Bonobos & humans share 98.7% of the same genetic blueprint

Scientific challenges to the beliefs promoted by the Brahma Kumaris so called "World Spiritual University"
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Bonobos & humans share 98.7% of the same genetic blueprint

Post02 Dec 2013

For the lack of any intellectual feasible explanation from either their god spirit or their most divine leaders, there's a tendency amongst some Brahma Kumari adherents to lean onto the polemics afforded by the assault of fanatical American Born Again Christian Evangelists on scientific discussion.

One such example, is the genetic similarity between humans and our closest relatives; chimpanzees and bonobo apes. Bonobos and humans share 98.7% of the same genetic blueprint, the same percentage shared with chimps, according to a study released by the journal Nature. (The two apes are much more closely related to each other, sharing 99.6% of their genomes, bonobos, chimps and humans shared a single common ancestor from about 6 million years ago, and chimps and bonobos sharing the same common ancestor until about a million years ago, when the Congo River formed. They were so close, scientists only realize that they were different species about 90 years ago.

Many lay individuals, such as comedians and journalists, approximate this figure to say in arguments that we share 99% of our DNA. "This is a false statement!!!", the Biblical and Brahma Kumari neo-Creationists cry ... attempting to "poison the well" and establish if it is "false" then their fairy stories must be "true".

Brahma_Kumari_Ddi_Janki.jpg
A highly evolved, intelligent, intuitive and sentient being, and close relative Dadi Janki

Well, it's not "false" ... in science we call it "a rounding up to the nearest figure for the sake of discussion".

One of the problem of adhering to a cult that encourages "not thinking" and "not questioning" (to quote Dadi Janki) and denying any information from "impure" sources outside of it while fostering distrust of them as being "ignorant" ... and excluding criticism ... is that one quickly loses perspective of how stupid and illogical the self has become (see discussion elsewhere of social biases cloud our thinking).

Now, we know that the so called Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University has no intellectual output whatsoever and no explanations for it flexible belief system ... theirs is a religion of submissive "acceptance via repetition" that offers no understanding or explanation whatsoever. It's founders were completely uneducated and it's highly likely that that they had never heard of Darwin, evolution, genes or dinosaurs when the religion was first established ... and their god has made no mention of them since.

Hence the BKs have to now borrow from American Biblical Creationists just as they have borrowed from other religions. Therefore, let us look at how the BKs' allies on the Biblical Creationists front do science ...


And, now, let us look at how scientists do science and what it takes to establish an idea and have it published by a well established journal like 'Nature'. You'll quickly notice the disadvantage of doing science; it's hard, it takes a lot of people doing a lot of work, it requires the investment of money in research and study rather than Cult PR, you have to offer it to other equally intelligent individuals to have it examined and criticised in detail, it's got to work and you've got to actually prove your theories somehow ... claiming to be "god", the "Father of humanity" or the "108 top souls in the world" does not make your utterances automatically true.

You decide where you think truth is likely to lie ... (no, I don't actually expect you to read all of this, nor the BKs to be capable of doing so and responding intelligently)
The bonobo genome compared with the chimpanzee and human genomes

Kay Prüfer, Kasper Munch, Ines Hellmann, Keiko Akagi, Jason R. Miller, Brian Walenz, Sergey Koren, Granger Sutton, Chinnappa Kodira, Roger Winer, James R. Knight, James C. Mullikin, Stephen J. Meader, Chris P. Ponting, Gerton Lunter, Saneyuki Higashino, Asger Hobolth, Julien Dutheil, Emre Karakoç, Can Alkan, Saba Sajjadian, Claudia Rita Catacchio, Mario Ventura, Tomas Marques-Bonet, Evan E. Eichler et al.

Two African apes are the closest living relatives of humans: the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and the bonobo (Pan paniscus). Although they are similar in many respects, bonobos and chimpanzees differ strikingly in key social and sexual behaviours and for some of these traits they show more similarity with humans than with each other. Here we report the sequencing and assembly of the bonobo genome to study its evolutionary relationship with the chimpanzee and human genomes. We find that more than three per cent of the human genome is more closely related to either the bonobo or the chimpanzee genome than these are to each other. These regions allow various aspects of the ancestry of the two ape species to be reconstructed. In addition, many of the regions that overlap genes may eventually help us understand the genetic basis of phenotypes that humans share with one of the two apes to the exclusion of the other.

