How can we assert the great American novel The Right Stuff has near 100% sequence similarity with Mirriam Webster’s Dictionary? Simple, take the words in the dictionary and find identical words in the novel, and you’ll find the spelling is 100% identical in most cases! Would you then use such an illegitimate method to argue humans share a close genetic identity with fish. Apparently Darwinists are quite willing to do exactly that.
Consider this recent paper: The African coelacanth genome provides insights into tetrapod evolution which concludes:
Through a phylogenomic analysis, we conclude that the lungfish, and not the coelacanth, is the closest living relative of tetrapods.
The paper goes on and on about how closely related we are based on molecular data. Ok here is the problem, lungfish have genome sizes that are up to 133 giga base pairs whereas humans have a genome size of around 3.5 giga bases pairs. At best then, based purely on genome sizes we could say humans only have around a 3% identity with the lungfish. 😯
How then can Darwinists say we are so closely related to lungfish? The same way I could assert the novel The Right Stuff is almost 100% related to a dictionary. At some level the comparison is utterly bogus because snipping sequences from one creature out of context and aligning it with other sequences in another creature gives a false impression of similarity. Aligning sequences isn’t wrong in-and-of-itself, but the inferences we make have to take the degree of aligning needed into account. That obviously isn’t being done!
That said, since the time of Linnaeus, creationist have asserted common descent from a conceptual (not physical) ancestor, hence it is proper to say we share more similarity with primates than with fish. No need to run away from the chimp/human similarity. That was a creationist observation, not a Darwinist one…
We can even see that we reasonably “descend” from mammals or some vertebrate, but it looks very forced to argue we descended from fish. The molecular data accord with primates descending from primates, mammals from mammals, etc. But it doesn’t accord well with birds and mammals descending from fish (3% identity at best between lungfish and humans!).
Nevertheless these fabricated evolutionary stories do give us compelling and entertaining origin myths:
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/
HT: Walter ReMine for the dictionary idea