The country's going to hell in a handbasket, and has been doing so since Jamestown.

Thanks for the survey. Interesting inductive studies of this nature remind me again that as believer, I truly can have no political party affiliation. Now, to be sure, I can be loosely affiliated, which is to say that most of my votes fo to a particular party, for, say, their stance on important moral issues such as abortion, but I emphasize loose.

Bottom line, Christians are in a different political party headed by King Jesus. Our loyalties must lie there completely as we work through various imperfect systems here. These particular stats are discouraging in a sense, but they should encourage us all the more to take up the arms of the army of Christ, which are spiritual. Our effective communication of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the most culture changing practice we can engage.

Eric wrote:

42% replied that they believed life has existed in its present form since the beginning of time. 18% believed in evolution "guided by a supreme being," and 26% believed in evolution through natural selection.

From my perspective, that's actually better than the usual poll results. Typically speaking, the last category gets less than 15%. Of course, these are rather silly poll questions as worded. The third one really shouldn't be there as it is not exclusive with the other two - a false trichotomy, so to speak. Option #3 is entirely compatible with option #2. And the first category - ironically, the most popular one - is the one that no rational, educated person could possibly take. Given the nature of the fossil record, it is patently absurd to claim that life has existed in its present form since the beginning of time, yet that is the one that the largest group of people in this and many other polls choose to believe. Which is why I don't take such polls seriously. The vast majority of the population knows as much about this issue as they do about the conjugation of verbs in primitive Sanskrit.

It's also true that the choice between Option 1 and [Options 2 and 3] leaves out concepts such as progressive creationism. And in the strictest sense, even young-earth creationists believe that life on Earth was substantially different before Noah's flood. So the wording of the questions is very important, as you point out. (The press release I linked to has links to the actual questionnaires.)

I can understand why Ed is so against those who teach ID or creationism. His kind has had free reign in the school for about 40 years to give it their best shot and polls still have results like this. That must be really frustrating for you.

I've always felt that the largest reason for the current sad situation of the Muslim world is their turning their back on anything vaguely resembling modernity in favor of a puritanical sixth century static interpretation of their religion, placing it so thoroughly at the core of their civilization that there is no room for anything else. JohnH, Eric Seymour and their fellow creationists would be very happy if the U.S. followed the equivalent Christian path although they aren't capable of seeing it that way since like the Muslims they believe that anything to do with their religion is always inherently good and incapable of being bad for anyone including non-believers.

Jim S:

You don't know me. Frankly, I don't want some evolutionist teaching creationism. If we want to teach it, I would prefer that it be done in the context of the church and family. I do not want a gov't endorsed or mandated religion.

What I do want is for anti-religious bigots like those that populate universities such as UCal to understand that people of faith can think critically. FCOL, much of the early science was done by people who believed in a creator. You do understand that, don't you? What the UCal bigots want is to remove faith or people of faith from the equation. They want, like you, to pretend that Christians are the equivalent of the Wahhabi or Taliban Muslims. (Disclaimer: I admit that not every Christian feels this way and some would likeh to establish something like Puritan New England or Calvin's Geneva; I don't and would join you in resisting that). It seems to me that if you force Christians to the fringe, you might turn them into what you observe about Muslims.

Your assumption that Eric or I are anti-science is unwarranted. How do you get that from what we said? The core issue is the issue of origins and common descent. That does not disqualify us from understanding science.

This morning it was reported that the human and ape genomes were "virtually identical" but later noting that meant there were something like 40 million differences. I'm going to assume this is true. How long did the ape to human evolution take? Was there enough time for the 40 million differences to occur? If you assume one differnce occurs per generation, and one generation per year, you need 40 million years. I am not a geneticist, but the numbers and time just don't add up. Certainly, nothing like this HAS BEEN OBSERVED. It is in this area that the information theory and ID people have some valid points especially when you put this across the very diverse life we have on this planet.

Hope you can pry open that mind of yours at some point.

