What makes us Different?

The cover story Time Magazine on October 6, 2006 was entitled, “What makes us Different?.” The writers are interesting—Let’s face it, they are good—but they offer us a classic example of filtering (in communication, this means carefully selecting which ideas to allow through) and juxtaposing (placing ideas side-by-side to imply a relationship that may not otherwise exist). I do not argue here that evolution is true or false, but that some of the arguments presented in this article are easily falsified—in some cases, self-falsified.

For example, in the second paragraph, the first “evidence” is presented: “Scientists figured out decades ago that chimps are our nearest evolutionary cousins, roughly 98% to 99% identical to humans at the genetic level.” (Because this was established decades ago, there is no need to document the evidence, right?) To their credit, the authors do not then conclude that chimps and humans are 89% identical, but they apparently do not catch an anomaly in their fifth paragraph, where they say, “Just a year ago, geneticists announced that they had sequenced a rough draft of the chimpanzee genome, allowing the first side-by-side comparisons of human and chimpanzee DNA.” So, how could they have known for decades that chimp and human DNA were 98% identical, if only one year ago we gain the capability to compare their DNA?

Decades ago scientists discovered that the cytochrome c molecule produced by human mitochondria is 98% to 99% identical to the cytochrome c molecule produced by chimp mitochondria. (The molecule contains108 amino acids, with 106 being identical between chimp and human. 106/108=98.1%) This molecule is one of the 100,000 proteins produced and maintained by human DNA. This is similar to the way someone might take one verse of the Bible to “prove” some point while ignoring the vast majority of Scripture.

It is not even a comparison of DNA, but of the products of DNA. Since DNA has 64 possible ways of being structured in order to specify the 20 possible amino acid outcomes, there was at the time of the original claim a less than one-in-three chance that any given amino acid was constructed from identical DNA. So a more accurate parallel would be like saying that the Bible and the Qu’ran are 100% identical because a verse can be found in each that could be translated as “God is One.”

Now to a more important point than the disqualification of the evidence: The evidence still remains in use after several decades of new discoveries. Great fanfare accompanies the unveiling of new evidence FOR evolution, but later disqualification of the same is not only quiet but also slow. It remains in the public’s minds, yea, even in our classrooms, long after the scientific community has put them on the trash.

I will end with a comment about the authors’ very next sentence: “Already, that research has led to important discoveries about the development of the human brain over the past few million years and possibly about our ancestors’ mating behavior as well.” This sentence assumes that a) humans and chimps have a common ancestor, and b) that the ancestor is common within the past few million years. These are assumptions, because neither has been demonstrated as irrefutable by this article or any other evidence, but by presenting the “98% to 99%” claim, they easily move to what they obviously consider obvious—Darwinian evolution MUST be true.

This entry was posted on October 22, 2006 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Science and faith. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.