Oh look, the in tray is full again … this is going to be fun …
This post of yours alone tells me that you have MUCH to learn. Pay scrupulous attention to what follows, because failure to do so will result in much embarassment here on your part. I’ll begin with the following elementary concepts:
Elementary Concept No. 1 : Atheism does NOT involve “belief”. Atheism, in its rigorous formulation, consists of nothing more than suspicion of unsupported mythology fanboy assertons. That is IT. As a corollary, it does NOT involve presenting assertions of its own, merely treating YOUR assertions with proper suspicion. Indeed, you can learn the following pithy maxim to make this concept easier to digest - "NOT treating unsupported mythological assertions uncritically as act, is the very ANTITHESIS of ‘belief’ ".
Elementary Concept No. 2 : Not accepting YOUR assertions does not mean accepting contrary assertions. This is an elementary lesson taught in every class on basic logic. In the absence of supporting evidence for either assertion, it is perfectly possible to be suspicious of both A and Not-A. Indeed, this concept is made explicit in the textbook Methods of Logic by Willard Van Ormand Quine, who was one of the foremost logicians and analytical philosophers of the 20th century. I commend this textbook to everyone with the diligence required to wade through its admittedly terse prose.
Elementary Concept No. 3 : Topics such as the origin of the universe, the origin of life, or the origin of biodiversity, are NOT the remit of “atheism”. The topics just cited are the remit of SCIENCE, and in particular, the remit of well-defined and specific scientific disciplines. In the case of the three listed above, they are the remit of, in turn:
[1] Origin of the universe: Physics, particularly the subdivison known as cosmological physics;
[2] Origin of life: Chemistry, particularly the subdivision known as prebiotic chemistry (itself a subdivision of organic chemistry);
[3] Origin of biodiversity: Biology, particularly the subdivision known as evolutionary biology.
Elementary Concept No. 4 : Scientific postulates are NOT a matter of “belief”, they are a matter of understanding and evidence. Evidence that scientists have presented in abundance in several million peer reviewed scientific papers. Indeed, I’m reminded at this juncture, that not only have scientists provided, for example, direct experimental test and verification of evolutionary postulates, but that several of those tests can be replicated in any high school laboratory.
Now I suspect others here may have a different view of the output from cosmological physics, but you’ll find I’ve been prolific with respect to discussion of relevant scientific subjects, cosmological physics included, and an important part of my output here can be studied in detail here.
As for human ancestry, the scientific consensus is that we share a common ancestor with the other great apes. Before you even think of taking offence at the suggestion that we are apes, we have a large body of data, from both palaeontology and molecular phylogeny, pointing to this conclusion. Indeed, if the various ludicrous assertions peddled by evolution denialists were something other than products of their rectal passages, the entire discipline of molecular phylogeny would not even exist.
But wait, there’s an even earlier item to bring to the table, courtesy of one Carl von Linné, better known to the world as Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy. Who, wait for it, decided on the basis of comparative anatomy (a discipline he did much to make rigorous during his life, alongside his taxonomic work), that humans and chimpanzees were sufficiently closely related, to warrant their placement in the same taxonomic Genus. The reason he didn’t? Religious interference in his scientific work. About which he lamented in a letter written to the fellow taxonomist Johann Georg Gmelin. The letter in question can be read in full here.
Here’s the original Latin passage:
This translates to:
Note that Linnaeus wrote this letter SIXTY TWO YEARS BEFORE DARWIN WAS BORN. The letter is dated February 25, 1747. Charles Darwin wasn’t born until 1809, and didn’t publish any material on the subject of evolution until 50 years later. Linnaeus alighted upon the idea that humans and chimpanzees were related 112 years before Darwin published On The Origin of Species. I’ll let that one sink in for a while.
Meanwhile, let’s take a look at some of the findings from molecular phylogeny, in particular, the finding that the genomes of thousands of living organisms contain insertions known as ERVs for short. To give them their full title, these are endogenous retroviral insertions. Which occur when various retroviruses (of which there are many, I might add, indeed there are entire families of these) insert genetic material into the genome of the host.
I’ll clarify that last statement more rigorously, as it has an impact upon what follows. Any virus alters the genome of the particular cell it infects, and only that cell. Consequently, only infected cells exhibit the requisite changes I’m discussing. But, if those cells happen to be what are known as “germline cells”, i.e., cells in the testis or ovary, then because those cells produce sperm and eggs, any changes in those cells are passed on to offspring via the genetically altered sperm and eggs arising from those germline cells.
Now it transpires that this has happened many times in a wide range of organismal limeages. Mammals are the most intensively studied organisms in this regard, but you can also find germline retroviral insertions that resulted in the requisite gene remnants being disseminated across multiple generations in other organisms. That minor digression over, what is important is that because of the mechanism retroviruses use to insert their genetic material into a host, they exhibit NO preference for any particular part of a DNA strand, when insertion is conducted. As a corollary, if two different individuals are infected by a retrovirus, the insertion points in the two genomes will almost certainly be different. The probability of identical retroviral insertions occurring in two individuals is minuscule.
But here’s the major point. When any group of organisms arise from a common ancestor, ERVs can be used to trace the family tree. If that common ancestor acquired a germline ERV, that ERV will be disseminated by inheritance to all the descendants of that common ancestor. If a new ERV affected some of those descendants, that ERV will appear in their descendants in turn. Each new ERV inection in the family tree, will allow that family tree to be contructed, and the cladistics of that group of organisms determined rigorously.
Quite simply, the probability that a group of organisms simultaneously acquired the exact same sets of ERVs independently, is so astronomically small as to be dismissed for practical purposes. On the other hand, if that group of organisms inherited the ERVs from a common ancestor, the probability of this occurring is 1.
And guess what? Humans and chimpanzees share over two dozen identical ERV insertions in their genomes. The probability of this happening independently in the two lineages is almost ridiculously tiny. The probabillity of this occurring via inheritance from a common ancestor is 1.
Of course, this isn’t the only piece of data from molecular phylogeny that supports common ancestry of all great apes (and our being one of them), there are quite literally hundreds more, too many to fit into one post. But this piece of data is particularly useful, because [1] it acts as practically a guarantor of common ancestry when discovered in a clade of living organisms, and [2[ allows rigorous phylogenetic trees to be constructed. If evolution didn’t happen, none of this data would exist.
An apposite scientific paper (one of many, I might add) covering ERVs in primates, is this one:
Constructing Primate Phylogenies From Ancient Retrovirus Sequences by Welkin E. Johnson & John M. Coffin, Proceedings of the National Academy of SCiences of the USA, 96(18): 10254-10260 (31st August 1999)
From that paper:
The paper can be read in full via the link I provided without downloading the PDF, though of course the diligent can do this as well. The cotents of that paper make for fascinating reading among those of us with an interest in scientific topics.
Electrochemistry. Won’t take long for you to learn about this if you exert some diligence in the matter.
At this point, you should be aware that you are seriously out of your depth.