A Matter of Genes and Chromosomes

[_The Dude]

So my question is this: Where did the other 23 chromosomes come from? Obviosly, Mary's 23 could not simply have been doubled, because she had no Y chromosome to contribute and have a male child.

Do miracles come in different sizes? Are there "big" miracles and "little" miracles? Well, assuming there are, it should be noted that it wouldn't take an entire Y chromosmome to turn Mary's doubled set into something that would produce a male. One gene, called SRY, is enough to confer as much maleness as Jesus ever exhibited (since he had no offspring as far as we know). SRY has the sequence:

gttgaggggg tgttgagggc ggagaaatgc aagtttcatt acaaaagtta acgtaacaaa
gaatctggta gaagtgagtt ttggatagta aaataagttt cgaactctgg cacctttcaa
ttttgtcgca ctctccttgt ttttgacaat gcaatcatat gcttctgcta tgttaagcgt
attcaacagc gatgattaca gtccagctgt gcaagagaat attcccgctc tccggagaag
ctcttccttc ctttgcactg aaagctgtaa ctctaagtat cagtgtgaaa cgggagaaaa
cagtaaaggc aacgtccagg atagagtgaa gcgacccatg aacgcattca tcgtgtggtc
tcgcgatcag aggcgcaaga tggctctaga gaatcccaga atgcgaaact cagagatcag
caagcagctg ggataccagt ggaaaatgct tactgaagcc gaaaaatggc cattcttcca
ggaggcacag aaattacagg ccatgcacag agagaaatac ccgaattata agtatcgacc
tcgtcggaag gcgaagatgc tgccgaagaa ttgcagtttg cttcccgcag atcccgcttc
ggtactctgc agcgaagtgc aactggacaa caggttgtac agggatgact gtacgaaagc
cacacactca agaatggagc accagctagg ccacttaccg cccatcaacg cagccagctc
accgcagcaa cgggaccgct acagccactg gacaaagctg taggacaatc gggtaacatt
ggctacaaag acctacctag atgctccttt ttacgataac ttacagccct cactttctta
tgtttagttt caatattgtt ttcttttctc tggctaataa aggccttatt catttca

As far as protein coding genes go, this is one of the smallest. SRY doesn't even have any introns. I wonder why....

By the way, for all you evolutioninsts out there, how do you determine exaclty when a new species has evolved? Or do you use some kind of contiuum, and man never really became a different species, just a spot on a continuum?

I lean towards "just a spot on a continuum".

[_Mercury]

The LDS view is that God is the literal father of Jesus Christ. And this is not a thread to discuss the details of conception, so don't go there. Other Christian denominations suggest that the conception of Jesus required no male of any kind.

So my question is this: Where did the other 23 chromosomes come from? Obviosly, Mary's 23 could not simply have been doubled, because she had no Y chromosome to contribute and have a male child. And science of course would uphold the idea that no individual exists with only 23 chromosomes.

So, if you don't believe that God is the literal father of Christ, and you believe in the virgin birth, what do you think about this?

It is more likely that Jesus was an alien baby than some kolobian sace god inseminated a virgin.

Here is my theory:

Mary, after masturbating Joseph, stimulated herself. This is a documented method of "virgins" becoming pregnant. I am not trying to be crude, just thinking of things more likely than the absurd notion of typical god creation myths in western culture. This is making the bad assumption that Jesus of nazareth ever existed in the first place.

[_truth dancer]

1. The simplest explanation is best.

The simplest explanation is that Jesus was a man, with a human mother and father.

More complicated than this is that 2,000 years ago a woman in Jerusalem had a baby without a sexual encounter with a man.

By far and away the most complicated and seriously hard to believe of all explanations is that an advanced primate male from outer space, living on a sphere near Kolob came to Earth 2,000 years ago and impregnated a female with human sperm.

2. Miracles aren't "shazzams. They are operation of laws we don't know and understand yet.

Exactly which is why I do not understand the need for some believers to reduce the miracle to something so limited by human understanding.

In other words, in my opinion it is MUCH easier to go with the idea that something happened that we do not understand than it is to believe something that seems ridiculous and made up by humans based on very limited knowledge.

3. "Human" DNA came from Adam. And where did Adam get his from? And yes, I believe that Adam was placed here as who he was, and wasn't just a one step up mutation of a lower life form.

I was under the impression that most apologists are believers in evolution. Am I wrong about this? Do you know others who still do not believe in evolution? If so, anyone with whom we may be familiar?

By the way, for all you evolutioninsts out there, how do you determine exaclty when a new species has evolved? Or do you use some kind of contiuum, and man never really became a different species, just a spot on a continuum?

My understanding is that a species is generally considered an exclusive mating population.

