Evolution for Dummies and Christians

You say this, Carico, while on another thread around here you said there was a "sperm barrier" or some such between humans and apes. Yet human sperm has been observed to penetrate gibbon ova. Do you have any evidence for a "barrier" of any sort?Ref:"Human spermatozoa display unusually limited affinities in their interaction with oocytes of other species. They adhered to and, when capacitated, penetrated the vestments of the oocyte of an ape--the gibbon, Hylobates lar--both in vivo and in vitro. On the other hand, human spermatozoa would not even attach to the zona surface of sub-hominoid primate (baboon, rhesus monkey, squirrel monkey), nor to the non-primate eutherian oocytes tested." (Sperm/egg interaction: the specificity of human spermatozoa. Bedford JM, Anat Rec 188(4):477-87)

Carico, please pay attention:APES NEVER INTERBRED WITH HUMANS!!!Instead, animals that we, today, would likely say were some sort of ape critter bred among themselves. Perhaps one daddy fathered kids on either side of the Limpopo River. The kids on the north side moved to the woods. The kids on the south side moved to the savannah. They didn't see each other again, but kept breeding among each of their two populations.Over a few hundreds of generations, the north woodsy family had changed just a tiny bit - they were better at climbing trees thad the daddy had been, since the kids that weren't as good at climbing didn't get as much fruit to eat, and some part of the bone and muscle changes that helped climbing were heritable.. Meanwhile, the south savannah family had changed a tiny bit, too: they stood upright more than the original daddy had. The ones that didn't inherit the oddity of standing to look around were more likely to be a cheetah snack.In addition to those changes, the two groups were isolated from each other - first by the Limpopo, later by their preference for woods or savannah, later still by not liking each other's looks when the river was down - and finally by diverging enough genetically that they couldn't breed any more. Two species, where there once was one. No interspecies sex, ever.APES NEVER INTERBRED WITH HUMANS!!!Critters just bred with their own kind, got separated, and the "kind" that each had been changed, little by little. Until we wound up with chimps and humans.

Don't go out and look much, do you, Carico? Simple, like the biggest male fish around a coral head turning into a female when the "queen" female disappears?

I repeat:APES NEVER INTERBRED WITH HUMANS!!!Instead, animals that we, today, would likely say were some sort of ape critter bred among themselves. Perhaps one daddy fathered kids on either side of the Limpopo River. The kids on the north side moved to the woods. The kids on the south side moved to the savannah. They didn't see each other again, but kept breeding among each of their two populations.Over a few hundreds of generations, the north woodsy family had changed just a tiny bit - they were better at climbing trees thad the daddy had been, since the kids that weren't as good at climbing didn't get as much fruit to eat, and some part of the bone and muscle changes that helped climbing were heritable.. Meanwhile, the south savannah family had changed a tiny bit, too: they stood upright more than the original daddy had. The ones that didn't inherit the oddity of standing to look around were more likely to be a cheetah snack.In addition to those changes, the two groups were isolated from each other - first by the Limpopo, later by their preference for woods or savannah, later still by not liking each other's looks when the river was down - and finally by diverging enough genetically that they couldn't breed any more. Two species, where there once was one. No interspecies sex, ever.APES NEVER INTERBRED WITH HUMANS!!!Critters just bred with their own kind, got separated, and the "kind" that each had been changed, little by little. Until we wound up with chimps and humans.