Homology

السلام عليكم و رحمة الله

Remember that homology means similarity between two different creatures due to common ancestor - anatomically or genetically (or molecular) . Which means that a human and a bacteria should have less in common than between a human and a chimp. The more unsimilar you are the further away the common ancestor between the two is and the more similar you are, the more recent your common ancestor is. Homology is used every time among evolutionist to determine the split between two creatures. This is the standard method used by Charles Darwin himself - which is why he believed that the humans and chimps had common ancestor due to their similarity. How can you falsify such belief? All you have to do is to show high similarity between creatures that look nothing like each other genetically or show less similarity between two creatures that look alike genetically. 

Here is an example to understand. Imagine a cat, bat and a bird. Based on Darwin's own method we just need to look and whoever looks similar had a recent common ancestor. Who is closer to the bird? The cat or the bat? It is obviously the bat. There is no question about it. Therefore the evidence of homology must point to high similarity between bat and bird and less similarity between cat and bird on the genetic level (because we already established that bat is more similar to bird than a cat - so anatomical homology should be in accordance to genetic similarity if homology is true). Yet to our surprise the genetic evidence contradicts the anatomical evidence. The cat is more similar to the bird than the bat. Sean B. Carrol said,

"...consider bats and birds, both of which have adaptations that enable flight. This superficial resemblance might imply that bats are more closely related to birds than they are to cats, which cannot fly. But a closer examination reveals that a bat's wing is far more similar to the forelimbs of cats... than to a bird's wing" [1]

So homology is contradicted and thus unreliable. At least that's what common sense dictates but evolutionist have their way out. This contradiction has it's own name called homoplasy (or convergent evolution - to sound too scientific). This means that similarity between unsimilar creatures is due to pure accident. It just happened to be similar. So homology contradicts homoplasy and homoplasy contradicts homology. Moreover you cannot falsify the data. It's either homology or homoplasy. If similarity can arise by pure chance then how exactly can we trust Darwin's own method? And since similarity and unsimilarity are both evidence for evolution then does homology or homoplasy have any real meaning? Despite the obvious contradiction between homology and homoplasy, they - the evolutionist - still use homology and homoplasy as if they don't contradict each other. Also how can you possibly know if something is homology or homoplasy? You can't. You simply make it up as you go along. If you want the alleged 99% similarity between apes and humans as homology then you say its homology and if you don't want to say that then say it's homoplasy. 

Homology is really the method of forging your own ancestors. It has no real meaning behind it or scientific evidence. It's mere conjecture and imagination. 

What I showed above is contradiction between anatomical and molecular evidence. But there is even a contradiction between molecular evidences.

Michael Lynch notes that a study, led by Wray (and others), showed similarities between genes and came with the date of 1.0 to 1.2 billion for the origin of major animal phyla.[2] But other works showed that the origin of major animal phyla is actually just 800 million years ago.[3] But other molecular evidence shows yet different stories. Lynch again notes that a study led by Ayala (and others) showed that the origin for the major phyla at 600-670 million years.[4] What that means is that even molecular evidence contradicts molecular evidence all the time. It was first assumed that all genes change at a constant rate but soon enough it was discovered that change occurs at an irregular rate: some fast, some slow.[5] An example would be histone protein which hardly changes and thus evolutionist will never use histone proteins[6] because then any creature would be our cousin and had recent common ancestor with us. That is bad because that would contradict the anatomical homology between chimps and humans. So here is evidence of molecular evidence contradicting molecular. Despite this blatant problems and unsolvable problems Lynch says,

"Given the substantial evolutionary time separating the animal phyla, it is not surprising that single-gene analyses yield such discordant results. Under such circumstances, the statistical noise associated with the substitution process leads to a high probability that phylogenetic analyses based on different molecules will yield different topologies. "[7]

Which simply means that whenever evolutionist want a data to suit them, they accept it and whenever they don't like it they refuse it with fairytale stories about quick change or some unknown event that changes everything. Also it means that different genes give different stories. (Topology in this context means trees)

