Chromosome 2 Fusion is Folly

Over at the Darwin Ranch, Rusty Swingset is having his employees put in extensive overtime at the propaganda mill again. Many of their efforts are easily dismissed by thinking people, but others such as the alleged chromosome 2 fusion seem plausible on the surface.

Credit: FreeDigitalPhotos / dream designs, modified at PhotoFunia

One reason biblical creation science ministries exist is to provide information and analysis of "evidence" for evolution that secularists misinterpreted and are less than true. Some professing Christians claim to have lost their faith because they thought the Bible was refuted by evolution.

However, there are many resources available, and there is really no excuse for not making a reasonable effort to learn the facts. One example is Rhett McLaughlin, a media figure who obtained evolutionary material from biased and unreliable sources such as Wikipedia. Did he check biblical sources? (See "An open letter to Rhett McLaughlin — and anyone else on the road to unbelief".) There are many examples of "former Christians" who demonstrate appalling ignorance of Christianity, and seem to have had their biases and rebellion against God confirmed by atheistic sources (Prov. 18:17).

Anti-creationists point to several icons of evolution to say, "Aha! Gotcha!" to justify their evolutionary worldview. Critical thinking and science can pull on the reins and holler, "Whoa!" to those alleged proofs. Evolutionists presuppose their worldview and interpret data accordingly. We all do that, but observed science does not necessarily support historical science.

It's reasonable to have ideas about what happened in the distant past and see if there is observable evidence in the present that supports them. Supposedly, humans and apes branched off from a common ancestor, but the chromosome count is different between us and them. Evolutionists speculate that since they have one more pair than humans, ours may have fused in the unobservable past. Then they commence to doing storytelling and using the complex scientific principle of Making Things Up™. Details that are used in support of their tales are actually hostile to the chromosome 2 fusion idea, supporting instead recent special creation.

At first glance, this argument seems convincing. From an evolutionary perspective, since we presumably share a common ancestor with the great apes, it’s very likely that we would have the same number of chromosomes. But we don’t. Great apes have 48 (24 pairs) chromosomes, and humans have only 46 (23 pairs). To explain this dissimilarity, evolutionists predicted an ancient end-to-end fusion “event” in evolutionary history when two chromosomes became one. So as the human ancestor and ape ancestor diverged from the common ancestor, a fusion occurred in the branch that eventually became Homo sapiens sapiens—us—but not in the branch that became the great apes.

When scientists compared human and chimp chromosomes, they found remarkable similarity in banding (the patterns developed by a DNA stain when a dye is applied by researchers) between our chromosome 2 and chimp chromosomes 12 and 13. Could this be evidence of an ancestral fusion event? Evolutionists certainly believed it was—so much so that they renamed chimp chromosomes 12 and 13, 2a and 2b.

To read the entire article or hear the Mp3, swing on over to "Unraveling the Chromosome 2 Connection". You may also wish to see "Creation Science and Chromosome Fusion".