Mageth

I refer back to something Ed said a couple of pages ago:

If human genes were more diverse in ancient times the population could be less than that. And there is evidence that they were. Africans have more diverse genes than any other human group and are considered the oldest human group.

Actually, that seems to be evidence that they weren't more diverse.

African genes are more diverse and they are the "oldest human group." It follows that younger human groups have less diverse genes. Does it not follow, then, that if you go back in time, the African group had less diverse genes, as they would be a "younger group"?

Your example refutes your own premise that in ancient times, human genes were more diverse.

[ March 08, 2002: Message edited by: Mageth ]</p>

Ed

Usually, but not always.

Quote:

Ed: Well maybe it came from beneath the earth's crust. auto: Your lies have no place here. The water would be under enormous pressure. Pressure = heat. And the displacement of atmospheric gasses caused by the water surging upwards at such incredible speeds would have created a lot, lot more. (You know what happens when a meteor comes down? Well the same would have happened as the water surged up.) It would also have created a tremendous shockwave, so Noah and pals would have had the pleasure of being blown to pieces and flash fried at the same time.

No, a meteor is traveling thru air which doesnt have as much cooling power or resistance as water so, the heated water traveling thru deep cool water would cool off much more rapidly than a meteor.

Quote:

Ed: How do you know? Were you there? auto: How do you know Jesus was ressurrected, were you there?

I was just trying to make a point about his overly dogmatic statement. If you make such a statement you should at least back it up with evidence or what you think is evidence. But he didnt.

Quote:

Ed: His experiment was the first step in demonstrating that life cannot come from nonlife [...] auto: You forgot to add, "...in meat broth." And I'm almost certain deliberately. Your degree of self-deception is so great, I'd bet you'd believe 2+2=5 if your cult told you so.

No, actually I had forgotten he used meat broth. But isnt that similar to the primordial soup, they taste similar to me
God is bound by logic just like us so he cannot make 2+2=5.

Quote:

auto: Ok, give empirical evidence of helium, hydrogen, and various natural interactions producing a personal being. auto: Look in the mirror, then read a damn book.

As a biologist I have read many books on the molecules to man transition and none are very convincing.

Quote:

auto: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union functioned fairly well. Does that mean they were not barbarous, immoral, or evil? auto: If your God said that rape and murder were moral, would it not still be barbarous, immoral, or evil? Or would you follow His Command without batting an eyelid?

It would depend on if we were made in his image or not. Our consciences are generally based on his moral law especially in western countries where we have been exposed to it longer.

[b] He was demonstrating that death was the natural outcome of disobedience to the king of the universe. Sometimes for even animals.

Ed

No, I said sometimes the amount of information remains the same. What I mean is the more specific the gene the more information it contains. In general the more specific a message the more information it contains.

Ed

The recent discovery of specified complexity, the multiple problems associated with the early earth conditions, and etc.

Quote:

Ed: Nevertheless it is possible they will disappear but a Creator is the most logical conclusion from the existence of these gaps. lp: Ed, how are you so sure that the Big Bang had not been caused by Tootchko the Magnificent, who creates Universes just for the fun of it? Or that time-traveling extraterrestrial visitors had not been responsible for the origin and some of the evolution of Earth life?

I dont think Tootchko is adequate to cause the universe (you need to provide more info about him) and time travel is logically impossible.

Quote:

Ed: And then once one has shown that a creator can logically exist and then try to communicate with him, for most people his existence is confirmed by experience. lp: What evidence? Is this anything like Hillary Clinton's conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt?

No, God generally does not speak audibly to people and there are far more people who have experienced God than a deceased Mrs. Roosevelt.

Quote:

(me on inorganic vs. organic...) Ed: However the division is much greater than organic vs. inorganic. lp: From the vantage point of 2 centuries later.

Yes and even then it was considered impassable.

Quote:

lp: (stuff about a "law of sufficient cause" deleted; Ed waves it around as if it was a good substitute for determining whether some cause can really cause some effect.)

