How exactly is DNA evidence for evolution?

Question

How exactly is DNA evidence for evolution?

Answer 1

Evolution in biology is defined as any change in a population that is inherited over several generations. DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is the molecule that is responsible for each organism’s heredity. Since the sequence of DNA can be shown to change through mutation or error at a regular and predictable rate, it is possible to observe evolution as it occurs within a given population.



One of the best evidences for evolution is found by examining Chromosome 2 in humans. Chromosome 2 is unique to the human lineage of evolution, having resulted from a head-to-head fusion of two acrocentric chromosomes that remained separate in other primates.



The precise fusion site has been located in 2q13–2q14.1, where further analysis confirmed the presence of multiple sub-telomeric duplications to chromosomes 1, 5, 8, 9, 10, 12, 19, 21 and 22. During the formation of human chromosome 2, one of the two centromeres became inactivated. This was 2q21, which corresponds to the centromere from chimp chromosome 13, and the centromeric structure quickly deteriorated, but the inactivated sequence is still recognizable.

Answer 2

DNA in itself is NOT evidence for evolution. DNA could exist even if evolutionary theory was demonstrably untrue.



It is the genes and base sequences WITHIN DNA that are evidence for evolution, specifically the similarities, and differences, between the DNA of different species and populations within species.



(That's the short answer, for the long answer you'll have to make the effort to learn, and understand,the science.)

Answer 3

Related species have similar DNA. Diversity is expressed by genetic diversity within a species. Geographic separation and changes in environment change the dominant populations which can become cross-infertile.



DNA provides the physical expression of genes, a theoretical construct.

Answer 4

In a nutshell, DNA is evidence for evolution because the differences in the DNA of different species follows the differences resulting in the evolution of those species from their common ancestry. And that encompasses all living things and their common single-celled ancestor that lived more than a billion years ago.



http://itol.embl.de/



Those differences in DNA are predicted by and required by the evolutionary process.



Creationists will say that is evidence of a common creator, but a common creator would not be required to use such a relationship. And why would such a creator (specifically the creationist creator) use such a relationship that, in fact, provides evidence for evolution?



Added



See my answer to this question for an interesting side point



https://answersrip.com/question/index?qid=20150416201815AAHRRoX

Answer 5

Its not, comparative DNA is. Chimps and bonobos have 98 percent of our DNA, gorillas 97 percent and orangutans about 96 percent, That is not true evidence of anything but it is about as strong an implication as you can get.

Answer 6

Evolution Of Dna Evidence

Answer 7

The evidence isnt just the fact it exists, the evidence comes from the study of its contents and how it relates to the geographical and phenotypical distribution of creatures on the planet



For example the study of the distribution of marsupials, how genetically different they are, and how long ago the continents split supports the theory that they diverged from a particular species at a particular place, a particular time ago.



No single piece of evidence "proves" evolution but everything we study fits this model, and is all adds up to a compelling case for it being true

Answer 8

How exactly is DNA evidence for evolution?



---- The similar DNA which reflects the degree of relatedness of organisms.

Answer 9

What is evolution?



"...all the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form." [G A Kerkut, 1960]



"Life on earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species—perhaps a self-replicating molecule—that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection." [Jerry Coyne, 2009]

For evolution to work you must have a heritable replicator. DNA gives cells the ability to be heritable replicators so it provides a necessary condition for evolution, but it is probable that the first self-replicating molecules did not use DNA.



For DNA to be evidence of evolution it would require that;



1. Evolution can plausibly account for the origin of DNA by purely natural processes.



Although there are several ingenious hypotheses none of these has been shown to be plausible in natural conditions. DNA is an unstable molecule that depends on repair enzymes that are encoded in the DNA, and these are produced by other protein machines that are also encoded in the DNA. Bootstrapping this from basic biomolecules appears insurmountable.



2. Evolution can plausibly account for the information encoded in the DNA by purely natural processes.



So let's suppose we have a basic DNA molecule that can repair itself (a big concession), can evolution add the necessary information? The proposed mechanism is mutation & selection operating through many minute beneficial steps. While a change requiring a single non-beneficial step can be managed by mutation/selection any more becomes exponentially more difficult. There are no good observed examples of beneficial information adding mutations! (Bad examples include adult lactose tolerance and sickle cell trait). So the evidence does not support evolution adding genetic information.