Whereas chimpanzees are widespread across equatorial Africa, bonobos live only south of the Congo River in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As a result of their relatively small and remote habitat, bonobos were the last ape species to be described and are the rarest of all apes in captivity. As a consequence, they have, until recently, been little studied. It is known that whereas DNA sequences in humans diverged from those in bonobos and chimpanzees five to seven million years ago, DNA sequences in bonobos diverged from those in chimpanzees around two million years ago. Bonobos are thus closely related to chimpanzees. Moreover, comparison of a small number of autosomal DNA sequences has shown that bonobo DNA sequences often fall within the variation of chimpanzees

Bonobos and chimpanzees are highly similar to each other in many respects. However, the behaviour of the two species differs in important ways. For example, male chimpanzees use aggression to compete for dominance rank and obtain sex, and they cooperate to defend their home range and attack other groups. By contrast, bonobo males are commonly subordinate to females and do not compete intensely for dominance rank. They do not form alliances with one another and there is no evidence of lethal aggression between groups. Compared with chimpanzees, bonobos are playful throughout their lives and show intense sexual behaviour that serves non-conceptive functions and often involves same-sex partners. Thus, chimpanzees and bonobos each possess certain characteristics that are more similar to human traits than they are to one another’s. No parsimonious reconstruction of the social structure and behavioural patterns of the common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees and bonobos is therefore possible. That ancestor may in fact have possessed a mosaic of features, including those now seen in bonobo, chimpanzee and human.

To understand the evolutionary relationships of bonobos, chimpanzees and humans better, we sequenced and assembled the genome of a female bonobo individual (Ulindi) and compared it to those of chimpanzees and humans. Compared with the 6× Sanger-sequenced chimpanzee genome (panTro2), the bonobo genome assembly has a similar number of bases in alignment with the human genome, a similar number of lineage-specific substitutions and similar indel error rates (Table 1 and Supplementary Information, sections 2 and 3), suggesting that the two ape genomes are of similar quality. Segmental duplications affect at least 80 Mb of the bonobo genome, according to excess sequence read-depth predictions. Owing to over-collapsing of duplications, only 14.6 Mb are present in the final assembly (Supplementary Information, section 4), a common error seen in assemblies from shorter-read technologies. We used the finished chimpanzee sequence of chromosome 21 together with the human genome sequence to estimate an error rate of approximately two errors per 10 kb in the bonobo genome, with comparable qualities for the X chromosome and autosomes. The bonobo genome can therefore serve as a high-quality sequence for comparative genome analyses.

On average, the two alleles in single-copy, autosomal regions in the Ulindi genome are approximately 99.9% identical to each other, 99.6% identical to corresponding sequences in the chimpanzee genome and 98.7% identical to corresponding sequences in the human genome. A comprehensive analysis of the bonobo genome is presented in Supplementary Information. Here we summarize the most interesting results.

We identified and validated experimentally a total of 704 kb of DNA sequences that occur in bonobo-specific segmental duplications. They contain three partially duplicated genes (CFHR2, DUS2L and CACNA1B) and two completely duplicated genes (CFHR4 and DDX28). However, bonobos and chimpanzees share the majority of segmental duplications, and they carry approximately similar numbers of bases in lineage-specific duplications

As in other mammals, transposons, that is, mobile genetic elements, make up approximately half of the bonobo genome (Supplementary Information, section 6). In agreement with previous results, we find that Alu insertions accumulated about twice as fast on the human lineage as on the bonobo and chimpanzee lineages (Fig. 2b). We identified two previously unreported Alu subfamilies in bonobos and chimpanzees, designated AluYp1, which is present in 5 copies in the human genome and in 54 and 114 copies in the bonobo and chimpanzee genomes, respectively, and AluYp2, which is absent from humans and present in 24 and 37 copies, respectively, in the two apes. We found that, as in mice, African-ape-specific L1 insertions are enriched near genes involved in neuronal activities or cell adhesion and are depleted near genes encoding transcription factors or involved in nucleic-acid metabolism (Supplementary Information, section 6). In humans, L1 retrotransposition has been shown to occur preferentially in neuronal precursor cells and has been speculated to contribute to functional diversity in the brain. The tendency of new L1 integrants to accumulate near neuronal genes on evolutionary timescales may mimic the somatic variation found in the brain.