You have yet to demomstrate that it is not.

Quote:

Ed: .. But as I have stated before the animals scattered over the earth according to their species specific ecological requirements. lp: Ed has completely ignored my discussions of biogeography. Plants and animals are usually distributed over a fraction of the range that they can survive and thrive in, sometimes a very small fraction. Rabbits have been very successful in Australia, almost too successful, even though they had been introduced in 1859. And alongside rabbits are cows, sheep, pigs, dogs, foxes, camels, water buffalo, cactus plants, etc. I can quote legions of other examples; Ed, I hope that you are capable of understanding my discussion.

There may have been some barrier that prevented rabbits from entering Australia prior to that time.

Quote:

Originally posted by Oolon Colluphid: Perhaps, Ed, you’d care to explain why in humans the 'language' in this code is 95% incomprehensible gibberish? Why the same bits of gibberish are repeated millions and millions of times? Ed: Hello Oolon. There is are several possible explanations. First, it may only be incomprehensible gibberish because we have not yet discovered what its function is and the repetitions may also have a function that we have not yet been discovered. Or they may be the result of mutations, the scriptures dont say that humans are immune to mutations. lp: "Junk DNA" got its name because much of it has no clear function -- if any at all. Some junk DNA is pseudogenes, genes that can no longer be expressed.

Yes, it may be genes that are presently no longer used but were in the past due to changes in environmental conditions.

[b] Nowhere, thats my point.

Ed

How do you know it didnt have a purpose in the past but presently doesnt? It could be leftover from previous environmental conditions.

theyeti

In many cases, that's exactly what's happened. Mutations have rendered the gene disfunctional because the environment was such that it was no longer needed (i.e, there was no selective pressure). The question here is why do humans and apes share the same disfunctional genes with the same mutations that silence them. The chances of this happening by chance are astronomically low.

Also, not all pseudogenes came from genes that were once functional. Many (probably most) are what are called processed pseudogenes. These arise when mature mRNA is reverse transcribed into a cDNA, and then the cDNA is inserted randomly into the genome (although I think A/T rich regions are more likely to recieve an insert, this due to the lower melting point I presume). Processed pseudogenes have a degenerate poly A tail, a truncated 5' end, and are flanked by tandem repeats. All of this is the result of having come from an mRNA, and thus processed pseudogenes can be definitively identified. Alu sequences are an example.

Again, the thing here is why do humans and apes share the same processed pseudogenes in the same location unless by common descent? This cannont be explained by chance or by functional necessity. Furthermore, since we know how these sequences arise, then there's not much left to do but propose a deceptive God to explain how they could exist without evolution. I'm basically repeating the stuff I wrote <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=000407&p=2" target="_blank">here</a>.

theyeti

lpetrich

Where is the disclaimer to that effect in the Bible? Why are we supposed to have to puzzle it out? That's not what one would call the ideally-written instruction book.


Have you ever tasted Urey-Miller primordial soup?

So God looks human? Can he commit sins? And why isn't humanity all-male and miraculously reproducing? That would be because God is male, of course.

Xenophanes was right: people create gods in their likeness.

A "king" who physically allows something to happen then complains about it later. And don't give me any sauropod dung about free will -- if it leads to sin, it's bad, b-a-d, bad. Read what Jesus Christ says about body parts that cause one to sin -- they ought to be removed.

That's not what is usually called "information"; there is a technical meaning, which is the bits needed to describe a message. And that increases when genes get duplicated.

What is "specified complexity", and how does it differ from what might be called "unspecified complexity"?

You've provided nothing but an assertion of impossibility. Imagine that you make a track in space-time as you live. But if you do some time travel to the past, your track will reverse direction relative to your neighborhood's overall time.

The same way that many people have experienced the deities of Mt. Olympus, the Virgin Mary and medieval saints, ghosts, and so forth?

