Luskin: Comparing human DNA to chimp DNA

I believe the argument can now say....using your ages, there wasn't enough time for those mutations to occur and produce all of those differences.

I believe Haldane presented quite a dilemma.....and now that dilemma has gotten notably harder for the evos to explain.
Here is an interesting paper:

To put this into perspective, the number of genetic differences between humans and chimps is approximately 60 times less than that seen between human and mouse and about 10 times less than between the mouse and rat. On the other hand, the number of genetic differences between a human and a chimp is about 10 times more than between any two humans.

Again this shows that chimp are far more like humans than like mice. But there is another curious point here, that the difference between chimp and man is only ten times the difference between different people.

Evolutionist say that it took six million years for those differences to accumulate. If you are saying that that is not enough time, well that is a big problem for creationism, because there is no way you can get to a tenth of that - i.e., the dfferences within mankind - in just 6000 years. There just not enough time for mankind to have become so diverse in such a short time.
 
Also wrote this elsewhere, re: Haldane's dilemma:

Anyway, he [Sanford] eventually wrote a book (as all such folk usually do) that made a splash a few years ago (I will not name it for I do not want to generate any publicity for it), and someone on a forum I was on at the time quoted from it. I couldn't believe the quote was real, so I Googled it and found a web site had hosted a couple of chapters for an advertisement, I guess, available to read for free on it for a while when it came out. I read those, found the quote, and chuckled (on p. 128-9):

"Selection for 1,000 specific and adjacent mutations could not happen in 6 million years because that specific sequence of adjacent mutations would never arise, not even in 6 billion years."

Think about that for a moment. Really think about it -

"...1,000 specific and adjacent mutations could not happen in 6 million years because that specific sequence of adjacent mutations would never arise..."


Surely I am not the only one who, upon reading that, immediately thought "STRAWMAN!!!"?

I mean, does he REALLY think that Haldane (or anyone else, ever) actually posited that new genes are needed in evolution, and that new genes are made 1 beneficial mutation at a time, right next to each other???


Now, some may think that I am taking him out of context to make another creationist look like an incompetent fool (which, it turns out, is actually pretty easy). I thought about this, and so searched for the quote again, and was able to find the entire book online (a plain text version, to be sure) for free under a different name. So, with context:


Waiting on “Haldane’s dilemma”. [EDITED to fit in CARM's character limits]
[...]

Haldane (1957), calculated that it would take (on average) 300 generations (>6,000 years) to select a single new mutation to fixation, given what he considered a “reasonable” mixture of recessive and dominant mutations. Selection at this rate is so slow that it is essentially the same as no selection at all. This problem
has classically been called “Haldane’s dilemma”. At this rate of selection, one could only fix 1,000 beneficial nucleotide mutations within the whole genome in the time since we supposedly evolved from chimps (6 million years). This simple fact has been confirmed independently by Crow and Kimura (1970), and ReMine (1993,2005). The nature of selection is such that selecting for one nucleotide reduces our ability to select for other nucleotides (selection interference). Simultaneous selection does not help.

NOTE - Interesting that he provided citations for the rate of fixation according to Haldane, even though this is not controversial, but for his mere assertion re: simultaneous selection, he offers...... Nothing....ReMine did the same thing thoughout his book - all sorts of citations for trivial issues, not a one for his zany creationist claims.


Can Natural Selection Create?

At first glance, the above calculation seems to suggest that one might at least be able to select for the creation of one small gene (of up to 1,000 nucleotides) in the time since we reputedly diverged
from chimpanzee. There are two reasons why this is not true. First, Haldane’s calculations were only for independent, unlinked mutations. Selection for 1,000 specific and adjacent mutations could not happen in 6 million years because that specific sequence of adjacent mutations would never arise, not even in 6 billion
years.
One cannot select mutations that have not happened. Second, the vast bulk of a gene’s nucleotides are near-neutral and cannot be selected at all—not in any length of time. The bottom line of Haldane’s dilemma is selection to fix new beneficial mutations occurs at glacial speeds, and the more nucleotides under selection, the slower the progress. This severely limits progressive selection. Within reasonable evolutionary timeframes, we can only select for an extremely limited number of unlinked nucleotides. In the last 6 million years, selection could maximally fix 1,000 unlinked beneficial mutations, creating less new information than is on this page of text.* There is no way that such a small amount of information could transform an ape into a human....


