This just in: We are 99.5% gorilla …
| March 7, 2012 | Posted by News under Genetics, Human evolution, News |
Well, we must be. From “What Have We Got in Common With a Gorilla? Insight Into Human Evolution from Gorilla Genome Sequence” (ScienceDaily, Mar. 7, 2012), we learn,
Researchers have just completed the genome sequence for the gorilla — the last genus of the living great apes to have its genome decoded. While confirming that our closest relative is the chimpanzee, the team show that much of the human genome more closely resembles the gorilla than it does the chimpanzee genome.
Before we were 99% chimpanzee, so … Hey, wait a minute … Don’t sign anything …
46 Responses to This just in: We are 99.5% gorilla …
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Hmm, seems they inadvertently left a few notes out of the article:
First, it has now been revealed that chimps are not nearly as identical in their DNA sequences to humans as was once thought (and still widely believed);
moreover, what was once thought to be 98.8% identical gene sequences similarity, for protein coding portion of the genome, is now found to be only 86%-89% identical.
Second, neo-Darwinists simply have not ‘scientifically’ demonstrated their mechanism for their materialistic conjecture:
OT:
Who wants to stake a bet on how long these numbers hold and whether or not they are accurate 10 years from now?
I mean, come on, gorillas are even less human like than chimps and we’re supposed to believe these numbers are accurate?
Not buyin’ it.
Two things:
1. The article suggests that this discovery will upend the primate tree of life and require some reshuffling of positions. But weren’t we being told that DNA evidence confirms prior tree of life assignments, rather than requiring changes?
2. More importantly, the whole business of declaring how similar we are to chimpanzes or gorillas or any other creature based on DNA sequencing is intellectually incompetent. DNA is incredible and an astounding example of complex specified information in its own right. But it does not even come close to determining who we are. There is a tremendous amount of information outside of DNA that determines what part of DNA is accessed, when it is accessed, how often it is accessed, what happens to the RNA after the transcription, what happens to proteins after they are built, and on and on. As was mentioned by someone on another thread (ba77?), DNA is a “parts list.” Perhaps it is more than that, but, nevertheless, it is an instructive analogy.
Claiming that because my DNA is similar to a chimp’s DNA I am therefore similar to a chimp is as intellectually obtuse as claiming that my house must be similar to your house because we both got our materials at the Home Depot. And I’m setting aside for a moment the fact that the % claims of similar DNA have historically overstated the numbers, because even if our DNA and chimp DNA were absolutely identical in every nucleotide it would not mean that we are identical. There is a whole overlay of controlling information that is not contained in DNA.
You want to know the difference between a chimp and a human? Don’t gaze at a printout of nucleotides; go out and do some observations. Go visit a chimp library, or a chimp factory, or a chimp computer software lab . . . Oh, no, wait. Well, then, go read Shakespeare, or listen to Chopin, or look at some of DaVinci’s works. Sorry to upset the traditional storyline, but the chimp isn’t 99% of the way there, or 95% of the way there, or any other meaningful percent of the way there to being human. Despite all the concerted efforts to prove for the past couple of centuries that we are on some kind of continuum, the fact remains that the separation between us and other creatures is not just one of degree, it is of kind.
Any observation of similarity in DNA simply demonstrates that the overall difference isn’t in the DNA.
Agreed. I think the evidence points not to common descent, but to a common Designer!
Well put Eric!
And yet how many times has the claim been made that the mythical 99% genetic similarity number, that has been kicked around for years, proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that man evolved from apes? Never mind that the number is now known to be fictitious, and never mind that Darwinists have never actually demonstrated that their mechanism, of random variation and natural selection, can ‘randomly’ generate even a single functional protein, much less have the neo-Darwinists actually demonstrated that their mechanism can transform anything like a monkey into a human. Shoot, as referenced before, the Darwinian mechanism can’t even fix a single beneficial mutation into fruit flies after decades of trying! Darwinism is simply given a free pass by neo-Darwinists as far as rigorous proof is concerned. Moreover on many internet sites, such as PT and PZ Myers blog, many neo-Darwinists have become the feces flinging monkeys they claim we came from. A person who honestly questions the claims of Darwinism and demands real proof that what is said can be done by Darwinist actually can be done in the real world is insulted, ridiculed and treated to all sorts of deceptive tactics of rhetoric devised to camouflage the fact that there is no real evidence.
