Science suggests we share 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees.. I don't believe that. Someone PROVE that.

Someone did. They sequenced the genomes of both species and that was the result.

We also share some compelling percentage of our DNA with house flies and frogs and venus fly traps and sharks and Velociraptors (though we probably won't get a good sample of Velociraptor DNA to figure out exactly how much).

I'm really interested in the relationship between say, Homo-Sapiens and Neaderthals.

Then you should probably try searching via Google's science interface instead of ranting on /r/conspiracy. We know that pretty closely, too.

Here's the Google Scholar link: https://scholar.google.com/

Don't you ever feel like your being watched?

Only when I'm using a computer or mobile phone or go somewhere that I know or suspect has security cameras. Then again, I've never been diagnosed with Paranoia so I have that going for me.

Don't you ever have a group of strange things happen that spark new understandings about this world, and what it is?

Well it wasn't all that strange to me, but these things that others probably find weird called "education" and "reading" definitely sparked my understanding of the universe.

...as an alien sucking out blood and or other fluids...

Mosquitoes are aliens? Damn glad I smack all them bitches to death on sight then!

Seems like an awful lot of work to get here from... wherever "there" is... just to suck my blood. All that time, effort, engineering... you'd think they could replicate human blood more easily than getting here. Hell, we can almost replicate human blood in the lab now and we're nowhere close to being able to send any appreciable number of living beings to another star system, right?

the Earth IS flat

I'm shocked. SHOCKED. Oh. Wait. No, I'm not.

Should be easy enough to prove though. Get the weakest Infrared telescope, drag it to Traverse City, Michigan on a dry, winter day, and take a picture of Chicago with it. If you can do that, you'll have proved that the earth's curvature is not what science says it is and either collect a Nobel prize or be killed by our mosquito alien overlords for exposing their plot... one or the other.

Have you ever thought, maybe humanity is so into science and science fiction because we have already been to the stars

Not really. We're into science because we're curious and science fiction because we have imaginations.

Maybe humanity has an expansive culture throughout the galaxy and we're fighting a war with greys and reptilians and we on "Earth" happen to be "prisoners of war".

This perspective often seems to be spewed by people who have no concept of the planet's or the species' history beyond their own lifetimes.

I laughed multiple times. It was quite entertaining but OP might have found it to be emotionally upsetting. You better hope the SJW's don't find this.

pseudo-scientific

Give me the names of these "someone's" who "sequenced our DNA".

You can find the science via the Google Scholar link I provided. I"m not searching and copy-pastaing for you.

could run circles around you in that domain

Unless your OP was a work of pure fiction, you cannot.

I'd love to hear more about what you have to say about this flat earth nonsense.

I've already shared all I need to share. The experiment is relatively simple. Go prove flat earth, then get back to us.

cold, and unwilling to open your mind.

My mind is completely open to evidence. It's impossible to quantify how much stuff I learned... KNEW... back in high school and early college that has been replaced or modified as i encounter new evidence.

So show me some.

There are some things you can't see, can't touch, can't perceive.

We invent tools so we can perceive them. Science is cool.

You just feel them.

This is the realm of imagination, which is not evidence. I can imagine a lot of shit. A lot of really weird, really interesting, fun, dangerous, compelling, and entertaining shit.

But it's all imagination.

What's the difference between probability and possibility?

Probability is the way we measure possibility. Some things are impossible. For example, me single-handedly and without tools lifting the building I'm sitting in off its foundation.

A better question is: does the fact that we can imagine something make that thing necessarily possible? (Spoiler: No)

its that ANYTHING is possible

Newp. And anyone who actually believes that either has an incredibly weak imagination or an incredibly weak understanding of the universe.

Can't have regular joes going around thinking they could uplift themselves could we?

Why not?

That'd be terribly bad for business.

Well, business is making it pretty tough to uplift yourself financially, at least in America, but it's not impossible... yet.

in a universe where certain physical laws had lined up differently, who knows

OK, I'm down with that. For some silly reason, I thought we were discussing THIS universe.

so I won't bother you with intellectual conversation anymore

You weren't before. ;-)

sweating away by the computer screen, eating evolved animal crackers and sipping soda

Not sweating, eating trail mix, sipping water.

perhaps catching a glimpse of a new video game your so psyched for

Nothing interesting on the horizon, sadly, so I'm still sort of with the one I started almost 4 years ago.

national geographic, the TV PROGRAM

I lost interest in saggy aboriginal boobs as a teenager, thanks. My TV is on for sporting events and Simpsons episodes and that's about it. Though the GOP Debate drinking game was somewhat fun.

Yeah, but our demise will be entertaining as fuck if we manage to elect Trump.

I hate that I hate you.

That's a very unhealthy attitude to take about someone you don't know beyond a handful of interactions on a silly internet forum.

You know everything

I know little.

yet you sit around and play video games all day?

I think I've played a grand total of 2 hours of video games in the past 7 days.

Stop responding with even stupider memes so I can focus on my mission, actually living a human life.

Sorry, I didn't realize I was forcing you to read and type. The power I possess is truly unimaginable!

That's an interesting notion, but I don't try to represent anyone but myself. If someone else wants to jump on the bandwagon, I hope they'll at least find a meaningful way to contribute.

"I can't hang mentally, so I'll bow down and pretend like I have important shit to do today."

You smoked today, huh?

This is one of the most detailed studies on the matter I could find.

https://www.genome.gov/Pages/Research/DIR/Chimp_Analysis.pdf

They even break down variation due to viral infections.

So prove that all DNA research is fake. Better yet. Prove to me that contrary DNA research is valid... You do know that creationists use your argument?

Not this shit again.