3. DNA as it appears in organisms today is consistent with evolutionary descent.



If DNA is consistent with evolutionary descent we should see correspondence between trees derived from morphology and fossils and those derived from genetics. We don't. Not only do trees derived from genes not match those constructed from morphology, they don't agree with each other!



4. DNA excludes alternative explanations, or at least supports evolution better than alternative explanations.



It is not good evidence if it supports other explanations equally or better than it does evolution. The DNA evidence supports descent from created kinds BETTER than it does evolution.



[edit] 10 years ago human chromosome 2 would have been taken as good DNA evidence for evolution, but the years have not been kind to the hypothesis that it formed as fusion of 2 ape genes. This fusion was supposedly an End to End fusion, which would have been unique in itself. Most other fusions are crossover fusions.



Telomeric DNA at the ends of our chromosomes normally consists of thousands of repeats of the 6-base-pair sequence TTAGGG. But the alleged fusion point in human chromosome 2 contains far less telomeric DNA than it should if two chromosome were fused end-to-end: the location only has 158 repeats, and only 44 are perfect copies of the sequence.



The cluster of "telomeres" that marked the fusion site have now been found to be common throughout all chromosomes, so there is no reason to think it actually marks a fusion site. (Although it has led some in desperation to claim it is evidence of multiple past fusions). Furthermore it is located at a transcription binding site within the DDX11L2 gene, which prior to the fusion would have existed as parts on separate genes. This is an important gene with multiple functions so it is unlikely it formed during fusion.



Similarly the centromere "marker" has been found in many places across all chromosomes so again it is unlikely it is actually the result of a fusion.



As Ken Miller said "we should be able to look at our genome, and discover that one of our chromosomes resulted from the fusion of two primate chromosomes. So we should be able to look around our genome, and you know what, if we don't find it, evolution is wrong - we don't share a common ancestor". The more we have looked the less we have found the evidence he wanted. Conclusion: We don't share a common ancestor.

Answer 10

Well.... DNA is the instruction for building every cell in your body and everything that those cells produce.



And it changes. Demonstrably. Visibly.



Humans manipulate it..... and produce predictable outcomes. Because we have mapped it, and generally understand how it does what it does.



Any other questions?

Answer 11

You are evidence of evolution.



Look in the mirror. Do you look the same as 10 years ago?

Answer 12

DNA is impossible by chance and evolution isnt true

DNA is information

information comes from a mind, not from matter

therefore God exists

Answer 13

The record of evolutionary changes are encoded in DNA.



http://eveloce.scienceblog.com/16/dna-proves-evoution/



http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/01/bill-nye-creationism-evolution



http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics

Answer 14

its not, especially seing that there have been some very interesting new research

first of all, God created Adam first and then created Eve from Adams rib therefore there is more to say about male DNA and genetics to be said.

Answer 15

Well it started as RNA and then grew in consideration, honour, altruism and care, this became the DNA we know of today.

Answer 16

What does the evidence reveal? If evolution is true, then it should seem at least reasonably possible that DNA could have come about by means of a series of chance events. If the Bible is true, then DNA should provide strong evidence that it is the product of an orderly, intelligent mind.



When considered in the simplest of terms, the subject of DNA is quite understandable—and fascinating. So let us take another trip to the inside of a cell. This time, though, we will visit a human cell. Imagine that you are going to a museum designed to teach you about how such a cell works. The whole museum is a model of a typical human cell—but magnified some 13,000,000 times. It is the size of a giant sports arena, the kind that can seat an audience of about 70,000 people.



You enter the museum and stare awestruck at this wondrous place full of strange forms and structures. Near the center of the cell stands the nucleus, a sphere about 20 stories tall. You make your way there.



You go through a door in the nucleus’ outer skin, or membrane, and look around you. Dominating this chamber are 46 chromosomes. Arranged in identical pairs, they vary in height, but the pair nearest you is about 12 stories tall (1). Each chromosome has a pinched place near the middle, so it looks a bit like a link sausage but is as thick as a massive tree trunk. You see a variety of bands running across the model chromosomes. As you draw closer, you see that each horizontal band is divided by vertical lines. Between those are shorter horizontal lines (2). Are they stacks of books? No; they are the outer edges of loops, packed tightly in columns. You pull at one of them, and it comes free. You are amazed to see that the loop is composed of smaller coils (3), also neatly arranged. Within those coils is the main feature of all of this—something resembling a long, long rope. What is it?