As the kids say, WHOOMP there it is! Context seals the deal (see the text in red).

How do we classify that - sleight of hand? Bait and switch? Strawman? Lie? Confusion factor?

To sum up - Haldane's model was about the time needed to fix beneficial mutations (i.e., mutant alleles, or genes that had acquired novel function via mutation) given the understanding at the time (1957). IF all of Haldane's parameters were 100% applicable to all large, slowly reproducing populations, he calculated that it would take 300 generations for that mutant allele to reach fixation (be present in all members) of a population. That is all. It was not REMOTELY about making a brand new gene one mutation at a time, so why did Sanford take the time to set up a scenario indicating how impossible THAT would be?
This was considered a 'dilemma' at the time due to the current beliefs/understandings - that humans had more than 100,000 genes, that evolution occurred only or primarily via selection, etc.

And a mere 1000 or so such mutations since we split from chimps? PREPOSTEROUS! Humans are so special and so different from the apes that there HAD to have been much much larger changes to explain it all! Or so Sanford's hero ReMine claimed (without evidence), and so Sanford perpetuates.

Couple of problems....

1. Not all population geneticists accepted Haldane's model as accurate or universally applicable. Warren Ewens, for example, said in an interview (italics mine):

"...There was an interest in two load concepts. The first was the mutational load, and interest in that concept came from the concern about genetic damage caused by atomic bombs. This was discussed in detail by the great geneticist Muller in 1950. Jim Neal and Jack Schull had gone to Japan shortly after the 1939-45 war to conduct an examination of the mutational effects of the atomic bomb. Their work on this matter was very well known, and so the question of how much genetic damage had been produced by the bomb was uppermost in many people’s minds. That damage became analyzed mathematically as a mutational load.

A second form of the load concept was introduced by the British biologist-mathematician Haldane who claimed, in 1957, that substitutions in a Darwinian evolutionary process could not proceed at more than a certain comparatively slow rate, because if they were to proceed at a faster rate, there would be an excessive “substitutional load.” Since Haldane was so famous, that concept attracted a lot of attention. In particular, Crow and Kimura made various substitutional load calculations around 1960, that is at about that time that I was becoming interested in genetics.
Perhaps the only disagreement I ever had with Crow concerned the substitutional load, because I never thought that the calculations concerning this load, which he and others carried out, were appropriate. From the very start, my own calculations suggested to me that Haldane’s arguments were misguided and indeed erroneous, and that there is no practical upper limit to the rate at which substitutions can occur under Darwinian natural selection."

Interestingly, ReMine had interviewed Ewens for his 1993 book, but did not seem to care much about his disagreement with Haldane and Crow, for what are obvious reasons.

2. Experiments demonstrated that Haldane's model had flaws, 1 example:

Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA Vol. 71, No. 10, pp. 3863-3865, October 1974
Solutions to the Cost-of-Selection Dilemma
(substitutional load/gene substitution/evolutionary rate)

3. The notion that some large number of genetic changes is required to produced notable phenotypic change is false:

Am J Hum Genet. 1998 Sep;63(3):711-6.
Mutations in Fibroblast Growth-Factor Receptor 3 in Sporadic Cases of Achondroplasia Occur Exclusively on the Paternally Derived Chromosome

Abstract
More than 97% of achondroplasia cases are caused by one of two mutations (G1138A and G1138C) in the fibroblast growth factor receptor 3 (FGFR3) gene, which results in a specific amino acid substitution, G380R. ..

I present that only to show that a single mutation can affect all limbs as well as the skull and other structures. No huge suite of mutations required.

I am shocked that Sanford would not have had the sense to do a lit review prior to writing his creationist pap.
 
A simple explanation of how differences between two genomes can have different values. Short answer, it depends on how you measure the difference.

