[fishtank]

Image from online ICR article.

[Resolute Conservative]

My tree: God —> Adam —> Noah —> me.

[txrefugee]

LOL...just wait till they say that humans are working their way up to being monkeys. That will explain many of our politicians and entertainers.

[VanShuyten]

“Orangutans, who supposedly are the least evolved among apes compared to humans.......”
All animals at the same point in time have evolved equally, a point missed by many creationists.

[twister881]

DemocRAT tree: cousin —> cousin —> sibling —> raving lunatic

[dragonblustar]

Where does Helen Thomas fit into all this?

[RedMDer]

I think after chimp comes democrat.

[Maelstorm]

I’m not surprised. The whole assertion of the overly simplistic evolutionary pedigree of man from ape is mostly fantasy and wishful thinking. Protein expression caused by epigenetic factors is very different in humans and apes not to mention apes have MORE chromosomes than humans which appears due to chromosome fusion. Genes work a lot like a programmers toolkit. Maybe that’s because of a common programmer? ;-)

[BroJoeK]

posted by fishtank:

That gene-tree is highly confusing and essentially meaningless.
Here is an actual representation of the expected gene & species tree of great apes:

This gene/species-tree is "expected" because the fossil evidence is not robust enough to necessarily confirm it.
DNA analysis produces a mixed picture -- with some evidence confirming the above, others... not so much:

"A and B are two different loci.
In the upper figure they fit to the [expected] species tree.
The DNA that is present in today's gorillas diverged earlier from the DNA that is present in today's humans and chimps.
Thus both loci should be more similar between human and chimp than between gorilla and chimp or gorilla and human.
In the lower graph, locus A has a more recent common ancestor in human and gorilla compared to the chimp sequence.
Whereas chimp and gorilla have a more recent common ancestor for locus B.
Here the gene trees are incongruent to the species tree."

Translation: more research needed.

But, overall, DNA sequence differences between

• humans and chimps is: circa 1%,
• between humans and gorillas: 1.5% and
• between humans and Orangutans: 3%.

So contrary data -- apparently suggesting humans more closely related to Orangs or Gorillas -- might, in fact, suggest something quite different.