Badfish

But true. Neither science (if you want to call creationISM a science) cannot demonstrate our origins. I am seeing that evolutionists seem more concerned with the fascination that we "seemed" to evolve from common ancestors or what have you, creationISM actually tries to explain our actual origins from the very beginning.

I would say that even the process of evolution is a creation of some sort, a new creation as a result of natural selection or other devices of nature.

Therefore it's not entirely ridiculous that creation by a designer is possible. IMO

In fact many theists make a good argument for ID and evolution from common ancestry (not good enough for me, but still compelling), I can buy adaptive evolution or micro evolution because of changing climatic conditions or other natural occurances, possibly even natural selection, causing gene or DNA mutation.

So basically IMO, creation by an ID and evolution can work in tandem, and should be explored as a possibility because of a lack of evidence to contradict the concept of our beginnings as presented by CreationISTS.

Jack the Bodiless

Badfish:

I think you need to clarify what you mean by the term "creationist". Usually it refers to belief in Genesis-style "special creation", the separate creation of individual species: which is baloney, as it's contradicted by masses of evidence.

I get the impression that what you're advocating is an initial creation event of a primitive organism, followed by God-guided common descent: "Theistic Evolution".

But, as a scientific theory, theistic evolution is unsatisfactory because it doesn't explain God. You're merely replacing one mystery with another.

Oolon Colluphid

Did he mention intelligent design? <rubs hand with glee>

Badfish

Yes that is true, Jack, however the mystery and the Genesis style creation does have testimony, which also contains a fairly accurate geneology (suggesting the testimony of Genesis could be close), also suggesting that there is a small preponderance over any other speculative theories of the origins of the cosmos. IMO

Badfish

LOL,

Yes I believe he did, but I'm not the only one. I believe that it is a prevailing underlying theme here by the anti-evolutionists, could be wrong.

Why? Do you have demonstratable evidence to the contrary? Or just more speculation with philosophy and no evidence theories?

Wounded King

So it shows that you can induce elements of the early developmental program of the tooth in chick, without the need for any non-chick material. While the expression of BMP and FGF is obviously ectopic or from an exogenous source it is not prone to the same problems of contamination to which the mouse/ chick chimera studies are.

It doesn't need to leave you wondering, even a passing familiarity with developmental biology would give you a wealth of instances of interesting changes to the developmental program caused by ectopic expression, overexpression, knockouts, knockins and a whole host of other techniques. Does your 'So what?' mean that you fail to see the point of the entire field of developmental biology? As with naturally occurring mutants the interference with normal developmental programs is the easiest way to investigate those programs.

You said that mouse tissue was necessary for anything to happen, I was simply directing you to research that shows that material derived solely from the chick, excepting the viral vector used for the transfection, was sufficient to induce certain elements of the early tooth devlopmental pathway, or at least morphological movements and patterns of gene expression almost identical to those seen in early tooth development in the mouse.

Do you think that the induction of supernumerary limbs by growth factor treatments tells us nothing about the initiation of limb development?

You say
This is not the same thing at all. Rather than adding a large number of disparate completely novel elements all that is happening is a few genes, which the chick already expresses in other tissues, are ectopically expressed in the tissue underlying the mandibular epithelium. They didn't fiddle around with every factor under the sun until they got the right ones. The required factors were hypothesised on the basis of studies of tooth development in other models. If the expression of a gene, which is known to be important in inducing teeth in mice, induces tooth like structures in the mandibular tissues of chick why is it such a leap of faith to suggest that their may be a conserved vertebrate pathway of dental development, what better explanation can you provide? That those specific factors just happen to induce morhpholgical and gene expression profiles similar to those seen in mammalian teeth germs? Or is your contention that while large elements of these developmental pathways are conserved they are unable to actually give rise to teeth in chicks as chicks never had teeth? Is there any evidence to support this?

As far as the results being drawn from our ingenuioty go, you seem to be ruling out the entire field of science, most experiments require an element of ingenuity to design them, should we only rely on things which are self obvious or perhaps the result of divine revelation rather than use our ingenuity to investigate?

Oolon Colluphid

Well, it depends. What exactly do you mean by intelligent design? What sort of things does it purport to explain? Are there any predictions we can draw from it?

TTFN, Oolon

Charles Darwin

"all the members of the gibbon family that have been surveyed"? Last I checked there was only one gibbon sequence. In any case, to my knowledge there is no evidence that convergent mutations occur in distant species. The evidence that we do have is of them occurring in the same or very similar species. So it is not clear why you are having difficulty accepting the idea that there could be a convergent mutation within the hominidae, but not in the gibbon.

In fact, under evolution, what are the chances that a pseudogene would be caused by independent events? The evolutionists who published the urate oxidase findings noted this, and so were forced to make the strange conclusion that the pseudogene was selected for! :

"Because the disruption of a functional gene by independent events in two different evolutionary lineages is unlikely to occur on a chance basis, our data favor the hypothesis that the loss of urate oxidase may have evolutionary advantages." [J Mol Evol, 34:78-84, 1992]

pangloss

Of course all vestigials have a function and are therefore not vestigials.

Why, the great anatmist/physiologist (theologian, actually) George Howe once informed me that his posterior auricularis muscles could not be vestiges because he sometimes uses them to adjust his glasses.....

Maybe CD can provide a functon for the extensor coccygis? If, of course, we must rely on the "no functions for vestiges" caricature....

monkenstick

there is convergent evolution in the hominidae and in the gibbons, except that the mutations which are "convergent" are different for both of these monophyletic groups

so a C->T transition in codon 33 just happened to occur in all the members of hominidae, but no C->T transition in codon 18

and a C-> T transition occured in codon 18 in all the gibbons, but not a C->T transition in codon 33

take a look at the tree in the link. All the convergent mutations you're asking me to accept support the current tree - its a co-inincidence that is so ridiculous as to be preposterous

A more recent paper posits the explanation that the pseudogene took two hits - a reduction in promoter function in the common ancestor of gibbons and hominidae followed by different nonsense mutations in those lineages

The conclusion isn't strange at all, if there is selective advantage in turning off a gene, then inactivating mutations in it will be favoured. The hypothesis is that urate, having antioxidant properties, may contribute to longer lifespans and a reduction in cancer rate.