JohnH wrote:

I can understand why Ed is so against those who teach ID or creationism. His kind has had free reign in the school for about 40 years to give it their best shot and polls still have results like this. That must be really frustrating for you.

I am indeed frustrated that we do such a lousy job of teaching evolution in public schools, but that doesn't have much to do with my opposition to ID or old-fashioned creationism. I've spent years spelling out in great detail the reasons for my opposition to those ideas. The suggestion that it can all be boiled down to this one simplistic reason is presumptuous nonsense.

What the UCal bigots want is to remove faith or people of faith from the equation.

Also nonsense. UC admits thousands, probably tens of thousands, of students from Christian high schools every year. Given that 90% or more of the population of this nation are "people of faith", it would stand to reason that the majority of UC students and faculty are likely "people of faith". So the notion that UC is out to destroy "people of faith" and remove them from society or from the university is so hyperbolic that it cannot be taken seriously.

This morning it was reported that the human and ape genomes were "virtually identical" but later noting that meant there were something like 40 million differences. I'm going to assume this is true. How long did the ape to human evolution take? Was there enough time for the 40 million differences to occur? If you assume one differnce occurs per generation, and one generation per year, you need 40 million years. I am not a geneticist, but the numbers and time just don't add up.

With reasoning like this, you didn't need to bother telling us that you're not a geneticist. I love how you use this vague phrase "differences". The comparison finds about 35 million "differences" - that is, unmatching nucleotides - in a genome of approximately 3 billion nucleotides. Overall, that's a difference of about 1.2% in terms of nucleotide sequences. Do you really think it is as simple as calculating X number of "differences" per generation to determine whether there is enough time or not? Does such a simple calculation square with the real world and what we have observed in population genetics? Of course not. Such a simple calculation cannot account, for example, for frame shift mutations (which would change an entire range of nucleotides in one fell swoop) or for gene duplication (which would add thousands of nucleotides all at once) or for chromosome fusing (humans have one less chromosome than chimps because two chromosomes have fused together to form one longer one) or for deletions and insertions of whole stretches of DNA to different parts of the genome (we have identified thousands of such deletions and insertions just in comparing these two genomes) or for the insertion of endogenous retroviruses, the work of which makes up a sizable portion of every genome. This, my friend, is why I object to creationism, because the advocates of it insist on pontificating about how every single geneticist in the world is wrong about evolution when it is clear that they have about a 5th grade understanding of that subject themselves. If you really think it's just that simple to prove that 99.9% of the scientists in relevant fields have it completely wrong, you truly are living in a dream world.

Jim S--If you want to be taken seriously around here, you might want to avoid posting comments that are nothing more than assumptions, "lumping," and vast generalizations.

Ed:

I know the whole issue is much more complicated than I posted. That is part of the point.

So how many frame shift mutations were there and how many retroviruses that caused apes to evolve into humans?

What is the number of differences in DNA sequences/genes in human populations today? I'm not doubting there are differences, but it seems that they are all turning out human.

I don't doubt the work the geneticists have done in postulating what happened in evolution and their observations of similarites in genomes (and differences). I'm just asking whether they have observed it happening in nature? Have they observed these changes occur in nature?

Ed,

Just one minor quibble with your response to JohnH. Frameshifts don't necessarily change many nucleotides at once, because frameshifts are defined in terms of amino acid residues, not nucleotides. A frameshift is simply the insertion or deletion of N nucleotides in coding sequence, where N is not divisible by three. It can be as small as a single nucleotide.

I'd also note that John's calculation of the number of mutations per generation also needs to account for population size. We don't have a single chimp and a single human each generation.

You're right, I did not, but also assumed that there was one generation per year.

That leads to my next question (and this one really is a question): are you saying that there are multiple changes among a generation of apes? If so, how do all of those changes get encoded into the genome for transmission to the next generation?

