Our Closest Wormy Cousins

Here is a new origins science result for discussion. Many people feel uncomfortable about having a common ancestor with monkeys so how do you feel about our Cambian common worm ancestor?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151118155119.htm

My Cambian worm ancestor wore cool sunglasses to protect against the intense UV !

They wouldn’t have helpped with the cosmic rays aimed at their gonads. :frowning:

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That new Grandmother Fish kids’ book is along these lines. Admittedly it doesn’t go all the way to worms, but it calls an early jawed fish “Grandmother Fish,” and refers to “Grandmother Reptile,” “Grandmother Mammal,” “Grandmother Ape,” and “Grandmother Human,” so you get five times the offensiveness… in a book intended to indoctrinate (oh, I mean introduce beautiful and true concepts to) kids, so that makes it exponentially more offensive, right? :smiley:

My 2-year-old can’t get enough of it, incidentally. She demands I read it every day. Apparently she’s not offended by having an ape as a grandma.

Good times.

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One wet ear wax allele, coming right up!

Glad to hear that she likes it. She will be prepared for kindergarten science class better than the children of YECs.

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I’m happy she enjoys it. Here’s another wonderful science book for small children: Icarus at the Edge of Time

by physicist Brian Greene. Imagine writing about the effects of gravity on time…for children! It’s a beautiful book.
And here is a link to the trailer for the musical work by Phillip Glass inspired by the book:
Icarus at the Edge of Time - Trailer I’d love to see it some time. They perform it at the World Science Festival in NYC.

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Icarus at the Edge of Time looks like a great book for small children. In previous posts Eddie was arguing that you couldn’t teach children about general relativity because they didn’t know tensor calculus yet. This book shows that children can learn the deepest insights of reality at a very early age.

Patrick, you are getting dangerously off topic from the subject of our wormy cousins! :wink:

A few weeks ago, I posted the results of a new find in human origins. A common ancestor named Laia. New primate species at root of tree of extant hominoids: It lived 11.6 million years ago and precedes the divergence between hominids and hylobatids -- ScienceDaily

Today, the AIG paid, YEC non-paleontologist Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell gives her Ob-Gyn view on the fossil find. Does the Fossil Gibbon in the Gap Monkey with Human Ancestry? | Answers in Genesis

It seems that’s only confirming what I learned in school zoology in 1968, which was based on taxonomy.

The 70% thing is interesting, though, in that the real lesson is that taking too genocentric a view of evolution makes you go blind. As George Gaylord Simpson said when haemoglobin similarities were claimed to show that gorillas and humans were virtually identical:

From any point of view other than that properly specified, that is of course nonsense. What the comparison really seems to indicate is that … haemoglobin is a bad choice and has nothing to tell us about affinities, or indeed tells us a lie.

And one anthropologist added:

Does it not stand to reason that if you essentially cannot tell human haemoglobin from gorilla haemoglobin, the sensible thing to do is look at something else? In other words, if you cannot tell a human from a gorilla, you really should not be in biology.

The key lesson, then, is that the genome of an acorn worm, which has almost nothing in common with a human, indicates that crude gene similarities count for little. After all, we share close to 100% of the same chemical elements with not only acorn worms, but asteroids.

We should really focus on being half bananas as we have 50% of the genes in common with them :slight_smile:

The problem is that as a human you are only 1% of your genome to begin with and only 10% of the cells that are part of you.

Don’t understand this. How can you be only 1% of your genome? And only 10% of your cells?

what makes you what you are materially is mainly bacteria. The ability to utilise certain metabolites depends on their biotransformation in your gut which in some examples even requires two types of bacteria to perform more complex biotransformations as we showed in the conversion of some plant phytoestrogens already in the last millennium.

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It is true that the majority of the cells in and on us are microbial cells, not human cells, that have co-evolved with us. Every human has about 100 trillion microbial cells. This community of non-human cells is called the microbiome.
The Secret World Inside You is a new exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan that explores the microbiome.

This should make the resurrection very interesting!

Not true. The human genome is the human genome, and the microbes on and in us have their own genomes.

I never thought of that! That is interesting. Isn’t the atoms of my body once the atoms of some other body thousands of years ago?

you may want to split hairs as clearly the human genome side of the human is referred to as the human genome by definition under the exclusion of the microbiome that is an essential part of you as a human. That you have troubles accounting for it is one thing, that humans ignore being a microcosm of their own dependent a lot on non human genetics and biochemistry is another thing. If you fail to see yourself as an ecosystem of your own you live in some denial.

Considering that you are made from recycled material anyhow - do you think resurrection to be “decomposting” of your physical body?

Here is another great link about the microbiome that includes a lecture: Meet your Microbiome

The resurrection doesn’t mean that your original cells are included in the package. We lose many cells every day (e.g. squamous skin cells), and what about organ transplants? That would make it a bloody mess! And who wants wisdom teeth, cysts, or polyps back? It’s an interesting concept to think about, but not an insurmountable problem.