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You see similarity and choose to look no further. Fine. But don't say we have no evidence, because similarity is evidence. It's one thing to decide not to look at it. That's a choice. It's another to claim there is none. That's a falsehood.

We would expect chimps to have similar genomes to humans whether we have a common ancestor or not. That is why it takes something more than similarity to show common ancestry. All life has similarities, and that does not necessarily imply causation.

Is it really for hard for you to see that if we have gigabytes of genetic information - not just one characteristic- for hundreds of different descendants, we can piece together what the genome of the ancestor looked like, even though we don't have any direct information about it?

You could, but you would have no way of verifying the analysis. And the further back you go, the higher the possibility of being in error. At some point the blue eye trait, for example, could disappear completely and you could not really know if/when that happened.

From post #247:

So what's your alternative explanation for all this? You say...what? It's because of a necessary similarity between similar organisms? But out of these 76 sites with informative differences, only 18 involve differences that change the amino acid composition of the protein; the rest can have no effect on phenotype. Further, many of those amino acid changes are to similar amino acids that have no real effect on protein function. In fact, ND4 and ND5 do exactly the same thing in all organisms. These nested similarities have nothing to do with function, so similar design is not a credible explanation.

We would expect chimps to have similar genomes to humans whether we have a common ancestor or not. That is why it takes something more than similarity to show common ancestry. All life has similarities, and that does not necessarily imply causation.

But the SPECIFIC PATTERNS -- and btw, mutiple, nested heirachies of patterns; and patterns that persist even if you look only at synonomous mutations (that don't change the amino acid coded for) or other factors with no functional impact -- DO imply common ancestry, and cannot be explained by any other cause suggested to date (excepting intentional deception by a creating agent).

See the brief exposition in #247 and please answer for us the questions that the author asks of antievolutionists.

What is being missed here, as usual by those on the anti-evolution side of the argument, is that the specific ways in which the assorted primate genomes would be similar were predicted by scientists using the theory of evolution.

It isn't just any old similarity, but a highly "specified" pattern of similarity that matches the predictions of common descent and pre-existing beliefs about the chain of descent. A Designer could have made things look this way, but only if the Designer wanted to make it look as if common descent is true. What is the difference between an infinitely powerfully being making something look true, and that thing being true?

We would expect chimps to have similar genomes to humans whether we have a common ancestor or not.

Why? Why would a nonfunctional part of the genome be similar?

You could, but you would have no way of verifying the analysis. And the further back you go, the higher the possibility of being in error.

Yes, but since we have a large volume of data, we can quantify the error.

We would expect chimps to have similar genomes to humans whether we have a common ancestor or not.

Why? If the majority of the genome is junk, then it could be completely different junk and not effect the result at all. The genes could be distributed completely different on a dramatically different number of chromosomes, yet still code the same proteins.