As if there is some kind of barrier can stop rabbits but not kangaroos or wallabies or wombats or koalas or any of Australia's other distinctive fauna. How did all the kangaroos get to Australia without going astray? Why didn't the wombats burrow into the ground near Mt. Ararat? Why did all the rattlesnakes slither to the Americas, leaving none behind? Why did the skunks and raccoons and New World porcupines and armadillos and buffalo and turkeys also go to the Americas, leaving none behind? Why did all the ostriches go to Africa instead of to Australia or India or South America or New Zealand? Ed, if you wish to hang yourself by maintaining that Noah's Flood was literal history, Noah's Ark and all, I'm not going to stop you.

Oolon Colluphid

Ed, please respond to Rufus’s, Patrick’s and now my request to explain exactly why the first three skulls I posted are apes and the rest are human. What are your criteria?

The reason it is essential you answer is that D, for instance, is Homo habilis, <a href="http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/ha/ER1813.html" target="_blank">KNM-ER 1813</a>, and the <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/compare.html" target="_blank">creationist writers</a> Cuozzo, Gish, Mehlert, Bowden, Menton, Baker, Lubenow, Taylor and Van Bebber are unanimous in considering it to be an ape. With a cranial capacity of 510cc, it has just over a third that of the <a href="http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/ViktoriyaShchupak.shtml" target="_blank">average modern human</a>.

Similarly E is <a href="http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/ha/oh24.html" target="_blank">OH 24</a>, also Homo habilis, and has a brain only a bit bigger, at around 600cc. Have another look. L, underneath it, is a modern human. Which does it look more like, D or L?

On the other hand, B and C are Australopithecus africanus. Here are some images comparing A africanus to chimps and gorillas:







Sure they’re apes. Evolution solves this simply, by pointing out that we are too. So what are your criteria for saying which is ape and which human? I assume you’re sure they’re separate ‘kinds’. Surely we, as the pinnacle of creation, shouldn’t be hard to distinguish, should we?

Your thoughts please.

“The molecules to man transition”? “The molecules to man transition”?? That’s three and a half thousand million years of transition you’re talking about there pal. Do please tell us some of these books. Did any of them mention <a href="http://www.mdgekko.com/devonian/devo-index.html" target="_blank">Acanthostega, Elginerpeton, Hynerpeton, Ichthyostega Metaxygnathus, etc etc</a>, or the <a href="http://www.gcssepm.org/special/cuffey_05.htm" target="_blank">Synapsida</a>, for instance?

And just out of curiosity, just what variety of biologist are you? You’re the one mentioning it as if it gives you some sort of expertise, so let’s see what field you work in.

And do please tell us more about this flood. Okay, you don’t know the date. But you know something about it, right? Things like, was it global as the bible states, how did things survive it, and so on.

TTFN, Oolon

[ March 12, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>

hezekiah jones

This is a great question. Has anyone ever answered it?

Oolon Colluphid

Don't know. It sounds a bit to me like it could mean functional complexity, complexity that does something. In Mount Improbable, Dawkins says that "there is an uninteresting sense in which, with hindsight, any particular arrangement of parts is just as improbable as any other. Even a junkyard is as improbable, with hindsight, as a 747, for its parts could have been arranged in so many other ways". The arrangement of the bits of a mountain is undoubtedly complex, but they’d all still be mountains. Only designed -- and designoid -- objects have a special sort of complexity: "the vast majority of arrangements of the parts of a Boeing junkyard would not fly. A small minority would. Of all the trillions of possible arrangements of the parts of an eye, only a tiny minority would see.[...] There is something very special about the particular arrangement that exists. All particular arrangements are as improbable as each other. But of all particular arrangements, those that aren't useful hugely outnumber those that are. Useful devices are improbable and need a special explanation."

But I don’t think that is what Ed was getting at, so I'm just as foxed as you. Care to elaborate, Ed?

TTFN, Oolon