YEC: Denying Facts or Differing Interpretations of Data?

[Witchdoc]

The majority of differences in coding regions between humans and chimpanzees are synonymous mutations (ie they code for the same amino acid).

Whether you think there is any sense for a designer to make humans and chimpanzees have mostly synonymous differences is up to you to decide.

Some molecular evidence for human evolution

I wrote this several years ago, but I think it’s a useful introduction to molecular data, even though the method is not one anybody actually uses in phylogenetics. Here is a set of DNA sequences. They come from two mitochondrial genes, ND4 and ND5. If you put them together, they total 694 nucleotides. But most of those nucleotides either are identical among all the species here, or they differ in only one species. Those are uninformative about relationships, so I have removed them, leaving 76 nucleotides that make some claim. I’ll let you look at them for a while. [ 10 20 30 40 50] [ . . . . .] + 1 2++ 3 11 +4 3 ++ 52+1 2615+4 14+ 3 3+6+ gibbon ACCGCCCCCA TCCCCTCCCT CAAGTCCTAT CCAATCTACT GTACTTTGCC orangutan ACCACTCCCA CCCTTCCTCC TAAGACTCAC ACAACTCGCC ACACCTCGTC human GTCATCATCC TTCTTTTTTT AGGAATTTCC TCTCTCCGTC ACGCTCTAC…