Signs you've been involved in the E/C "debate" too long

how fitting that the next line in the song is, "'cause I believe in fairy tales..."

Yeah. Cute in a song about childhood innocence and make-believe; not so cute in a science class.

When the fundies have taken over the science curriculum what make you think they're going to stop there?

How about this for a sports class: Drop-kick me Jesus through the Goalposts of life

Oh I've definitely been in this "debate" for too long. I've been pissing about online with this topic for about 7 years or so, but I've been doing it in real life since I was 16, about 15 years ago (I was a late comer to the net!).

I TOTALLY understand where you are coming from Tara, I see creationism/ID analogies/instances everywhere. Perhaps the most notable outgrowth is my almost total lack of tolerance for supernaturalist nonsense I encounter. On a bad day that song would have caused minor ranting!

BBC Radio 4 is a good source of quasi-religious clap trap and superstitious gibberish taken seriously. My commute to work is thankfully solo, because "Thought for the Day" can provoke some spectacular commentary.

Please Help!

I'm in a debate on another forum. I'm trying to point someone to more information about the relative similarity of chimpanzees to humans compared to the similarities of two other species in the same genus.

I'm currently performing searches on both TalkOrigins and also Google but am having difficulty finding what I need.

Also if any of you happen to know this off the top of your heads (or have a handy link), I'd like to know the various means of providing the % similarity numbers. From the reading of done, one measure is the number of base pairs in common, another is the similarity of the genes. Are their others? Can you provide information on which measure provide which results (e.g. 98.5% similar vs. 80% similar)?

Thanks a bunch if you're able to help.

I've now found some of the information I sought here and here.

Your additional insights would be VERY welcome!

BBC Radio 4 is a good source of quasi-religious clap trap and superstitious gibberish taken seriously. My commute to work is thankfully solo, because "Thought for the Day" can provoke some spectacular commentary.

When the fundies have taken over the science curriculum what make you think they're going to stop there?

Or how about The Polar Express and its slogan "Believe"? And then the whole movie just vilifies skepticism from start to finish.
Karl

As for doing this too long, well heck, I've been in this fight since 1982.

Signs you've been involved in the E/C "debate" too long

Signs you've been involved in the E/C "debate" too long

Hi Jim,

According to this article, the 98.5% figure for similarity between chimps and humans is based on studies of DNA hybridization-- in other words, 98.5% of DNA taken from chimps and humans can find an exact match somewhere in the sequence of the other species when they are mixed together. This doesn't take into account insertions and deletions; when the exact sequences are compared, the authors find that about 95% of the nucleotides are exactly shared between the two species. This article spells out precisely how they got these numbers (it's a rather technical article).

The authors state that they don't have enough information to say what the effect of these insertion and deletion events are, but from scanning the article it seems to me that most of the changes-- I'd hazard to say over 90%-- are not in coding regions.

Another article, a more recent one, reports on a study that seems to have looked at the sequences of the entire chimpanzee and human genomes. They reach similar conclusions-- the genomes differ by 1.2% due to single base-pair changes, but there's another 2.7% where one species has a duplicated region and the other doesn't. This is brand spankin' new data-- this paper came out in September.

(I'm not sure what your level of expertise is, so I'll throw this in, with apologies if you already know this: the base-pair changes alter the sequence, for instance changing the sequence AGGT to ACGT. The other 2.7%, I gather, involves chunks that are missing from one genome or the other, or chunks that have been duplicated in one genome or the other-- in the latter case, there are no novel sequences, it's just that the same sequence gets repeated more than once, like misprinting a book so that it contains two copies of the same page.)

Tables 1 and 2 in this article provide more data than you probably want about similarities and differences among primate species. It's kind of old data, though.

Hope this helps!

Jim--

This PDF article may also be of interest. It demonstrates that humans are considerably closer to chimpanzees and bonobos than chimpanzees and bonobos are to gorillas. It also focuses in on functional DNA changes, rather than considering all DNA changes.

Argh. There goes my morning. But I know a lot more about primate DNA comparisons than I did two hours ago!

Once again, I've pulled something out of Tony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook, and changed it up a bit. The recipe started out as Onglet Gascon. However, the bone marrow didn't turn out. Also, I figure why use half a cup of white wine and reduce it by half, if you can instead use a cup of dry sherry and reduce it by three-quarters. That, and you just can't get onglets on short notice in this town, so I went with sirloin steaks, instead.

you just can't get onglets on short notice in this town

Sheesh. What a backwater.

