Evidence in a nutshell.

Did you know that if you sampled the DNA of EVERY LIVING THING ON THIS PLANET you would see several similarites:

1. They contain the same basic materials- a ribose sugar (deoxy or not), a phospate to stick the sugars together, and 4 different nitrogen bases: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and guanine.
2. They are helical (to the best of my knowledge)
3. It is the order of the bases that determines which proteins are made.
4. It is these proteins that ultimately control your traits.
5. There are two ways they can be packaged- as chromosomes or plasmids.

Every bacteria, protist, fungi, plant, and animal (from sponges on up to us) have this. We all share common DNA. We share something like 30% our DNA code with plants! Which means that 30% of our DNA sequence is also found in a tree, shrub, or grass. Man, that is astonishing! Depending on who you ask, we share 46 to 98 % of our DNA with chimps.

Now, you have to decide which conclusion you want to draw, creationism or evolution.

...But I gotta make this point: If you don't believe in evolution than you should only use penicillin for every infection you or yours ever gets, since bacteria couldn't possible evolve and become resistant to the earliest antibiotics....

I think if we tried to really understand this info we 1st need to teach ourselves some genetics. For instance, it's rather elementary to say that we share 98% of the DNA of chimps so we must be so very similar! THat we have exactly the same DNA except for 2% of it. We also share a lot of homologous (similar) structures with horses, rabbits, and rats,which means the DNA sequences must also be similar, but we don't hear too many people comparing us to them,saying man came from horses and such. Homology does not always point to phylogeny.

In order for evidence to have meaning, for you to be able to interpret it, you have to know what hell it means. And sometimes that takes time. Time for you to search, learn, ponder, and conclude.

We are bombarded with 30 second news bites, 30 minute tv shows, 2 hour movies. we are told that since children have such short attention spans eveything must be completed in 20 minutes. In this instant gratification world, we don't want to take the time to learn for ourselves, we want to be presented with the pertinent details that give us a broad overview.

Here's the problem- in order for me to teach you the overview of something I have to lie and omit cerain pieces of the problem to keep it simple enough for you to understand.

Maybe that's why there are so many prevalant, well believed scientific lies out there right now- green house effect/global warming (We're All Gonna Die!), water impurities and shortages(There's Not Enough!), OJ getting away with murder (If the glove ... never mind), man came from apes (Have you even read Origin of Species?), and so on.

Anything that we try to put in a nutshell will be seriously lacking in fullness of truth, in Big Picture. It's up to you to learn the whole story.