To investigate whether bonobos and chimpanzees exchanged genes subsequent to their separation, we used a test (the D statistic 10) to investigate the extent to which the bonobo genomes might be closer to some chimpanzees than to others (Supplementary Information, section 10). To this end, we generated Illumina shotgun sequences from two Western, seven eastern, and seven central chimpanzees (Fig. 1a) and from three bonobos (Supplementary Information, section 5). We then used alignments of sets of four genomes, each consisting of two chimpanzees, the bonobo and the human, and tested for an excess of shared derived alleles between bonobo and one chimpanzee as compared with the other chimpanzee. We observe no significant difference between the numbers of shared derived alleles (Fig. 1b). There is thus no indication of preferential gene flow between bonobos and any of the chimpanzee groups tested. Such a complete separation contrasts with reports of hybridization between many other primates. It is, however, consistent with the suggestion that the formation of the Congo River 1.5–2.5 million years ago created a barrier to gene flow that allowed bonobos and chimpanzees to evolve different phenotypes over a relatively short time.

Because the population split between bonobo and chimpanzee occurred relatively close in time to the split between the bonobo–chimpanzee ancestor (Pan ancestor) and humans, not all genomic regions are expected to show the pattern in which DNA sequences from bonobos and chimpanzees are more closely related to each other than to humans. Previous work using very low-coverage sequencing of ape genomes has suggested that less than 1% of the human genome may be more closely related to one of the two apes than the ape genomes are to one another. To investigate the extent to which such so-called incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) exists between the three species, we used the bonobo genome and a coalescent hidden Markov model (HMM) approach to analyse non-repetitive parts of the bonobo, chimpanzee, human and orang-utan genomes. This showed that 1.6% of the human genome is more closely related to the bonobo genome than to the chimpanzee genome, and that 1.7% of the human genome is more closely related to the chimpanzee than to the bonobo genom

To test this result independently, we analysed transposon integrations, which occur so rarely in ape and human genomes that the chance of two independent insertions of the same type of transposon at the same position and in the same orientation in different species is exceedingly low. We identified 991 integrations of transposons absent from the orang-utan genome but present in two of the three species bonobo, chimpanzee and human. Of these, 27 are shared between the bonobo and human genomes but are absent from the chimpanzee genome, and 30 are shared between the chimpanzee and human genomes but are absent from the bonobo genome, suggesting that approximately 6% (95% confidence interval, 4.1–7.0%) of the genome is affected by ILS among the three species. The HMM estimation of ILS is further supported by the fact that the HMM tree topology assignments tend to match the ILS status of the neighbouring transposons (P = 7.2 × 10−6 and 0.025 for bonobo–human and chimpanzee–human ILS, respectively; Fig. 3c and Supplementary Information, section 6). We conclude that more than 3% of the human genome is more closely related to either bonobos or chimpanzees than these are to each other.

Such regions of ILS may influence phenotypic similarities that humans share with one of the apes but not the other. In fact, about 25% of all genes contain regions of ILS (Supplementary Information, section 8), and genes encoding membrane proteins and proteins involved in cell adhesion have a higher fraction of bases assigned to ILS than do other genes. Amino-acid substitutions that are fixed in the apes and show ILS may be particularly informative about phenotypic differences. We identified 18 such amino-acid substitutions shared between humans and bonobos and 18 shared between chimpanzees and humans (Supplementary Information, section 12). These are candidates for further study. An interesting example is the gene encoding the trace amine associated receptor 8 (TAAR8), a member of a family of G-coupled protein receptors that in the mouse detect volatile amines in urine that may provide social cues. Although this gene seems to be pseudogenized independently on multiple ape lineages, humans and bonobos share a single amino-acid change in the first extracellular domain and carry the longest open reading frames (of 342 and 256 amino acids, respectively; open reading frames in all other apes, <180 amino acids) (SI 12). Further work is needed to clarify if TAAR8 is functional in humans and apes.

