Dr. Ellis Silver says the evidence points to mankind evolving on a different planet. Here’s a quote from the article:
“The book called ‘Humans are not from Earth: a scientific evaluation of the evidence’ is basically a resume of theories for and mostly against man’s evolution on Earth. In the book, leading environmentalist and ecologist Dr. Ellis Silver goes through an evaluation of thirteen leading hypothesis and seventeen factors which suggest HUMANS ARE NOT FROM EARTH.”
Here’s a sampling of the evidence as he sees it:
Mankind is ill-suited for the environment on earth.
No other species gets sunburned.
Ubiquitous back pain later in life means mankind probably evolved on a planet with lower gravity.
No other species on earth has Rh-negative blood
Because mankind is naturally violent, earth may be a prison planet.
Is this proposal taken seriously by any academics?
No, but this is a fine analogy to how creation “science” and other cargo cults work: concentrate on a few things that seem to fit your theories while ignoring the great mass of data that contradict them, and ignoring other explanations of those few things too.
Mankind is far more suited to earth’s environment than to any other planet/moon we know.
Hammerhead sharks get sunburned.
Ubiquitous back pain later in life means mankind probably evolved from a quadrupedal species.
Other species have species-specific blood groups too, with some chimp blood factors being similar to the Rh+/- factor. Also, less than 10% of humans have Rh-neg blood, and we have verified predictions about Rh-factor origins. .
Many animals are even more naturally violent, including spiders, barracuda, mantises and ratels.
Meanwhile, the evidence that humans did evolve on Earth includes genetic and morphological comparisons, biochemical compatibility and fossil precursors.
The evidence doesn’t point to mankind evolving on a different planet, but it does point to Ellis Silver being a Kook.
Welcome to the group! Did you belong to the old Richard Dawkins/Rational Skepticism forum? I seem to recall having a number of spirited discussions there with someone with a name much like yours. My name there was Shrunk.
Not only that, the Rh factor was first discovered in rhesus monkeys, and some humans have it. That seems like evidence for our relationship to other primates, not against it. Even worse, Rh- is not the absence of the Rh gene; it’s the possession of a broken copy. This guy seems not to know much biology. (But he has met one alien and one alien-human hybrid, so you can believe him.)
We share 98% of our DNA with chimps. There is absolutely no reason why an alien genome would share 98% of its DNA with an Earth species. In fact, there is no reason why an alien species would share some of the most basic genetic systems that life on Earth has, such as our specific arrangement of tRNA’s and ribosomes.
