“Can you ‘splain more about the Rh- and 24-23 chromosome thing?”
All primates and monkeys have a protein marker on their blood cells called the Rh marker. RH stands for RHesus monkey within which we first discovered this protein blood marker. Having Rh positive or Rh negative blood affects the success of blood transfusions because your immune system will reject the opposite blood type.
For some reason, 15% of humans don’t have the Rh blood marker so we label them as Rh-. A good amount of these people are white Europeans and many of them do have blue eyes. The mysterious Basque people of northern Spain have the highest percentage of Rh- blood (about 27%). They also claim to be descended from Atlanteans. Of course, blue eyes are also another strange genetic variation in an animal that used to spend all its time outside. I have blue eyes and it sucks because without sunglasses the summer sun hurts my eyes and I have a higher chance of getting cataracts.
Anyhow, Rh+ or Rh- blood can be harmful to the health of a pregnant woman and child if the child has the opposite of the mother. From an evolutionary perspective, it doesn’t make sense for Rh negative blood to exist. No one has explained the benefits of it and we definitely know that it impacts reproductive health. Before we had modern medical interventions for the Rh pregnancy problem, a constant number of women or children would simply die during gestation of Rh blood type incompatibility.
What about the missing chromosome, you ask… All other primates besides humans have 24 pairs of chromosomes. But for no good reason at all, suddenly some hominoids popped up with 23. Two pairs of primate chromosomes became chromosome pair number two in humans for no good reason whatsoever.
However, in my opinion, the most important human genetic anomaly is the great variety and commonality of prepubescent genetic disorders in human children. When a genetic disorder ends up killing a child, that child cannot directly pass on its genetic disorder. Yet these genetic disorders in humans persist in a deeply flawed human genome. We don’t see this wide variety of genetic disorders in wild animals. However, in domesticated animals like cats and dogs we do see a somewhat greater variety of genetic disorders. Why do domestic animals have these disorders? Because of human intervention in their breeding. When we over-select for certain traits, we can end up with something like the pug, a dog that can’t breathe properly due to its overly short face. Human intervention in the breeding of domestic animals created some of their genetic problems.
So did some type of intervention into human DNA end up leaving us with a deeply flawed genome? Are we allowed to ask that question?
If you do a Google or a Bing search on these topics there’s quite a bit of information about them. Despite the fact that information on these topics exists, we rarely hear about them in school. It's because they don’t want us really understanding who we are.
It is the same reason they must cover up existence of Bigfoot. Once we understand who Bigfoot are, we will have a much better understanding of who we are.
I believe the Pug also needs to have caesarean sections to be born in most cases because the head is so large it has trouble coming out of the birth canal. Dog breeding has gotten pretty insane, the variations that have arisen in such a short evolutionary time span are very diverse. If modern society collapsed, I cant see packs of Chihuahuas taking over and thriving on their own in Sub-Saharan Africa with all the predators that currently exist, but who knows maybe they would specialize and become underground dwellers like meerkats.
I think to a certain extent humans also domesticated themselves. I look at DNA as a code and it behaves like code. Any code that is capable of replicating can replicate, the code itself does not factor in if that code is ultimately doomed to become unable to replicate further down the line. Also we are not code in a vacuum, we exist running simultaneously with other code, a symphony of multi threaded code is the human species.
In some science fiction shows the grey alien species are said to be incapable of breeding, and they are said to instead rely on continuous cloning which would mimic the natural life and death cycle of the species, the end result the same: allowing them to continue to exist and remain immortal as an species (just like humans), the code instead of being polymorphic code: breaking apart and recombining with another set of instructions would instead rely on asexual reproduction: copying and pasting the same code continually to achieve the same result. I think this type of replication is more vulnerable to the original code degrading or fraying, its not as stress tested from mutation or error as sexual reproduction. Some animals are capable of asexual reproduction and virgin births if there are no males, some can do it, some use it as their exclusive method of replication. I believe aphids mostly use asexual reproduction, and some condors and snakes and maybe frogs and fish can have virgin births if no males are present.
There has already been intervention in our own genetic evolution and in other species as well. It does not matter if the changes were made by an external force or internal. Humans are beginning to hack the DNA code with crispr technologies. I cant wait until we can edit our code to the point where we can ditch the code and exist as pure energy. We may have already bootstrapped our own existence from nothing. Replication is an awesome topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymorphic_code
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamorphic_code