Two things:
1. Does anyone know whether a chimp/human comparison has been done actually lining up the whole of DNA? I realize this would be a challenge, but it seems a lab with high performance computers should have the compute capability to do it. What I’m driving at is that many, perhaps most, of the comparisons have been done (i) using only part of the DNA, (ii) not taking into account larger positional context.
By (ii) I mean that if we find sequence x in one place in chimp DNA and sequence x in another place in human DNA it has historically been considered that the two sequences “match up” and are counted as being part of the similarity. While this idea makes some sense and cannot be dismissed out of hand, it is based on the old and incorrect idea that the genome is simply transcribed 1 for 1 and that the only important thing is the nucleotide sequence. We now know that not only is the sequence important, but that the positioning of the sequence within the larger DNA, the surrounding material, the 3-d structure of the molecule, proximity to certain triggering signals, etc. all influence if, how, and when the particular sequence is expressed. Thus, having an identical sequence x show up in two different contexts does not necessarily mean they are identical. It is somewhat analogous to taking War and Peace and Doctor Zhivago and arguing that because most of the words that show up in the one book also show up in the other, the books are, say, 90% identical. Like a book, DNA is not just a collection of independent sequences. The placement, order and context are important.
Anyway, just wondering if there have been any studies that analyze the whole of chimp and human DNA as aligned, not just comparing selected sequences to see if similar sequences are to be found.
2. There is certainly more I have to learn about the specific chimp-human comparisons, but my understanding is that there are some interesting, indeed striking, similarities in some cases, whether in specific sequences or in larger DNA structures. I think we need to be careful not to dismiss this evidence too quickly. Indeed, we should probably acknowledge that in some cases these similarities are consistent with the idea of descent with modification.
I fully agree that the source of the modification is where ID comes into play and that the idea of mutations and natural variations turning a monkey into a man (so to speak) is preposterous. That said, some of the genetic similarities are interesting and deserve thoughful consideration. Yes, it could be that we are looking at design re-used. Yes, it could be that descent occurred, but was guided. But these are also speculations. The fact is that some similarities are there and they are interesting. Perhaps at this point that is all we can say: they are interesting.
Guys, did you read the article? Most human sequences are more closely related to chimp sequences (we already knew that), some are more closely related to Gorilla sequences (we actually already knew that too, the headline is the percentage showing this pattern).
That’s down to incomplete lineage sorting, a very well chracterised phenomenon that can make gene trees diverge from species trees, but certainly isn’t going to “upend the primate tree of life”.
Eric-
1- I have been asking and have been told that I basically have no right to ask for such a thing- that is there isn’t a complete side-by-each comparison of the two genomes
However, and I believe bornagain77 has linked to it in the recent past,there is Genome-Wide DNA Alignment Similarity (Identity) for 40,000 Chimpanzee DNA Sequences Queried against the Human Genome is 86–89%
2- Given that most proteins are for every day stuff- maintenance and survival- I would expect all animals to have some level of similarity
Also having a knuckle-walker evolving into an upright biped may have the feasibilty of a computer virus evolving into an app. We just don’t know if changes to a genome can account for all the other changes that are required.
Apologies, wd400. I was referring to this version of the report:
http://news.nationalgeographic.....n-science/
Yes, yes, the authors go on to assure us that this doesn’t upset the “overall view of evolution” whatever that may mean. But they do acknowledge “It means within each branch [i.e., primate branch] things can happen. We can’t just conform to a simple tree on a gene-by-gene basis.”
As I said, interesting stuff. But all the talk of similarity, relatedness, closest relative, etc. is an interpretive gloss put on the DNA comparisons that really doesn’t mean much substantively.
As I said, interesting stuff. But all the talk of similarity, relatedness, closest relative, etc. is an interpretive gloss put on the DNA comparisons that really doesn’t mean much substantively.
Well, no, the magic number of 98.5 or 97% identity doesn’t mean much. But the DNA evidence makes the evolutionary history of these species clear and there’s nothing “interpretive” about that.
wd400 you state:
Okie Dokie wd400 you seem to have all this evolutionary relationship stuff figured out from genetic sequences and I guess you are also certain this proves that man evolved from apes by neo-Darwinian means, but I have one nagging question right off the top of my head since genetic similarity carries such weight,,, exactly where do we stick kangaroos in the line leading up to humans???
BA,
Kanagaroos aren’t on the “line” leading to humans (the focus on that one narrow line in the primate tree it itself a silly mistake many people make)
That article is talking about conservation of gene order (not gene sequence) which is turns out it strong among mammals. Still no upending of trees required.
