Re: [asa] historical versus experimental sciences

Well said, George. Thank you.

Earlier this evening I was asked (off list) to respond to a question (on list):

"Dennis- could you give a short/quick response to this claim: Fused human chromosome #2 is not evidence of human evolution from apelike creature because it could be that the fusion happened after humans were created."

It would be very odd for this to be the case - that humans created ex nihilo would exhibit signs of a fusion that lines up precisely with what we see in separate chromosomes in chimpanzees.

The issue is not that there is a fusion - the issue is something called synteny - the same genes in the same relative order / spatial arrangement on chromosomes. There is no pressing need to organize genes into a specific order for function (with a few exceptions at a small-scale level). We can see very different chromosome arrangements in flies without obvious defect, for instance. Mice also exhibit quite a lot of variation in chromosomal structure in different populations.

Yet what we see when we compare humans and chimps is the same genes in the same relative places - across the entire genome. This is the real kicker - not the fusion issue. This genome-wide conservation of synteny makes perfect sense from a common descent point of view, but from a non-evolutionary Design point of view it would suggest that the Designer was constrained to use (or chose to use) a pattern that gives the appearance of descent.

One well-known major exception to conserved synteny between humans and chimps is of course human chromosome 2 - but here we see that upon closer inspection synteny is preserved, though a fusion has taken place. The fact that we see remnants of a centromere and telomeric sequences that line up with the chimp genome is just another example of conservation of synteny - except now we're talking about conserved synteny for once-but-now-non-functional sequences.

For those coming to Baylor I'll be going into all this in more detail (and with pretty pictures!).

The main antievolutionary approach to this kind of thing is to separate the evidence from its context of consilience and attack the pieces separately. Homology is just common design! Pseudogenes have function! Amino acids must be conserved for function! et cetera. It's rather like refuting each dot on a child's connect-the-dots picture by placing them onto a blank sheet and saying "look, no pattern!" The point is that the dots (representing our imperfect knowledge and the gaps in the evidence) still form a discernible pattern that directs further research to fill in the gaps. In 150 years we've found out that there is more detail that we thought between some of the dots, but the overall picture that Darwin proposed remains essentially unchanged.

see (some of you) soon.

dv

A lot of physicists & chemists could do their work without any reference to
the theoretical frameworks of relativity or quantum mechanics, so the
contrast with biology isn't all that dramatic. But this isn't the most
serious misunderstanding here. The real question should be whether or not
we're interested in finding any approximation to a comprehensive truth about
the physical world. If we are, large theories like relativity & quantum
mechanics are needed. & if our understanding is to include biological
phenomena and the history of life on earth, evolution with natural selection
as its primary mechanism is the best theory we currently have. Downplaying
its significance because a person can work on some limited class of
biological phenomena without referring to it shows ignorance of what science
is all about.

Shalom
George
http://home.roadrunner.com/~scitheologyglm

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Received on Thu Jul 30 00:35:47 2009