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Marco, maybe this is just me being overanalytical as usual, but I hope the sentences I chose to discuss with you here aren't offensive. I know usually I'm just overanalysing, and there's no problem in the first place, but I don't want you to feel like I'm attacking you. As far as I'm concerned this is just a friendly discussion of ideas and science.

No offense taken, in fact I like some of your examples, though I think you dodged the question of why there are identical copying errors in junk DNA.

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Well I think we can agree on this one definition. A mutation can be determined to be good or bad based on how it measures up to the original genetic data within that species. Fair enough?

I don't think that definiton helps. You are merely replacing "how good a mutation is" with "how it measures up to the previous generation". Now a definition for "measures up" would be required for this to make sense. If you define it as difference in life span or procreation rate of the new organism compared to its predecessor then you have a usable biological definition.

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Therefore, since red blood cells do their job about 1000 times worse (that's just a number, not a scientific number, the point is is that it is worse) in a person with sickle cell anemia, would it not be fair to say that compared to the original data, this is bad?

Yes, if there were no mitigating circumstances then this would indeed be bad. But in this case the mitigating circumstances are quite clear: you are more likely to have health complication due to sickle cell deformation but much less likely to die from Malaria. If sickle cell anemia suddenly appeared in a population and remained in the genepool even though there were no deaths from malaria then you would even have evidence against evolution. But that's not the case.

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However, that 2% actually represents 80 million nucleotides. Which doesn't sound quite so low anymore does it? Its all about how you present the information sometimes. Either way, I would say that's quite a difference.

I don't follow you. 80 million compared to 3000 million is rather a low. What are you trying to say?

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Furthermore, you may have heard of Cytochrome C (its a widely studied amino acid chain)? Its something common to a lot of different kinds of life (like we have junk DNA in common with chimps), so it could (by that same logic) be compared side by side to see exactly how similar different species are to each other. Or in other words its a good tool for comparison between different species. We're only 3% different from corn. So does this mean we evolved from corn, or maybe I should say that corn and humans branched off from a similar ancestor?

Sorry, but you have fallen for yet another debunked creationist lie. Here's a list of the amino acids making up cytochrome c in various organisms. Please compare corn to human and you'll see that it's far more than 3%. I didn't count it, but 3% seems more like the difference we see between humans and rhesus monkeys:
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http://members.cox.net/ardipithecus/evol/seq.html:
human  	         mgdvekgkki fimkcsqcht vekggkhktg pnlhglfgrk tgqapgysyt aanknkgiiw gedtlmeyle npkkyipgtk mifvgikkke eradliaylk katne
chimpanzee 	 mgdvekgkki fimkcsqcht vekggkhktg pnlhglfgrk tgqapgysyt aanknkgiiw gedtlmeyle npkkyipgtk mifvgikkke eradliaylk katne
rhesus monkey  	 gdvekgkkif imkcsqchtv ekggkhktgp nlhglfgrkt gqapgysyta anknkgitwg edtlmeylen pkkyipgtkm ifvgikkkee radliaylkk atne
corn  	         asfseappgn pkagekifkt kcaqchtvek gaghkqgpnl nglfgrqsgt tagysysaan knkavvween tlydyllnpk kyipgtkmvf pglkkpqera dliaylkeat a

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One other quick point: E. Coli has a DNA molecule which is roughly 4,000,000 nucleotides long. So the difference between human and chimp (80 million nucleotides) is 20 times greater than an entire organism. And that's just considering the junk data. When you start going into the actual active data that number gets much much higher.

I agree with the numbers, but what's your point?

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However, the DNA dictates all the proteins in each type of cell and the differences we see between the skin and the liver should be smaller than what we see. So even with identical DNA there is a hidden information system which we do not yet fully understand."


Part of that "hidden information system" is methylation- basically certain bases/nucleotides are marked with a methyl molecule which indicates that a given protein is not to be transcribed in this particular (skin, liver, etc.) cell. That's why stem cells are so interesting: they are markerless. There are other marker mechanisms in play involving the secondary structure of DNA winding but that is beyond my knowledge of biology or chemistry.

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The point of your junk DNA argument then seems rather null.

Huh?
Let me try it like this: makers of road maps are known to include fake roadnames on their products. Why do they do this? Because the underlying information (infrastrucutre) could not be copyrighted and if someone were to copy a commercial map he could claim it as his own work and it would be hard to prove him wrong. However, when as part of the forgery he copies these fake roadnames then it's clear that he did not do the mapping, but that his map is based on that of another publisher. Back to junk DNA: if there are identical base sequences in organism A and B that can not be transcribed into proteins, thus are meaningless to the organism then you could claim that organism B just so happens to have identical junk DNA (statistically unlikely) or just like in the map example you could conclude that organism B might have copied it from organism A.

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I could call into question the methods scientists use to even determine these percentages in the first place

That's probably a road to disaster We do not have the complete genome for chimpanzees but we do have the genome for parts of it and can compare the nucleotides to that of humans divide the number of variations by the genome length and you have the percentage of difference. And since this is science you (or any creationist in a biochem lab) could disprove it by showing that there are more variations then have been observed. Until then it's wishful thinking.

Last edited by Marco_Grubert; 04/05/06 21:31.