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- - The arguement that recently convinced me of god's existence (http://archives2.twoplustwo.com/showthread.php?t=382834)

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There are thousands of gaps in the fossil record

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And every time a new fossil is found, two new gaps are created.

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TM 266-01-060-1, "Toumai", Sahelanthropus tchadensis
Discovered by Ahounta Djimdoumalbaye in 2001 in Chad, in the southern Sahara desert. Estimated age is between 6 and 7 million years. This is a mostly complete cranium with a small brain (between 320 and 380 cc). (Brunet et al. 2002, Wood 2002) It has many primitive apelike features, such as the small brainsize, along with others, such as the brow ridges and small canine teeth, which are characteristic of later hominids.


From another site:


It's likely that this is a human ancestor. If you ask whether it's absolutely certain that this is a human ancestor my answer would have to be no we are not [sure]," said Bernard Wood of George Washington University


From Nature magazine:


Sahelanthropus tchadensis is an enigmatic new Miocene species, whose characteristics are a mix of those of apes and h o m o erectus and which has been proclaimed by Brunet et al. to be the earliest hominid. However, we believe that features of the dentition, face and cranial base that are said to define unique links between this Toumaï specimen and the hominid clade are either not diagnostic or are consequences of biomechanical adaptations. To represent a valid clade, hominids must share unique defining features, and Sahelanthropus does not appear to have been an obligate biped.

We believe that Sahelanthropus was an ape living in an environment that was later inhabited by australopithecines and, like them, it adapted with a powerful masticatory complex. A penecontemporary primate with a perfect and well-developed postcranial adaptation to obligate bipedalism is more likely to have been an early hominid.


From Talkorigins, definitely not a creationist sympathizer:


Brunet et al. consider Toumai to be a hominid, that is, on our side of the chimp-human split and therefore more closely related to us than to chimps. This is not at all certain. Some scientists think it probable; others have suggested that it may come from before the point at which hominids separated from chimps, while Brigitte Senut (one of the discoverers of Orrorin tugenensis, "Millennium Man") has suggested that it may be an early GORILLA .
 my emphasis

Ok, that's one miss. I'll do the next one tomorrow.

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Awesome. Thanks for checking that out. So from the above, it appears to be either a late non-hominid ape or an early hominid ape, that could appear in our ancestral lineage just before the most recent common ancestor of chimps and humans, or just after. But either way, it is probably a human ancestor.

The fact that some people consider it to be the earliest hominid and some consider it to be more (non-hominid) ape-like is exactly what you'd expect if there were no sharp dividing line between hominids and non-hominids. ("The world's earliest hominid" is like "the world's tallest midget.") If it has some hominid features and some non-hominid features . . . perhaps it is an intermediate.

Indeed, there are many other good examples of the same phenomenon. In fact, I've got a fun exercise for you if you're up to it. Take a look at this picture and, for each fossil skull, try to categorize it either as a human skull, or a non-human ape skull:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comd.../hominids2.jpg

I'll start you off with a hint. Fossil A is a modern chimpanzee. Fossil N is a modern human. Which category do the others fall into -- human or non-human?

<I'll wait here while you finish categorizing them . . . >

Here's the significance of that exercise.

The evolutionary model predicts that between chimps and humans there is a smooth progression of ancestral organisms with no sharp breaks in it. You can trace the human lineage backward to the most recent common ancestor of chimps and humans, and then from there trace your way forward to modern chimps, and each step of the way will be just an ever-so-slight modification. There's no sharp dividing line between chimps and humans, just like there's no sharp dividing line between children and adults. The border is blurry.

The creationist model, on the other hand, would predict that there are humans, and there are apes, and there are no intermediates between the two. If you find a skull, it might be an ape skull or it might be a human skull, but it's certainly not in a blurry-border area linking non-human apes to humans.

Take a look at the picture and see what you think. To me, it looks like a pretty smooth transition. The chimp skull (A) is obviously unlike the human skull (N), but in between many of the others really combine features of both, so it's hard to categorize them as "obviously ape" or "obviously human" -- it looks to me like many of them are in between, just as the evolutionary model would predict.

The creationists disagree with that characterization, however. They maintain that all the skulls are either clearly ape or clearly human. They are separate categories with no blurring in between, and any given skull fits into one category or the other.

The curious thing, however, is that while creationists all agree that each skull is either "clearly ape" or "clearly human," they disagree about which category the particular skulls go into.

Look at skull D. Creationists pretty much agree that it is a non-human ape skull. So far so good.

But now look at skull F. Three creationist sources say that it's clearly a non-human ape skull. Eight creationist sources, however, identify it as being merely a human skull.

Same goes for various other skulls. Of those same 11 creationist sources, eight list Java man as being a non-human ape while three list it as being human (a different 8-3 breakdown from the previous skull, however). Meanwhile, six list Peking man as being a non-human ape, while seven list it as being human. Skull H is reported to be a non-human ape by one source while twelve list it as being human. And so on.

So you see, there are plenty of links betwen apes and man. It's just that the creationists refuse to see them as links, but instead see them as being completely ape or completely human.

