Did humans descend from other primates?

[McCulloch]

Man did not descend from the primates.

Did humans descend from other primates?
Are humans primates or should there be special biological taxonomy for humanity?
Please cite evidence.

[otseng]

And only creationists separate evolution into micro and macro. There is no difference, there is only evolution.

The terms were coined by Yuri Filipchenko. And I have not seen any evidence that he was a creationist.

Russian entomologist Yuri Filipchenko first coined the terms "macroevolution" and "microevolution" in 1927 in his German language work, "Variabilität und Variation".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroevolution

They, on their own, show common descent of all apes alive today to such certainty that it is perverse to deny it.

I would ask that you avoid the hyperbole and judgments. If I stated that it would be perverse to believe in evolution, I would surely be taken to task.

If we are to only go by what has been observed, then we can also rule out macroevolution. Macroevolution would only be an extrapolation of microevolution, not something that we can observe.

This statement is a falsehood, speciation has been directly observed in not only the lab but in nature...

See post above.

Once intelligence takes over from nature then harmful mutations may not be so effective in killing. Our compassion leads us to work to keep those with such defects alive long after they would have perished in nature. Diabetes(type 1)is a good example. By keeping diabetics alive through childhood and allowing them the ability to reproduce we perpetuate the genes that cause the disease.

Well, I'm supportive of being compassionate towards those with diseases. But, my point still stands that I have not seen evidence that natural selection will select out human genetic inheritable diseases.

[Grumpy]

otseng

And only creationists separate evolution into micro and macro. There is no difference, there is only evolution.

The terms were coined by Yuri Filipchenko. And I have not seen any evidence that he was a creationist.

He is, however, obsolete on this point(1927), evolution is not separable into micro or macro, that is just a subjective interpretation of the same effect. Evolution is changes in a population, whether the change is visible or not is simply dependent on which genes are affected. If by macroevolution one means speciation that is just the continuous collection of small changes, not a difference in kind, just in volume.

They, on their own, show common descent of all apes alive today to such certainty that it is perverse to deny it.

I would ask that you avoid the hyperbole and judgments. If I stated that it would be perverse to believe in evolution, I would surely be taken to task.

Someone standing in the morning sunshine would be perverse to deny the existence of the sun. The evidence for common descent in all primates is just as solid, one can only deny it due to either ignorance of those facts or intent. Your stories in the Bible do not and can not change the facts.

"Let me try to make crystal clear what is established beyond reasonable doubt, and what needs further study, about evolution. Evolution as a process that has always gone on in the history of the earth can be doubted only by those who are ignorant of the evidence or are resistant to evidence, owing to emotional blocks or to plain bigotry. By contrast, the mechanisms that bring evolution about certainly need study and clarification. There are no alternatives to evolution as history that can withstand critical examination. Yet we are constantly learning new and important facts about evolutionary mechanisms."
- Theodosius Dobzhansky "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution", American Biology Teacher vol. 35 (March 1973)

"It is time for students of the evolutionary process, especially those who have been misquoted and used by the creationists, to state clearly that evolution is a fact, not theory, and that what is at issue within biology are questions of details of the process and the relative importance of different mechanisms of evolution. It is a fact that the earth with liquid water, is more than 3.6 billion years old. It is a fact that cellular life has been around for at least half of that period and that organized multicellular life is at least 800 million years old. It is a fact that major life forms now on earth were not at all represented in the past. There were no birds or mammals 250 million years ago. It is a fact that major life forms of the past are no longer living. There used to be dinosaurs and Pithecanthropus, and there are none now. It is a fact that all living forms come from previous living forms. Therefore, all present forms of life arose from ancestral forms that were different. Birds arose from nonbirds and humans from nonhumans. No person who pretends to any understanding of the natural world can deny these facts any more than she or he can deny that the earth is round, rotates on its axis, and revolves around the sun."
- R. C. Lewontin "Evolution/Creation Debate: A Time for Truth" Bioscience 31, 559 (1981)

"In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact"--part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus the power of the creationist argument: evolution is "only" a theory and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is worse than a fact, and scientists can't even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): "Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science--that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was."
Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.
Moreover, "fact" doesn't mean "absolute certainty"; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us falsely for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Evolutionists have been very clear about this distinction of fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory--natural selection--to explain the mechanism of evolution."
Stephen J. Gould, " Evolution as Fact and Theory"; Discover, May 1981

I guess I just get tired of trying to argue with those who will not admit to the facts and who make claims without them. I was using the word perverse in it's intended context(even gave the definitions to avoid misunderstanding), not as a put down. If I offended I am sorry.

But what do you call flat refusal to see, hear or understand the facts in a forum that is supposedly for that purpose? You are entitled to your own beliefs, but not to your own facts.