Oh, and signs I've been doing this too long?
Responding to THAT post.

Makes me think of the Foxworthy "You might be a redneck..." series of jokes.

Like, You might have been in the Evo/ID debate too long, if
1)You're on a first name basis with Sal Cordova.
2)???

B. Spitzer,

I sincerely thank you for your effort. I was able to find some information on the similarities between various animals and humans based upon the number of common genes.

I hadn't found any of the articles that you referenced, so I'll check those out too. Thanks for the information!

FYI, I haven't had any formal Biology training past what I got in HS. However, I do read a lot, including the popular science magazines like "Scientific American" and I'm able to follow what they're discussing pretty easily in most cases.

Although I haven't actively participated in the culture wars until last year, I have been following the talk.origins since at least the early '90s and possbibly earlier than that. I've picked up a fair amount of biology/genetics from just following the links to information like yours!

2 "When someone says 'Second Law of Thermodynamics'...and you think 'CF001',

...yew jess might be followin too closely.

yup. that'll get 'er done.

2. When Pat Robertson retrospectively predicts your next illness.

This PDF article may also be of interest. It demonstrates that humans are considerably closer to chimpanzees and bonobos than chimpanzees and bonobos are to gorillas. It also focuses in on functional DNA changes, rather than considering all DNA changes.

Re "are humans closer to ordinary chimpanzees or to bonobos? Or are we equidistant from both?"
I wondered about that too. I recall reading that we're closer to bonobos, but I don't know if that's accurate or not.

Henry

Another thing it mentions in that article that I've always been fascinated by is the fact that chimpanzees apparently have much more genetic diversity than humans do. I suppose the reason for this is that humans went through some serious genetic bottlenecks while chimpanzees never did.

Also, humans in Africa show much more genetic diversity than humans everywhere else in the world, but we'd expect that.

As an aside, the linguistic diversity in Africa is considerable but still not as great as that seen in certain other parts of the world, like the Caucasus, New Guinea, or pre-contact California. (Languages change faster than mitochondrial DNA.)

Signs you've been involved in the E/C "debate" too long:

You can remember when the ID folks used to admit it was about God.

keiths, that's pretty good.

1) You understand that the intelligent designer was an unintelligent design by humans that was supposed to be intelligently designed by the intelligent designer.

2)You have archives of standard rebuttals because you repeated yourself once too many.

3)You still have to repeat yourself because creationists are too lazy to read your standard rebuttals.

4)You realise that creationists are too lazy to read. Period.

5)You started calling your ex wife "Dave"... Scot...

6)You're vocabulary include words like "Stop Heddling around and start making sense"

7)If you child asks you what sound a sheep makes you answer with "Behe Behe"

8)When someone says "They say that" or "I once read that" you immediately request the quoted sources.

When you start a conversation, your wife &/or kids say something like "this isn't about ID again, is it?".

You remember life before TalkOrigins.org

Re "are humans closer to ordinary chimpanzees or to bonobos?

I believe all the genetic evidence is consistent with the notion that "chimps" and "bonobos" (Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus, respectively) have diverged from a common ancestor more recently than we Homines diverged from an earlier ancestor common to both. So it's like asking whether you're more closely related to your cousin, Troy, or his sister, Pam.

I think the social structures of the two Pan species are significantly different, and there's all sorts of fun speculation over which more closely resembles human social structures. But I'll leave that to someone who actually knows what s/he is talking about.

I thought common chimps like to fight and kill while bonobos like to make uh........more bonobos.

Right. So which are more "human-like"?

Russell,

Based upon the discussion above, they (chimpanzee & bonobo) are genetically equidistant from us. However, the three of us are closer to each other than humans, chimpanzees, or bonobos are from gorillas.

I thought common chimps like to fight and kill while bonobos like to make uh........more bonobos.

More signs you've been involved in the E/C "debate" too long:

You giggle to yourself anytime anyone mentions bullfrogs.

Your office "pin-up" is Dr Eugenie Scott/Judge Jones.

You know what the WISTAR conference was.

Completely OT:

Graculus -- is that you Tenebrae? How are you? Could you contact me or Excelon immediately, so we get the debate sorted out?