Posted on 02/26/2009 1:27:47 PM PST by JoeProBono
Although some of us can be annoying little pests...
Well I’ll be... a primate’s uncle.
The most ironic part of the story is that the act applies to non-human primates. I bet Paul Mulshine wishes he would ahve actually read the act before he called everyone dumb.
You’ve met my first wife, I see.
I hate to ruin his fun, but it’s laymen translating biology textbooks into “common English” who are at fault. “Animal” was, initially, an adjective describing a type of soul. “Rational” souls were capable of moral judgment, and hence both needing of and capable of redemption. “Animal” souls were those guided on instinct. Hence, “animals” are those with an animal soul that is not tempered by a rational soul. That’s why calling someone an animal meant he was savage and amoral. But of course, that was meant only in a relative sense, or such a person wouldn’t need salvation. Now, if his wife is an animal, that’s something he should keep private.
Oh, and by the way, a whale’s a fish. Sure, it’s not part of the phylogenic taxon “pisces,” but then again, neither are shellfish, jellyfish, starfish, cuttlefish, or most other kinds of “fish.”
A chimpanzee and a gorilla have more difference in their DNA than a chimpanzee and a human.
The two closest related apes are humans and chimps.
We have 60% of the same genes as a fruit fly, but they are not the exact same DNA. For example we both use the gene for the hemoglobin protein to carry oxygen, but the DNA that codes for the genes has different DNA and different Amino Acids in the protein.
Oh, then the idiot author calls Huckabee an idiot for insisting he’s not evolved from primates. Turns out the whole article is really just a back-door slam on all creationists. But, parsing Huckabee’s words, He’d have to agree with Juckabee to be consistent. See, Huckabee said he’s not evolved from apes. “From” implies separation. If primates include humans, than Huckabee is still a primate; he may have evolved from OTHER primates (if you believe in evolution)*, but not from primates in general.
*I’m an old-earth creationist, myself, so I regard evolution as a partly useful and partly misleading paradigm.
>> The two closest related apes are humans and chimps. <<
If by most closely related you mean sharing the highest portion of DNA. But that’s a little like saying that my Ford is more closely related to my lunchbox than to my Saturn. (The Ford and the lunchbox are both steel. The Saturn has a higher component of plastic.)
>> The room was in tears. <<
It wasn’t THAT bad of a joke.
The high degree of homology between humans and chimps, as well as the nested hierarchy of similarity and divergence of DNA sequences is best explained by our recent common ancestry.
There is simply no zoological justification for removing humans from the ape clade, but plenty of egotistical and prideful justifications.
Mouse DNA is 98% identical to human DNA.
No it isn’t.
Humans and chimps are 98% the same in genetic DNA and nothing other than a chimp is nearly that close to a human.
The genes of humans and mice are about 85% the same.
But obviously the truth of the matter doesn’t seem to matter as you seem inclined to just make things up when you don’t wish to accept data.
Source: Howard Bell, "Of Mice and Medicine"
Minnesota Medicine, April 2007
Among the findings are that mice and human beings both carry about 30,000 genes. Differences within these individual genes — the precise sequences of the four-letter DNA code — spell out the obvious differences between the two mammalian species. On a letter-by-letter basis, the genes are 85 percent the same.
This is data from the project that sequenced the mouse genome.
Howard Bell the medical writer is off his rocker, and provided no citation for his contention.
Moreover the comparison is GENETIC DNA. Howard Bell implies that this is a genome wide comparison. A genome wide comparison would be a GREATER than 15% difference, most certainly not a 2% difference.
Perhaps Howard Bell was confused because we share 99% of the same genes. That is NOT saying that the genes themselves are 99 or 98% the same, just that if you find a particular copy of a gene in a human you are 99% likely to find the same gene (and those genes will be 85% exactly the same).
Point conceded. Thank you for the education.
This is all true, but irrelevant to my point.
>> There is simply no zoological justification for removing humans from the ape clade, <<
Well, not if you define similarity based on common DNA. But evolutionary bottlenecks are the prime means by which two lineages are distinguished from each other. And when the two lineages are first separated, there will be a single nucleotide separating their DNA, while members of each group will have normal variations of untold thousands of nucleotides... it's just those differences won't be significant.
Hundreds of millions of years later, maybe that divergence will distinguish between two kingdoms. So what sort of differences are significant enough to justify a new clade? The ability to retain, evolve and advance societial knowledge from generation to generation? The ability to define evolutionary niches via wetware as opposed to hardcoded genes?
Comparing % differences among DNA is a proxy for the passage of time. If two species of cockroaches are nearly identical after 400 million years, are they more distantly related than trout are from people?
My references to using DNA as a proxy for relative passage of time was referring to individual nucleotides. I see from other posts you were referring to functional genes. In that case, two species of roaches, hundreds of millions of years removed will be more similar than fish and people. But I still maintain my point about how 1 genetic difference will be revolutionary, while others will have little effect and will not cause speciation.
Like I said, I think it was someone saying that we have 99% of our genes in common, which of course makes sense as we do the same tasks (within 99%) and have the same genes (within 85%) to make the same proteins to accomplish those tasks.
I read an interesting thing about the comparison to rats in that one thing they could identify that rats had in comparison to humans was a lot more genes for liver detoxification and scent. Makes sense if you are a garbage eating rat.
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