Grumpy

[otseng]

From what I can gather from human evolutionary theory, mitochondrial "Eve" was not the only human female at that time. There was a population of humans (how much, nobody seems to know). But, what it means is that every single lineage of all other females went extinct. What can account for that?

You misunderstand the concept of mitochondrial Eve. She is the most recent female common ancestor of all humanity. That is all. None of the other lineages from her time had to become extinct. They just all eventually interbred with at least one of her direct descendants. Modern genetics does not predict a bottleneck of just one female, ever.

Mitochondrial DNA is only passed from mother to child.

"Because mtDNA is transmitted from mother to child (both male and female), it can be a useful tool in genealogical research into a person's maternal line."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_DNA

If other lineages other than Eve bred and did not die out, it would not be possible for their mitochontrial DNA to trace to Eve. It would rather be an odd piece of the puzzle that would not be able to fit into the mtEve pattern.

Let's take an example of two females - Eve and Fran. Eve names her children Eve and Everest. Fran names her children Fran and Francis. All subsequent descendents of Eve continue to name their children Eve and Everest. Same from Fran. Fran has children with Everest, so their children would be Fran and Francis. Eve has children with Francis, so their children would be Eve and Everest. There would be an unbroken female line from the first Eve to all other Eves and Everests. Likewise for the Fran line.

What you would expect after many generations is that there would be a population of a bunch of Eve, Everest, Fran, and Francis. But if after many generations, all you have is Eve and Everest, then it would need to be explained how did the Fran line die out. For human evolutionary theory, it would have to also explain how did all the other female lines die out.

What I believe to be the more parsimonious explanation is that there was no Fran (or any other females) to begin with and all originated from a single female.

[nygreenguy]

What you would expect after many generations is that there would be a population of a bunch of Eve, Everest, Fran, and Francis. But if after many generations, all you have is Eve and Everest, then it would need to be explained how did the Fran line die out. For human evolutionary theory, it would have to also explain how did all the other female lines die out.

What I believe to be the more parsimonious explanation is that there was no Fran (or any other females) to begin with and all originated from a single female.

All it takes for a line to die out is there to be either no children, or only males. If you only have a male, your maternal line ends.

[Abraxas]

From what I can gather from human evolutionary theory, mitochondrial "Eve" was not the only human female at that time. There was a population of humans (how much, nobody seems to know). But, what it means is that every single lineage of all other females went extinct. What can account for that?

You misunderstand the concept of mitochondrial Eve. She is the most recent female common ancestor of all humanity. That is all. None of the other lineages from her time had to become extinct. They just all eventually interbred with at least one of her direct descendants. Modern genetics does not predict a bottleneck of just one female, ever.

Mitochondrial DNA is only passed from mother to child.

"Because mtDNA is transmitted from mother to child (both male and female), it can be a useful tool in genealogical research into a person's maternal line."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_DNA

If other lineages other than Eve bred and did not die out, it would not be possible for their mitochontrial DNA to trace to Eve. It would rather be an odd piece of the puzzle that would not be able to fit into the mtEve pattern.

Let's take an example of two females - Eve and Fran. Eve names her children Eve and Everest. Fran names her children Fran and Francis. All subsequent descendents of Eve continue to name their children Eve and Everest. Same from Fran. Fran has children with Everest, so their children would be Fran and Francis. Eve has children with Francis, so their children would be Eve and Everest. There would be an unbroken female line from the first Eve to all other Eves and Everests. Likewise for the Fran line.

What you would expect after many generations is that there would be a population of a bunch of Eve, Everest, Fran, and Francis. But if after many generations, all you have is Eve and Everest, then it would need to be explained how did the Fran line die out. For human evolutionary theory, it would have to also explain how did all the other female lines die out.

What I believe to be the more parsimonious explanation is that there was no Fran (or any other females) to begin with and all originated from a single female.

Suppose Fran had only sons, or, rather, only her sons ever had children. Her sons then mated with the daughters of Eve. Because the mDNA is passed from the mother, and all the mothers in this situation are the daughters of Eve, none of Fran's mDNA gets passed on. There is no need for the line to die out, only for it to at some point not produce a breeding female in a generation.

There's no dilemma for me since one cannot even define what is a Home sapiens. (Yes, I'm taking this from the Ignostic playbook)

Frankly, the definition is irrelevant as your theory fails regardless of what it is.

If it is 200,000 years old or more that Homo Sapiens exist, then your predictions fail. If it is younger than 200,000 years, we have an extensive fossil record of the rise of Homo Sapiens, meaning your predictions fail. Anywhere in between, you fail because we end up with both a lengthy fossil record and older humans. No matter how you define it, your predictions do not hold making an ignostic position not tenable.

