I am not trying to start a dialogue about the existence of God, however, I am always amazed to find an engineer, which generally means a logical thinker, that can believe in the statistical odds macro evolution. It takes far more faith to believe in the BIG BANG than it does creation.
Here is an interesting article that I saw a while back that was entertaining:
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Scientists believe they have found a key gene that helped the human brain evolve from our chimpanzee-like ancestors.
In just a few million years, one area of the human genome seems to have evolved about 70 times faster than the rest of our genetic code. It appears to have a role in a rapid tripling of the size of the brain's crucial cerebral cortex, according to an article published on Thursday in the journal, Nature.
Study co-author David Haussler, director of the Centre for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said his team found strong but still circumstantial evidence that a gene, called HAR1F, may provide an important answer to the question of what makes humans more intelligent than other primates."
Human brains are triple the size of chimpanzee brains.
Looking at 49 areas that have changed the most between the human and chimpanzee genomes, Haussler zeroed in on an area with "a very dramatic change in a relatively short period of time."
Haussler said the gene didn't exist until 300 million years ago and is present only in mammals and birds, not fish or animals without backbones. But the gene didn't change much during that time, Haussler said.
He said there were only two differences in the gene between a chimpanzee and a chicken. But there were 18 differences in the gene between human and chimpanzee and they all seemed to occur in the development of man.Andrew Clark, a Cornell University professor of molecular biology who was not part of Haussler's team, said that if true, the change in genes would be fastest and most dramatic in humans and would be "terrifically exciting."
However, the gene changed so fast that Clark said that he has a hard time believing it unless something unusual happened in a mutation. It's not part of normal evolution, he said. Haussler attributed the dramatic change to the stress of man getting out of trees and walking on two feet.And it's not just that this gene changed a lot. There is also its involvement with the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for some of the more complex brain functions, including language and information processing.
"It looks like in fact it is important in the development of (the) brain," said co-author Sofie Salama, a research biologist at Santa Cruz, who led the efforts to identify where the gene is active in the body.
The scientists still don't know specifically what the gene does. But they know that it is switched on in human fetuses at seven weeks after conception and then shuts down at 19 weeks, Haussler said.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/science/gene-clue-in-monkey-brain-evolution/2006/08/17/1155407916074.html**********
I put two sections in bold for comment.
(1) The monkey is scientifically more similar to a chicken than to a human, but I have never heard that monkeys evolved from chickens.
(2) This evolution believing scientist directly says that the change from monkey to man happened so fast it can't be explained with normal evolution and would have required a mutation.
This is the classic case of making scientific facts support a predetermined result. I bet it never occured to him that maybe man didn't evolve from a monkey?