Of related note:
Here is a professor of paleoanthropology openly admitting that genuine problems exist in the Darwinian story of human origins.,, All I can say is that he must be tenured!
In Part 2 he is frank in admitting the problems that genetic comparisons are presenting to the ‘simple’ story of human evolution.
Dr. Fazale Rana commented, after watching the preceding video, that it almost seemed like Dr. Wood took a page out of his ‘Who Was Adam’? book;
Related notes:
Here is a paper which, though technical, shows that the modern genetic evidence we now have actually supports Adam and Eve. Moreover, the evidence it presents from the latest genetic research is completely inexplicable to neo-Darwinism, i.e. neo-Darwinism, once again, completely falls apart upon rigid scrutiny; (and although I don’t agree with the extreme 6000 year Young Earth model used as a starting presumption in the paper for deriving the graphs, the model, none-the-less, can be amended quite comfortably to a longer time period. Which I, personally, think provides a much more ‘comfortable’ fit to the overall body of evidence)
CMI has a excellent video of the preceding paper by Dr. Carter, that makes the technical aspects of the paper much easier to understand;
Moreover this genetic evidence for ‘Adam and Eve’, elucidated by Dr. Carter, is corroborated by several other lines of genetic evidence:
No, the DNA does not make the evolutionary history clear. The DNA comparisons of similarities show that there are similarities. Period. That is all. Everything beyond that about an alleged evolutionary history is entirely interpretive.
This is particularly the case in light of the following known facts (among others):
- There is no known detail — not even the slightest inkling — of what particular changes in DNA sequences would do in the alleged ancestral organism (let’s call it a “chimp” just for simplicity’s sake).
- It is not clear that the DNA changes would in fact make a chimp into a human. There is no sound theory for explaining how it is that the small amount of difference (if we take the Darwinist storyline at its word that there is 97+% of similarity) in the DNA can have such profound effects in the ultimate organism.
- It is known that there is a whole other level (multiple levels, actually) of information above DNA that controls how DNA is expressed. Indeed, researchers have already demonstrated that similar genes in humans and other primates can have very different expression.
No. Running comparative DNA tests to determine similarities will tell us only about DNA similarities. Everything beyond that is a speculative storyline.
wd400, that’s the whole problem with Darwinian thinking, no matter what the genetic evidence says it will never uproot Darwin’s tree of life in your imagination. Unfortunately for you, others no so committed to a dogmatic point of view, see the genetic evidence now ‘pouring out’ very differently:
I would like to point out that this, ‘annihilation’ of Darwin’s genetic tree of life, article came out on the very day that Dr. Hillis, a self-proclaimed ‘world leading expert’ on the genetic tree of life, testified before the Texas State Board Of Education that the genetic tree of life overwhelmingly confirmed gradual Darwinian evolution. One could almost argue it was ‘Intelligently Designed’ for him to exposed as a fraud on that particular day of his testimony instead of just any other day of the year.
Here is another article, written by a leading researcher in the world mind you, that states the true pattern found for life, from comparative genetic evidence:
Since evolutionists continually misrepresent the true state of the evidence for molecular sequences, here are several more comments and articles, by leading experts, on the incongruence of molecular sequences to Darwin’s theory:
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1S5wXsukzkauD5YQLkQYuIMGL25I4fJrOUzJhONvBXe4
As well, completely contrary to evolutionary thought, this following article and video shows that the ‘same exact genes’ in different species have actually been shown to produce ‘completely different’ body structures:
If and only if DNA was destiny, but we know it isn’t
Eric,
I’m not talking about similarity – I’m talking about inferring the pattern of speciation that gave rise to humans, chimps and gorillas. We can use DNA sequences to reconstruct that history .
BA,
That’s just silly, you’re talking about studies on trying to recreate the patterns at the very base of the tree of all life. We are talking about recovering signal from the last 10 million years
Joe,
No. What DNA mainly is is history, and the history of these genomes is enough for us to infer quite a lot about the history of these species.
So biology isn’t about science, it’s about history?
What if no amount of genetic change can account for all the other changes required?
So perhaps if you assume a history you can use DNA to weave your tale-
How much of the genome is involved with development and what part is involved with daily activities? And in which does your “history” reside- developmental or daily?
Biology is a science. One of the things we can do with it is infer something about the history of lineages/populations/species.
What if no amount of genetic change can account for all the other changes required?
Well, that would be a very bold claim which someone would need some evidence for, wouldn’t it?
How much of the genome is involved with development and what part is involved with daily activities? And in which does your “history” reside- developmental or daily?