THE STRUCTURE OF AN AMAZING MOLECULE



Let us simply call this part of the model chromosome a rope. It is about an inch [2.6 cm] thick. It is looped tightly around spools (4), which help to form the coils within coils. These coils are attached to a kind of scaffold that holds them in place. A sign on the display explains that the rope is packed very efficiently. If you were to pull the rope from each of these model chromosomes and lay it all out, from end to end it would stretch about halfway around the earth!*



One science book calls this efficient packaging system “an extraordinary feat of engineering.”18 Does the suggestion that there was no engineer behind this feat sound credible to you? If this museum had a huge store with millions of items for sale and they were all so tidily arranged that you could easily find any item you needed, would you assume that no one had organized the place? Of course not! But such order would be a simple feat by comparison.



In the museum display, a sign invites you to take a length of this rope in your hands for a closer look (5). As you run it between your fingers, you see that this is no ordinary rope. It is composed of two strands twisted around each other. The strands are connected by tiny bars, evenly spaced. The rope looks like a ladder that has been twisted until it resembles a spiral staircase (6). Then it hits you: You are holding a model of the DNA molecule—one of the great mysteries of life!



A single DNA molecule, tidily packaged with its spools and scaffold, makes up a chromosome. The rungs of the ladder are known as base pairs (7). What do they do? What is all of this for? A display sign offers a simplified explanation.



THE ULTIMATE INFORMATION STORAGE SYSTEM



The key to the DNA, the sign says, lies in those rungs, the bars connecting the two sides of the ladder. Imagine the ladder split apart. Each side has partial rungs sticking out. They come in only four types. Scientists dub them A, T, G, and C. Scientists were amazed to discover that the order of those letters conveys information in a sort of code.



You may know that Morse code was invented in the 19th century so that people could communicate by telegraph. That code had only two “letters”—a dot and a dash. Yet, it could be used to spell out countless words or sentences. Well, DNA has a four-letter code. The order in which those letters—A, T, G, and C—appear forms “words” called codons. Codons are arranged in “stories” called genes. Each gene contains, on average, 27,000 letters. These genes and the long stretches between them are compiled into chapters of a sort—the individual chromosomes. It takes 23 chromosomes to form the complete “book”—the genome, or total of genetic information about an organism.*



The genome would be a huge book. How much information would it hold? All told, the human genome is made up of about three billion base pairs, or rungs, on the DNA ladder.19 Imagine a set of encyclopedias in which each volume is over a thousand pages long. The genome would fill 428 of such volumes. Adding the second copy that is found in each cell would make that 856 volumes. If you were to type out the genome by yourself, it would be a full-time job—with no vacations—lasting some 80 years!



Of course, what you would end up with after all that typing would be useless to your body. How would you fit hundreds of bulky volumes into each of your 100 trillion microscopic cells? To compress so much information so greatly is far beyond us.



A professor of molecular biology and computer science noted: “One gram of DNA, which when dry would occupy a volume of approximately one cubic centimeter, can store as much information as approximately one trillion CDs [compact discs].”20 What does that mean? Remember, the DNA contains the genes, the instructions for building a unique human body. Each cell has a complete set of instructions. DNA is so dense with information that a single teaspoonful of it could carry the instructions for building about 350 times the number of humans alive today! The DNA required for the seven billion people living on earth now would barely make a film on the surface of that teaspoon.21



A BOOK WITH NO AUTHOR?

Answer 17

It's not...

Answer 18

Google "Canary Trap" or "Barium Meal" and read that it is and how it works.



Example: You are an English Teacher that assigned a 500 word essay to your class. You get 2 papers that 98% of both are identical, same words, same word order, same sentences, same paragraph, same paragraph order, etc.. How likely is it that the same student did NOT write both papers?



DNA (Whole Genomes) work the same way. There are "markers" like:



Humans have 23 chromosome pairs and the rest of the Great Apes have 24 pairs. If we look at human chromosome #2 we find that it is a fused pair that matches chimpanzee chromosome #2 + #13 AND ALL THE MARKERS LINE UP, INCLUDING TELOMERES IN THE WRONG POSITION (Basically, the “end of file” markers normally on the end of chromosomes. In humans there is a set in the middle of chromosome #2) and both humans and chimps have identical sets of damaged DNA in identical locations caused by extremely rare chance encounters with viruses who became endogenized into our own DNA and rendered harmless. The odds that all those markers in human and bonobo chimpanzee match up EXACTLY can only be explained by evolution OR God is deceptive and planted false evidence in the genomes to make us think evolution is real.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXdQRvSdLAs



2 hour Miller Lecture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVRsWAjvQSg



http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7055/full/nature04072.html



These endogenized retroviruses (ERV) not only proved our ancestry with chimps, but are revealing our connection to other more distant cousins like the gorillas, gibbons and lemurs.



http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles...



http://www.wired.com/2012/01/evolution-of-multicellularity/



http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section4.html#retroviruses



EDIT:



I notice you got a few Creationist responses, when you evaluate those, please consider:



Matthew 7:16 and Medical Research



What are the “fruits” of Creation Science in Medical Research?



