From Dr. Brown he is a very reasonable creationist more then myself.
Dear Mike,
This came on the asa net. Do you have an explanation ?
Hi list,
Dick Fischer's ORIGIN'S SOLUTION mentions the dreaded endogenous retroviral sequence common to both chimp and human DNA as a strong lobbyist for common descent. Anybody have any other reasonable explanation?
(Name withheld)
Hi ,
This is an extremely important question that Creationists have to face. It is exactly the same question that I sought to answer with my research on Pseudogenes. In my talk at Andrews University, I introduced the idea of "Common Mechanism" as an alternative to "Common Descent". I also discussed evidence that shows "Common Mechanism" is being a possible answer to the origin of the many common sequences found in different species.
The common sequences that have given us problems in the past are sequences that don't seem to have a function for the organism. Common sequences that are easily identified as being functional, can easily be explained as existing because God designed them in the same way. I don't like the term "Common Designer, " because it has connotations of a deficient God who designs different animals in the same way because he is running out of ideas, or because it is too much effort to redesign the different animals.
A rocket designer designs a rocket. It works. Now he is asked to design a larger rocket. What he does is to use what he has already learned from his previous experience to save on effort and time. His larger rocket is going to look much like the smaller one. That is what Common Designer means. It takes too much effort not to use what has already be done before.
The question is, do we want to say the same thing about God? Is God designing the various animals in such a similar fashion because it would be too much effort to completely design a completely different design? Like the rocket designer?
I don't think so. I think this is our chance to start looking for alternative ideas. Instead of thinking of God as a designer, maybe we should think of Him as an artist (well, maybe both). If we go into a new house, maybe Mexican style, we might expect the whole house to have common features throughout. We would expect to see various artistic themes throughout the whole house. Also we would expect to see various differences in the house that is due to artistic variations of the Mexican themes found in the house.
I might expect God to have created the Earth in the same way. The animals (and plants) have many common features which I attribute as being artistic themes. Also, all one has to do is to look at a comparative anatomy text book to see the artistic variations of themes God has placed in this world.
I might expect the same artistic theme aspect of God's creation to be as deep as the very molecules we are made of. This could also include proteins and DNA.
I introduced this whole issue in my talk at Andrews.
back to the other issue. . .
The b-hemoglobin Pseudogene is a excellent example of a functionless portion of the genome. Yet the same Pseudogene is found in different species (only 6 differences between human and chimp in the whole sequence!).
Why are they there? Maybe there is some sort of function. The problem is that function has been sought by many for a number of years. Nothing yet has surfaced. Of course this is an open ended search. Jim Gibson by the way, wrote an article supporting the idea that there must be some purpose that is yet undiscovered. His article is on the internet in the Geoscience web pages.
The other possibility is that there is no function. That the sequence is what it looks like, defective. Many say that the presence of the b-hemoglobin Pseudogene is very strong evidence for a common ancestor. Human, Chimp, Gorilla, Monkeys (both new and old world), Baboon, etc., all have virtually the same Pseudogene. (However as more species are compared, the differences also increase as well)
In my yet unpublished work, (don't spread my research around yet) I see evidence for the existence of either viral or enzymatic activity that creates mutations.
So I think there is a mechanistic process that has produced many of the Pseudogenes that we have, rather than a random process. If the Pseudogene is truly defective and if the mutations are truly found in patterns (not random), then the idea that it's a common mechanism is possible. Viruses have enzymes that, under the same conditions, do repeatable reactions.
If the DNA in Humans, Chimps, Monkeys, etc., are very similar, then if they are all infected by the same virus, would we expect the virus to do the same thing in the different species? I think so.
The "dreaded endogenous retroviral sequence common to both chimp and human DNA" is probably the major example of Common Mechanism. Viral enzymes (proteins) react with specific DNA sequences. If both chimp and human DNA have the same active sites, I would expect the viral proteins to react in the same exact way to both human and chimp.
Common descent or common Ancestor is not the only answer.
Pseudogenes: a description of the problem: Molecular History Research Center