Take genome X: AAAAAAAAAA and genome Y: AAAAAAAAAT

If we directly compare the whole genomes then there is 0% match because the two genomes do not match.

Now split each genome into two pieces:

X: AAAAA AAAAA​
Y: AAAAA AAAAT​

Comparing those pieces gives a 50% match. The first halves match, the second halves do not.

Next split each genome into five pieces:

X: AA AA AA AA AA​
Y: AA AA AA AA AT​

Comparing those pieces gives an 80% match. The first four fifths match, the last fifths do not.

Now split each genome into ten pieces:

X: A A A A A A A A A A​
Y: A A A A A A A A A T​

Comparing those pieces gives a 90% match. The first nine tenths match, only the tenth tenths do not.

The measured difference between genome X and genome Y depends on the technique used to measure the difference.
And your initial segment - the 0% match - is basically what Jeff Tomkins did when he declared humans and chimps to be only 70% identical.
He has yet to do a similar analysis on any pairs of creatures that YECists claim are descendants of a 'Kind' on the ark...
 
Articles about what we have learned.

Since evolutionists speculate that humans and chimps shared a common ancestor about three to six million years ago, their theory requires a human-chimp DNA similarity of 98 to 99%. The first time they constructed a chimp genome and compared it to humans, they claimed 98.5% DNA similarity based on cherry-picked regions that were highly similar to human. However, an extensive DNA comparison study I published in 2016 revealed two major flaws in their construction of the chimp genome.1

First, many chimp DNA data sets were likely contaminated with human DNA, especially those produced in the first half of the chimpanzee genome project from 2002 to 2005. Second, the chimpanzee genome was deliberately constructed to be more human-like than it really is.2 Scientists assembled the small snippets of chimp DNA onto the human genome, using it as a scaffold or reference. It’s much like putting together a jigsaw puzzle by looking at the picture on the box as a guide. Since many chimpanzee data sets likely suffered from human DNA contamination, the level of humanness was amplified. I studied the 2005–2010 data sets that showed less human DNA data contamination and found they were only 85% similar to human at best.1 Article.


A review of the common claim that the human and chimpanzee (chimp) genomes are nearly identical was found to be highly questionable solely by an analysis of the methodology and data outlined in an assortment of key research publications. Reported high DNA sequence similarity estimates are primarily based on prescreened biological samples and/or data. Data too dissimilar to be conveniently aligned was typically omitted, masked and/or not reported. Furthermore, gap data from final alignments was also often discarded, further inflating final similarity estimates. It is these highly selective data-omission processes, driven by Darwinian dogma, that produce the commonly touted 98% similarity figure for human–chimp DNA comparisons. Based on the analysis of data provided in various publications, including the often cited 2005 chimpanzee genome report, it is safe to conclude that human–chimp genome similarity is not more than ~87% identical, and possibly not higher than 81%. These revised estimates are based on relevant data omitted from the final similarity estimates typically presented. article.

Often scientific reports or mainstream media claim 99% identical comparisons between human and chimp genomes. The number has been dropping in some circles recently, but is still on the order of 95+%. There is inherent bias in these calculations because significant lengths of DNA that are quite different between the two species are omitted from the results. A very simplified comparison would be comparing blue jeans (pardon the pun) with cut-off jeans. The fact that the legs are missing on one is discounted and only the upper portion is compared, with particular emphasis on the comparison of the rivets, buttons, pockets, topstitching, and zipper, but not much comparison on the brand, color, or the quality of the fabric. In a similar way, gaps or missing portions (like the missing legs on the cut-off jeans) and regulatory portions (like the fabric) from one are typically ignored, and only gene-rich segments of DNA are analyzed (like pockets, buttons, and rivets). Taking all those things into account, in 2012 creationist scientists Drs. Tomkins and Bergman came up with an overall similarity of around 81%—quite a difference!1 Other researchers have come up with even lower percent similarity, averaging around 70%. In 2013, Tomkins tested alignment of each chimpanzee chromosome against its human counterpart and only found an overall genome similarity of about 70%, which was published in Answers Research Journal. Article
It is customary - and honest - to at least put quotation marks around things that you copy and paste verbatim from ICR.
But at least you put a link!
 