It's as if I said that there was a smooth transition between black and white, with various shades of gray in between. But every time I find a new shade of gray, the creationists all claim that it's not really gray; it's just black -- or white -- one or the other, only they can't agree among themselves on which it is.

ABCDEFG

A is clearly black while G is clearly white . . . but what about D? Creationists would all agree that there's no such thing as gray, so it's obviously either completely black or completely white . . . but 65% think it's black while 35% think it's white.

That's what the transitional hominid fossils are like. They are transitional between apes and humans. But since creationists aren't allowed to believe in transitional fossils, they have to categorize them as being completely ape or completely human . . . but they can't agree on which are which.

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Does your definition of a "serious scientist" begin and end with their ability to make your points?

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No.

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I could certainly grab Pat Robertson's quotes and generalize them to all religion but that wouldn't be correct would it?

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When he is correct, which he often is, yes. I'm willing to discuss any theological statement he makes rather than just calling him a kook, but you want to dismiss any scientist who questions orthodox evolution as heretical by definition.

I did a short google of the alien thing. About 6 months ago I got more hits than I did this time which perhaps means the theory is receding. Here are some I found:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0824081046.htm

http://www.comdig.org/index.php?id_issue=2000.12#440

http://www.brightsurf.com/news/feb_0...s_022004_c.php

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P.S. Alos, you can't count anything Crick did after the double helix Nobel as reasonable examples of scientific thought.

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If a Nobel prize winner isn't a serious scientist, who the heck is?

The link between humans and non-humans is not only supported by fossil evidence; the DNA evidence is also overwhelming.

This is taken mostly from here.

Some time ago, a few scientists were examining chimpanzee sperm in their laboratory (don't ask how it got there), and noticed that it had 24 chromosomes. Meanwhile, they knew that human sperm had only 23 chromosomes.

What could account for the difference? They theorized that the common ancestor for chimps and humans may have had 24 chromosomes, but sometime after the human and chimp lineages had branched off from each other, two of the humans' chromosomes had fused together.

Ah, a testable theory!

The theory makes several predictions:

1. One of our chromosomes would look like two chimp chromosomes stuck together.

2. This same chromosome would have an extra sequence in it that looked like a centromere. (Centromeres are things in the middle of the chromosome that microtubules grab onto to divide a pair of chromosomes during mitosis.)

3. It would also have telomeres (ends), but in the middle, and they would be in reverse order. Sort of like this:

ENDchromosomestuffDNEENDchromosomestuffDNE

The "DNEEND" in the middle is what two telomeres would look like if two chromosomes were stuck together.

These predictions were all made before the answers to them were known. Then they were tested. The results?

See image. (H = human, C = chimp, G = gorilla, O = orangutan.)

1. "Look like" is inexact, so you don't have to count it as a testable prediction. See the similarity for yourself, however, before moving to the more definite predictions.

2. The human Chromosome 2 -- the one that looks like two chimp chromosomes fused together -- does indeed have an extra sequence in it that is characteristic of a centromere. To quote the abstract from the relevant research paper, "In situ hybridization, under low stringency conditions with two alphoid DNA probes (pY alpha 1 and p82H) labeled with digoxigenin-dUTP, decorated all the centromeres of the human karyotype. However, signals were also detected on the long arm of chromosome 2 at approximately q21.3-q22.1. Since it is supposed that human chromosome 2 originated by the telomeric fusion of two ancestral primate chromosomes, these findings indicate that not only the telomeric sequences, but also the ancestral centromere (or at least its alphoid sequences), have been conserved."

3. The human Chromosome 2 also has a sequence characteristic of a telomere (the "DNEEND" analogue) exactly where it was expected to be found. To quote the abstract from the relevant research paper, "We have identified two allelic genomic cosmids from human chromosome 2, c8.1 and c29B, each containing two inverted arrays of the vertebrate telomeric repeat in a head-to-head arrangement, 5'(TTAGGG)n-(CCCTAA)m3'. Sequences flanking this telomeric repeat are characteristic of present-day human pretelomeres. BAL-31 nuclease experiments with yeast artificial chromosome clones of human telomeres and fluorescence in situ hybridization reveal that sequences flanking these inverted repeats hybridize both to band 2q13 and to different, but overlapping, subsets of human chromosome ends. We conclude that the locus cloned in cosmids c8.1 and c29B is the relic of an ancient telomere-telomere fusion and marks the point at which two ancestral ape chromosomes fused to give rise to human chromosome 2."

These second and third predictions would have been extremely unlikely to be confirmed if the theory that generated them -- that a chromosomal fusing occurred in the human lineage after it branched off from the chimpanzee lineage -- were not correct. If chimps and humans were always separate, and do not share a common ancestor, then why is there evidence of an ancestral fusing? If God wanted a single long chromosome, he could just make a single long chromosome. He wouldn’t have to do it by actually fusing two chromosomes and leaving the telomeres there.

The telomeric remnant is like the human coccyx at the level of our DNA. And the argument that it might have been put there on purpose by a designer is like the "God planted fake dinosaur bones deep in the earth to give the false appearance of an evolutionary past" argument at the level of our DNA.

