@SW-User
Here’s the kicker, she also thinks that creation is going to fade away over time rather than the other way around.
Honestly, I've never seen @
newjaninev2 say anything close to that. I was so impressed by her evolution evidence that I saved big chunks of it. Perhaps you could show us all, in the paragraphs below, where you thing that claim was made??
All species carry ‘silenced’ genes… these are genes that once caused certain proteins to be produced, but now no longer function in the original manner. Such genes are called pseudogenes.
Nearly all mammals have functional genes for expressing an enzyme (L-guluno-?-lactone oxidase) that allows the production of vitamin C, which is essential for proper metabolism.
I say ‘nearly all mammals’ because primates cannot produce their own vitamin C. In humans, there is a set of four genes that code for vitamin C production. As you may know, these genes are composed of many, many smaller units called nucleotides, so these four genes contain a very large number of such nucleotides (the human genome has 64 billion nucleotides}. The first three genes are fully functional, but the final gene in the sequence has a mutation in a single nucleotide, and this mutation prevents the sequence from completing. That’s why humans need to obtain vitamin C from their food… because the mechanism for producing it has become a pseudogene.
Across all primates (chimpanzees, bononbo, humans, and apes) not only is it the final gene in the sequence that is silenced, but within that gene the same nucleotide carries the mutation that is responsible.
Now, why would this be?
1. astonishing coincidence
2. when the gods created all the species they put genetic pathways for vitamin C production into all mammals, but then inactivated a single nucleotide from among the four genes necessary for that production, inactivated the same nucleotide in all cases, and did that only in primates. They obviously thought this to be a tremendous joke to play, because we carry around 2,000 such pseudogenes.
3. All mammals developed the ability to produce vitamin C, but around 40 million years ago, in the ancestor common to all primates, that ability was removed by a mutation in a single nucleotide, and the deficit was passed to all primates due to common descent during evolution.
Here's a bit more:
Genes direct protein production. That’s pretty much all they do (they have quite dull social lives, and don’t seem to have hobbies or outside interests). Those proteins are built up from amino acids.
The genes comprise large numbers of base-pairs, which are simply guanine matched with cytosine and adenine matched with thymine. The human genome contains around 3.2 billion of these base pairs (the largest we’ve found so far is that of the flowering plant Paris japonica, which has 150 billion base pairs. The marbled lungfish has 133 billion base pairs).
As I said, proteins are built up from amino acids. Each amino acid that is used to build the proteins is specified by three base-pairs (those blocks of three base-pairs are called codons).
Let’s look at cytochrome c (we could use any number of such proteins, but I have a fondness for cytochrome c… I like the alliteration)
The cytochrome c protein is built up from around 100 amino acids.
This means that there are 10E135 possible ways that the amino acids could be arranged… but not all of those arrangements would work, of course.
However, because there’s a high level of redundancy in the construction of cytosine c (and all proteins), a stunning 10E93 variants would still be functional.
So that’s 100,000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000 possible ways that DNA could produce functional cytosine c.
Time to make some predictions in accordance with the Theory of Evolution, don’t you think?
1. Because evolution began from a tightly limited range of organisms, only one of those possible functional variants will have been passed down over the last 3.5 billion years.
2. Because of point mutations (among other factors), there should be evidence of extremely slight variation that has crept in over the last 3.5 billion years… after all, even high-fidelity copying systems aren’t perfect (and it would be suspicious if they appeared to be so)
3. That variation should be negligible for species that have comparatively recent common ancestors, and increase between species with more distant common ancestors… while still remaining negligible (The process is remarkably stable, so we wouldn’t expect too many of the 10E93 functional variants to have appeared).
So, what do we find?
How many amino acid differences are there between humans and other species?
To make things interesting, let’s list some species in order of how long it has been since we shared a common ancestor with each species, and then see how many amino acid differences there are between us and that species.
