MattofVA

This is one of the more seemingly convincing creatonist pages I have come across: the two good arguments put forth here are :

1. unrelated groups sharing proteins that more closely related groups/species do not.

2. homologous structures and proteins in closely related organisms often not sharing homologous(same location) genes for these things.

Anyone have ascoop on this?
Bullshit as usual probably?

Here:

emporium.turnpike.net/C/cs/homology.htm

pangloss

Since Menton does not supply any references, as far as I would be concerned, it is all made up.

Having had an email exchange with Menton in the past, I think that could very well be the case.

Happy Wonderer

Ooh, this page has a quote for the "wow is that dumb!" thread. I got dibs on it!

hw

theyeti

You don't have to look hard to find some major screw-ups.

I don't know why he mentions gel electrophoresis. It's not used for protein sequencing.

And obviously, proteins are not analagous simply to "building materials" because they have a far deeper relationship with phenotype than the mere material used for a building.

Cytochrome C is identical in humans and chimps. And according to the phylogenetic tree, turtles are an outgroup to the birds and snakes (though their position is not certain). There's no reason to expect them to be any closer to snakes than to birds.

Yeah, it sure is. That's because it can do things other than widen the birth canal. So what? You tend to find lots of eukaryotic proteins with prokaryotic precursors. Could it be because the two groups have shared ancestry?

Is there some law that prevents organisms from losing proteins?

Denton's molecular phylogenetics argument was grossly flawed, and he's since retracted it. (And he now accepts evolution.)

****

The rest have similar flaws. The real problem is that he offers up only a few cherry-picked examples, mostly consisting of tiny hormones which are highly subject to selection, and are thus terrible examples. Of course this does nothing to prove that phylogenetics methods are generally unrealiable. And his claim about incongruence between molecular and embryological and fossil phylogenies is flat-out false.

theyeti