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My question to you medved is this: Do you really believe the Earth orbited Saturn at one time? Or that humans are the result of genetic engineering? Or that the Grand Canyon is the result of lightning strike(s)?

Are humans the result of genetic engineering and/or re-engineering in past ages? I think that's the way you have to bet it.

Evolutionists are looking at the wrong end of the "lineup" or whatever you want to call it of hominid and human types. The problem is at the near end and not the far end.

Recent studies of neanderthal DNA turned up the result that neanderthal DNA is "about halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee", and that there is no way we could interbreed with them or be descended from them via any process resembling evolution. That says that anybody wishing to believe that modern man evolved has to come up with some closer hominid, i.e. a plausible ancestor for modern man, and that the closer hominid would stand closer to us in both time and morphology than the neanderthal, and that his works and remains should be very easy to find, since neanderthal remains and works are all over the map. Of course, no such closer hominid exists; all other hominids are much further from us than the neanderthal.

An evolutionist could try to claim that we and the neanderthal both are descended from some more remote ancestor 200,000 years ago, but that would be like claiming that dogs couldn't be descended from wolves, and must therefore be descended from fish, i.e. the claim would be idiotic.

That leaves three possibilities: modern man was created from scratch very recently, was genetically re-engineered from the neanderthal, or was imported from elsewhere in the cosmos.

Aside from that conundrum, there is direct evidence of genetic engineering in past ages.

Henry Gee
Monday February 12, 2001
The Guardian

The potentially-poisonous Japanese fugu fish has achieved notoriety, at least among scientists who haven't eaten any, because it has a genome that can be best described as "concise". There is no "junk" DNA, no waste, no nonsense. You get exactly what it says on the tin. This makes its genome very easy to deal with in the laboratory: it is close to being the perfect genetic instruction set. Take all the genes you need to make an animal and no more, stir, and you'd get fugu. Now, most people would hardly rate the fugu fish as the acme of creation. If it were, it would be eating us, and not the other way round. But here is a paradox. The human genome probably does not contain significantly more genes than the fugu fish. What sets it apart is - and there is no more succinct way to put this - rubbish.

The human genome is more than 95% rubbish. Fewer than 5% of the 3.2bn As, Cs, Gs and Ts that make up the human genome are actually found in genes. It is more litter-strewn than any genome completely sequenced so far. It is believed to contain just under 31,780 genes, only about half as many again as found in the simple roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans (19,099 genes): yet in terms of bulk DNA content, the human genome is almost 30 times the size.A lot is just rubbish, plain and simple. But at least half the genome is rubbish of a special kind - transposable elements. These are small segments of DNA that show signs of having once been the genomes of independent entities. Although rather small, they often contain sequences that signal cellular machinery to transcribe them (that is, to switch them on). They may also contain genetic instructions for enzymes whose function is to make copies and insert the copies elsewhere in the genome. These transposable elements litter the human genome in their hundreds of thousands. Many contain genes for an enzyme called reverse transcriptase - essential for a transposable element to integrate itself into the host DNA.

The chilling part is that reverse transcriptase is a key feature of retroviruses such as HIV-1, the human immunodeficiency virus. Much of the genome itself - at least half its bulk - may have consisted of DNA that started out, perhaps millions of years ago, as independent viruses or virus-like entities. To make matters worse, hundreds of genes, containing instructions for at least 223 proteins, seem to have been imported directly from bacteria. Some are responsible for features of human metabolism otherwise hard to explain away as quirks of evolution - such as our ability to metabolise psychotropic drugs. Thus, monoamine oxidase is involved in metabolising alcohol.

If the import of bacterial genes for novel purposes (such as drug resistance) sounds disturbing and familiar, it should - this is precisely the thrust of much research into the genetic modification of organisms in agriculture or biotechnology.

So natural-born human beings are, indeed, genetically modified. Self-respecting eco-warriors should never let their children marry a human being, in case the population at large gets contaminated with exotic genes!One of the most common transposable elements in the human genome is called Alu - the genome is riddled with it. What the draft genome now shows quite clearly is that copies of Alu tend to cluster where there are genes. The density of genes in the genome varies, and where there are more genes, there are more copies of Alu. Nobody knows why, yet it is consistent with the idea that Alu has a positive benefit for genomes. To be extremely speculative, it could be that a host of very similar looking Alu sequences in gene-rich regions could facilitate the kind of gene-shuffling that peps up natural genetic variation, and with that, evolution. This ties in with the fact that human genes are, more than most, fragmented into a series of many exons, separated by small sections of rubbish called introns - rather like segments of a TV programme being punctuated by commercials.

The gene for the protein titin, for example, is divided into a record-breaking 178 exons, all of which must be patched together by the gene-reading machinery before the finished protein can be assembled. This fragmentation allows for alternative versions of proteins to be built from the same information, by shuffling exons around. Genomes with less fragmented genes may have a similar number of overall genes - but a smaller palette of ways to use this information. Transposable elements might have helped unlock the potential in the human genome, and could even have contributed to the fragmentation of genes in the first place (some introns are transposable elements by another name). This, at root, may explain why human beings are far more complex than roundworms or fruit flies. If it were not for trashy transposable elements such as Alu, it might have been more difficult to shuffle genes and parts of genes, creating alternative ways of reading the "same" genes. It is true that the human genome is mostly rubbish, but it explains what we are, and why we are who we are, and not lying on the slab in a sushi bar.

