WHAT DOES GENETICS TELL US ABOUT HUMAN ORIGINS?

This post was taken from my book New Evidence for Two Human Origins: Discoveries That Reconcile the Bible and Science (2009 edition).¹

Evidence for Theistic Evolution from Retrotransposons

In the past few years, great strides have been made in our understanding of the genome; some of these discoveries are destined to change the way we view our oringins. In his excellent timely article, "Human Evolution: How Random Process Fulfils [sic] Divine Purpose," Graeme Finlay explains how the human genome came to possess markers shared with other mammals. The natural processes that accomplished it have now been discovered. One of his examples of these processes is the retrotransposon.
Retrotransposons “are parasitic residents of the genome that copy-and-paste themselves into new sites of genomic DNA via an RNA intermediate.”² One of these retrotransposons is the ERVWE1 insert. This insert came into the mammalian race via the gibbon. New world monkeys did not have this insert, but the later arriving gibbons did possess it. Also the orang, gorilla, chimpanzee, and humans have it. As the natural process that adds the insert proceeds, it reproduces a few of the chromosome bases that are situated beside it. This new set of inserts appears in the chromosome on the opposite side of the insert. Please see a section of the new world monkey chromosome and a section of the chromosome of the gibbon as it exists on through the rest of the species including the human species:

New world monkey species:

…CAATTATCTTGCAACCATG…

Gibbon through man:

…CAATTATCTTGCAAC [ERVWE1] CAACCATG…

The characteristic reproduction of the bases CAAC compels us to conclude that a natural process was employed to add this ERVWE1 insert into the gibbon genome and that, when the gibbon branched off to produce new species, the insert ERVWE1 was carried along to become part of the later species as well. Our example is not a rare occurrence. Finlay emphasizes this with the following satistic: “We have inherited at least 300,000 LTR retrotransposons and endogenous retroviruses in our DNA.”³

Finlay concludes: “Genes present in our DNA really arose when transposons acquired coding capacity in simian [ape or monkey] ancestors.”⁴ Finlay’s one article gives evidence for theistic evolution (of the pre-Adamic race per my thesis), the old age of the earth (since much time is required for these evolutionary processes), and the truthfulness of the Bible (because the Bible states that the pre-Adamites were the descendants of earth and heaven).
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¹Gary T. Mayer’s book New Evidence for Two Human Origins: Discoveries That Reconcile the Bible and Science (Bloomington, IN, Milton Keynes, UK: AuthorHouseTM, 2009), 172-73.
²Graeme Finlay, “Human Evolution: How Random Process fulfils [sic] Divine Purpose,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 60, no. 2 (2008): 106. Journal article may be accessed at http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2008/PSCF6-08Finlay.pdf.
³Ibid.
⁴Ibid., 108