Relics of Eden

Relics of Eden, by Daniel J. Fairbanks

I read most of this book a couple of months back, although not all because the library wanted it back (I tend to stack-read my books).

Simply put, this book is a must-read for those who wish to prove to themselves and to others that Apes and Humans have common ancestors.

The book is both scientifically accurate, well-references, AND readable. First, it introduces concepts like junk DNA, then explains how some of it is created by viruses and self-splicing elements inserting themselves at random into the coding DNA. So for example, a sejunkntence might havjunke the word "junk" injunkserted at junk random places.

Now while you might think that a sentence like: "This sentences describes how to make an eyeball" could have been written by an intelligent designer in all species that have eyeballs, it is a little harder to think that an omnipotent designer would have written: "This senjunktence describesjunk how to make an eyejunkball", BUT IT IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to conceive how two seperate species having the same sentence "This senjunktence describesjunk how to make an eyejunkball" are not inheriting this material from each other. Why would God include the same junk DNA at the same places in both sentences?

And yes - we do know its junk, because we see this same word "junk" littered throughout our genome thousands of times, inserted all over the place.

More deeply, the word "junk" isnt a 4-letter word, but a 50-letter word, most of which have been changed slightly through the millennia, so it may read like:
"iamjunkpleasecopimealloveryourdna" in one place, "iamjunkpleasecopymealloveryuurdna"in a second place, and "iamdjunkpleasecopymealloveryourdna" in a third.
When you compare these, you can reconstruct the original junk word:
"iamjunkpleasecopymealloveryourdna"
And lo and behold, when you do this, the junk word starts acting like a computer virus, spreading copies of itself through the genome. So we see what this word is - its an infectious piece of DNA that copies itself - so no surprise that we see it littering itself through the genome.

Now when we compare Chimp and Gorilla DNA, we might see
"I am an ape, I havjunke two hands andjunk two feet" in both their DNA sequences.
But if we look at human DNA, it reads:"I ajunkm an ape, I havjunke two hands andjunk two feet"

Now its clear from this that humans have evolved from the same ancestors as chimps and gorillas, and that humans have had a new instance of "junk" added since we diverged from them.

This is all explained much more clearly in the book.

Another argument is that whereas the other apes have 24 pairs of Chromosomes, humans have 23. Now chromosomes have a definite structure:

endakdjhflsdjkfhcenter;asdkfjlsdkfjend

You can see the word "end" at the ends, and the word "center" at the center.

Now most of our chromosomes and those of apes are similar, except that whereas apes have two:

endblahblahcentertalkend and
endfunnycentergooberend

we have just one

endblahblahcentertalkeendfunnycentergooberend

It doesnt take a massive stretch of the imagination to see what has happened: the two ape chromosomes fused to create a single human chromosome.

You can see that clearly because just as you would expect, there is an "end" within the chromosome, and two "center"s. Furthermore, one side is the same as one ape chromosome, and the other side is the same as the other ape chromosome. You can even see the join: "eend". Here, two "end"s got stuck together, losing and "nd" in the process.

To argue that evolution hasnt occurred, and that all these are just coincidences - the happenstance occurrence of junk at identical places, apparent fusion events - is to say that any designer has loaded the genome with so many false leads to pretend to mankind that he has evolved from apes, and that therefore the designer is vindictive and purposefully misleading.

The alternative is to accept that we simply evolved from ape-like creatures.