Posted on 11/22/2002 9:09:10 PM PST by forsnax5
Your expectation has already been contradicted even without completely mapping the living genome. How will you revise your thinking?
My guess is slime mold is next. It can morph. Makes it easy for just-so stories
As edsheppa and Dr. Stochastic have said, this has already been thoroughly falsified. If you only listen to the selective lawyering from your side about the places where the data conflict, you could easily miss this. (Especially on this forum.) Nevertheless the overall picture is very plain.
The Convergence of Molecular and Cladistic Trees.
Figure 4.4.1. Human endogenous retrovirus K (HERV-K) insertions in identical chromosomal locations in various primates (Reprinted from Lebedev et al. 2000, © 2000, with permission from Elsevier Science).
[This ping list for the evolution side of evolution threads, and sometimes for other science topics too. If you want to be included, let me know. This is not a ping list for the creationism side of the debate. If you've been getting unwanted pings, please tell me and I'll drop you.]
How can extinction rates be estimated by way of an estimated 10% sample of an unknown (but estimated) survey population?
Probably the environmentalists are using the same incredibly refined techniques as those used to estimate that there are 3 million homeless in the US. The numbers seem to come from the Seventh Planet.
LOL!
Or perhaps the sixth, making it a stastical analysis by attenuation?
I had no idea using the term "lawn" would generate such a lively discussion. Jeepers!
I am aware that a device known as "the Tree of Life" is used in the Kabala (new age version) and Tarot reading. My understanding is the Kabala originally was rooted from the Torah (Spanish) and of course the Tree of Life is mentioned in Genesis and Revelation as being in the center of Eden and Paradise respectively. That's one reason why I believe Eden is in the spiritual realm - but I digress...
Several of you seem to believe my "lawn" choice has already been disputed. But I'm not convinced by your assertions. I visualized a "lawn" when I saw this article:
What it really means to be 99% chimpanzee (excerpts:)
But in fact, DNA similarity is not structured in quite that way. There are, as everyone knows, only 4 bases in DNA. And this places an odd statistical constraint on the comparison of sequences. No DNA similarity at all that is to say, two random sequences that share no common ancestry are still going to match at one out of four sites. In other words, the zero mark of a DNA comparison is not zero percent similar, but 25% similar.
Once again, the DNA comparison requires context to be meaningful. Granted that a human and ape are over 98% genetically identical, a human and any earthly DNA-based life form must be at least 25% identical. A human and a daffodil share common ancestry and their DNA is thus obliged to match more than 25% of the time. For the sake of argument lets say 33%.
The point is that to say we are one-third daffodils because our DNA matches that of a daffodil 33% of the time, is not profound, its ridiculous. There is hardly any biological comparison you can make which will find us to be one-third daffodil, except perhaps the DNA.
In other words, just as Simpson argued in the 1960s, the genetic comparison is exceptional, not at all transcendent. DNA comparisons overestimate biological similarity at the low end and underestimate it at the high end in context, humans are biologically less than 25% daffodils and more than 98% chimpanzees.
The focus on base-pair mismatch itself is misleading, for it encodes a number of archaic assumptions about genetics and evolution. In fact, it ignores what is quite possibly the most significant development in biology in the last quarter-century namely, the complexity of genome structure.
If humans and chimpanzees are over 98% identical base-for-base, how do you make sense of the fact that chimpanzees have 10% more DNA than humans? That they have more alpha-hemoglobin genes and more Rh bloodgroup genes, and fewer Alu repeats, in their genome than humans? Or that the tips of their chromosomes contain DNA not present at the tips of human chromosomes?
Obviously there is a lot more to genomic evolution than just nucleotide substitution. But the percentage comparison renders that fact invisible, and thus obscures some of the most interesting evolutionary genetic questions.
Once you recognize that there are easily identifiable differences genetically between humans and chimpanzees the presence of terminal heterochromatin is 100% diagnostic you can begin to see that the pattern of relationships between the species is actually the same genetically as anatomically. Humans and chimps are simply very similar to, yet diagnosably different from, one another.
You also visualize a lawn when you see the fossil record represented as vertical parallel lines. (You have posted such pictures.) That's a question-begging reconstruction which assumes what it tries to show, that nothing is related to anything else.
The scale of similarities appears non-linear, yes, but that's because nothing is a zero. Common descent and all that. The daffodil is not totally unrelated to you. Nevertheless, nothing is as related to you as the chimp.
So, in your opinion, no species is related to any other species, and any similarities are purely coincidental?
Just the opposite! I see 25% hard genetic similarities among every living thing, like soil. Actually, I suspect on the animal side of the lawn the similarities will be greater, more like 50% but that's just a guess. It would look like a rise in the soil.
The "grass blade" for a daffodil is on the same lawn as the chimpanzee and the human. The chimpanzee is a tad longer than the human. And there might be a blade with a fork or two where creatures have differentiated to adapt to their environment (like the finches.)
If all the sequences are maintained in drawing it, then to me, the end result will look like a "lawn."
It's certainly possible to look out at the world of living things and to see only discrete, stand-alone creatures, utterly unrelated. That's exactly what we do see the very first time we open our eyes and look around. But one of the glories of the human mind is that when we look long enough and hard enough, we have the capacity to see similarities and patterns. Ultimately we learn to use the highly refined technique of inductive reasoning, which can lead us to useful theories about the world in which we live -- such as evolution. That's when the Tree of Life takes shape. And then, goodbye lawn.
Deductive and Inductive Thinking.
I do recall that chart, it shows Time one way and morphological distance the other. The Darwin prediction looks like a tree, the fossil evidence looks like a lawn.
For lurkers, you can see the pictures here.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.