One other point: I don't think you can have apes and humans in each generation during the evolutionary process because the humans aren't here yet. That might be true now but in the past, it couldn't be. At some point, the ape stops being an ape and becomes a human. Where is that line? (It's hard to tell sometimes; in my own case, pretty sure I'm human). :)

Looking at the paper in Nature by the Chimpanzee Genome Sequencing and Analysis consortium, I see that the figure of of 35 million nucleotide substitutions refers specifically to single-nucleotide changes. Insertions and deletions are calculated separately. So, Ed's comments about retroviral insertions and large insertions/deletions aren't relevant to JohnH's question about the number of nucleotide substitutions per generation.

However, the 35 million nucleotides include places where either the chimp or the human genomes are variable. So, if the chimp has an "A" at a certain position and humans have either "A" or "T," that counts as a change. When the consortium looked at 7.2 million single nucleotide polymorphisms in the human genome (places where different humans vary in sequence), they found that 80% of the time, one of the human sequences matched the chimp sequence.

This paper contains some seriously nifty data. Anyone who doesn't have access to the online version of Nature should endeavor to get a hard copy from their local library.

That leads to my next question (and this one really is a question): are you saying that there are multiple changes among a generation of apes?

Yes

If so, how do all of those changes get encoded into the genome for transmission to the next generation?

Within the population, lots of animals are reproducing and contributing their genomes (and any new mutations) to the next generation. Through the wonders of sexual reproduction, a mutation that occurred in animal A and one that occurred in animal B can end up together in animal C. But note that not every change ends up in every individual of a species. That's why humans and chimps vary among themselves.

One other point: I don't think you can have apes and humans in each generation during the evolutionary process because the humans aren't here yet. That might be true now but in the past, it couldn't be. At some point, the ape stops being an ape and becomes a human. Where is that line? (It's hard to tell sometimes; in my own case, pretty sure I'm human)

You have to think of it in terms on lineages. No one is arguing that humans evolved from chimpanzees. Rather, humans and chimpanzees diverged from a common ancestor, and chimpanzees are are modern as humans. The differences between humans and chimpanzees reflect mutations that occurred either in the lineage leading to humans or the lineage leading towards chimapnzees, even if those mutations occurred before the modern species existed. By analogy, you could be carrying a mutation that occurred in your grandmother's DNA, even though you didn't yet exist when the mutation actually happened.

JohnH, to a certain extent there is no such thing as Christians for me to have an opinion about. Because once you get past believing in Jesus as Savior there isn't one monolithic body of belief, just numerous overlapping ones.

Secondly what I believe is that creationists have proven that while they may be capable of critical thinking they are more than willing to completely abandon that ability if someone persuades them that any given scientific conclusion goes against their religion. Thus Darwin can't be right even to biologists if they decide that the Bible is literally true. The geologists can't be right. There's a geologist who once he adopted the young earth creationist branch of Christianity as his religion bent everything he had learned to try and prove all the other geologists wrong because he knows what God did. He will never change his mind and he won't succeed in changing the minds of the geologists. Once someone who claims to think critically has shown that they will abandon it for one school of faith then what stops from them from doing it in other areas? The conservative political movement against any possibility that global warming exists is one example.

As far as my post containing generalizations, the characterization of those who rejected a Christian class that rejects completely and utterly one of the primary bases for modern biology as anti-Christian bigots seems a bit general to me.

Indeed, Jim. They refuse to play by the rules of science when the conclusion is common descent and natural selection, and that leads me to question how are the creationists conservatives. It seems to be very liberal to abandon rules.

To answer your question about human variation, about one nucleotide in 1200 is different from one person to another. Every human now alive descends from a common ancestor who probably lived from 10^4-10^5 years ago in a population bottleneck. Humans, genetically speaking, are remarkably homogeneous. Chimpanzees differ from one another by 1 in about 850 nucleotides. In other words, chimpanzees display far more genetic variation. This is partly because humans are such a new lineage.

Humans and chimps, by the way, differ by 12 nucleotides in 1000 from one human to one chimp, on average. Natural selection has certainly conserved many of the genes.