The ILS among bonobos, chimpanzees and humans opens the possibility of gauging the genetic diversity and, hence, the population history of the Pan ancestor. We used the HMM to estimate the effective population size of the Pan ancestor to 27,000 individuals (Fig. 3b), which is almost three times larger than that of present-day bonobos (Supplementary Information, section 9) and humans17 but is similar to that of central chimpanzees. We also estimated a population split time between bonobos and chimpanzees of one million years, which is in agreement with most previous estimates.

Differences in female and male population history, for example, with respect to reproductive success and migration rates, are of special interest in understanding the evolution of social structure. To approach this question in the Pan ancestor, we compared the inferred ancestral population sizes of the X chromosome and the autosomes. Because two-thirds of X chromosomes are found in females whereas autosomes are split equally between the two sexes, a ratio between their effective population sizes (X/A ratio) of 0.75 is expected under random mating. The X/A ratio in the Pan ancestor, corrected for the higher mutation rate in males, is 0.83 (0.75–0.91) Under the assumption of random mating, this would mean that on average two females reproduce for each reproducing male. The difference in the variance of reproductive success between the sexes certainly contributes to this observation, as does the fact that whereas bonobo females often move to new groups upon maturation, males tend to stay within their natal group. Because both current and ancestral X/A ratios are similar to each other and also to some human groups (Fig. 4), this suggests that they may also have been typical for the ancestor shared with humans.

The X/A ratios for Ulindi (bonobo), an African human and a European human were inferred from heterozygosity, and that for the Pan ancestor was inferred from ILS. The low X/A ratio for the European has been suggested to be due to demographic effects connected to migrating out of Africa.

Because factors that reduce the effective population size, in particular positive and negative selection, will decrease the extent of ILS, the distribution of ILS across the genome allows regions affected by selection in the Pan ancestor to be identified. In agreement with this, we find that exons show less ILS than introns (Fig. 3d and Supplementary Information, section 8). We also find that recombination rates are positively correlated with ILS (Fig. 3e), probably because recombination uncouples regions from neighbouring selective events. Unlike positive and negative selection, balancing selection is expected to increase ILS. In agreement with this, we find that ILS is most frequent in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), which encodes cell-surface proteins that present antigens to immune cells (Supplementary Information, section 10) and is known to contain genes that evolve under balancing selection.

To identify regions affected by selective sweeps in the Pan ancestor, we isolated long genomic regions devoid of ILS. The largest such region is 6.1 Mb long and is located on human chromosome. This region contains a cluster of tumour suppressor genes, has an estimated recombination rate of 10% of the human genome average and has been found to evolve under strong purifying selection in humans. The diversity in the region, corrected for mutation rate, is lower than in neighbouring regions in chimpanzee but not in bonobos (Fig. 5a), and parts of the region show signatures of positive selection in humans. Apparently this region evolves in unique ways that may involve both strong background selection and several independent events of positive selection among apes and humans.

The fact that the chimpanzee diversity encompasses bonobos for most regions of the genome can be exploited to identify regions that have been positively selected in chimpanzees after their separation from bonobos, because in such regions bonobos will fall outside the chimpanzee variation. We implemented a search for such regions, which is similar to a test previously applied to humans to detect selective sweeps since their split from Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis), in an HMM that uses coalescent simulations for parameter training, the chimpanzee resequencing data and the megabase-wide average of the human recombination rates (Supplementary Information, section 7). Because the size of a region affected by a selective sweep will be larger the faster fixation was reached, the intensity of selection will correlate positively with genetic length. We therefore ranked the regions according to genetic length and further corrected for the effect of background selection. The highest-ranking region contains an miRNA, miR-4465, that has not yet been functionally characterized. Four of the ten highest-ranking regions contain no protein- or RNA-coding genes, and may thus contain structural or regulatory features that have been subject to selection. Notably, four of these ten regions are on chromosome 6, and two of these four are within 2 Mb of the MHC (Fig. 5b). This suggests that the MHC and surrounding genomic regions have been a major target of positive selection in chimpanzees, presumably as a result of infectious diseases. Indeed, chimpanzees have experienced a selective sweep that targeted MHC class-I genes and reduced allelic diversity across a wide region surrounding the MHC27, perhaps caused by the HIV-1/SIVCPZ retrovirus.