But that's not all. There are genes that can't fit homology at all. Those genes are known as ORFan genes. Those genes are so unique they exhibit no similarity to any existing gene (that's why they are called orfan genes, which is orphan genes). Those ORFan genes are everywhere and evolutionist will not use those to make evolutionary trees since they won't fit the pattern they like. It is said that there 1000 ORFan genes in humans[8]. Get it? 1000 genes is equal to approximately 5-6% of our DNA. So how are we 99% or 98.5% or 97% similar to chimps? It's impossible. So add to the 5-6% the 2% alleged differences, you get 8% difference between humans and chimps - that is 92% similarity. No more 95% or above. No doubt more ORFan genes will be found and the alleged similarity will fade away. But the question is how does ORFan genes come to existence? It couldn't arise by gene duplication.[9] So where do they come from? Though there is no certain answer but some evolutionist claimed that ORFan genes came by a process called de novo. Which simply means once upon a time a junk gene existed[10]. This junk gene which is as good as a garbage bin changed as time went on and miraculously became functional and so unique. Yes garbage changed to purity and cleanliness by chance. This is how bad homology has become. It was believed that ORFan genes is impossible since homology/evolution doesn't predict that[11] but now it's flooding everywhere and anywhere. A false prediction.

Due to these problems you start to understand why ideas like the web of life, bush of life, forest of life etc come to rise. The tree of life as Dawkins once thought was true[12] has died. And the reason why there is even a tree, web or bush of life is because evolutionist assume that alleged similarity means common ancestor. If you stop assuming, you will have no tree, web or forest of life. What you will have is dots across the page, each dot representing sudden appearances of animals.

To summarise homology (also called "molecular evidence") is the method of forging your own ancestors. Remember the saying? The strong, the ones in power, writes history (i.e. lie about the past). It is happening in front of your eyes cloaked in a respected area of research called science. Homology "is still a funny word: in the context of proteins and genes, it makes sense only if we don’t think about it too deeply" and a "useless word"[13]

Here is another example when different body structure give you different stories. For example when Lucy was uncovered, the evolutionist believed that Lucy evolved into a Australopithecus africanus and then into you and me.

Why? Because the head of Lucy appeared more ape-like than africanus[14]. But then a discovery was made in Sterkfontein[15] which is of africanus which shows that its legs was more ape-like than Lucy's![16] So now the legs are giving a different story than the heads. Did Lucy's descendants revert back to apish-ness? If yes then how does that explain the alleged "human-like" head of africanus? 

That is just an example of how different body parts (head and leg in this case) give different stories. Now africanus is thrown away as a side-branch dead end since they don't want it to put doubt on Lucy. Of course all these fake tree drawings are just fancy trees they like. It may well be true that Lucy's descendants reverted (that's if Lucy had human-like legs) since evolution is random. But that's one example.

In fact one author denied Lucy altogether[17]. His claim is obviously rejected but Clarke discovered an Australopithecus which was not knuckle-walking (Lucy was) and he believed that it evolved into humans thus throwing Lucy to an evolutionary dead-end. He said that his discovery "argues against the commonly held view that human... ancestor would have been long-armed and knuckle-walk[ing]..." and that it argued against the fact that humans and chimps are closely related[18]

This all happened in 2002. Who knows what happened next but that Lucy vs africanus is definitely an important example. 

But taking this incident and reflect upon it, does homology really give a consistent story? Does it even give a story in the first place? Can fossil evidence even give a story? No. For example, here we have Lucy in all her glory, how do we know for sure that she evolved into humans? We don't know. What if she became  a chimpanzee? What if she and her family went actually extinct without evolving like africanus, robustus etc? How do we know for sure what really happened? What if Lucy isn't Lucy[19]? What if Lucy became Homo naledi?[20] We will never know. Homology fails to help and homoplasy refutes homology.

Fairytales after fairytales.

Note: I wrote this for my friend. I prefer to keep my articles strictly about history.

و الله اعلم

References and notes

[1] Neil A. Campbell and Jane B. Reece, 8th edition, Biology, page 541 (emphasis is mine). It's a biology textbook.