More DNA evidence

There is also the matter of our vitamin C pseudo-genes: another smoking gun.

Mammals are generally able to synthesize their own vitamin C. Humans, however, are unable to do so. We must get vitamin C from our diets or else we will get scurvy. We have all of the genetic mechanisms required to synthesize vitamin C, but it appears that a single mutation has "broken" this mechanism, rendering it ineffective.

As it turns out, gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and in fact all primates are in the same boat as us. They all have the general mammalian genetic mechanisms for synthesizing vitamin C, but in each case the mechanism is broken.

Here's the interesting part.

There are probably a billion different ways to break the genetic mechanism used to synthesize vitamin C. Mutations are all essentially random, so all of these billion mechanisms are equally probable. The "smoking gun" is that all primates (including humans) have the exact same deleterious mutation in their vitamin C synthesizing genes, in the exact same location. The odds against this occurring by random mutation separately in all primates (and only primates) are astronomical.

On the other hand, we know for a fact that DNA is inherited, and that mutations are passed down to descendents.

So the two obvious possibilities are that (a) the exact same mutation occured in each species of primate independently, or (b) the mutation occured once in a common ancestor of all primates and was subsequently inherited by all its descendents, including chimps, gorillas, and humans.

Typos in written English are a decent analogy for genetic mutations. Suppose you stumble upon a KJV Bible that, in Mark 7:27, says, "Go and sin on more" (instead of "no more"). Now suppose that you find that same typo in many different printings of the Bible. (This actually happened, by the way. You can also find some KJV editions that command, "Thou shalt commit adultery.")

What's more likely? That each printing was from a different manuscript that independently made the same error? Or that the error was made once in a single manuscript and was subsequently copied numerous times?

Obviously, the latter is more likely -- in both the KJV and in primates' vitamin C synthesizing genes. The fact that we have the exact same deleterious mutation in the exact same place is exceptionally strong evidence that the vitamin C pseudogenes in chimps and humans were copied from the same source.

BTW, guinea pigs also have a broken vitamin C mechanism. Theirs, however, is broken in a completely different place, showing that it is almost certainly unrelated to the primate break.

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I don't have much to go on here, but I think the vast majority of evolution-supporting biologists don't incorporate HAT into evolution.

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I don't claim they do. I claim they will if necessary which is one reason why evolution is unfalsifiable. Another is punctuated equilibrium, or hopeful monster theory. Already in use to explain the lack of Darwinian gradualism.

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But evolution has nothing to do with aliens. If genetic changes between species are the result of alien intervention and not genetic mutation, then evolution would be falsified.

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But evolution has nothing to do with aliens.

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It's generally more to do with abiogenesis but it can also be used to replace early evolution. The idea would be that life initiated elsewhere, some evolution occurred, those early life forms migrated here (meteorites perhaps) and then evolution continued here as advertised. The whole idea is to get around the perceived inadequacy of 4.5 billion years to account for today's biological facts. I saw some of this when examining the application of the laws of probability to abiogensis and evolution. There are models that show 4.5 billion years isn't nearly enough time, so HAT allows a few extra billion years.

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It's generally more to do with abiogenesis but it can also be used to replace early evolution. The idea would be that life initiated elsewhere, some evolution occurred, those early life forms migrated here (meteorites perhaps) and then evolution continued here as advertised. The whole idea is to get around the perceived inadequacy of 4.5 billion years to account for today's biological facts. I saw some of this when examining the application of the laws of probability to abiogensis and evolution. There are models that show 4.5 billion years isn't nearly enough time, so HAT allows a few extra billion years.

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**I should note at this time that, lacking any study in biology or anthro, I feel like a retard defending evolution, as I have nothing to go on but philosophical ground. I digress**

To me, this doesn't sound like an attempt to prove or disprove evolution, it sounds like an attempt to explain our origins based on the assumption that evolution is true.

Let's simplify things a little. We don't need to know every chromosome, missing link, ancient species and carbon atom to believe that evolution is true. Evolution revolves around one basic principle, as I see it:

Genetics data is prone to mutation. Accordingly, slight mutations within the parents' offspring will often occur.

Assuming that this is true, the rest of the theory follows logically: some mutations make survival more likely than others. Those with advantageous mutations are more likely to pass on their genes, and natural selection takes place.

Disprove mutation, and you disprove evolution. Would you agree with this statement?

NotReady-

I am fascinated by the fact that you can know all this stuff, seem to have even studied all this stuff, have the intelligence to understand all this stuff, yet still manage to be a Christian fundamentalist! ??

Seriously, I'm intriqued. It makes me think I might've missed something.

Re: More DNA evidence

Maurile,

No matter how much 'proof' you present (and you did an excellent job in those two posts) some people will never get it. You mentioned so many interesting and undeniable facts that you wonder how anyone could dispute evolution but NotReady will never be convinced.

When you throw in some common facts like you can't distinguish most mammals from each other early on in their embryonic states, the fact that we have the remnants of a tail or an appendix, that dolphins have lungs, ad infinitum you would think everyone would believe. But alas, I think we are wasting our time.