The bonobo genome shows that more than 3% of the human genome is more closely related to either bonobos or chimpanzees than these are to each other. This can be used to illuminate the population history and selective events that affected the ancestor of bonobos and chimpanzees. In addition, about 25% of human genes contain parts that are more closely related to one of the two apes than the other. Such regions can now be identified and will hopefully contribute to the unravelling of the genetic background of phenotypic similarities among humans, bonobos and chimpanzees.

Methods

We generated a total of 86 Gb of DNA sequence from Ulindi, a female bonobo who lives in Leipzig Zoo (Supplementary Information, section 1). All sequencing was done on the 454 sequencing platform and included 10 Gb of paired-end reads from clones of insert sizes of 3, 9 and 20 kb. The genome was assembled using the open-source Celera Assembler software (Supplementary Information, section 2). In addition, we sequenced 19 bonobo and chimpanzee individuals on the Illumina GAIIx platform to about one-fold genomic coverage per individual (Supplementary Information, section 5). Supplementary Information provides a full description of our methods.

References

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Gyllensten, U. B. & Erlich, H. A. Ancient roots for polymorphism at the HLA-DQ alpha locus in primates. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 86, 9986–9990 (1989)

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Acknowledgements

The sequencing effort was made possible by the ERC (grant 233297, TWOPAN) and the Max Planck Society. We thank D. Reich and L. Vigilant for comments; the 454 Sequencing Center, the MPI-EVA sequencing group, M. Kircher, M. Rampp and M. Halbwax for technical support; the staff of Zoo Leipzig (Germany), the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary (Entebbe, Uganda), the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Center (Pointe-Noire, Republic of Congo) and the Lola ya Bonobo bonobo sanctuary (Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo) for providing samples; and A. Navarro, E. Gazave and C. Baker for performing the ArrayCGH hybridizations. The ape distribution layers for Fig. 1a were provided by UNEP-WCMC and IUCN.2008 (IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, Version 2011.2, http://www.iucnredlist.org). The National Institutes of Health provided funding for J.R.M., B.W., S.K., G.S. (2R01GM077117-04A1), J.C.M. (Intramural Research Program of the National Human Genome Research Institute) and E.E.E. (HG002385). E.E.E is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. T.M.-B. was supported by a Ramón y Cajal grant (MICINN-RYC 2010) and an ERC Starting Grant (StG_20091118); D.E.S., K.A. and S.H. were supported by the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Ohio Supercomputer Center (#PAS0425) and the Ohio Cancer Research Associates (GRT00024299); and G.L. was supported by a Wellcome Trust grant (090532/Z/09/Z). The US National Science Foundation provided an International Postdoctoral Fellowship (OISE-0754461) to J.M.G. The Danish Council for Independent Research | Natural Sciences (grant no. 09-062535) provided funding for K.M. and M.H.S.

Author information

Affiliations

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany

Kay Prüfer, Michael Siebauer, Jeffrey M. Good, Anne Fischer, Susan E. Ptak, Michael Lachmann, Aida M. Andrés, Janet Kelso & Svante Pääbo

Bioinformatics Research Centre, Aarhus University, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark

Kasper Munch, Asger Hobolth, Julien Dutheil, Thomas Mailund & Mikkel H. Schierup

Max F. Perutz Laboratories, University Vienna, A-1030 Vienna, Austria

Ines Hellmann

Human Cancer Genetics Program and Department of Molecular Virology, Immunology and Medical Genetics, The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA

Keiko Akagi & David E. SymerJ.

