Gorilla Genome Is Bad News for Evolution

[Stu]

Gorilla Genome Is Bad News for Evolution

In a significant number of cases, evolutionary trees based on DNA sequences show that humans are more closely related to gorillas or orangutans than chimpanzees—again, all depending on which DNA fragment is used for the analysis. The overall outcome is that no clear path of common ancestry between humans and various primates exists, so no coherent model of primate evolution can be achieved.

The recent release of the gorilla genome spectacularly highlights this evolutionary quandary. According to the Nature study, "in 30% of the genome, gorilla is closer to human or chimpanzee than the latter are to each other."

One of the first papers to expose this problem in the area of primate evolution was published in 2007 by the Center for Integrative Bioinformatics of Vienna's Ingo Ebersberger and his colleagues. They wrote:

Thus, in two-thirds of the cases, a genealogy results in which humans and chimpanzees are not each other's closest genetic relatives. The corresponding genealogies are incongruent with the species tree. In concordance with the experimental evidences, this implies that there is no such thing as a unique evolutionary history of the human genome. Rather, it resembles a patchwork of individual regions following their own genealogy.

Furthermore, even the method employed is itself bias in favour of a common lineage:

It is noteworthy that both the recent gorilla paper and Ebersberger's report utilize highly filtered data in which repetitive DNA (which comprises a significant portion of the genome) is masked and omitted, homologous (similar) regions are pre-selected, and sequence gaps are omitted. Both papers cited here explicitly state this. After this initial level of data selection, a methodology called multiple sequence alignment lines up the DNA segments between multiple organisms and the data is parsed into evolutionary trees.

Therefore, the data are always carefully prepared and selected for optimal tree development and should be full of evolution-favorable DNA sequences. Nevertheless, despite all of the data manipulation to make it more conducive to an evolutionary outcome, the picture that always emerges is a unique mosaic pattern of DNA between the various genomes being compared.
Entire article here

[Ivellious]

This article needs to study current biological theory a little bit better. Contrary to their presupposition, biologists do not hold chimps and humans as direct relatives (i.e. we did not evolve from chimps). We are cousins, both evolving from apes. Gorillas evolved from these apes as well, diverging slightly before humans and chimps did. In other words, we all have a recent common ancestor...and this research demonstrates that all three are closely related. Raw DNA numbers don't tell the whole story, especially when you consider that biologists hold gorillas, chimps and humans to be highly related to begin with.

[Stu]

This article needs to study current biological theory a little bit better. Contrary to their presupposition, biologists do not hold chimps and humans as direct relatives (i.e. we did not evolve from chimps). We are cousins, both evolving from apes. Gorillas evolved from these apes as well, diverging slightly before humans and chimps did. In other words, we all have a recent common ancestor...and this research demonstrates that all three are closely related. Raw DNA numbers don't tell the whole story, especially when you consider that biologists hold gorillas, chimps and humans to be highly related to begin with.

That's what you got out of the article? Read it again.

The article does not say we are direct descendants of chimps.
It states that current evolutionary thinking says that chimps are our closest relatives of all current living apes. Big difference.

What the article actually points out is that "no clear path of common ancestry between humans and various primates exists, so no coherent model of primate evolution can be achieved".

Read the entire article again, it suggests nothing of what you have stated:

The corresponding genealogies are incongruent with the species tree. In concordance with the experimental evidences, this implies that there is no such thing as a unique evolutionary history of the human genome. Rather, it resembles a patchwork of individual regions following their own genealogy.

[bippy123]

The problem with all of this is that evolutionary biologists have never been able to prove this in the real world (intermediary species) , they sure tried with Lucy and a few others but when the true research was performed they found out that none were intermediate species to man, and the DNA relation has been overblown.

As a former believer in evolution I used to believe it without questioning the supposedly unbiased scientists that made those claims, why even my walking with mammals DVD still has those errors in there when talking about lucy's species like it's ability to walk upright as it's natural way of locomotion .

Science is supposed to be the pursuit of truth , not the pushing of methodological materialism on unsuspecting lay people like me . I had my book on the study of Permian and Cambrian species as well as the study of species from the eras in between and they state as fact that we all evolved from one common ancestor. Interesting fact except for one problem: it's never been proven and they know it.

It seems more likely that some species might appear related in some way but it certainly doesn't fit thcdata of the theory of evolution, but deductively I feel that it fits better with a designer using the same material to design these animals, especially since all of the major phyla appeared during the Cambrian era.

[bippy123]

Oh, I forgot to mention what I did with those books. Word of advice folks, never try to use hardcover pages as toilet paper lol.

[Danieltwotwenty]

Oh, I forgot to mention what I did with those books. Word of advice folks, never try to use hardcover pages as toilet paper lol.

I lol'd

[bippy123]

Oh, I forgot to mention what I did with those books. Word of advice folks, never try to use hardcover pages as toilet paper lol.

I lol'd

I'm such a dork lol

[Stu]

As a former believer in evolution I used to believe it without questioning the supposedly unbiased scientists that made those claims, why even my walking with mammals DVD still has those errors in there when talking about lucy's species like it's ability to walk upright as it's natural way of locomotion.

What would you say was the key moment in which you realised the failings of neo-Darwinism? Or was it more of a gradual process?

Science is supposed to be the pursuit of truth , not the pushing of methodological materialism on unsuspecting lay people like me .

That is why I'm so passionate about the subject. The pursuit of scientific truth is no more; instead, as you say it has become a ideological movement based on a priori commitments to materialism. That angers me.

