mormonsandscience

When my daughter sings "I am a Child of God" I often get upset and stand up in the middle of the room yelling, "No you're not! You're <em>my</em> daughter! Trust me, I should know! If you're God's child, then what am I?"

Just kidding, I'm usually filled with a good feeling confirming that my daughter is, in truth, a daughter of God. She is both my daughter and God's daughter. If I were to really have a problem with that song it would be based on a complete misunderstanding of how a person can have both earthly and heavenly parents.

I think Elder Packer is doing the equivalent of standing up and yelling; he has a fundamental misunderstanding of how humanity's origins can be both divine and physical.

Re: President Packer standing up and yelling.

According to Gen. 5:3, Seth was in the likeness and image of Adam. D&C 107:43 adds that "his likeness was the express likeness of his father [and he] could be distinguished from [Adam] only by his age." This is confirmed by D&C 138:40 which states that Seth "was in the express image of his father, Adam."

How did evolution produce a physical body that was not only in God's image, but was in His "express" image?

<b>Gordon B. Hinckley:</b> "In the account of the Creation of the earth, 'God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness' (Gen. 1:26). Could any language be more explicit? Does it demean God, as some would have us believe, that man was created in His express image?"

I'm not the least bit bothered by your beliefs (scientific or religious) one way or the other, I'm just wondering how evolution could have accomplished the "express" image part.

<i>If you can search the world and find anyone who would claim that they or their ancestors are monkeys</i>

Actually, evidence (DNA, morphological) strongly implies that our most recent common ancestor with old world monkeys is younger than our most recent common ancestor with new world monkeys.

And the implication from this is, in fact, that we are monkeys, our ancestors split off to become new world monkeys. us, and old world monkeys in that order.

We are mammals, we are monkeys, and we are apes. Get over it, or try to at least. It sucks if your religion conflicts with this obvious truth, but at least you can take heart most religions have historically gotten this wrong.

Re: scripture literacy

Framing my question in the context of scripture implies nothing about your scripture literacy. It merely requests an answer in that same context.

Seth looked so much like Adam that you could tell them apart only by age. In other words, they looked like twins. In order for Adam to arrive on earth in the express image of God, it required a body that was essentially God's physical twin. The question was how evolution did it.

I like this part of your answer: "Sounds like a miracle to me, and God's pretty good with those."

When God gets involved at the miracle level, it's no longer evolution. At that point, it's genetic engineering by God, i.e. "creation."

Good grief Troy, I *published* some of the DNA evidence you refer to.

And the "implication" you claim is absolutely incorrect. Cladistically, it is correct to refer to humans as being apes. However it is not correct to say that because monkeys share a common ancestor with humans, that humans can be called monkeys. If the term "monkey" is to retain any meaning at all, it has to refer to the two haplorrhine clades that branched away from the apes. Otherwise, by the same reasoning, humans can also be called lemurs, bats, butterflies, oak trees, and mushrooms. Monkeys could be called apes, and "hummingbird" and "swift" would both collectively refer to all the birds we now know as hummingbirds and swifts.

Tim, I used to have an auto insurance policy that covered collision with "a bird or an animal." Do I get to collect twice if the organism I hit is *both* a bird and an animal?

Unless BKP is making a doctrinal assertion that Adam's physical body was born of a heavenly mother by viviparous reproduction, there seems to be some considerable ambiguity about what being a child of God is?

1. Viviparous physical birth
2. Viviparous spiritual birth
3. Spiritual adoption
4. Created directly from the dust
5. Divinely guided evolution
6. Wind up the clock evolution

"Everyone knows that. Every four-year-old knows that!"

Yet another example of [pseudo]intellectual bullying. I have a hypothesis about where he learned that from (hint: see the last thread). It seems the only way a person ignorant of the field on which he is commenting to feel secure is to belittle anyone willing to take a moment to actually open his/her mind and think for a minute. Sad.

Oh, R. Gary, it's really no point to try and have a reasonable discussion with you, so I'm just not gonna try. (been there, tried that) Thanks, though.

" However it is not correct to say that because monkeys share a common ancestor with humans, that humans can be called monkeys"

My point was a bit subtler than that.

Old world monkeys and new world monkeys are monkeys, yet the human line split from old world monkeys AFTER the new world monkeys.

Yes we are apes but the timing of our split off from other monkeys means we are monkeys too.

Science used to say we weren't apes, but shared a common ancestor with them. Now, it is commonly asserted that we are apes too.

I am not a scientist and only know what I know from reading, and I also find monophyletic classification contentious if not confusing.

But I am not arguing that here.

The simple implication that a human common ancestor split off into TWO kinds of monkeys, one appearing BEFORE and one appearing AFTER our own split, strongly implies to me that we (and our ape cousins) are also properly considered a form of monkey.

"Otherwise, by the same reasoning, humans can also be called lemurs, bats, butterflies"

I agree with this and find the doctrinaire assertions of the cladistic school to be overly dogmatic. It is possible with enough separation of time and morphology to no longer be considered a form of an ancestor, ie I think it's bizarre to consider humans a form of fish.

If new world monkeys didn't exist, I think it would not be intelligent to assert that humans were monkeys.

But the implication of their existence in our family tree requires us to carefully consider the monkey attributes of our most recent common ancestor with monkeys.

BECAUSE we have the new world monkey split, and new world and old world monkeys are strikingly similar, our common ancestor with monkeys was not only monkey-like, but was a monkey.

Most scientists disagree that humans and apes are monkeys.

But as humans (and apes) are still mammals, we are also still monkeys.

+ simians (monkeys)
++ new world monkeys
++ old world monkeys
+++ apes
++++ great apes
+++++ african great apes
++++++ humans

R. Gary's authoritarian use of the scriptures would be more interesting if we had any way of verifying what those scriptures say. A photograph, perhaps. A drawing. I'm always suspicious of people who say someone looks like someone else's twin. That kind of judgment is usually largely in the eye of the beholder.