Craig Venter Institute, Rockville, Maryland 20850, USA

Jason R. Miller, Brian Walenz & Granger Sutton

University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA

Sergey Koren

454 Life Sciences, Branford, Connecticut 06405, USAC

hinnappa Kodira, Roger Winer & James R. Knight

Genome Technology Branch, National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892, USA

James C. Mullikin

MRC Functional Genomics Unit, Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QX, UK

Stephen J. Meader & Chris P. Ponting

The Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, Roosevelt Drive, Oxford OX3 7BN, UK

Gerton Lunter

Graduate School of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Kanagawa 226-8503, Japan

Saneyuki Higashino

Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA

Emre Karakoç, Can Alkan, Saba Sajjadian, Mario Ventura, Tomas Marques-Bonet & Evan E. Eichler

Sezione di Genetica-Dipartimento di Anatomia Patologica e Genetica, University of Bari, I-70125 Bari, Italy

Claudia Rita Catacchio & Mario Ventura

ICREA, Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (UPF-CSIC), 08003 Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

Tomas Marques-BonetLola

Ya Bonobo Bonobo Sanctuary, “Petites Chutes de la Lukaya”, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo

Claudine André

Réserve Naturelle Sanctuaire à Chimpanzés de Tchimpounga, Jane Goodall Institute, Pointe-Noire, Republic of Congo

Rebeca Atencia

Chimpanzee Sanctuary and Wildlife Conservation Trust (CSWCT), Entebbe, Uganda

Lawrence MugishaZoo Leipzig, D-04105 Leipzig, Germany

Jörg Junhold

Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA

Nick Patterson

Division of Biological Sciences, University of Montana, Missoula, Montana 59812, USA

Jeffrey M. Good

International Center for Insect Physiology and Ecology, 00100 Nairobi, Kenya

Anne Fischer

Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark

Mikkel H. Schierup

Department of Computer Engineering, Bilkent University, Ankara 06800, Turkey.

Can Alkan

The bonobo genome assembly has been deposited with the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank) under the EMBL accession number AJFE01000000. 454 shotgun data of Ulindi have been made available through the NCBI Sequence Read Archive under study ID ERP000601; Illumina sequences of 19 chimpanzee and bonobo individuals are available under study ID ERP000602.
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Pink Panther

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Re: Bonobos & humans share 98.7% of the same genetic bluepri

Post03 Dec 2013

Re: your video link to Kid Cameron and the banana:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z-OLG0KyR4&feature=player_embedded

The explanation of the perfect ‘design” of the banana and the demonstration of how it fits the human grip makes you glory in God’s genius at reproductive anatomy.

Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University has no intellectual output whatsoever

This is a major aspect that needs exploration - but there’s not much there to explore! How do you explore an absence or a negative?

As you imply, the whole rationalisation of the BKs' existence is mostly borrowed reinterpretations.

The little that is unique to BKs, that says ”no, BKs are not vedantists (or sikhs or sufis or this or that) because of this reason, when that is isolated and examined, lacks rational foundation.

It leaves desirous believers to latch on to the borrowed, like creationist science on one hand and Hindu scriptures on the other, usually grasping flimsy straws. Which is ironic because creationism - if it had valid evidence- would therefore validate judeo-christian theology and invalidate the Hindu scriptures. So begins the cherry picking of convenient out-of-context points of argument. Coherent cogency is lacking. Instead it becomes a hopscotch across disparate domains.

The 5000 your cycle does allow for inversions of sequence (others like creationists and Gita that BKs use as evidence are a distorted memory of sangam yuga) but this begs the real question - does that ”5000 your cycle” idea have real legs to stand on, or is it a mutually reinforcing fallacy?

Of course, where the weight of hard evidence comes up against theoretical assumptions, one has to go with the hard evidence. Otherwise one would leap off tall buildings whenever the desire to fly arose, because at that time, the rules should change, because of what I believe.

Lokila’s video linkabout the ”positive thinking” industry and paradigm that denies (or seeks to suspend) reality and the laws of physics goes to this.

Oh, BTW, before anyone brings up that Furphy that humans have more in common with a potato than a chimp because both humans and potatoes have 48 chromosomes, that’s exactly the kind of ”little knowledge” that is a dangerous thing.

Will all 48 character texts mean the same thing? (and that question does contain 48 characters!) (as did that one if you include brackets and space.)
Will any sum with 48 factors add up to the same? (that’s another 48 character sentence - hey I don't do sudoku, but I am making a point.)
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ex-l

ex-BK

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Re: Bonobos & humans share 98.7% of the same genetic bluepri

Post03 Dec 2013

Pink Panther wrote:The explanation of the perfect "design" of the banana and the demonstration of how it fits the human grip makes you glory in God’s genius at reproductive anatomy.