I'm not stating that currently there is more genetic diversity (though there could be). I'm saying that when the 8 people repopulated the world at the time of the flood, the females had more genetic diversity as compared to the males. This is because all the males were of Noah's line. The females were not of Noah's wife's line.

Fair enough, but what does this predict in measurable terms? How can we tell if the prediction is right?

Right, because evolution is unfalsifiable. Any lack of evidence or evidence against evolution doesn't matter.

Does it not seem strange that if humans evolved, that we are not able to find any fossil evidence of the common ancestor between man and chimps or any of the other great apes? That we cannot establish any clear evidence that there is a gradual progression of hominids to humans?

Because we have found a gradual progression of hominids increasingly related to humans, which is almost as good. Some of them may even be our ancestors.

[Goat]

From what I can gather from human evolutionary theory, mitochondrial "Eve" was not the only human female at that time. There was a population of humans (how much, nobody seems to know). But, what it means is that every single lineage of all other females went extinct. What can account for that?

You misunderstand the concept of mitochondrial Eve. She is the most recent female common ancestor of all humanity. That is all. None of the other lineages from her time had to become extinct. They just all eventually interbred with at least one of her direct descendants. Modern genetics does not predict a bottleneck of just one female, ever.

Mitochondrial DNA is only passed from mother to child.

"Because mtDNA is transmitted from mother to child (both male and female), it can be a useful tool in genealogical research into a person's maternal line."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_DNA

If other lineages other than Eve bred and did not die out, it would not be possible for their mitochontrial DNA to trace to Eve. It would rather be an odd piece of the puzzle that would not be able to fit into the mtEve pattern.

Let's take an example of two females - Eve and Fran. Eve names her children Eve and Everest. Fran names her children Fran and Francis. All subsequent descendents of Eve continue to name their children Eve and Everest. Same from Fran. Fran has children with Everest, so their children would be Fran and Francis. Eve has children with Francis, so their children would be Eve and Everest. There would be an unbroken female line from the first Eve to all other Eves and Everests. Likewise for the Fran line.

What you would expect after many generations is that there would be a population of a bunch of Eve, Everest, Fran, and Francis. But if after many generations, all you have is Eve and Everest, then it would need to be explained how did the Fran line die out. For human evolutionary theory, it would have to also explain how did all the other female lines die out.

What I believe to be the more parsimonious explanation is that there was no Fran (or any other females) to begin with and all originated from a single female.

That was explained, at least on several different times , in this very thread. What you don't have is this little thing known as 'evidence'.. and you can't explain why other chromosomes, and other genes have different 'last common ancestors' that have vastly different ages for it.


Using your 'flood model' and your creation model, how are you determining the dates of the 'last common ancestor'? Using your flood model and your creation model, how do you explain the differences in ages between the last common Y-adam and the mdna eve.

Using the flood model and the creation model, please explain the difference in age for the last common ancestor with the gene MCPH1, which regulate brain size.

[beety]

I believe that human is not from any other primates. I believe that god creates man in his own image and likeness therefore Human is came from God. the first man on earth was Adam and as stated in the bible his flesh and life is come from god.

[McCulloch]

I believe that human is not from any other primates. I believe that god creates man in his own image and likeness therefore Human is came from God. the first man on earth was Adam and as stated in the bible his flesh and life is come from god.

Thank you for adding your opinion on this matter. It is an opinion shared by other biblical literalists. However, this is a debate. Unsupported opinion has no weight or value in debate. Please provide us with the reasons why you hold this opinion. Surely you have reasons for your beliefs. How do you answer the evidence of biology that suggests that humans are one of the primates and that the primates have one common ancestor?

[otseng]

Yes, I would agree that we have observed speciation. But, it would be quite an extrapolation to show that this demonstrates evolution of (non-human) primates into humans. So, rather than placing the burden on me to disprove this, the burden is on those who claimed that this indeed has happened.

If I read you correctly, you are the one claiming that there is some sort of qualitative difference between "macroevolution" and "microevolution". I see only a quantitative difference - the amount of genetic change that has accumulated. There is no known biological mechanism which stops accumulation of genetic changes at some arbitrarily defined threshold (the species or genus or kind). We know that small changes can accumulate over a short time. We know that speciation can impose reproductive boundaries between two populations formerly of the same parent species. It follows that many small changes would then accumulate independently in each species over longer periods of time, leading to the pattern of genetic similarity we see today.

Which confirms my point. Macroevolution would be an extrapolation of microevolution. It is an inherently unobservable since it requires a long period of time.