[sandy_mcd]

The article does not say we are direct descendants of chimps.
It states that current evolutionary thinking says that chimps are our closest relatives of all current living apes. Big difference.

What the article actually points out is that "no clear path of common ancestry between humans and various primates exists, so no coherent model of primate evolution can be achieved".

Read the entire article again, it suggests nothing of what you have stated:

The corresponding genealogies are incongruent with the species tree. In concordance with the experimental evidences, this implies that there is no such thing as a unique evolutionary history of the human genome. Rather, it resembles a patchwork of individual regions following their own genealogy.

The meaning of "the entire article" is unclear.
Presumably Ivellious is talking about the hominid evolution Nature paper of 2012 which clearly shows relationships Ivellious mentioned.
In fact the Nature paper on hominid evolution includes this figure

a, Phylogeny of the great ape family, showing the speciation of human (H), chimpanzee (C), gorilla (G) and orang-utan (O). Horizontal lines indicate speciation times within the hominine subfamily and the sequence divergence time between human and orang-utan. Interior grey lines illustrate an example of incomplete lineage sorting at a particular genetic locus—in this case (((C, G), H), O) rather than (((H, C), G), O). Below are mean nucleotide divergences between human and the other great apes from the EPO alignment.




The quote above is from a different 2007 article.
The abstract of that article explains the discrepancy noted by Stu.

Abstract

The human genome is a mosaic with respect to its evolutionary history. Based on a phylogenetic analysis of 23,210 DNA sequence alignments from human, chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan, and rhesus, we present a map of human genetic ancestry. For about 23% of our genome, we share no immediate genetic ancestry with our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. This encompasses genes and exons to the same extent as intergenic regions. We conclude that about 1/3 of our genes started to evolve as human-specific lineages before the differentiation of human, chimps, and gorillas took place. This explains recurrent findings of very old human-specific morphological traits in the fossils record, which predate the recent emergence of the human species about 5-6 MYA. Furthermore, the sorting of such ancestral phenotypic polymorphisms in subsequent speciation events provides a parsimonious explanation why evolutionary derived characteristics are shared among species that are not each other's closest relatives.

Oops - i realize now that Stu is referring to the ICR article which references the two scientific articles.
Well, if the ICR is going to come to different conclusions than the authors of the original papers, I wish they would go into the reasons why.

[Canuckster1127]

Oh, I forgot to mention what I did with those books. Word of advice folks, never try to use hardcover pages as toilet paper lol.

Of course not ... that's what Sears catalogues are for ....

[bippy123]

As a former believer in evolution I used to believe it without questioning the supposedly unbiased scientists that made those claims, why even my walking with mammals DVD still has those errors in there when talking about lucy's species like it's ability to walk upright as it's natural way of locomotion.

What would you say was the key moment in which you realised the failings of neo-Darwinism? Or was it more of a gradual process?

Science is supposed to be the pursuit of truth , not the pushing of methodological materialism on unsuspecting lay people like me .

That is why I'm so passionate about the subject. The pursuit of scientific truth is no more; instead, as you say it has become a ideological movement based on a priori commitments to materialism. That angers me.

It was something that started out as a gradual thing. You gotta remember that I was fully indoctrinated and in my mind I saw everything as an intermediate fossil and that was my mindset. I never paid much attention to the incredible information that was required to make the jump from one species to another, and darwinian evolution conveniently swept it under the rug. This was one of the keys that had me starting to question darwinian evolution.

australopithecus (lucy) was the other. When they presented australopitcus to me on dvd I remember being so excited to see this ape that was supposedly on the transition to becoming more humanlike in just the way she walked. Then I saw an article somewhere online (dont remember the article), by a young earth creationist scientist that was saying things about australopithecus that seemed totally rediculous to me as a theistic evolutionist. So i humored the writer of the article and started reading it for fun. The writer claimed that australopithecus didnt walk on all fours most of the time but only at certain times like a monkey or gorilla. I started checking the research out and lo and behold most biologists agreed with this.

I started feeling a bit betrayed and it started to become a snowball effect, and after Stephen Meyers Signature in the cell I was won over to the intelligent design camp.
Meyer showed the incredible complexity of the cell and rightly comparing it to a huge complex city.


After that I started to understand what a true intermediate form was and suddenly I saw the fossil records for what they truely were and not the lie that Darwinian evolutionists claimed it to be.
The kicker was how these scientists instead of admitting the incredible gaps in the fossil records started trying to force any tiny fossil find after another into their darwinian worldview instead of being unbiased and speaking up against it.

So my answer Stu is that it started out as a gradual descent but it went into full blown mode later on.
To me the coup de gras was perry marshall's website cosmicfingerprints.com which showed that DNA is a language, a code and how biology books even referred to it as one. He even went on one of the largest atheist forums and dared them to show one example in nature where a language could arise without an intelligent mind behind it. He went into their backyardand destroyed them on this point. I had made the switch fully from theistic evolution (francis collins etc etc etc) yo intelligent design.

I agree with you STU and I know your anger as I also felt it too , and thats why I also support teaching intelligent design right alongside darwinian evolution in high schools. This way we can do away with their propaganda and let the students have a chance to see both sides of the coin, but like the dover trial, darwinian evolutionists are scared to let us see both sides because they know that once they do, they will start leaving this archaic worldview and a paradigm shift will take place.

I hope one day we will all be young enough to see this happen. That will be one great party to throw

[bippy123]

Oh, I forgot to mention what I did with those books. Word of advice folks, never try to use hardcover pages as toilet paper lol.

Of course not ... that's what Sears catalogues are for ....

Dang, why didnt I remember this , darn hemmoroids:( lol