Nepenthe: The sad thing is, your answer is nearly identical to that of AnswersInGenesis's.
(Google "A Tale of Two Chromosomes", unfortunately I cannot post URLs)
A. They start with "Wrong, because the bible says so!"
Most importantly, reliable eyewitness testimony is more powerful than circumstantial evidence in establishing historical details. The Bible, inspired by the Creator himself, indicates that humans were created in the image of God and distinct from other animals.
Then, they ramble on about how birds "use tools", so thus "chimps using tools" doesn't necessarily mean they are related to us. How this is relevant beats me.
Ironically, a few birds have been known to use human language quite well, at least for an animal.6 Simple tool making ability is also seen in a variety of animals.7 While intelligence in animals is quite fascinating, it is still significantly different from that of humans and gives no hint of common ancestry.
They then go on and say: "Dr Miller[the guy they are responding to on the subject] may be talking about something else, which is wrong!". (Of course, he isn't.)
Dr. Miller's enthusiasm about this chromosomal rearrangement may be tied to the older notion that such mutations are the basis for speciation...
... I don't even know what to say to their next few sentences.
So, the bottom line is that centric fusions themselves do not inevitably result in a new species. It is conceivable that some apes exist with 46 chromosomes. Yet these animals will be distinctly apes; they will not be “evolving” to become a human.
And, after that, they completely and totally fail. How, exactly, does this explain the fact that the human chromosome 2 looks exactly like chimp. chromosomes 12 and 13 fused together?
If the observed evidence is really from a fusion, it is best explained by the fusion of two human chromosomes.
Then, they change the topic to their favorite topic(and most easily debunked point), which is that of information:
The biggest problem with Dr. Miller’s story is that it distracts the audience from the real issue. It is not the number of chromosomes that is really a significant difference between humans and apes, but the information contained on those chromosomes.
Then, they explain that because humans only share *some* of the miRNA proteins in their brains with chimps, they somehow cannot be related. This is of course, nonsense. With the rapid evolution of the human brain since we diverged from a common ancestor, we'd expect there to be many differences in brain chemistry between chimps and humans.
Despite the superficial similarities between human and ape chromosomes, there are important differences on the molecular level. There are many protein coding genes in humans that are distinctly human and are not found in chimps.
The guy's argument then amounts to:
God gave humans the exact same branding patterns on their chromosomes as chimps, for some apparent reason, and then an individual in the human lineage had a lucky chromosome fusion event that somehow spread throughout the entire population.
He ignores that the evidence is not only in the branding patterns, but in the individual genes.
The lengths that some will go for Creationism is truly amazing.
-Kirk.