[2] Michael Lynch, The Age and Relationships of the Major Animal Phyla, Evolution, Vol 53, No. 2 (Apr., 1999) pp. 319-325 (p. 319).  For free access see http://www.indiana.edu/~lynchlab/PDF/Lynch90.pdf

[3] Douglas H. Erwin et al, The Cambrian Conundrum: Early Divergence and Later Ecological success in the early history of animals, Science, 25 November 2011, Vol.334(6059), pp. 1091-7. See http://science.sciencemag.org/content/334/6059/1091.full

[4]  Michael Lynch, The Age and Relationships of the Major Animal Phyla, Evolution, Vol 53, No. 2 (Apr., 1999) pp. 319-325 (p. 320).For free access see http://www.indiana.edu/~lynchlab/PDF/Lynch90.pdf

[5] Simon Y. W. Ho and Sebastian Duchene, Molecular-clock methods for estimating evolutionary rate and timescales, Molecular Ecology (2014) 23, 5947-5965 (p. 5947). See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25290107

[6] Ernst Mayr, 2002, What Evolution Is; Ibid, page 5951

[7]  Michael Lynch, The Age and Relationships of the Major Animal Phyla, Evolution, Vol 53, No. 2 (Apr., 1999) pp. 319-325 (p. 323). For free access see http://www.indiana.edu/~lynchlab/PDF/Lynch90.pdf

[8] http://www.biologicinstitute.org/post/127163753549/something-borrowed-something-new-human-orphan

[9]  Ruiz-Orera J et al. (2015) Origins of De Novo Genes in Human and Chimpanzee. PLoS Genet 11(12).

Gene duplication is a gene that is duplicated. So let's say for example you have gene which has the letters AAAA and you duplicate that to get another AAAA. So now you have two genes with the exact code. Then vision that the first gene changes and becomes AAAB whilst the other gene changes and becomes AAAG. There is 75% similarity between these two gene. That is exactly what gene duplication is, just longer codes.

[10] Christian Schlotterer, Genes from scratch - the fate of de novo genes, Trends in Genetics, Volume 31, Issue 4, 215-219.

For free access see http://www.cell.com/trends/genetics/pdf/S0168-9525(15)00034-7.pdf; Aoife McLysaght and Laurence D. Hurst,Open questions in the study of de novo genes: what, how and why, Nature Reviews Genetics 17, 567-578 (2016). See http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v17/n9/abs/nrg.2016.78.html

[11] Christian Schlotterer, Genes from scratch - the fate of de novo genes, Trends in Genetics, Volume 31, Issue 4, 215-219. For free access see http://www.cell.com/trends/genetics/pdf/S0168-9525(15)00034-7.pdf

[12] Richard Dawkins, 2009, The Greatest Show on Earth, Bantam Press chapter 10

[13]  Ford Doolittle, The nature of the universal ancestor and the evolution of the proteome, Current Opinion in Structural Biology, Volume 10, Issue 3, pages 355-358. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10851188

[14] Mark Collard and Leslie Aiello, "From forelimbs to two legs" Nature 404 (March 23, 2000): 339-340

[15] Clarke and Phillip Tobias, "Sterkfontein member 2 foot bones of the oldest South African hominid" Science 269 (5223):521-524 

[16] Lee Berger and Phillip Tobias, "A chimpanzee-like tibia from Sterkfontein, South Africa and its implications for the interpretation of bipedalism in Australopithecus africanus" Journal of Human Evolution, April 1996, Vol 30 (4):343-348

[17] Clarke, "Newly revealed information on the Sterkfontein Member 2 Australopithecus skeleton", South African Journal of Science 98, November/December 2002. 523-526

[18] Ibid, 526

[19] Because Lucy was discovered scattered across a hillside. The bones were not found together, therefore some came up with the idea of "family" rather than one person called Lucy. The reason why it was accepted as being one is because no two of the same bones were found therefore, most likely, the bones relate to one person but recently one bone of Lucy's backbone belongs to a baboon (https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27325-baboon-bone-found-in-famous-lucy-skeleton/). So is Lucy a mixture of God knows what? Lucy lived with baboons? Why did not the baboons evolve since they all lived in the alleged harsh climate?

[20] Homo naledi never became a human since it coexisted with humans, its alleged age is 912 ka years old. See Mana Dembo et al, "The evolutionary relationships and age of Homo naledi: An assessment using dated Bayesian phylogenetic methods" Journal of Human Evolution 97 (2016) 17-26

Women's evolution

السلام عليكم و رحمة الله

Some women are not happy with the standard story of evolution. Why you ask? Because the male is the hero all the time. Think about it. When was the last time you heard of the female ape-human creature saving her husband and child? When was the last time you heard the female hunting in the open Savannah of the desert of Africa for food? It's always a he always a male. The female is the lonely ape-like creature on the trees. She's only mentioned at breast feeding the baby and mating with the heroic ape-human creature. And Elaine Morgan (1920-2013) tries to break this male-centered view in the standard evolutionary theory stories on human evolution.

