Recently I heard someone argue that the vestigial telomeres in chromosome 2 don't exist in the numbers an "evolutionist" would expect. Those vestigial telomeres, he argued, also supposedly degenerated far more than, again, an "evolutionist" would expect. Therefore, they're not vestigial telomeres but telomeric sequences found throughout chromosomes. Here's what he specifically said:
To address the science, though, the fusion was supposedly a telomere-telomere fusion, the first documented aside from in cancer cells: “Fusion of telomeres is a rare occurrence in normal lymphoblasts and fibroblasts, although it has been observed in 20-30% of the cells of certain tumors, where it appears to be nonclonal (25-29) . . . The frequency with which telomere-telomere fusion has participated in chromosome evolution cannot readily be assessed. ” (http://www.pnas.org/content/88/2...). That is because the function of telomeres is typically to prevent fusion and is a highly unlikely way for fusion to actually occur at all—much less lead to a higher organism.
Humans typically have 2500 repeats of the telomeric sequence TTAGGG (15,000 base pairs). Chimpanzees have telomeric sequences that are twice as long (Blood cell telomere lengths and shortening rates of chimpanzee and human females.). If there was a fusion, even if there had been degeneration, we could have expected thousands of repeats. However, another group found “Only 48% of the 127 repeats in RP11–395L14 and 46% of the 158 repeats in M73018 are perfect TTAGGG or TTGGGG units” (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc...). So there were few repeats to begin with (127+158=285, ~4% of the 7500 that could be expected), and most of these were degenerate. That also forces them to raise the question “If the fusion occurred within the telomeric repeat arrays less than ∼6 Mya, why are the arrays at the fusion site so degenerate? The arrays are 14% diverged from canonical telomere repeats (not shown), whereas noncoding sequence has diverged <1.5% in the ∼6 Mya since chimpanzee and humans diverged (Chen and Li 2001)” (ibid.). They come up with several explanations, but of course they have to keep riding with the Evolution assumption and can’t admit that the data just don’t fit their assumptions because they have no other option with God excluded. The Christian response that these telomeric repeats are simply normal telomeric repeats that intersperse chromosomes and that the human chromosome, though similar (as humans and chimpanzees are also outwardly similar), is unique.
Furthermore, we would expect there to be little genetic function in this region, since telomeres are not active, but are expendable parts of the chromosome that only protect the rest. On the contrary, though, the region around the fusion site is functionally quite active (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc...).[...]
As I said, the vestigial telomeres don't exist nearly in the numbers one would expect, and have supposedly degenerated far more than one would expect. I find it more likely that they are just telomeric sequences that are found throughout chromosomes. Most are peri-centric (Distribution of non-telomeric sites of the (TTAGGG)n telomeric sequence in vertebrate chromosomes), about where the fusion location is supposed to be.
What would be your response?