Dr. Craig is a liar.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

I actually meant to respond to your other similar post, but time got away from me, and it wasn't actually about evolution anyway (similar to here).   I do find this to be the best argument for evolution, because I think it is the main one, that tries to demonstrate common descent (rather than assuming it).   If you want to start another thread or message me, if you have better information available (better than that simplistic drawing).  I would be looking for more of the actual data, with similarities and discrepancies included (what are the difficulties).  Personally, I think that because common descent is assumed so much, that it isn't taught very well.  The data isn't organized and explained well.  I'm by no means an expert in biology so I need some help and explanation, and I realize that I may not understand everything.   But in my experience, someone who knows the subject well, should be able to explain their reasoning, and someone who doesn't know the subject well can assess it.

As I explained in my previous post, this isn't something I can easily show you unless you've taken the time to understand genetics: what it is, how it works, and why we know what we know.

By "common descent", we simply mean that we observe that DNA is handed down from parents to offspring, with certain modifications by well-understood mechanisms (among them are recombination, transpositions, and of course point mutations). The fact that certain sections (the inactive ones) tend to be highly preserved over many generations, due to the lack of Natural Selection "weeding out" different versions of the active genes as it does, we can use the handed-down inactive sections as "markers" to trace lines of descent.

It's that exact mechanism we use in court to determine paternity, identification of criminals, etc.

The "simplistic drawing" is nothing of the sort. It's a map of what can be seen with your own eyes, in a gel electrophoresis experiment, as I explained. Here's what a result it looks like in real life:



And how it's charted, which results in the "simplistic" drawings you saw, for easier viewing.


What you're essentially asking me to do (by provoking me with the "if you're really an expert" kind of statement) is to educate you on the entire field of genetics, and why it works the way it does. If you really, honestly want to know the details of why we know what we know about common descent, I suggest you poke around at the UC Berkeley bio department's website or the National Institutes of Health's PubMed publications, and others like them. They have many excellent articles on how it works and why. With all due respect, it's not my job to give you a college education.

I will happily sum up, if you like... but if you're going to call the layman's explanations "simplistic" and refuse to take my word (that's fine), then I'm going to point you to the complex answer, and recommend you put in the requisite amount of study to understand it for yourself.

Edit to Add: On the other hand, I know you're desperately seeking for signs of duplicity or dodgy answers from me, so you can protect your beliefs.*sigh* Fine. I'll link you to one article at the NIH which will help you see more about the subject of shared human-chimp ERVs.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26088204