Iain wrote:
> Hence, a YEC could well argue that man and apes were created
> separately, and the humans originally had 48 chromosomes.
No need to specify YEC. This approach was first published (well, I first
read it there, maybe someone else published it before that) in the book
"Intelligent Design 101" in the appendix that Casey Luskin wrote to
specifically address Francis Collins's book. He has a figure in that
appendix which says the chromosome fusion could also be explained by common
design. In his diagram, he notes that both humans and chimps could have been
designed with comparable 48 chromosomes. Then the human lineage undergoes
the fusion mutation along the way.
I would just suggest that this is an "appearance of common ancestry"
argument quite analogous to "appearance of age" arguments. They cannot be
logically or scientifically disputed. But neither are they arguments that
cast doubt on the original scientific assessment of old age or of common
ancestry. It is an assumption of design ex nihilo which cannot really be
juxtaposed as a mutually exclusive alternative to a scientific explanation.
The basic assumption is that a human ancestor came into being in some
unknown way which had identical genetic structure as the chimp ancestor but
was yet biologically completely unrelated.
If one naively takes the common designer concept and tries to apply it to
the chromosome fusion data, it seems that there is no explanation, just a
stretch rationalization to fit an assumption. From a starting point of the
data of the chromosomes, one might infer a common designer from the common
elements of the other 22 chromosomes, but finding an inactive centromere in
one chromosome and some telomeres in the middle doesn't fit that picture.
Maybe one might deduce an apprentice designer did the human and got things
mixed up whereas a master designer did the chimp. Or the human was the
practice round. But one would be hard pressed to conclude a common designer
from that data point. If one starts from a common designer assumption, one
would never predict the occurrence of such a fused chromosome--maybe the
chromosomes would have fused but without the inactive centromeres or the
telomeres in the middle. So the common designer approach doesn't work well
as an explanation and is a stretch with a rationalization.
Saying that the common design option exists and therefore common ancestry
cannot be considered to be proven, is quite similar to saying that
appearance of age options exist and therefore old age determinations cannot
be considered to be proven. Both are technically correct. And both are quite
wrong.
Randy
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Received on Mon Jul 20 14:10:43 2009
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