Originally Posted by
Tog_
The is no "Original Strain" in the sense that I think you mean. I'm different than both of my parents in some way. If we go back 100 years, I'm probably taller than everyone in my family. If we go back 500, I'm almost certainly taller. If we go back 1000, or 2000, I'll probably tower over most of the population. I'm 5' 11".
Each generation, everything changes a little. It won't be enough to notice from one generation to the next but it happens.
A lot of people use a tree as an analogy, but I like a river better. Imagine you are at the mouth of a huge river and you take a water sample. This is the "original strain". As you go up the river, you will get to forks. If you go to the right, it's possible to be in water with a much different content than if you went left. As you keep going, you eventually get to the source of that branch of the river. You take another sample. This sample will look nothing like the first, but it will be part of the first. If this is the only branch of the entire river system that flows out of a silver ore deposit, it's possible that it's the only branch that contains traces of arsenic. That arsenic will still be seen in the sample from the mouth of the river, but in a much smaller amount per unit of water.
DNA is the same way. If you go back to the first bipedal mammal, it won't have human DNA. It wont' have chimp DNA. But both humans and chimps will have traces of its DNA in their own. That's where evolution gets the term "Common Ancestry". Both humans and apes have a common ancestor. Somewhere down the road, we turned left, and they turned right. Further up their path, the chimps made a turn and became different. Further long, the gorillas, then the orangs did the same. There are almost certainly others others that have died off completely. That's the "missing link". It's not the creature that links humans to chimps. It's the one that links all the apes to one common ancestor.
In a sense, the "original strain" of human might be something very much like the scum that forms on stagnant water. You just have to go back further.
This is where the contention between evolution and creationism forms. Creationism says that humans arrived as humans. Period. Evolution says that something glorped its way out of the water and learned to breathe air, make fire, and buy things on credit. All scientific evidence to date favors the glorping.
Also, let's sy that somewhere in the human family tree ET does show up somewhere. What would it really change? THere would be a little but of ET in everyone, so we'd still all be basically the same.
Oh, but those differences would show up when we looked at our DNA compared to the DNA of other critters. Like the arsenic in the river. If only one branch ha it, it would stand out. We dont' see it, so if there was ET DNA in humans, it would have to be present in everything else as well, in which case. So what?
(Funny side note. The spell checker doesn't like glorped, but it's okay with glorping. Might have to look that up).
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