Every base has a history. About 90% of the genome is junk, it’s not really possible to divide the rest of it into “development” and “day to day” sections.
wd400, you state:
Really??
Well wd400 seems you are either completely unaware of the the severe problems with this line of evidence or you are being deliberately misleading;
Further note as to how much unwarranted trust you seem to placed into this ‘cherry picked’ genetic similarity evidence:
And regardless of what you believe, the truth is that the similarity between chimps and humans is far larger than what you imagine it to be:
Moreover as has been repeatedly pointed out to you wd400, this similarity, even if it weren’t as screwed up as it is, still does nothing to scientifically prove that the similarity is arrived at by ‘random’ neo-Darwinian processes.,, But that would require you to actually get ‘scientific’ instead of just telling stories. Joe can school you on that!
wd400 you state:
Oh yeah no dogmatism here!,,, Care to show us the studies in which 90% of the genome has been removed with no ill effect???
This is getting a bit silly. Woesse is specifically talking finding the root of tree of life. And gene-tree species-tree incongruence doesn’t meant we can’t find a species tree – the gorilla genome being an example of exactly that!
I said to start with that “magic number” of nucleotide identity is meaningless (Casey Lusking doesn’t seem to get this, so is on some sort of mad scramble to find a lower magic number, so far as I can tell). But I’ve not been talking about similarity at any stage in this conversation so why you are I can’t imagine.
And no, there is no dogmatism in saying that ~90% of the genome is junk. That’s a pretty average estimate. Add up the viruses, broken transposons, psuedogenes and non-conserved intergenic space and that’s about what you’ll get. There is also the genetic load argument which makes it clear most of the genome can’t be essential. If you evidence that much more than 10% of the genome is useful I’ll happily bump my estimate up to suit.
wd400, you say that 90% of the genome is useless junk. OK PROVE IT!!! Show the studies in which 90% of the genome has been removed. Tell you what I’ll save you the trouble:
Hmm wd400, once again you are either completely unaware of the facts or are being severely misleading, my bet is on the later!!!
Notes:
But hey wd400, let’s cut to the chase and why don’t you actually provide substantiating evidence for neo-Darwinism instead of playing stupid games?
BA,
If you keep reading “news” from one source you are always going to get a slanted view about reality. Of course there are a few cases in which pseudogenes, viruses and transposable elements have been repurposed into something helpful – but that doesn’t explain why there are millions of copies of them which aren’t modified into other roles.
And I’m not playing stupid games, I’m supporting one very small point – the result that ~15% of genes in the human genome are more closely related to gorilla genes than chimp genes doesn’t undercut the fact humans and chimps share a recent common ancestor (more recent, in fact, than the human-chimp-gorilla ancestor)
wd400, I think more than enough evidence has been presented severely undermining your claim to ’90%’ junk DNA, indeed undermining your very credibility to being forthright and honest with the evidence in the first place!,,, whether you agree or not I really don’t care! But to move on, you now claim, as a ‘fact’, that ‘humans and chimps share a recent common ancestor’,,, all from supposed genetic similarity evidence which you have not established to any compelling degree, Yet I have already listed, in post #1, studies that have severely undercut the entire similarity line of reasoning. But what the hey it’s all you got to work with so I guess your going to keep repeating the same inconsequential stuff hoping that anything sticks. But let’s get down to some nitty gritty experimental evidence and let’s see what the all mighty power of neo-Darwinism can do when put to the test shall we wd4000? I mean you really want to show us IDiots what neo-Darwinism can do don’t you??? So let’s look at actual empirics!!!
Where’s the substantiating evidence for neo-Darwinism?
Four decades worth of lab work is surveyed here:
Michael Behe talks about the preceding paper in this following podcast:
How about the oft cited example for neo-Darwinism of antibiotic resistance?
That doesn’t seem to be helping! How about we look really, really, close at very sensitive growth rates and see if we can catch almighty evolution in action???
Shoot that doesn’t seem to be helping either! Perhaps we just got to give the almighty power of neo-Darwinism ‘room to breathe’? How about we ‘open the floodgates’ to the almighty power of Darwinian Evolution and look at Lenski’s Long Term Evolution Experiment and see what we can find after 50,000 generations, which is equivalent to somewhere around 1,000,000 years of human evolution???
Now that just can’t be right!! Man we should really start to be seeing some neo-Darwinian fireworks by 50,000 generations!?! Hey I know what we can do! How about we see what happened when the ‘top five’ mutations from Lenski’s experiment were combined??? Surely now the Darwinian magic will start flowing!!!