As for "no known biological mechanism which stops accumulation of genetic changes", this can be demonstrated in the breeding of animals. Though we can produce a variety of animal breeds, there is no example that I've seen where any major novel morphological features have been produced. Hair length and color can change. Length of necks, legs, beaks, ears, etc can change. Features from different animals can be combined, but no new major features arises. So, there appears to be a limit to microevolutionary changes when we breed animals. And if there is a limit to artificial selection, why should we expect natural selection to be limitless?

With regard to the above - I meant what mechanisms prevent the accumulation of many small "microevolutionary" changes to from "macroevolutionary" change. Would you please briefly define these so we're on the same page?

What I mean by macroevolution is major novel morphological features between different species. "An example of macroevolution is the appearance of feathers during the evolution of birds from theropod dinosaurs."

http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/v ... 017#321017

On the contrary, I explained what distributions of ERVs (and genes in general) would be definitively at odds with common ancestry: While phylogeny is noisy, the sequences of many independent ERVs (and genes) independently point toward a single inferred ancestral tree. If surveyed genes or ERVs predicted a single tree no better than random data, this would be be in direct contradiction of the theory.

Are you saying that organisms that have similar morphological features and would also have totally different genome sequences would falsify your theory?

You suggested that analogous gene similarity might arise due to similarity of designed function.

I don't necessarily claim that, but I don't rule it out either.

If I follow this line of reasoning, should I consider the following a prediction of the creation model? Organisms with similar functions (e.g., bats and avians, whales and fish) should have very similar genes related to their shared function.

I do not make a claim about this either.

You have been invoking a designer, but you have not specified any of the tools used by the designer (or the genetic artifacts left by those tools which we might observe today).

It's not necessary to specify the tools used by a designer to infer a designer. I do not need to know the tools used by the sculptures of Mount Rushmore to infer that it was a product of intelligence rather than natural forces.

But this is impossible because we can't genetically sample extinct intermediate forms.

This is not entirely true, but I would agree that it is generally true. However, it is entirely possible that in the future we would have the genome mapped for all extant species. And then determine all the genetic changes necessary to go from one species to another.

Due to the same inability to genetically sample these fossil species, we will probably never have a definitive phylogeny for them.

I would agree with this.

Aha! You might exclaim. Pakicetus is not an ancestor of modern whales but it merely some relative. There is no set of transitional fossils for whales! This phylogenetic tree is drawn conservatively (without any direct ancestor-descendant relationships) to reflect our ignorance.

The graph is interesting and I could make some comments about it. But, let's restrict the discussion to human ancestry from the primates. What chart can you produce on the evolution of humans?

One last note on this subject: You suggest that these data would falsify your creation model, but it seems to me you are simply setting an impossibly high bar for the data. We can't give you the former without DNA that has long since degraded. We can't give you the latter to the certainty you desire because fossil evidence - while useful - cannot give the precision that genetic evidence does for extant species.

It might be high, but I don't think impossible.

Can you give falsification criteria for your model which do not invoke evolution? After all, maybe neither is correct.

I do not know of a third model. And no literature I've come across mentions any other explanation other than evolution or special creation.

Also bear in mind that evolution doesn't necessarily select for long life. Many diseases with genetic components (like some types of cancer) have late onset - typically near the end of human's reproductive window. These genes-of-interest are "immune" to natural selection because they don't penalize reproduction. They may cause death, but only after copies have already been passed to children. (And those copies won't affect the children until they've been passed to grandchildren...)

As you stated - "Mutations which reactivate pathogenesis are selected against (due to cancer, MS, etc.), but mutations which benefit the host will be selected for."

What evidence can be shown that harmful mutations are selected out in humans?

Finally, would you please clarify what you mean about neutral mutation? While natural selection doesn't act on neutral mutations, I'm not sure what you mean by its "failing to account" for them. What do you mean when you say, "there would be no mechanism to select them out"? Why do they need to be "selected out"? They are not errors against some Platonic template which must be corrected. They are simply new points in the fuzzy cloud of genomes we label 'human.'

I probably can't go much farther on this argument without knowing the percentage values of harmful, neutral, and beneficial sequences resulting from a mutated virus. So, I'll drop this argument until we know more about these percentages.

[otseng]

Evolution has abiogenesis as its starting point, which is untestable. Or if you believe in panspermia instead, that is also untestable.

All we need to show is it was possible, and that has been done several times over.

What has been done several times over?

Show that abiogenesis is possible.

Where has this been done?
Just a few places.. a list of references on the wiki article for abiogensis.

1. ^ Miller-Urey Experiment: Amino Acids & The Origins of Life on Earth

(deleted for brevity)

* Dedicated issue of Philosophical Transactions B on the Emergence of Life on the Early Earth freely available.

I'm not stating that there are no theories on how life arose. I'm stating that it is untestable. A positive test is being able to produce life from non-life. Was any of those on that extensive list able to accomplish this?