Roller

Hi!

There's a debate going on about a UFO "contactee" Billy Meier and some of his writing on one of the forums. Now you are probably wondering why UFO's on Evolution/Creation board? The thing is, this guy Billy is claiming (that's what his UFO friends told him) how humans were genetically engineered by a race in Sirius constellation. Purpose of that "engineering" was creating humans for battle against the enemies of that engineering race. I know, I know, you're probably thinking: "Guy is a whacko, so?"

Now comes the interesting part - he claims how those humans escaped their masters and came to Earth. Regarding this, I have a couple of questions. First of all, if humans were "introduced" to Earth, why then is our DNA so similar with other living beings? If we were "genetically engineered" and introduced from non-Earth environment, then no similarities between humans and chimps (or any other living being for that matter) should exist. Right? Another thing is this: if I'm not mistaken, genetic engineering presupposes DNA. Even if living beings exist someplace other than Earth, they could evolve some totally different hereditary mechanism. Right? Therefore, "genetic engineering" makes no sense. Anyway, I was just wondering to hear your thoughts on this.

Doubting Didymus

I think your objections are right on track. We would not expect to fit into a phylogeny with everything else unless we evolved here, but we do.

Regarding genetic engineering, I suspect that discreet units of hereditary material may well be a natural consequence of evolution, unless the biology of extraterrestrials is very very very different from everything we know. This means that alien life may well posess 'genes', the word meaning 'discrete hereditary package'. These may well be engineerable, but there is no reason I know of that it should be DNA over some other molecule. That question will be resolved when we know more about abiogenesis.

johngalt

It sounds almost like the Raelians and their theory. I agree with you that this is very unlikely because we are so close with primates in our DNA.

Roller

Thank you on your comments!

Yes, this probably sounds similar to what Rael is saying. But, then again, you have Sitchin who is saying, contrary to entire Sumerian cuniform scientific community, how we were created some 250.000 years ago. Again as a slave race but here on Earth, for the sole purpose of digging gold for our Niburian (Anunnaki) masters. Anunnaki would then use that gold to fix their atmosphere (don't ask me how). Couple years back, while I was still deeply involved in the UFO community, things like this led me to believe that all of this is human imagination (at least stories from Billy, Rael, Sitchin, Daeniken, Hancock, I'm yet unsure about the UFO phenonemon itself). Anyway, this part is not appropriate for this forum.

Oolon Colluphid

that, of course, is Dawkins’s point that heredity is fundamentally digital, and his prediction that any life, anywhere, will also be at base digital (for only digital information has sufficient copying fidelity to remain fairly intact through innumerable copyings).

Cheers, Oolon

nogods4me

You would think that an alien race capable of space travel and complex genetic engineering, would have been able to simply build a machine to dig the gold, or design a weapon to defeat their enemies. Instead of creating a frgile, unpredictable species, just so we could escape our slavery and start our own civilization. Sounds like a variation on the exodus myth to me.

Oolon Colluphid

Well ‘Billy’ can stop right there. Sirius is a star -- our second-nearest -- in the constellation of Canis Major. And constellations are optical illusions: their component stars are nowhere near each other, except from the line of vision from earth. There ain’t no Sirius constellation for anything to come from.
Not strictly necessarily, but the probability of us fitting right in alongside the African apes is pretty, erm, astronomical, as well as just plain implausible.
You are, basically, spot on. But more damning than the DNA evidence, in this case, is the rather beautiful series of transitional fossils for the human lineage. Which species was the engineered-and-introduced one? Australopithecus afarensis? A africanus? Homo habilis, erectus, ergaster, heidelbergensis? Not only is there no predicted reason for our close apparent affinity with the African apes; the fossil record also shows that humans didn’t appear fully-formed (engineered), like Athena from the head of Zeus -- we evolved like everything else from a decidedly Earth-bound common ancestor.

Cheers, Oolon

Oolon Colluphid

To put it in a nutshell (and cos I love this pic so much ): ask Billy which of these was the introduced, engineered species:



That should sort him.

Cheers, Oolon

BioBeing

Of all the "alien" theories I've heard, the one that makes the most sense is simply that self-replicating molecules (being so utterly improbable to have come into existance here on Earth) must have been brought by asteroids, and that life as we know it has evolved from there. [Was that proposed by Sir Fred Hoyle? I think it was someone famous.] Note I say most sense - I still don't think it makes any real sense. It is still displacement, and Occam's Razor is against it (not only did self-replicating molecules have to form, they then had to get on an asteroid and piggyback over here).

So lets wait until we have a real sample of alien DNA (or whatever they use for their genetic material) before we start hypothesizing about our evolutionary relationship to them, shall we?

Doubting Didymus

Well, that's not exactly what I was talking about. Dawkins' points about heredity being digital is referring to the form of the DNA molecule itself: the 'digits' being everyones favourite four letters: atg&c. Dawkins predicts that digital inheritence would be common, simply because analog inheritence would not copy with enough fidelity to last for many generations. (myself, I'm not so sure. I think an analog inheritance system would work for evolution provided that the fidelity was high enough for natural selection to maintain the 'genome' faster than it degrades. Sex would be vital to that system. Lots and lots of it, in order to recombine those parts of the analog genome that best survived copying.)

In any case, what I was talking about was the arrangement of the digits (bases in our case, god knows what in aliens) into discreet groups that are never separated, or are very rarely separated. Thats a 'gene', and the term would apply equally to our groups of ATGC as it would to an aliens hypothetical groups of ZKPFAM. I think that if the aliens evolution is ANYTHING like ours was at all, then these discreet and longlived units of collected information should be present, and 'genetic' engineering should be as easy for them as it is for us.