Elaine Morgan

She has wrote a whole book entitled The Descent of Woman (get it? Darwin wrote The Descent of Man). The whole book is one long speculative fairy-tale story about how ape-human women evolved. She starts with how men think of women; as a man gone wonky,

"Throughout most of the literature dealing with the differences between the sexes there runs a subtle underlying assumption that woman is a man gone wonky; that woman is a distorted version of the original blueprint; that they are the norm, and we are the deviation"[1]

She thought that "It might have been expected that when Darwin came along and wrote an entirely different account of The Descent of Man [sic], this assumption [i.e. that women are men gone wonky] would have been eradicated... But it didn't"[2]

Even though she said that at least Darwin's idea made woman and man "contemporaneous" rather than woman created a while after from man, she did forget to mention more than just that from Darwin's Descent.

In the Descent[3] Darwin argues that women are inferior to men. But why are men superior to women? Darwin explains,

"It is generally admitted that with women the power of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilisation."

So because women have the power of intuition, rapid perception and imitation that makes the women inferior.

Let's define the words.

Intuition: knowledge or perception not gained by reasoning and intelligence[4]

Perception: (1) the act or the effect of perceiving (2) insight or intuition gained by perceiving (3) the ability or capacity to perceive (4) the process by which an organism detects and interprets information from the external world by means of the sensory receptor

Imitation[5]: (2) to pretend to be or to impersonate [something]

What Darwin is saying is that the savages (the blacks, like the Fuegians, Australians etc and religious people) are very intuitive (i.e. gaining knowledge without reasoning or intelligence) and that the womenfolk are similar to the savages in this respect. He's also saying that the savages are good at perceiving (isn't that good?) and women are good at perceiving therefore women are inferior to men and finally savages don't make anything new (they do and Darwin himself admits to that but he's talking in the general sense) rather they need to be taught by/copy the superior beings (i.e. the male whites) and somehow women also only imitate therefore they are inferior.

Darwin carries on throwing fanciful statistics around too,

"The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than women can attain - whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands.If two list were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music,-comprising composition and performance, history, science and philosophy, with half-a-dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison. We may also infer, from the law of the deviation of averages, so well illustrated by Mr Galton,[6] in his work on 'Hereditary Genius,' that if men are capable of decided eminence over women in many subjects, the average standard of mental power in man must be above that of women"(585 - italics are mine)

Most of that requires no explanation but the last sentence does. What Darwin means by "average standard of mental power in man must be above that of women" is that if statistics were shown that men are always smarter, then women are inferior (as Darwin believed). But the opposite is true, if statistics show that women are smarter then, men are inferior. Which also means that there is such a thing as "inferior" and "superior" not just among races of man (which Darwin also believed in) but also between the genders!

(Hold on a minute... If women imitate... Where did they learn kindness and sweetness? Men allegedly were hunting in the desert with brutal power in order to eat and be biped over millions of years. Did the man have kindness too over the kids? If yes what did the women do then? Something sounds fishy).

Then he beautifully summarizes what he means (should be written in gold! Joking)

"Thus man has ultimately become superior to woman" (586  - bold are mine - I felt greatness after reading that - joking again).

He even says that it is fortunate or else man and women would've been the same!

"It is, indeed, fortunate that the law of equal transmission of characters to both sexes has commonly prevailed throughout the whole class of mammals; otherwise it is probable that man would have become as superior in mental endowment to women, as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen" (586)

I am not sure whether this is a sign of happiness that man is superior to woman but it does seem that Darwin did feel fortunate/happy that man is superior.

In another passage Darwin says,

"Man is more powerful in body and mind than woman..." (620)

But did you know that Darwin used to call his own wife mammy?[7] So much for inferiority.

But that's not all. Darwinist started (before Darwin even published Descent) to try to prove that women are inferior to men not just by the fact that men occupy the seat of knowledge but also by the fact that women generally have smaller heads to men. That has a meaning for the Darwinist. The idea that women have smaller heads than men meant only one thing: inferiority. Carl Vogt, an admirer of Darwin (and whom Darwin mentions in the Descent) said,

"By its rounded apex and less developed posterior lobe the Negro brain resembles that of our children, by the protuberance of the parietal lobe, that of our women... The grown-up Negro partakes, as regards his intellectual  faculties, of the nature of the child, the female, and the senile white..."[8]

And Paul Broca (whom also Darwin mentions) claimed that women's brains are inferior to men.[9]

This is of course where Darwin got his ideas from. He published Origin of Species and people like Vogt and Broca took their cue and formed their racist views, Darwin took their views and incorporated it into Descent.

