Who Are We Super-Monkeys or Descendants of the Gods?
(This is taken (a full chapter) from an as yet unpublished manuscript with the working title of Alien Dawn)
Ever since the 1960s our civilization has been making quantum leaps in the technological arena. With robotocs and automation threatenting human identity the question is getting more serious with each passing decade.
We have spacecraft exploring the solar system; personal computers with more power than the mainframes had back then; cell phones that fit in a pocket; and personal computers that give us access to a galaxy of information.
Our anestors In essence we are going through an accelerated period, a technological revolution and great leap forward. Who can predict what is coming next?
That brings up the other branch of science and technology that we have been pursuing with equal vigor and haste. What is that? Biology and the fields of DNA research and bioengineering.
After Sir Francis Crick and James Watson identified the shape of DNA in 1950, advances in genetic research accelerated. By late last century the deciphering of the full human genome was undertaken.
In retrospect, it turns out that manned, space exploration is the hard problem and biotechnology advances, by comparison, have been relatively easy. Well, easy after the pioneers, like Crick, made key discoveries.
Geneticists have achieved results in bioengineering that would have been considered pure science fiction only 50 years ago. People can be cloned today; artificial transgenic creatures have been created in labs; hybrid human-ape creatures could be brought to life in genetic labs right now.
Creating human hybrids from extraterrestrial DNA and a primate species would have been child’s play to an advanced alien race. In fact we could easily seed microorganisms on the planets of our solar system at this early point in our space exploration program. If we as a race last long enough we could terraform Mars.
The ancient alien progenitors of the alien dawn would have had a very long term program that extended from terraforming to creating hybrids. In fact, we can nearly do that now after just 60 years of rapid development of our genetic knowledge and technologies.
What would possible for an ET race only 10,000 years more advanced? We cannot even imagine.
However, in the headlong rush forward we may have overlooked some important details. There are dozens upon dozens of puzzling enigmas related to DNA -- and the human-plant-animal genome -- that are being ignored.
The mainstream, science press has given the public an absurdly, oversimplified portrait of DNA. In addition, what the meaning and import of the discoveries in the critical biotechnology field really are, has hardly been articulated.
We, in the general public, also seem oblivious to the fact that our very Identity as a Race is being challenged. On the one hand science is claiming we are no more than super-apes who emerged through a series of random mutations.
On the other hand, the traditional view as embodied in various religions, is that we humans are spiritual beings inhabiting physical forms. One view is strictly material and based upon the theory of evolution; the other is spiritual and based upon religious traditions.
The above, represents the most fundamental division in our modern social psychology.
Given the above, I had good reason to title this chapter, ‘Who Are We’?
The issue is being hotly contested, and more intensely so, with each passing month and year. Many people have adopted hard, uncompromising positions that fight for the supremacy of their views like politicians.
In truth, the human identity is very much up for grabs and how the societal conflicts, now boiling over are resolved, will determine our future. The foregoing is very sobering. It demands that we delve into the matter with an open mind and mobilize as much objectivity as we can.
Over the course of the previous few chapters we delved into several mysterious races. In the course of examining the identity of the elongated skulls they possessed, I presented a number of basic genetic facts.
Those facts concerned mtDNA and the ABO blood groups. At this point we must delve deeper into the human genome to attempt to answer the question this chapter raises.
Evolutionists never seem to tire of pointing out just how much DNA we share with chimpanzees. The notion is routinely broadcast on science and biology blogs and picked up by the mass media. (Image)
You cannot have lived in modern society without seeing that sketch. Looks convincing until you examine the details such as the skull comparisons shown above
However, these same people never explain why we - in our short existence as a species - set foot on the moon and apes never did. After all they’ve had millions of years to evolve.
But rather than explore and migrate out of Africa they never left their rather small jungle habitats. Apes and monkeys have displayed the same behaviors, and occupied the same habitats for tens of millions of years without change.
Apparently their stability genes were not transmitted to the human lineage. All of this needs more explaining than evolutionists have heretofore presented.
Moreover, apes differ from humans in a wide variety of important ways. They live in extended families for example; we live in vast urban hives, in family units, and in small villages;
The point is that it does not appear that species really evolve over time as their consciousness and behaviors are more or less fixed. All the other mammals, (aside from humans(, betray extremely few, if any, signs that they are going to change either.
Their behavioral patterns that have been in place for millions and millions of years appear fixed.
