Well, I've never seen two bananas that were exactly alike.

All bananas look alike to me.

But don't get me wrong, some of my best friends are bananas!

For me, the differences between bananas are usually only skin deep.

20% sounds like a lot to me.

Yes, it would have to, else what do you have left?

"The most visible British genetic marker is red hair, he added. The writer Tacitus noted the Romans' surprise at how common it was when they arrived 2,000 years ago."

That's interesting! I always thought it strange that people seem to think of it as a Celtic thing even though you see redheads throughout England and its history and then further down the article it said this:
"It is actually quite common to observe important cultural change, including adoption of wholly new identities, with little or no biological change to a population," Simon James, the Leicester University archaeologist, writes.

One such change is the emergence of a Celtic identity in Britain. There are no historical references to Celts in ancient Britain."

So the Irish probably differ little from the English!

That's funny. In Central European folk wisdom, red hair is evidence of Jewish ancestry.

My understanding of red-headedness in Britain and Ireland was that it was a function of the Viking influence.

Also, anyone who thinks that there are no ethnic differences between Englishmen and Celts has not spent enough time travelling around Britain, or for that matter, the American South.

The differences aren't genetic.

You really should learn something about genetics if you intend to comment upon them.

Ah, but I'm not an adherent of the determinist faith.

I can't eat bananas they rip up my stoumach something fierce.

Scratch an Englishman and find a Germanic.

Schoolchildren in my district are being taught that the ancient Egyptians, the pyramid builders, were black Africans. It seems obvious that DNA investigation could clear this up, so what we are hearing is that DNA comparisons are impossible, all we have to go on being some ludicrous cartoons said to have been copied from antiquity.

So which is it? Can we use DNA yo prove once and for all that the ancient Egyptians were really Germans, as the Nazis taught, or Negroes, as we hear now, or just plain old Egyptians.

Genetics is a real problem for Orrin.

One one hand, like here, he has to deny it.

On the other, he has to claim that it works but has nothing to do with evolution.

It goes back to natural selection. Once you decide you have to ignore the evidence for that, the descent into complete incoherence does not take long.

Deny it? What's to deny? Life had to made of something. God chose genes. Because all life is the His Creation those genes don't differ much from the lowest to the highest. Genetics proves Creation.

Proves common origin (with the curious possible exception of the ciliate protozoans, which may not share a last universal common ancestor with us).

Yes, common origin suggests Creation.

No, it just suggests common origin.

Since nobody here seems to understand the shell game Orrin is playing, I guess I should spell it out.

'Genetic distance' is a term that can be used casually to discuss changing proportions in alleles of the same genes within a species. 'Genetic distance' precisely used measures the difference in genes across species.

Orrin has conveniently mixed up the two uses for his nefarious purposes.

If you're going to bring bananas in, then the 'genetic distance' between any two human populations is zero.

Anytime you're prepared to discuss evolution honestly, Orrin, I'm ready.

Harry:

Yes, that's the precise point. That all life in the universe has just one common origin and is made up of identical material tends to suggest Creation.

That you confuse genes with alleles suggests you don't know what you're talking about.

More than suggest, actually. Proves it.

Gene, allele, DNA, no matter which you pick the Creator used the same building block for every living thing. Life arises in just one way.

*sighs*

Neither one nor the other.

Let's go over the basic machinery: Genes are collections of DNA. DNA is read by protein synthesis structures which transcribes the patterns of A, T, G, and C into selectors that determine which amino acids get strung together into a specific protein. The protein string then kinks into a specific shape that determines what it does, either chemically or mechanically, within the cell. The constraints on the kinking process to get to the shape necessary to perform that specific function is pretty strict, and is the subject of much computer simulation because there are so many variables: I am reminded of those toys consisting of chains of plastic links that can be kinked into many shapes, but one needs a specific number of links kinked in a specific order and a specific way to get a sufficiently complicated shape, even though there are many ways to kink them into very SIMPLE shapes. (A recent article in a science magazine whose title my memory fails to recall, was about parkinson's disease. It said that there is protein machinery that guides the kinking function, and they conjecture that one model of parkinson's disease is that a certain protein kinks by itself BEFORE it gets to this machine, and that other protein machinery that removes faulty proteins doesn't recognize it as faulty. The faulty proteins accumulate as trash and poison the cell.)

The point to remember is that protein shapes dictate function and capability. Protein shapes, in turn are determined by the fixed physical properties of the amino acids and the atoms that comprise them. It appears to me the similarity in all the genetic material is due to natural constraints imposed by the nature of the materials involved that have to make up the structures that perform the required functions that all cells must do in order to be living cells.

I gotta git to work, so more on this later.

Yes, Orrin, it's all the same stuff, which proves nothing except that it's all the same stuff.

But you posted about genetic distance where there isn't any.

You might want to try to explain how you made such an elementary mistake instead of just waving your arms and saying, 'The Big Spook did it.'

Harry:

Yes, the point is that there's never much genetic distance. There can't be because everything's Created. That's where you go wrong.