Evolution is a Foundation Science that makes progress in the Biological Sciences possible. "Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution." - Theodosius Dobzhansky



Creationists are well funded. Is any of that money directed into Medical Research? Name an advance in medical science made in the last 100 years that is based on Creationism, Intelligent Design or any other theory for the diversity of life that we see and insight into how biology works. What has been Creation Sciences contribution to the human race? Are any Creation Scientists working on a general cure for cancer, an Ebola Vaccine, any thing like that? (NOTE: I am NOT asking, “Are there any Christian medical researchers?” There are a lot of those and every one of them apply the principles of and understanding of biology from Evolutionary Theory. I am asking, “Are there any Creationists medical researchers that apply the principles of and understanding of biology from Creation Theory?”) If you wanted to become a Medical Researcher, what college or university could you attend to learn biology based on Creation Theory? Isn't it strange that every Medical Researcher got their degree from a college or university that teaches biology based on Evolution Theory?



EDIT: For our Creationist Resident Responder:



For DNA to be evidence of evolution it would require that;



1. Evolution can plausibly account for the origin of DNA by purely natural processes. FALSE!

The origin of DNA is accounted for by The Laws of Thermodynamics applied to Carbon Chemistry in Aqueous Solution



Although there are several ingenious hypotheses none of these has been shown to be plausible in natural conditions. DNA is an unstable molecule that depends on repair enzymes that are encoded in the DNA, and these are produced by other protein machines that are also encoded in the DNA. Bootstrapping this from basic biomolecules appears insurmountable.



2. Evolution can plausibly account for the information encoded in the DNA by purely natural processes. FALSE!

Given time and mechanisms that preserve success, information increase is guaranteed. You can choose jigsaw puzzle pieces at random and assemble upside down, if you wish. You will complete the puzzle by trial and error and have more information than you started with, a completed picture.



So let's suppose we have a basic DNA molecule that can repair itself (a big concession), can evolution add the necessary information? The proposed mechanism is mutation & selection operating through many minute beneficial steps. While a change requiring a single non-beneficial step can be managed by mutation/selection any more becomes exponentially more difficult. There are no good observed examples of beneficial information adding mutations! (Bad examples include adult lactose tolerance and sickle cell trait). So the evidence does not support evolution adding genetic information.



3. DNA as it appears in organisms today is consistent with evolutionary descent. TRUE



If DNA is consistent with evolutionary descent we should see correspondence between trees derived from morphology and fossils and those derived from genetics. We don't. Not only do trees derived from genes not match those constructed from morphology, they don't agree with each other! FALSE TEST.



Comparisons of DNA sequences confirm and provide additional information regarding the treelike organization shown by morphological comparisons. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200... An important point to remember about DNA comparisons is that only about 2 percent of the genome codes for proteins, and another 2 percent regulates transcription, so that leaves about 96 percent of the genome essentially independent from morphological considerations. So we can't argue that DNA must be similar because morphologies are similar. They are independent tests. Independently derived models of the tree tend to converge and reinforce one another, including models based on many different DNA sequences



4. DNA excludes alternative explanations, or at least supports evolution better than alternative explanations. TRUE



It is not good evidence if it supports other explanations equally or better than it does evolution. The DNA evidence supports descent from created kinds BETTER than it does evolution. FALSE



No known non-Great Ape species correlates as well with H sapiens DNA as P bonobo. If the Creationist Resident Responder was correct, we should find higher or equal correlation elsewhere.



Oh, Yes: Creationist Resident Responder still needs to define "Kind" since he referenced a site in other answers that extends Kind to the FAMILY level of the Taxonomic Classification System and then explain why if wolverines and otters are the same Kind and share a Common Ancestor, why H sapiens and P bonobo cannot share a Common Ancestor.

Answer 19

DNA is the fingerprint of God.

Answer 20

It isn't.