But one more thing Darwin also claims that women are maybe "missing links" between a child and men. He said,

"The female... in the formation of her skull, is said to be intermediate between the child and man" (579)

And he references Vogt and Ecker on page 603.

Summary

I don't think this requires summary but according to Darwin your mum, sister, wife and all female relatives of yours are proven to be inferior to you (if you're a male).

There is a new book that just came out by Fatima Barkatulla called Khadijah: Mother of History's Greatest Nation. An excellent book on how superior women are. (it's really for children)


References

1. Elaine Morgan, 1985, The Descent of Woman, Souvenir Press, page 7

2. Ibid, page 7

3. Charles Darwin, Darwin: The Descent of Man, Wordsworth Classics of World Literature
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Descent-Man-Classics-World-Literature/dp/1840226986/ref=pd_sim_14_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=76G4FD9HY64DGT4VQHEQ

4. I am using The New Collins Concise English dictionary for all the definitions. First published in 1979 but the same definition is on Oxford dictionary https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/intuition

5. I am defining 'imitate' rather than imitation.

6. Francis Galton is the cousin of Darwin.

7. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, volume 4, Cambridge University Press, pages 146-147

8. Carl Vogt, 1864, Lectures on Man: His place in nature and in the history of the Earth, page 192
    You can access that book for free on https://archive.org/details/lecturesonmanhis00vogtuoft
    It's also in Stephen Jay Gould, 2007, The Richness of life, Vintage, page 515

9. Stephen Jay Gould, 2007, The Richness of life, Vintage, page 515

Taught by a Blackmoore

السلام عليكم و رحمة الله

Robert Erasmus Darwin

Like all fathers they want their son(s) to gain a good education, a decent job and a happy life. So was the father of Charles Darwin. Robert Erasmus Darwin[1] (the father of Charles Darwin - the picture on the right) told his son, with definite pressure, to go to Edinburgh University (in Scotland) to learn all the things a doctor requires. That included dissecting human and nonhuman bodies. This involved seeing chopped up flesh, real organs, real blood - raw and uncensored.

But poor Darwin simply couldn't take it. He could not take the sight of blood. So he decided to make his way in the University by not concentrating, not focusing, walking around the grand fields of Edinburgh, wishing for holidays and just having a chill.

One of the things Darwin did to chill was to learn how to stuff birds.[2] What is surprising is that the man who taught Darwin how to do this was a black man. His name was John Edmonstone.[3] John asked for one guinea per hour for two months[4] which was cheap. Darwin enjoyed the time he spent with John and learn a lot from him. John was described by Darwin as an "intelligent" and "pleasant" man.[5] Despite the fact that Darwin was taught by a "negro" in late 1820's (way before he was a evolutionist) he, later on in his life, after converting to evolutionism (or transmutationism as Darwin first called it), claimed that savages (all black people) are inferior in knowledge, ape-like creatures (at least some were) and nowhere near the standard and intelligence of the white. This is how Charles Darwin repaid John Edmonstone.


Reference

1. I added the word "Erasmus" since Erasmus was the father of Robert. The father of any son/daughter should have their name in the middle name of their son/daughter.

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpsQjDkNpMo This is a video about what stuffing is if you didn't know.

3. Even though there is doubt if he really was John Edmonstone. R. B. Freeman explains why there is a doubt and concludes, "A tentative conclusion, with unresolved problems, is that Darwin's negro bird-stuffer was John Edmonstone, originally a slave of Charles Edmonstone of Warrows Place, Mibiri Creek, Demerara River, British Guiana. He came to Scotland, with his master, in 1817, first for a brief period in Glasgow and then, at least in 1823, moved to Edinburgh where he still was in 1833". Quoted in R. B. Freeman, Darwin's Negro Bird-Stuffer, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 33. No. 1 (Aug., 1978), pages 83-86.

4. Adrian Desmond & James Moore, 1992, Darwin, Penguin, page 28.

5. Janet Browne, 1995, Charles Darwin: Voyaging, Pimlico, page 66