When Wash. U. scientists announced in May that they'd cracked the genetic code of the platypus, the secular media broke it as big news, promising advances in our understanding of human evolution. The creationists drew up in horror. First scientists had dared suggest that humans had evolved from apes. Now they were positing a common link to this? A 5-pound, furry, badgertailed, duck-billed mockery of a mammal that laid eggs from its rectum, nursed without nipples and packed venom in bony spurs on its legs? The Internet crackled with Christian outrage.
Dr. Wes Warren, the Washington University geneticist who led the international team of 100 scientists working on the project, still looks dazed by all the radio call-ins and furious letter-writers. Some said the odd-duck platypus disproved evolution, because nothing before or after has been remotely like it; God probably made it just to toy with the evolutionists. Others recoil from the very notion of sharing platypus genes.
"I've got one right here," Warren sighs, pushing forward an opened manila envelope from a 90-year-old Jehovah's Witness. "I've tried to explain that, at least in my opinion, belief in God is not incompatible with evolution." He's through trying. Just breaking the code was exhausting enough.
"It's the most difficult genome anybody's ever sequenced," Warren says, explaining that with all the repetition, "it's like doing a jigsaw puzzle that's 50 percent white sky."
Creationists might have stayed calmer if the intent were simply to better understand and conserve these ancient creatures. But Warren's frank about his team's agenda. Mammals fall into three categories: eutherians (99 percent, including us), marsupials (opossums, koalas, kangaroos) and monotremes (two kinds of spiny anteater and the duck-billed platypus). "The goal is to align all these genetic blueprints and look for similarities," he says, "so we can see what pieces of human have been retained over millions of years."
About 82 percent of human genetic material matches that of the platypus. And platypuses have long been cited as proof that God has a sense of humor—or was drunk when he made them. So if we did branch off from a common source 166 million years or so ago … would that make humans the product of a really bad hangover?
