 'letter' is different between the human and chimp genomes. These provide another 1.23% difference between the two genomes. Thus, the percentage difference is now at around 72%. We also find places where two pieces of human genome align with only one piece of chimp genome, or two pieces of chimp genome align with one piece of human genome. This "copy number variation" causes another 2.7% difference between the two species. Therefore the total similarity of the genomes could be below 70%. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/06/following_the_evidence_where_i047161.html
Moreover as has been repeatedly pointed out to you wd400, this similarity, even if it weren't as screwed up as it is, still does nothing to scientifically prove that the similarity is arrived at by 'random' neo-Darwinian processes.,, But that would require you to actually get 'scientific' instead of just telling stories. Joe can school you on that!bornagain77_{March 8, 2012
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Biology is a science. One of the things we can do with it is infer something about the history of lineages/populations/species. What if no amount of genetic change can account for all the other changes required? Well, that would be a very bold claim which someone would need some evidence for, wouldn't it? How much of the genome is involved with development and what part is involved with daily activities? And in which does your “history” reside- developmental or daily? Every base has a history. About 90% of the genome is junk, it's not really possible to divide the rest of it into "development" and "day to day" sections.wd400_{March 8, 2012
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So biology isn't about science, it's about history? What if no amount of genetic change can account for all the other changes required? So perhaps if you assume a history you can use DNA to weave your tale- How much of the genome is involved with development and what part is involved with daily activities? And in which does your "history" reside- developmental or daily?Joe_{March 8, 2012
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Eric, I'm not talking about similarity - I'm talking about inferring the pattern of speciation that gave rise to humans, chimps and gorillas. We can use DNA sequences to reconstruct that history . BA, That's just silly, you're talking about studies on trying to recreate the patterns at the very base of the tree of all life. We are talking about recovering signal from the last 10 million years Joe, No. What DNA mainly is is history, and the history of these genomes is enough for us to infer quite a lot about the history of these species.wd400_{March 8, 2012
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