Or even masturbation.

Given his own degree of logic, not all of humanity evolved in areas were there were bananas, but all societies evolved with something much closer for males to reach. Which leads me neatly onto Part II of our relationships with Bonobos and chimps ...

Science continues to develop in the breadth and accuracy of its knowledge through painstaking efforts and hard work, gradually influencing the rest of society, e.g. the idea that we "are" apes did not really rise until the 1960s (Emile Zuckerkandl). Given a human and chimpanzee, you can easily tell them apart, but given only their DNA, you can’t tell them apart. However, the 98/99% similarity is not such a great scientific discovery as is the shared heredity.

Most of society is very slow to keep up with science and received a watered down and filtered version of it. Much of society remains in whatever Dark Ages their societies crawled out of, or are still in. For example, it was only last year (2012) that bonobo genome was mapped, the chimp genome in 2005 and the human in 2003; therefore if you opinions ... or the Youtube videos you watch are more than 10 years old ... they're out of date now.

One of the biggest mistakes the popular mind has made of evolution is likening humanity to male dominated, aggressive chimpanzee society, rather than female dominated, cooperative bonobo society. The biggest differences between the two are in how they govern their societies. Chimpanzees are led by alpha males and tend to maintain order through aggression; while bonobos are dominated by females, and keep the peace through sex and affection.
Overall, bonobos have a "make love, not war" mentality, which is in stark contrast to the often aggressive and violent manner of chimps. For bonobos, sex is used for almost everything, including avoiding conflict, showing affection, reducing stress, solidifying social status, and simply saying “hello.” Bonobos are much more likely to keep the peace by offering a sexual favor, whereas a chimpanzee’s first instinct is to secure dominance through battle. In chimp groups, the highest-ranking male is the only one allowed to mate with the females, but in bonobo cultures, everyone has sexual freedom, and sex acts occur between all combinations of ages and genders.

As described by Dr. Christopher Ryan, what we can learn from our cousins, is:

    1. More sex = less conflict. As the great primatologist, Frans de Waal put it, "Chimps use violence to get sex, while bonobos use sex to avoid violence." While chimps victimize each other in many ways—rape, murder, infanticide, warfare between groups—there's never been a single observed case of any of these forms of aggression among bonobos, who are much sexier than chimps. As James Prescott demonstrated in a meta-analysis of all available anthropological data, the connection between less restrictive sexuality and less conflict generally holds true for human societies as well.

    2. Feminism can be very sexy. When females are in charge, everyone lives better (including the males). While male chimps run the show, among bonobos, it's the females who are in charge, with much better quality of life for everyone involved.

    3. Sisterhood is powerful. Although female bonobos are about 20% smaller than males—roughly the same ratio as in chimps and humans—they dominate males by sticking together. If a male gets out of line and harasses a female, ALL the other females will gang up on him. This sisterly solidarity, combined with lots of sex, tends to keep the males behaving politely.

    4. Jealousy is not romantic. While bonobos no-doubt experience unique feelings for one another, they don't seem to worry much about controlling one another's sex lives. Nor do bonobos seem to gossip very much.

    5. There's promise in promiscuity. All the casual sex among bonobos is arguably a big part of what has made them among the smartest of all primates. Until human beings came along and messed things up for them, bonobos enjoyed very high quality of life, low stress, and plenty of social interaction in hammocks. In fact, of the many species of social primates living in multi-male social groups, not a single species is sexually monogamous. Each of the arguably smartest mammals - humans, chimps, bonobos, and dolphins - is promiscuous.

    6. Good sex needn't always include an orgasm, and "casual" doesn't necessarily mean "empty" or "cheap". Most bonobo sexual interactions are nothing more than a quick feel, rub, or intromission—a "bonobo handshake," if you will. (See Vanessa Woods's excellent book by that name for a personal story of living with bonobos while falling in love.) But bonobos are very romantic: like humans, they kiss, hold hands (and feet!), and gaze into one another's eyes while having sex.

    7. Sex and food go together better than love and marriage. Give a group of bonobos a bunch of food and they'll all have some quick sex before very politely sharing the food. No need to fight over scraps like a bunch of uncouth chimps!

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