Human broke away from our nearest ancestors (bonobos and African chimps) about 7,000,000 years ago, If I recall correctly. From what I understand it seems like scientists generally believe human evolved as fully human about 100,000 to 150,000 years ago.

The Dude can correct me as need be. :-)

~dancer~

[_moksha]

From what I understand it seems like scientists generally believe human evolved as fully human about 100,000 to 150,000 years ago.

~dancer~

Closer to 200,000 years ago on the Serengeti according to National Geographic. No doubt at that time, God was seen as living atop Mt. Kilimanjaro.

[_charity]

This is one of those areas that is going to be so much fun to find out about on the other side. I imagine there will be a lot of forehead slapping.

So, the Dude. How does this spot on the continuum thing work with no interspecies breeding?

[_karl61]

I read that about five or six million years ago some species split and then a million years ago they got back together for a short time and then split again -

[_Sethbag]

This is one of those areas that is going to be so much fun to find out about on the other side. I imagine there will be a lot of forehead slapping.

So, the Dude. How does this spot on the continuum thing work with no interspecies breeding?

The further you are away from each other on the continuum, the less likely it is that you can interbreed. That probably about covers it. Note that even what we'd obviously consider different species, such as lions and tigers, can and have mated before. Whether their offspring will be able to reproduce again is going to depend on how close the parents are to each other on the continuum. Interestingly, there was recently a mule born which was able to reproduce.

The whole idea of absolute container-like designations of species, where each and every member is at the same level genetically, and there is a distinct cut-off between that species and any other related species, is actually a result of the human need to categorize and pigeonhole. Living things are actually fuzzier than that, really. The whole "species" pigeonhole only works, most of the time, because most species happen to be far enough apart on the continuum (multi-dimensional continuum, really) that they can't breed, etc.

Think of it this way. If you took a given frog population and moved half of it to another area, geographically isolated from the other half, they would at first obviously be the same species. Eventually there would be enough difference that if you put them back together they would be unable to breed. Now, do you think that this circumstance came about in a the twinkling of an eye, within one generation? So Gorp the frog is born, and all his brothers and sisters, and cousins and uncles and aunts and whatnot would be perfectly able to breed with the other population, but suddenly Gorp is unable to? Well actually no, it doesn't work this way.

Changes will gradually happen in genes in each local population, which influence animals' viability with each other for breeding. Due to sexual reproduction, those changes are shared with the other members of the local population, keeping them viable with each other. These changes lessen the likelihood of successful breeding with the other population, however, since that other gene pool isn't getting these changes, and is in fact getting its own changes. Would you call the two populations different species when there were just a 50% reduction in the viability of their breeding with each other? How about 75% reduction? When 90% of the frogs in each population couldn't successfully breed with the other population would call them different species? How about 99%? What if they could breed 5% of the time, but produce non-viable offspring 90% of the times they do manage it? See where this is going? The differentiation into different species is a gradual process, and we haven't really got a good name for these things while they're still in the hazy middle-ground.

In fact, though, species don't even exist. There's really no concept in nature of a distinct species. That is entirely a human construct, used to help us humans distinguish different groups of animals from each other. I think, if we were to look at this from Nature's point of view, rather than saying elephants and monkeys are different species, we'd have to say that the elephant gene pool is simply incompatible with the monkey gene pool.

[_karl61]

from wikipedia:

"In addition to the Toumai fossil, some experts use evidence from the genome to argue that the species associated with the chimpanzees and proto-humans split interbred over a long period of time, swapping genes, before making a final separation. A paper, whose authors include David Reich and Eric Lander (Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)), was published in journal Nature in May 2006.

It is generally believed that the Pan/Homo split occurred about 6.5–7.4 million years ago, but the molecular clock (a method of calculating evolution based on the speed at which genes mutate) suggests the genera split 5.4–6.3 million years ago. Previous studies looked at average genetic differences between human and chimp. The new study compares the ages of key sequences of genes of modern humans and modern chimps. Some sequences are younger than others, indicating that chimps and humans gradually split apart over a period of 4 million years. The youngest human chromosome is the X sex chromosome which is about 1.2 million years more recent than the 22 autosomes. The X chromosome is known to be vulnerable to selective pressure. Its age suggests there was an initial split between the two species, followed by gradual divergence and interbreeding that resulted in younger genes, and then a final separat"


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominidae

[_karl61]

I like this drawing of the evolutionary tree: the tree of life one might say ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Age-of-Man-wiki.jpg

[_GoodK]

By the way, for all you evolutioninsts out there, how do you determine exaclty when a new species has evolved? Or do you use some kind of contiuum, and man never really became a different species, just a spot on a continuum?

This is horribly oversimplified, but I think it has a lot to do with when species are no longer able to interbreed.

Read The Ancestors Tale, by Richard Dawkins if you want to learn more about how this applies to humans.

It's far more complicated then just, "Let there be monkeys"