KnightWhoSaysNi

I recently challenged a creationist medicine/biology professor at my university with scigirl's chimp/human chromosome argument, which argues decisively that chimps and humans had a common ancestor. I was somewhat intrigued by his reply:

(Wasn't it 99%, actually?)

First, you have YEC's who reject modern astronomy, geology, and biology. Then you have OEC's who only reject modern biology. Now you have creationists that accept evidence for common ancestry and the 'tree of life' but reject the mechanisms for change, such as natural selection and mutation. They claim that God created new species via common ancestry by supernaturally creating new genes.

This new breed of creationist probably relates much to the 'intelligent design' movement. I think Behe and Dembski fall into this category as well (from what I've read, they apparently accept common ancestry too). One very ironic thing about this 'evolution of creationism' is that new creationist breeds come closer and closer to resembling theistic evolution as their 'God of the Gaps' has fewer and fewer things to do.

MortalWombat

This guy is a medicine/biology professor and he thinks that the few percentage difference between chimps and humans is due to some genes being present in one species and not the other?

The 2% or so difference between chimps and humans lies not in whether or not a gene is present, but on the overall sequence homology between the two genomes. As far as I recall, chimps and humans have the same genes, but the difference between them is that, for instance, in a gene that is 1000 nucleotides long, there would be 20 nucleotide differences between the chimp and human version of that gene.

Also, why would a creator make identical crippled, inactive genes in humans and chimps (for instance, the inactive GLO gene involved in vitamin C biosynthesis which contains the same crippling deletion in primates and humans)?

It seems he didn't address the shared mistakes at all.