• Deep Time by Henry Gee will be published shortly in paperback by Fourth Estate. He is a senior editor of Nature. Related articles

I saved the weird one for last...

A short answer goes as follows: there is reason to believe that Jupiter and Saturn once comprised a small double star system which we were part of, and that the cosmic disasters you read of in the bible and other antique literature arose from the capture of that system by our present sun and the subsequent chaos which ensued.

Ancient literature described a number of things which we do not see in our present world, including:

Cosmic-scale catastrophes such as the flood in Noah's time, the catastrophe at the time of Exodus, the meteorite storms of Joshua's day:

JOS 10:11 And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to Bethhoron, that the LORD cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died: they were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword.
etc. In other words, the kinds of things Velikovsky wrote about.
Astral religion. The association between planetary bodies and the major gods of antique religions was primordial.
Electrostatic components of ancient religious practices. It turns out, that electrostatic phenomena in the very recent past on our planet were significantly more of a factor and a thing to be contended with than they are now.
An antique and radically different paradigm for the use of the human brain and mind, and a number of phenomena, including idolatry, prophecy, and oracles, which went hand in hand with that different paradigm.

All antique religions were astral in nature, the name associations between gods and planets being primordial. Now, if you were to pay some group of primitives in our modern world, such as democrats or evolutionists, to devise an astral religion outright from scratch, they would invariably end up worshipping the sun and the moon. Whatever's in third place in the sky today is WAY back in third place.

The two chieftain gods of all antique religious systems, however, were invariably the planets Jupiter and Saturn, Zeus and Kronos. That makes no sense given present realities, but it gets better.

The littlest bit of reading into antique sources turns up a wealth of information pointing to a different kind of sky in the antique world. Writers like Hesiod and Ovid constantly refer to a golden age prior to the flood as an age of Kronos (Saturn), when Kronos was the "king of heaven", and they refer to antediluvians as "children of Kronos". The languge is fairly simple; the sun is the "king of heaven" now.

Articles in the journals of Assyriology in the early 1900s turned up the fact that virtually all of the names used for the sun in the ancient near east were names which had originally been used for the planet Saturn, and then had been transferred to the sun.

Like I say, this stuff is JUST A THEORY; without owning a time machine, I've got no way of proving any of this to anybody, and you sure as hell do not see me jumping up and down demanding that any of this be taught as a fact in public schools at public expense.

But the simplest possible interpretation of what Hesiod, Plato, Ovid, and numerous others are claiming is that Jupiter and Saturn very recently comprised a small double star system, and that we were part of that system. The flood and the various cosmic disasters you read about in ancient literature amount to descriptions of the mayhem which ensued as that elder system was captured by our present sun and the component bodies began to orbit the sun separately.

Saturn and the Antique System

Egyptian enclosed crescent (prototype cosmic ship) and Babylonian Shamesh petroglyph

What the artists actually saw...

The Shamesh glyph is, in fact, the same thing as the familiar Islamic icon which is normally taken to be a star-moon icon. In real life, that cannot happen, i.e. a star will never be seen inside the crescent of the moon, simply because the unlit part of the moon will occult the star.

Egyptian artwork consistently replicates the cosmic alignment shown above as noted in several of the articles linked below. Here, the Mars/Venus alignment shows up on a piece of jewelry (shen-bond). The alignment which Egyptian and near Eastern art depicts consistently shows Earth, Mars, and Venus lined up in a sort of a stack below the gas giant. This is similar to what we saw when the string of comets followed eachother like a shish-kabob into Jupter a few years back.

The Saturn Myths: A brief introduction to what is emerging as the grand unifying theory of catastrophism.

Images courtesy of Kronia Communications

At this point, the authors of several of the variants of a Saturn thesis have their own WWW sites and generally do a better job of expounding those theories than I can. What I basically attempt to provide is a sort of a businessman's executive summary or big-picture view of the manner in which a number of the various puzzle pieces fit together, including the question of Jaynsian anomalies. My own general estimation of Saturn theory variants at this point is as follow: I believe that Ev Cochrane and David Talbott have done a better job of excavating and describing the Saturn system (the age just prior to ours) than other authors have. Nonetheless, they do not offer a plausible theory of how anything like the Saturn system could have come about in the first place or any sort of a general system of cosmology; Al DeGrazia and Earl Milton do that, and their "Solaria Binaria" is therefore my choice for first book to read on the topic. The fact that it can be had in PDF form for $10 along with twenty some other published works doesn't hurt.

Further Thoughts on the Topic

The Ship of Heaven: Egyptian Iconography and the antique system.

Petroglyphs: Images of the former sun on the walls of caves.

Intimations of an Alien Sky: Article on the antique system (Cardona)

Darkness and the Deep: Dwardu Cardona on the early stages of the antique system

Harold Tresman's Version of this whole business; an article posted to talk.origins, summer 1995. Geological Genesis, (C)1993 Harold Tresman, Chronology & Catastrophism Workshop (ISSN: 0951-5985) August 1993 Number1.

From a dwarf to a giant and back again, over and over: Ev Cochrane on the recurring myth of the warrior-hero who changes his size periodically.

Green Star: Egyptian descriptions of the green sun which they worshipped.

Saturn and the Antique System

What the artists actually saw...

Further Thoughts on the Topic

Other Catastrophism Links