Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Just a hack writer, but … question

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Yesterday, another hack writer caught up with me, for an interview, and wanted to know: so why do you fight Darwinism … ?

Yuh, I know. Why bother fighting the huge Darwinist tax burden. Of course, Darwinism is false, but so? People’s careers are wrecked if they oppose it.

Among other things, her editor had demanded that I account for the fact that humans share 98% of our DNA with chimps.

I asked her a simple – and, to me, obvious – question: Let’s kidnap a guy off the subway in Toronto. Yes, that is a felony offence, but maybe we can manage the whole thing discreetly and get the charges dropped, if he agrees that it was all a private matter anyway …

(would help if he was a friend or relative – of course, we could, at worst, be charged with wasting police time …)

But now! We’ve got him! We will put a chimp from the local zoo of similar age beside him (securely buckled in, because we would not want anything bad to happen to our man).

If both are more than 30 years old, and are normal specimens, how many people will believe that they are 98% identical?

What woman, otherwise consigned to being a spinster, would marry the chimp if she didn’t get the man? After all, the chimp is supposedly 98% of a man.

Actually, the chimp isn’t a man at all. He belongs in the wilds, or a preserve, or a zoo somewhere. Whatever works. Every woman in the world knows this.

None are the least bit interested in the chimp – unless entertaining children by a visit to the zoo.

So, my question is, what is this 98% similarity thing based on, other than to discredit genetics?

Comments
lol Denyse, Marry a chimp, marry a chick... en. whats the diff? ;-)DATCG
April 1, 2010
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DATCG, thanks for reff. That makes a lot of sense. You see, I don't doubt that evolution happens, but it troubles me that so much popular folklore blatted at us from TV programs is just nonsense - and a bad reflection on our culture. Surely, no woman would marry a chimp rather than remain single. So I must know that the 98%/99% claim is bunk - or else that genetics is bunk. I mean, women settle for less if they can't get more, so ... you expect that they compromise a bit, except - on this point they never do, so far as I can tell. Now, all that said: it is easier - from the standpoint of practical reason - to assume that the 98%/99% claim is bunk. I know that genetics is NOT bunk. As a gardener, I know that genetics is - in most of what it can teach us - a useful science. The advantage of the 70% figure is that it gives me a reason to believe that common descent could have occurred. Thus, I can account for why humans and chimps share a lot of genomic characteristics, BUT no woman wants to marry the chimp. Even if the guy on the other bench is just someone kidnapped from the Toronto subway - someone's unmarried brother-in-law ... :) Hence the possible charge of wasting police time. (They were just trying to find a wife for him, and he knew darn well what they were doing ... = Lonely? Marry him ... or marry the chimp!)O'Leary
April 1, 2010
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Pssssssssssst... check that DNA chimp again! Try 70% or less in recent Nature article after results of Y-Chromosome full sequencing data set for a chimp. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7280/full/nature08700.html Surely, this has been a hot top here since it was published? One of the juicy quotes is... "Indeed, at 6 million years of separation, the difference in MSY gene content in chimpanzee and human is more comparable to the difference in autosomal gene content in chicken and human, at 310 million years of separation." Chuckles... so, how do Darwinist explain this fiasco?DATCG
March 31, 2010
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That hack writer needs to know that that 2% makes all the difference in why the chimp is a chimp and not a human being. Even if the kidnapped guy was a chump does not even cut it. :)CannuckianYankee
March 31, 2010
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