What you are missing there is a comparison between chimp and gorilla DNA.

If, using the same methofology, chimp DNA is only 70% similar to gorilla DNA then that confirms chimps are closer to humans than gorillas. You do not have that data, one way or the other, so your data fails to address the OP. All you have done is shown how either side can cherry pick, which I said in the OP already: "The problem is that there are different ways to measure these things; if you want to emphasise the similarity you choose one, and if you want to emphasise the difference you choose the other. "
Humand didn't evolve from a lesser pimate.
 
Here is an interesting paper:

To put this into perspective, the number of genetic differences between humans and chimps is approximately 60 times less than that seen between human and mouse and about 10 times less than between the mouse and rat. On the other hand, the number of genetic differences between a human and a chimp is about 10 times more than between any two humans.

Again this shows that chimp are far more like humans than like mice. But there is another curious point here, that the difference between chimp and man is only ten times the difference between different people.

Evolutionist say that it took six million years for those differences to accumulate. If you are saying that that is not enough time, well that is a big problem for creationism, because there is no way you can get to a tenth of that - i.e., the dfferences within mankind - in just 6000 years. There just not enough time for mankind to have become so diverse in such a short time.
Evolutionist say that it took six million years for those differences to accumulate...and we also know that's bogus.
 
Humand didn't evolve from a lesser pimate.
Thanks for your unsupported religious belief.

If you can find some analysis for the difference in DNA between chimp and gorilla that uses the same methodology as your figure for chimp and human, get back to me.

Evolutionist say that it took six million years for those differences to accumulate...and we also know that's bogus.
Creations say it took only six thousand years for a tenth of those difference to accumulate. If you say there is not enough time for evolution to get from the chimp-human ancestor, then you have an even bigger problem getting from Adam and Eve to the diversity of DNA in mankind today.
 
Irrelevant as you can't present evidence evo created that DNA nor the information encoded in that DNA so evo is still not supported to ever happen.
So in your view the opening post of the thread is irrelevant to the thread....

Okay, thanks for your input, ferengi. Just as insightful as ever.
 
So in your view the opening post of the thread is irrelevant to the thread....
Okay, thanks for your input, ferengi. Just as insightful as ever.
Still can't present evidence evo created that DNA nor the information encoded in that DNA so evo is still not supported to ever happen.
 
Irrelevant as you can't present evidence evo created that DNA nor the information encoded in that DNA so evo is still not supported to ever happen.

Irrelevant as you can't present evidence creo created that DNA nor the information encoded in that DNA so creo is still not supported to ever happen.


See how silly and childish that looks? I realize that it is the best you can muster, but my gosh, it doesn't make you look very... intelligent or adult.
 
Thanks for your unsupported religious belief.

If you can find some analysis for the difference in DNA between chimp and gorilla that uses the same methodology as your figure for chimp and human, get back to me.


Creations say it took only six thousand years for a tenth of those difference to accumulate. If you say there is not enough time for evolution to get from the chimp-human ancestor, then you have an even bigger problem getting from Adam and Eve to the diversity of DNA in mankind today.
Why? Man came from man....not primates.
 
Why? Man came from man....not primates.
According to Genesis, he came from one man and one woman 6000 years ago.

The problem is that that is not long enough to get the genetic variation we see. As the article I linked to said, the variation between people is a tenth that between man and chimp. It you insist six million years is not enough for evolution, then no way is six thousand years enough time to get a tenth of that.
 
According to Genesis, he came from one man and one woman 6000 years ago.

The problem is that that is not long enough to get the genetic variation we see. As the article I linked to said, the variation between people is a tenth that between man and chimp. It you insist six million years is not enough for evolution, then no way is six thousand years enough time to get a tenth of that.
The variation between people re basically due to a loss of information.....the variation between the false concept of man and chimp being related are said to be due to so-called beneficial mutations. As I said, not enough time. Evo-ism looses again.
 
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