Now something is going terribly wrong here!!! Tell you what, let’s just forget trying to observe evolution in the lab, I mean it really is kind of cramped in the lab you know, and now let’s REALLY open the floodgates and let’s see what the almighty power of neo-Darwinian evolution can do with the ENTIRE WORLD at its disposal??? Surely now almighty neo-Darwinian evolution will flex its awesomely powerful muscles and forever make those IDiots, who believe in Intelligent Design, cower in terror!!!
Now, there is something terribly wrong here! After looking high and low and everywhere in between, we can’t seem to find the almighty power of neo-Darwinism anywhere!! Shoot we can’t even find ANY power of neo-Darwinism whatsoever!!! It is as if the whole neo-Darwinian theory, relentlessly sold to the general public as it was the gospel truth, is nothing but a big fat lie!!!
====
As I’ve said repeatedly, similarity is a red herring. We can use pop. gen. to infer species trees from gene trees even when they are (as expected) incongruous.
As to the rest of the Gish Gallop, I’m not engaging in any of that because (a) it’s not what I’m talking about (b) it’s evident you don’t understand much of it (c) that many exclamation marks is really not created the impression of someone who is doing any thinking between the typing and the linking.
Wow, lots of comments, which I haven’t fully waded through, but this last one #27 caught my eye.
“We can use pop. gen. to infer species trees from gene trees even when they are (as expected) incongruous.”
Good, so now we acknowledge that we are “inferring.” Just earlier today we were told that this was all very clear from the DNA itself and that there was nothing “interpretive” about it. This is good. We’re making progress.
I have to laugh, though, at the idea that we should expect species trees and gene trees to be incongruous. Go back and read the literature from 10 years ago. That was absolutely not the storyline then. No, genetics was supposed to be the great confirmer of the traditional tree of life and there are still lots of folks clinging to that storyline even today. So, no, you don’t get to now do a 180 degree turn and claim that incongruity is evidence for the evolutionary narrative because that is what was “expected.” Hogwash. It was absolutely not expected or predicted by evolutionary theory.
If it is expected now, it is only because we have more experience and now realize that things are in fact quite different from what evolutionary theory was misleading us to expect.
Eric, the effect of incomplete lineage sorting has been known for a very long time (certainly longer than 10 years), and it is not a problem that prohibits the reconstruction of the history of the human/chimp/gorilla lineages. The fact that we observe more or less exactly the amount of incongruence that is expected in an evolutionar scenario further strengthens the theory.
Maybe you could have a look at this article from BioLogos? What are your thoughts on this?
Go back and read the literature from 10 years ago. That was absolutely not the storyline then
why don’t we go back 25 years, to when Incomplete lineage sorting was a “well known” problem. Moreoever, the point is that based on what we know about population genetics you expect to see unsorted lineages quite a long time after speciation (or, indeed, after more ancient but rapid bursts of speciation).
wd400, after my post in #26, laying out the fact that you have no empirical evidence, you state;
Well no wd400, contrary to what you say, (a) it has everything to do with what you and every other neo-Darwinists claims can happen (b) The evidence I presented doesn’t need to be ‘understood’ by some elite neo-Darwinists like you but it needs to be countermanded with some extraordinary proof, (c) you do not respond to any of it, not because you think ill of my ‘thinking’, but because you have ZERO empirical evidence to offer in response to the crushing evidence.
And that is the whole point wd400! You are a religious materialistic dogmatist trying to highjack science without ever paying the price that science requires for proof. Namely providing actual empirical evidence to justify your outlandish claims!!!
Where did I say I was a neo-darwinist?
wd400 you ask;
What you are not a neo-Darwinist? Well what exactly do you believe? Do you believe that purely material processes can generate transcendent information? If not why in blue blazes are you defending your position? Please do elaborate your beliefs.
notes:
Well, in this thread all I’ve said is that humans and chimps share a common ancestor, as to humans, chimps and gorillas. And the junk DNA stuff, which I probably shouldn’t have been drawn into.
“Transcended information” sounds quite a lot like quantum mysticism, as does the text in your “notes”. So I’m not sure I believe it exists, let alone know where it comes from.
And no, I wouldn’t describe myself as a neo-darwinist
What if no amount of genetic change can account for all the other changes required?
Actually the people saying that changes to the genome can account for all the other changes are making the unsupportable bold claim.
IOW you have it all backwards.
