[_ Old Earth _] Are humans really apes?

[Dave Slayer]

Are humans really apes? Are we just an animal?

 

[lordkalvan]

Good question:

Source: http://shots.ikbis.com/image/149765/big ... skulls.jpg

 

[John]

No, Dave we are not apes and we are above every animal on this planet, just as God made us.

 

[Adullam]

Besides Clinton...whom do you have in mind?

 

[Crying Rock]

Are humans really apes?

No, even ToE types will testify to such.

 

[Barbarian]

Actually, we are apes. If you look at DNA, for example:

Notice that humans, australopithecines and chimpanzees are a clade with other apes as the outgroup.

BTW, Linnaeus, the creationist who first developed the present binomial classification of organisms, admitted that he should have put humans and apes in the same group. So it's not just DNA.

 

[Crying Rock]

Actually, we are apes. If you look at DNA, for example:

Notice that humans, australopithecines and chimpanzees are a clade with other apes as the outgroup.

Sure, anyone can define apes as including humans, but that doesn't mean humans evolved from anything prior to H. ergaster.

BTW, will you post the description that is supposed to go along with the image you posted.

I'm trying to figure out from where the DNA data for Australopithecus was derived.

Thanks.

 

[Barbarian]

Sure, anyone can define apes as including humans,

A cladogram is not a "definition." In this case, it's just a way of showing the most parsimonous way of related shared anatomical features (not DNA; sorry). But other than Australopithecines, you'd get the same cladogram with DNA. And since we've found a little dinosaur heme, it's not totally impossible that we will see some Australopithecine molecules eventually.

but that doesn't mean humans evolved from anything prior to H. ergaster.

That, and many, many other things do. It's not just anatomical and DNA evidence. It's the predicted fusion of human chromosomes where one human chromosome matches up with two ape chromosomes, right down to remains of telomeres and a centromere. At some point, it becomes perverse to deny it.

 

[Barbarian]

http://www.staffs.ac.uk/schools/science ... nchimp.JPG

 

[Crying Rock]

The Barbarian wrote:

And since we've found a little dinosaur heme, it's not totally impossible that we will see some Australopithecine molecules eventually.

And when, or if, we capture Australopithecus, H. habilis, H. rudolfensis, H. ergaster, H. erectus, or H. heidelbergensis DNA, then we'll be talking science, and not conjecture. Who would have expected that H.s.n. nDNA would be indiscernible from H.s.s. nDNA? Observation and conjecture are very different animals, to those with truly scientific interests.

Ask yourself this: are you seeking truth or defending a philosophical position (AKA dogma).

 

[Barbarian]

And when, or if, we capture Australopithecus, H. habilis, H. rudolfensis, H. ergaster, H. erectus, or H. heidelbergensis DNA, then we'll be talking science, and not conjecture.

Fortunately, there is a great deal of other evidence, which is now being found at an increasing rate, and the picture becomes clearer as we go.

Who would have expected that H.s.n. nDNA would be indiscernible from H.s.s. nDNA?

So far, you haven't shown us. Can you do that?

On November 16, 2006, Science Daily published an interview that suggested that Neanderthals and ancient humans probably did not interbreed. Edward M. Rubin, director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Joint Genome Institute (JGI), sequenced a fraction (0.00002) of genomic nuclear DNA (nDNA) from a 38,000-year-old Vindia Neanderthal femur bone. They calculated the common ancestor to be about 353,000 years ago, and a complete separation of the ancestors of the species about 188,000 years ago. Their results show the genomes of modern humans and Neanderthals are at least 99.5% identical, but despite this genetic similarity, and despite the two species having coexisted in the same geographic region for thousands of years, Rubin and his team did not find any evidence of any significant crossbreeding between the two. Rubin said, “While unable to definitively conclude that interbreeding between the two species of humans did not occur, analysis of the nuclear DNA from the Neanderthal suggests the low likelihood of it having occurred at any appreciable level.â€Â
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal

If it was "indiscernable", there wouldn't be any way to do the analysis. The differences are pretty much what we'd expect from a closely related species.

Chimps, Humans 96 Percent the Same, Gene Study Finds
Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News
August 31, 2005

Scientists have sequenced the genome of the chimpanzee and found that humans are 96 percent similar to the great ape species.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... genes.html

Observation and conjecture are very different animals , to those with truly scientific
interests.

You betcha. :yes

Ask yourself this: are you seeking truth or defending a philosophical position (AKA dogma).

Here's an easy way to test that:

If you ask a scientist why he thinks something is true, if he says (for example) "because professor X says so", it's a philosophical position. If he cites evidence, it's seeking truth.

 

[Crying Rock]

Crying Rock wrote:

Who would have expected that H.s.n. nDNA would be indiscernible from H.s.s. nDNA?

The Barbarian wrote:

So far, you haven't shown us. Can you do that?

Can you falsify Paabo's claim:

"…The Neanderthals are so closely related to us that they fall into our [genetic] variation," Professor Paabo said yesterday. In other words, it would be difficult to distinguish Neanderthal DNA from the DNA of a modern European, Asian or African…â€Â

 

[Barbarian]

It would be easy to verify the claim, simply by showing that there are some human populations that differ between each other by an equal or greater amount than humans vary from Neandertals.

That such evidence hasn't been offered, is an important clue.

And one still has to deal with the problem that Neandertal m-DNA differs from that of modern humans far more than any variation between groups of modern humans.

In order to aid in the analysis of the Neandertal genome, Dr. Pääbo has organized a consortium of researchers from around the world that plans to publish their results later this year. They will look at many genes of special interest in recent human evolution, such as FOXP2, which is involved in speech and language in modern humans, as well as genes such as the Tau locus and the microcephalin-1, implicated in brain aging and development, respectively. Variants of the latter genes found among present-day humans have been suggested to have come from Neandertals. The preliminary results suggest that Neandertals have contributed, at most, a very small fraction of the variation found in contemporary human populations.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 112731.htm

And then, there is this:

This is one of the enduring questions in human evolution as scientists explore the relationship of fossil groups, such as Neanderthals, with people alive today. Two recent papers describing the sequencing of Neanderthal nuclear DNA from fossil bone held promise for finally answering this question [1, 2].

However, the two studies came to very different conclusions regarding the ancestral role of Neanderthals. Jeffrey D. Wall and Sung K. Kim from University of California San Francisco now reveal in PLoS Genetics what they found when they reanalyzed the data from the two original studies.

Wall and Kim's reanalysis reveals inconsistencies between them and they believe that possible contamination with modern human DNA and/or a high rate of sequencing errors compromised the findings of one of the original Neanderthal DNA studies.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 160147.htm

Being somewhat Neandertal in my personal appearance (red hair, freckled arms, large nose, and a rather squatty, muscular body, not very good at throwing things) I'd be really pleased if it turned out my Northern European ancestors included Neandertals. But I think we have to be careful not to let our wishes get in the way of our reasoning.

 

[Crying Rock]

Let's tie these two discussions together:

viewtopic.php?f=19&t=36479&start=75

No use duplicating our arguments.