Darwinian proponents cannot have their cake and eat it too.
They insist we are nothing more than a species of mammal in the primate family. They claim that is a slam dunk fact. Then why do we exhibit such extremely divergent behaviors?
Furthermore, there are radical physiological and anatomical differences as well. For example, we stand upright while chimpanzees hunch over and drag their knuckles on the ground. There is a stark contrast in the human vs. the chimpanzee skull. (Insert)
The jaws are completely different. (Cont.)
More telling even is the fact that chimpanzees have 48 chromosomes and humans 46. This means a human cannot breed with a chimp and produce an offspring. However, different species that are truly close genetically, like horses and donkeys for example, can.
Furthermore, the brain of a chimpanzee has a volume of 370mL on average. In contrast, humans have a brain size of 1350mL on average. That is a huge difference in species supposedly 98% identical on the genetic level.
Most of ape communication is done through gestures and facial expressions. Many of their facial expressions – surprise, grinning, pleading, comforting – are the same as those of humans. However, only humans have the capacity to articulate spoken language.
Many physical and social traits separate humans from chimpanzees and other apes, the above are just a sampling. We turn now to take a look at the human genome,
I shall start with how well biologists and geneticists understood the underlying realities of the human genes, as well as those of other species before the genome was deciphered.
When the research was begun they assumed that we would have far more genes in our genome than other animals. And far, far more than the lowly plant kingdom.
Wrong, much to the shock and dismay of evolutionary biologists and geneticists. As it turned out, we have far fewer genes than some plants do!
The projected higher number of genes was made based upon the assumption they would account for our large brains and our ‘superior intelligence.’ But then it was found that rice has about seven times more genes, 140,000 to the 23,000-human genome. Whoops!
Our genome has about the same number of genes as many other mammal species. This is really one of the great mysteries of science. However, it is seldom acknowledged by scientists or the mainstream, science press.
That is not the only enigma that is ignored.
Geneticists claim that genetics explains almost everything. All our traits can be accounted for by hereditary factors. But can they even explain why they are studying the ape genome, while chimpanzees are doing exactly what they have done for 20 million years? Just because we have similar genomes does not prove that we emerged from a common ancestor.
The co-discoverer of the DNA shape, Sir Francis Crick realized that all life on Earth is closely related because it shares a common DNA substrate, a tree-trunk so to speak. He described the global genome as being fairly uniform in the trunk portion.
That substrate, or trunk, is why we humans share so many nearly identical genes with the apes. True, but so what? We also share almost 50% of our genome with bananas!
Wow, does that mean apples and bananas are our second and third cousins? No, the proponents of evolution never bring this whole set of facts up for review to the general public.
Hitting closer to home, human and pig DNA is 95% similar and even human and mouse DNA is about 93% similar. You won’t hear any geneticists jumping to compare humans to pigs or mice.
Beyond that, evolutionists never raise questions about the origins of this rather incredible level of genome uniformity. When geneticists are confronted by this data and asked how we can be so close to these critters they tend to back off.
Tucked away is that clever sketch and the 98% formula they use to try to convince people that we are just super-chimps. In fact, that is a very misleading way to present the genome.
You cannot argue that because we are 98 % similar to chimps they are our direct, ancestral lineage; and at the same time completely ignore the close pig/mouse/horse comparisons.
The 98% of the gene comparison that is then supposed to translate into ‘see humans descended from the apes’ is a statistical mirage.
If we look at the total genome, the trunk is shared by plants and animals. It is obviously the few genes that are different that are the critical ones, not the rest in the tree trunk. Each species is a branch that came from the same trunk that is clear.
In fact, we know we are not apes, we are humans even if we are not sure of our ultimate identity. The fact that the planetary genome is relatively uniform actually raises some very important questions.
Microbiologist Crick and biochemist Orgel wondered why the DNA code was so uniform. They reasoned that the uniformity -- and the singularity of the DNA code -- suggested that it evolved elsewhere and was transplanted to earth as a proven viable genome package.
They were the authors of ‘The Directed Panspermia’ theory which claims life was seeded on earth by an ET race.
One of the arguments they used was that the first, simple organisms appeared too early in the geological record. They found that they were simply too complex to have evolved in such a short time (2 billion years) according to this pair of scientists.
The intelligent design folks -- the scientific alternative to the strictly religious or strictly materialist views—picked up that point up and ran with it.
