Posted on 09/26/2005 3:27:53 AM PDT by Crackingham
When scientists announced last month they had determined the exact order of all 3 billion bits of genetic code that go into making a chimpanzee, it was no surprise that the sequence was more than 96 percent identical to the human genome. Charles Darwin had deduced more than a century ago that chimps were among humans' closest cousins. But decoding chimpanzees' DNA allowed scientists to do more than just refine their estimates of how similar humans and chimps are. It let them put the very theory of evolution to some tough new tests.
If Darwin was right, for example, then scientists should be able to perform a neat trick. Using a mathematical formula that emerges from evolutionary theory, they should be able to predict the number of harmful mutations in chimpanzee DNA by knowing the number of mutations in a different species' DNA and the two animals' population sizes.
"That's a very specific prediction," said Eric Lander, a geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and a leader in the chimp project.
Sure enough, when Lander and his colleagues tallied the harmful mutations in the chimp genome, the number fit perfectly into the range that evolutionary theory had predicted.
SNIP
Evolution's repeated power to predict the unexpected goes a long way toward explaining why so many scientists are practically apoplectic over the recent decision by a Pennsylvania school board to treat evolution as an unproven hypothesis, on par with "alternative" explanations such as Intelligent Design (ID), the proposition that life as we know it could not have arisen without the helping hand of some mysterious intelligent force.
SNIP
"What makes evolution a scientific explanation is that it makes testable predictions," Lander said. "You only believe theories when they make non-obvious predictions that are confirmed by scientific evidence."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I assume that you have an actual argument against the theory of evolution rather than just ridicule, right?
Thanks for the ping. :-)
2005-09-26 The Problem With Evolution
2005-09-26 Dispute over evolution goes on trial in U.S. court
2005-09-26 New Analyses Bolster Central Tenets of Evolution Theory
2005-09-25 In Evolution Debate, Creationists Are Breaking New Ground
2005-09-24 The trouble with Darwin (Bush's I.D. comments changed Australia's Educational Landscape)
2005-09-23 Ultimate thread on Dover, Pennsylvania's Evolution v. Intelligent Design trial
2005-09-22 Insight into our sight: A new view on the evolution of the eye lens (Desperate conjuncture)
2005-09-22 Intelligent designers down on Dover
2005-09-22 Intelligible Design
2005-09-22 Court Case Threatens to 'Drag Science into the Supernatural'
2005-09-22 Intelligent Design: An Ambiguous Assault on Evolution
2005-09-21 Researchers create functioning artificial proteins using nature's rules
2005-09-21 Intelligent design? Not on this campus [Pennsylvania]
2005-09-20 Challenged by Creationists, Museums Answer Back
2005-09-20 Darwin Goes to Church
Won't happen, but good luck.
"If you actually knew anything about molecular evolution or biology and acually had read the article in the recent Science concerning the Chimp's repeating element organization you'd know that the talk origins article you are fond of citing is dreadfully out of date and never has been really accurate."
I have and I understand it, would you care to elaborate?
True, but probably more like 90 percent than 96 percent.
That's a really cool analogy.
It's a bit like this. Suppose student A sits next to B, and A determines his answers by coin tosses. When the exams are turned in, B's answers are the same as A's.
Copied, or not?
Are you still keeping your list of threads?
On and off. I'm trying to update my database now; I've got a new data format that outputs text ready for pasting.
Even if this point were accurate, what does it prove? Does it prove that chimps and man have a similar ancestor, that they are different branches off of the same evolutionary trunk, or does it indicate that both chimps and man have the same designer who simply created man as a variation on an existing theme?
What do you make of this?:
Most Published Research Findings May Be False
Who is warping, twisting, and misrepresenting science in their arguments?
Here's an example:
The hobbits are in a class all of their own, say scientists March 04, 2005
From the article:
HOBBITS, the nickname for the little human relative first discovered last year, were not Homo sapiens but a separate species, analysis of its brain has confirmed.
We now have research that shows these people were "modern":
New 'Hobbit' disease link claimFriday, 23 September 2005
The researchers say their findings strongly support an idea that the 1m- (3ft-) tall female skeleton from Indonesia is a diseased modern human.
And you wonder why the general public is skeptical of the claims evolutionists and scientists make.
"or does it indicate that both chimps and man have the same designer who simply created man as a variation on an existing theme?"
So God looked and said about the chimp "It's no good and I can do better" and zap a little tweak here and a tuck there and we have Patrick Henry?
BTW and FYI, the coding portions of the chimp and human genome are 99% identical.
There are those who think it happened the other way around.
You have been around these threads long enough to have already seen the answer to that question on numerous occasions. This leaves us with a number of possibilities:
We'll leave the selection as an exercise for the lurkers. Just in case the lurkers haven't seen predictions of evolution before, here is a tiny subset of them.
Please point out where the OP said that "creationists can't read".
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.