So wd400, if you are not even sure ‘transcendent information’ exists (even though you just wrote a paragraph of transcendent information) then that would safely put you in the neo-Darwinian camp now wouldn’t it?!?
as well wd400 you say ‘quantum mysticism’ as if quantum mechanics is some kind of weird pseudo-science like neo-Darwinism is. Yet far from a ‘mystical’ pseudo-science, quantum mechanics has far more predictive power than any other foundational description of reality to date (especially exceeding the predictive power of General Relativity). In fact the foundation of quantum mechanics within science is so solid that researchers were able to bring forth this following proof;
Now wd400 this is completely unheard of in science as far as I know. i.e. That a mathematical description of reality would advance to the point that one can actually perform a experiment showing that your current theory will not be exceeded in predictive power by another theory is simply unprecedented in science!
Moreover as to establishing the ‘non-mystical’ reality of quantum mechanics:
It is important to note that the following experiment actually encoded information into a photon while it was in its quantum wave state, thus destroying the notion, held by many, that the wave function was not ‘physically real’ but was merely ‘abstract’. i.e. How can information possibly be encoded into something that is not physically real but merely abstract?
The following paper mathematically corroborated the preceding experiment and cleaned up some pretty nasty probabilistic incongruities that arose from a purely statistical interpretation, i.e. it seems that stacking a ‘random infinity’, (parallel universes to explain quantum wave collapse), on top of another ‘random infinity’, to explain quantum entanglement, leads to irreconcilable mathematical absurdities within quantum mechanics:
as well, as long as we are on the subject of quantum mechanics:
Preceding quote taken from this following video;
Moreover, the argument for God from consciousness can be framed like this:
Music and verse:
Actually the people saying that changes to the genome can account for all the other changes are making the unsupportable bold claim.
The difference between humans/gorillas/chimps seem to be of an acceptable order for evolutionary processes.
@ Indium,
Your link isn’t working for some reson. At least not for me.
Sonfaro, I am sorry!
Next try: Link
This seems to work in the preview at least.
Indium,
That paper came out in 1999/ 2000, well before the chimp genome was published- meaning well before we could get a handle on the real % of genetic variance.
What happens if that difference reaches 10%, or more?
Also there still needs to be a connection from the genetic changes to the anatomical and physiological changes.
Darwinists need to realize that the genetic “evidence” is only as good as how far you’re willing to interpret & extrapolate. So what if humans have genetic similarity to chimps & apes? On what grounds do you draw arrows to connect them? And what about the layers upon layers of “epigenetic” information that control which genes to express, when and where, and how often, let alone what happens to a protein and where it would go. Exaggerating percentages of similarity between humans and primates proves nothing (except for the speculative swordmanship of Darwinists).
Joe, yes 10% difference would need a different explation. But that is not observed.
Indium, thanks for the link to the paper. I don’t believe the paper says what you may think it says about what we have been discussing, namely demonstrating an evolutionary history.
For one thing, the authors assume that humans and chimps are related and then use that assumption to calculate the rate of mutation. In other words, the cause-effect chain is precisely backwards of what we are discussing here.
Second, they looked at pseudogenes, because pseudogenes, in the Darwinian storyline, are thought to be functionless. Yet we now know that many pseudogenes do indeed have function.
Finally, even with all that they acknowledge that:
In other words, the mutation rates only make sense if they further assume that “each additional mutation leads to a larger decrease in relative fitness,” which they later acknowledge isn’t water tight, but politely offer that “the results presented here indicate that some form of positive epistasis among deleterious mutations is likely.”
So unfortunately I can’t be too excited about this paper offering much in the way of evidence of an evolutionary relationship or history. There are lots of other papers in the same category.
—–
That said, as I said above, these are interesting questions and there is some interesting data that deserves attention, including by critics of traditional evolutionary theory. ID does not object to common descent and some ID proponents feel that there is decent evidence for an ape-to-human scenario. Others are much more skeptical of the evidence.
Personally, I don’t have a philosophical or theological stake in either outcome so I am purely interested from a scientific standpoint (just like most ID proponents) and am open to being convinced if the evidence is there. I’m not convinced yet, partly because so often when I look at the evidence people put forth (like the paper you cited), on closer inspection it either doesn’t address the issue directly or simply assumes it away.
Thus all I can confidently say for now, as I said above, is it is interesting.
How do you know?
Read the article I linked to in comment 9-
I know it is a creation website but if they are right then some evo will have to step up and either try to refute it or explain it (away).