If your job is to just make yourself look ignorant you are doing a hell of a job. If you want to argue about this I'd suggest finding the millions of threads addressing your question and read them all. I'm not helping you create another thread based upon ignorance.

OP you're getting sucked into arguments with intellectual bullies. If you wanted to have a decent "what if" style conversation this isn't the place for it because of these types of people. I'd bet there are quite a few regular users of this sub who'd like to get into this discussion with you but have learned not to. This topic on this sub is troll bait. The thing is, all these "science said so" responses you're getting comes from unscientific non imaginative jackasses who spend time belittling others for asking questions. They have shut their brains primary function of thought off and replaced it with accepted "scientific facts" which is incredibly lazy and antithetical to wisdom or knowledge. Yet they want you and I to believe we're the crazy ones. Have this discussion in person with your friends over a beer or joint OP. This place is just to infested with sophisticated idiots to have it here.

Have you ever tried staring at the sun?

Nobody should try staring at the sun.

http://gizmodo.com/5926497/what-happens-when-you-stare-at-the-sun

Have you ever gotten sick just from being outside?

No.

You would think we would have evolved to fly and/or breathe underwater, without mechanical assistance, given the same logic. Oh. Wait. Our ancestors did one of those and many species we evolved alongside did the other. Our diversity is different and driven by our environment for the past dozens of millennia - trees, brush, walking upright, tool use...

Neanderthal skeletons are shorter than ours. They aren't giants. Though the study of "giant" skeletons is very interesting.

We have sequenced the human genome though. You can read the technical papers if you life. Most are online. I'm not smart enough to do it, but maybe you are. I'm not educated in genetics at all so I'm pretty lost on what they are talking about.

Only partially. Francis Collins and Craig Venter worked on it separately and jointly, sharing discoveries and information. Venter worked for a private company while Collins worked for a government agency.

I think your situation is you need to review some basic biology.

Sorry I realize that may have come of as an incendiary comment: mostly referring to the first part of your rant about how you were asking for proof about the relationship between the great apes and humans. I made that comment while only reading half of your post before finishing. And that was unfair.

But, as someone who works in a biological field, I can assure you that it has been confirmed multiple times by genetic sequencing that we humans, as far as we understand the genetic code, are not exceptional to this planet.

The fact that nearly 100% of all life share the same mechanism known as "The Central Dogma" of biology, and it all uses roughly the same code and same material (nucleotides) parsimony tells us it's more likely everything evolved from a single primordial life form. Whether there were others in the soup, they may have been out competed and we're stuck with how biology works on this planet.

Now whether the way life works is unique to earth, that's a different story. Our origins may have come from a place far, far away. Not as humans, but at least the recipe to creat earth-like life carried on a celestial body that seeded this rock. Check out "panspermia" and the field of astrobiology as a whole.

Now whether we are on an installation, something like an inverse Halo station, being harvested by ETs or whatever... a bit of a stretch. But hey, maybe, I've never been to space. I really doubt it because I'm comfortable with a null hypothesis in my day to day life.

Do you have an estimate?

Sure, current estimates of the first single-cell organism is placed at roughly 1bn years after the formation of earth.

they found Homo sapiens skeletons that are hundreds of thousands of years older than previously thought.

I know and isn't it exciting? The fossil record is, and always will be, incomplete. I'm in the minority and like to think the human species of same anatomical structure existed before the current estimate. It opens the door to many of the mysteries surrounding the ancient world and newly discovered ancient civilizations (looking at you, Göbekli Tepe)

bashing any theory of us coming FROM Neanderthals

That theory is new to me... considering there is considerable evidence that Neanderthals and humans coexisted. Can't come from something that was extant in the same time period.

that is my theory

Well, what you described is called a MRCA (most recent common ancestor). Every species on the planet shares one, it's relative to how you compare the phylogeny. "X" doesn't really exist. Rather, gradual changes punctuated by periodic catastrophes change the genome of a population and over time, the genome will differ from a parent population. This will likely lead to an incompatibility between mating, resulting in sterile offspring, and whaddya know... speciation has occurred. That, my friend, is evolution. It's not really a theory, it's nature.

We sure are. In its essence, evolution is just change over time. As long as the human genome is experiencing random mutations, we are still evolving as a species.

In a more philosophical look, there really is no time. There's just one moment in the cosmos. We use time in a sense to demarcate changes in the cosmos - and perceive it only linearly. And in that linear progression of change, we are all susceptible to its current.

Edit: to add, not just experience random mutations, but having those mutations "fixed" to the genome as they are passed down to offspring and not selected out by a "selection pressure" if the change is detrimental to the species survivability.

Hmm, I see what you're getting out. It's not really a correct way of thinking, but I do see what you're getting at. If you're under the assumption that evolution has a certain goal or objective to change an organism into something "better", that's not the case. Again, evolution is just change. And with that change comes more intricacies and complexities to a lineage or "clade". De-evolution in that sense would be, I guess, changing back into a more rudimentary form (think of a sessile organism, like a filter-feeder).

Some think technology is stifling our evolution. While I agree, technology can make us lazy, it also has tremendous ramifications for good. And also evil. The two entities are co-evolving. We are, after all, the sex organs of the machine world. Maybe we'll approach the singularity of man and machine and that will be the ultimate fate of the human evolution.

And you might want to go back further. Agriculture is buy and large the catalyst to where we are today. Humans are more hunter-gatherers naturally. But then again, since everything is a product of the universe, there really is no "natural". It's more of an artificial term to differentiate between man-made entities and non-man-made entities.

The earth will be fine. Nature will be fine. We are the ones who will/will not be fine depending on our actions.

yeah man