Hey Guys, Not to spoil a good B movie but note the fallacy, on closer inspection, in the assertion that there could be a remote possibility of hidden code ...
> >One of the most clever Science Fiction "B" movies I can think of that explores the premise that our genetic heritage had been manipulated by aliens is: "Quatermass and the Pit." > a.k.a. "Five Million Years to Earth" It is well know among geneticists that we share over 98% of our DNA, including the junk part with chimps, which have been evolving for 25 million years and we can prove that their DNA has not changed much in that period. This puts proponents of the "hidden code" in the position of saying that, if there is a very detailed message, at least, that over 25 million years ago, in the pre-chimp line, some alien inserted code in that line - not the human line- which first caused the chimp line to split-off carrying the code, and then about 20 million years later caused our line to split-off, and continue carrying the code - since evolution cannot operate in reverse. But it gets worse... and far more improbable the further back you go and look at the similarities in the junk code. At least half of this junk DNA code in humans is identical, yes identical, in far lower species that go back beyond even primates to the very earliest multi-cellular reptilian life several hundred million years back... so are we, or rather the proponents of the "hidden message" nonsense, going to say that the alien code goes back that far? ...or were these genius alien coders somehow able to take that existing junk DNA heritage which is presumably random at some point, several hundred million years ago - and modify it to carry some non-random information, while still looking random, and also to not hinder it from eventually evolving into the kind of intelligence which will be able to decipher it? The whole premise of the "fish bowl" hypothesis is that whatever they do, they will "do not harm" right? It even gets more improbable and farfetched than that, even... but why waste any more time with hidden code nonsense, given that evolution is a one-way street, unless we can show that there are indeed some segments of the junk code which earlier primates do not carry ? If there are some - those would be the segments to examine closely, but now you have eliminated both the 98% which is shared and the ~2% which makes us different from chimps, so how much information can there be in that small fraction of a percent? Jones ANS: why? .... elementary, Watson.... because, like any good mystery story, it is both thought-provoking and easy to dramatize .... and best of all takes a long time to figure out why it cannot be true, and even then, there is the slight possibility that it can be true... poi-fect for voi-tex...