The Chromosome Barrier
In the foregoing I briefly touched upon the fact that humans have one fewer pair of chromosomes than do other great apes. We have 23 pairs and chimpanzees and gorillas have 24 pairs of chromosomes, 46 and 48 respectively. This has many implications as well as many ramifications.
A chromosome is the basic stuff of cells; an organized structure of DNA and protein housed in cells. It comes as a single piece of coiled DNA containing many genes, regulatory elements and other nucleotide sequences.
Chromosomes also contain DNA-bound proteins, which serve to package the DNA and control its functions. They are of paramount importance because they are the vectors of heredity and the critical ABO and Rh blood group data are in them. We saw that in earlier chapters.
In humans they can be divided into two types: autosomes and sex chromosomes. Certain genetic traits are linked to a person's sex and are passed on through the sex chromosomes. The autosomes contain the rest of the (genetic) hereditary information. All act in the same way during cell division.
As noted above, human cells have 23 pairs of chromosomes (22 pairs of autosomes and one pair of sex chromosomes), giving a total of 46 per cell. In the human evolutionary lineage, it is thought that two ancestral ape chromosomes fused, producing human chromosome 2.
This is considered to be the main divergence between the human and chimp genomes.
In the preceding chapter we learned that the human and chimpanzee ABO distribution pattern is very different. They completely lack two blood types that we (humans) possess (AB, Rh-) and have minimal type O, which forms our major blood group, and no Rh negative.
[Clarification:
The human and chimp (A/ minimal O) blood groups are not identical, the chimp type A is a species specific blood group, a homologue. Human type-A individuals could not receive type A chimpanzee blood, nor could they donate their type A to a chimp.
A two chromosome difference does not sound like much (mathematically) but this seemingly small difference means that our genetic codes are not compatible enough to produce offspring. That is a wide genetic divergence between two species that supposedly branched off from the same ancestor. (It is even wider with the gorilla.)
The major structural difference is that human chromosome 2 was apparently derived from two smaller chromosomes that are found in other great apes. A mutation, a fusion of two separate chromosomes is said to be the main difference between human and chimp chromosomes.
Once again a seeming small mathematical difference -- when translated into the variations between genomes -- turns out to make a huge difference. So far we have seen that humans and chimps have dissimilar blood groups and dissimilar chromosome patterns.
Once again neo-Darwinians want to emphasize the closeness of the two species using numeric relationships that imply a near match. However, genetics does not seem to work that way. The small (numeric) differences actually are highly significant and produce huge species-specific divergences.
In the genetic code a seemingly minor variation can translate into very different, species specific, genetic expressions, i.e., the simple biochemical switches that trigger a female fetus to change into a male, for example.
So at the point that the human and chimp genomes depart, this may translate into a small number but that is irrelevant. The departure produces major differences like a new blood type or fewer chromosomes that act as species partitions, etc.
The difference in the chromosome count is claimed to be due to the “end-to-end fusion” of two small, ape-like chromosomes in a human-ape ancestor that joined in the distant past and formed human chromosome 2. Sounds plausible on paper from a purely academic perspective.
The proof for the alleged fusion came in 1991, when researchers discovered a fusion-like DNA sequence about 800 bases in length on human chromosome 2. However, n 2002, 614,000 bases of DNA surrounding the fusion site were fully sequenced. They revealed that the alleged fusion sequence was in the middle of a gene originally classified as a pseudogene. (A pseudogene is one that has no known function.)
The research also showed that the genes surrounding the fusion site - in the 614,000-base window - did not exist on chimp chromosomes. That is where the supposed ape origin of the fusion was located. In genetics terminology, we call this discordant gene location a lack of synteny.
What we really need to know is that the fusion theory was proposed before the human genome was sequenced. Yet the model is still referred to dogmatically and no new studies have been conducted to support it.
Finally, the only research group to seriously analyze the actual fusion site DNA sequence data end up confounded. They found the results which showed a lack of evidence for fusion—a genomic condition for this region which they termed ‘degenerate’.(Fan, Y. et al., Genomic structure and evolution of the ancestral chromosome)
Here we are faced with a scientific sleight of hand, a shell game. There is no definitive proof of any ‘fusion’ occurring in chimpanzees that caused their chromosome count to diminish in their alleged genetic offspring.
Nonetheless, scientists keep pointing to the fusion theory as they do the 98% shared gene pseudo-statistic. But the fact is that the evidence is not there and the crucial genetic distinction between man and apes remains enigmatic.
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