Chimpanzee = 0
Rhesus Monkey = 1
Rabbit = 9
Cow = 10
Pigeon = 12
Bullfrog = 20
Fruit Fly = 24
Wheat Germ = 37
Yeast = 42
Evidence-based simplicity and elegance… the Theory of Evolution
Embryology evidence:
Embryology can be very helpful in showing how our evolutionary history appears during foetal development. There are a few quick and easy examples that spring to mind from all those available: gills, blood vessels, and kidneys.
In the early stages of development, fish embryos have a series of pouches (separated by grooves) near where the head will later develop. These are called the brachial arches - they develop into gills, and the grooves between them develop into the gill slits. It‘s very straightforward.
Other vertebrates have the same structures... including humans. In fact, I once had the opportunity to see these brachial arches for myself on a foetus, and it was fascinating. They‘re not ‘sort of like’ a fish‘s brachial arches... they are a fish‘s brachial arches. They‘re morphologically completely identical.
Tiktaalik roseae, on the cusp between ocean and land, used gills and lungs, but after the move onto land, gills were superfluous. Sometimes (it‘s very rare) human gill slits fail to close, but it‘s easily corrected via minor surgery once the infant is born.
Blood vessel development in fish is, once again, basic and straightforward, producing six major blood vessels. In mammals (including humans, of course), the same six major blood vessels appear in early foetal development, but then three of them disappear at the same time that our circulatory system stops resembling that of fish and instead becomes identical to the circulatory system of embryonic amphibians. Not similar... identical.
In amphibians, this system simply grows into an adult amphibian circulatory system, but in mammals (including humans, of course) it changes into the circulatory system of embryonic reptiles. Not similar to the circulatory system of embryonic reptiles... identical.
In reptiles, this system simply grows into an adult reptilian circulatory system, but in mammals (including humans, of course), it undergoes further changes (the development of carotid, pulmonary, and dorsal arteries) to become the mammalian circulatory system.
During development, human embryos form three distinctly different types kidneys... the pronephros, the mesonephros, and the metanephros. The first two systems are discarded. The pronephros is the kidney system found in fish and amphibians, the mesonephros is the kidney system found in reptiles, and the metanephros is the kidney system that we eventually use.
From fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal.
No matter how many comforting myths we mutter to ourselves, every foetus carries the truth.
One more block:
All apes except humans have 24 pairs of chromosomes. We humans are the only apes to have 23 pairs.
Evolution made a testable prediction; That somewhere in the human genome we should find evidence of chromosomal fusion. In other words, we should be able to find a fused human chromosome with the remnants of extra telomeres and centromeres.
Since the loss of all the genes in a chromosome would have been fatal to any species, scientists reasoned that if the Theory of Evolution was correct about common ancestry, one of two things must have occurred. Either two chromosomes had fused in humans’ evolutionary past, or chromosomes had split in the other apes. Using 'Occam's Razor’, which states that among competing hypotheses, the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one, the most likely event was chromosome fusion in humans’ ancestors.
Normal chromosomes have a centromere (a chromosomal locus that ensures delivery of one copy of each chromosome to each daughter at cell division.) and ends that are capped with telomeres… think of them as the aglets on shoelaces). It was postulated that if two chromosomes had fused, evidence for such an event would be found in a chromosome with two centromeres and telomeres where they did not belong. That is exactly what was found in human chromosome 2 (chromosomes are numbered by length).
It was subsequently established that the equivalent chimpanzee chromosomes contain the same genes as human chromosome 2 and if placed end to end the positions of those genes match those of the human chromosome. The same chromosomes in all other ape species also line up in the same way…. the fusion event has been confirmed.
Recently we have obtained largely complete genomes of two other human species, those of Neanderthal and Denisovans. We see the same chromosome fusion in their genomes as well, which tells us that the fusion event took place in a common ancestor.
The greatest test of any scientific Theory is in its usefulness as a predictive tool. In this case, as in many others, the Theory of Evolution has delivered.
