Skip to main content

dna, cookbooks, maps and chimpanzees

Let's take it as a given that 98% of human dna is similar to that of a chimpanzee.

For those who believe that it is a spiritual dimension that makes humans different, the closer this % is to 100, the better supported is the claim that genetics does not suffice to account for the differences between humans and their closest neighbors on the tree of life.

It is worth pointing out that a 2% difference in (non-junk) dna doesn't necessarily imply a similarly low level of phenotypic difference. To think that it does is to take dna as a kind of model or image of the human body. But it isn't: it's a set of instructions on how to grow, or as Richard Dawkins says in The Greatest Show, it is more like a cookbook than a blueprint. An even more creative simile by RD: a set of instructions for "auto-origami." In such a case, a slight difference in the instructions can yield a great difference in the final product. Think of a cake without baking soda. That might be less than 2% of the volume of the cake, but oh what a difference!

Moral of that story: it is a mistake to posit a linear relationship between the percentage of difference in phenotype and the percentage of difference in genotype.
Labels:

Comments

Leo White said…
Also, the lessor the difference in DNA between human and chimp, the stronger the argument that something other than a difference in DNA differentiates us phenotypically
from chimps
11:16 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dembski's "specified compexity" semiotics and teleology (both ad intra and ad extra)

Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological...
Post a Comment
Read more

particular/universal event/rule

While listening to a recorded lecture on Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, it occurred to me that every rule is in a way, a fact about the world. Think about baseball: from the p.o.v. of an individual player, a baseball rule is not a thing but a guide for acting and interpreting the actions of others.  But this rule, like the action it guides, is part of a concrete individual --i.e., part of an institution that has come into existence at a particular place and time, has endured and  may eventually go out of existence.  The baseball rule, as a feature of that individual, is likewise individual.  The term "baseball rule," on the one hand, links us to a unique cultural event; it can, on the other hand, name a certain type of being.  In this way, it transgresses the boundary between proper and common noun. If there were no such overlap, then we might be tempted to divide our ontology between a bunch of facts "out there" and a bunch of common nouns "in here....
Post a Comment
Read more

continuing the discussion with Tim in a new post

Hi Tim, I am posting my reply here, because the great blogmeister won't let me put it all in a comment. Me thinks I get your point: is it that we can name and chimps can't, so therefore we are of greater value than chimps? Naming is something above and beyond what a chimp can do, right? In other words, you are illustrating the point I am making (if I catch your drift). My argument is only a sketch, but I think adding the ability to name names, as it were, is still not enough to make the argument seem cogent. For one can still ask why we prefer being able to name over other skills had by animals but not by humans. The objector would demand a more convincing reason. The answer I have in mind is, to put it briefly, that there is something infinite about human beings in comparison with the subhuman. That "something" has to do with our ability to think of the meaning of the cosmos. Whereas one might say"He's got the whole world in His han...
2 comments
Read more