Convoluted human evolution: Speedy HARs (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, August 20, 2016, 12:03 (3018 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The Scientist website has published a diagram showing how small differences in HARs between human and chimp to achieve the evolutionary changes. Please look at the site to see it: - http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/46577/title/Understanding-Human-A... comment: Just slight tweaking. It shows why the genome of humans and chimps is 98% the same when looked at without regard for tiny differences like these.
 - dhw: “A slight tweaking”, and “it may have been a simple matter”. Perhaps, then, we should stop harping on about the enormous complexity of the required changes, as if it is beyond the scope of the cell communities themselves to make these tweaks and shifts.
DAVID: You miss an entire point: we see a code change, and its effects, but have no idea how the code change exerts its effects. We are missing a whole layer or mechanism of the process! - I know we don't know how it all works. That is why we keep theorizing. But until now you have always stressed the enormous complexity of the changes, to boost your contention that God must have preprogrammed them or dabbled them. These two posts (from chimps to humans, and from fins to hands) suggest that the actual changes are simple tweaks. In the context of my own hypothesis (that the cell communities create their own innovations), the simpler the tweak, the better.
 
DAVID's comment: Common descent is hard to deny with a study like this. God tunes the dial.
dhw: Maybe (theistic version) God created the dial, and left it to the organisms themselves to do the tuning.
DAVID: If He gave them enough guidance. - Either they did it themselves or they didn't. For “guidance” read “intelligence”.