Freethought & Rationalism Archive

MrDarwin · 04-03-2002, 10:22 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Ed:


Parasites and pathogens would have surivived in their host organsims that were on the ark or floating on vegetation mats. Land plants would have survived either by Noah putting some on the ark, some floating on mats, and some surviving as seeds and later germinating. In ancient times aquatic organisms may have been like present day anadromous aquatic organisms. Migration.

Hmmm, I don't generally like to bring in biblical arguments, but if you're going to make them, you're going to have to back them up. And the problem with the "floating mats" theory is this: in Genesis 6:17 God told Noah,

Quote:

"I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish." (KJV, "And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.")

So if you believe that any creatures that were not on the ark managed to survive, you're calling God a liar. Meanwhile, according to Genesis 7:21-23,

Quote:

Every living thing that moved on the earth perished-birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark." (KJV: "And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died. And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.)

So if you believe that any creatures that were not on the ark managed to survive, you are saying the Bible is wrong. So which is it, God lied to Noah or the Bible got it wrong?

MrDarwin · 04-03-2002, 10:31 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Oolon Colluphid:


Well I wasn�t following it closely, but as for what you �demonstrated�, it just looks as if everyone got bored and went home. However, since you believe things were literally created by an entity who cares for us in some way, what I�d like to know is: why did it create, for instance, the pathogenic organisms I listed above? Parasites and pathogens are exquisitely shaped for their lifestyles. And these are just the sort of �design� features that creationists usually trumpet as evidence for a designer.

I've seen the symbiotic relationship between the sea anemone and the hermit crab upon whose shell it lives extolled as a complex "design" that could not possibly have evolved. I pointed out to the creationist making the argument that the entire relationship is predicated upon (1) the hermit crab needing protection from predators, (2) the anemone having stinging cells, either for protection from predators, or to kill other organisms as food (possibly both), (3) the anemone and crab both benefitting from the death of animals that provide them with food, and (4) the hermit crab occupying a snail shell vacated by the death of the snail. So I have the same question: did this intricate system evolve, or was it designed by a deity that fully intended its creations to kill and eat each other? (And don't even get me started on ichneumon wasps and other parasitoids!)

Ed · 04-03-2002, 06:44 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by theyeti:

Originally posted by Ed:

Hello yeti. It may be that the original mutagenic source was gene specific and since apes share a very similar genetic code with humans, then such a thing as you describe would be very likely to occur.

yeti: Hi Ed. There just simly isn't any evidence for this. You are talking about a specific mechanism for creating a specific mutation at a specific base pair. No one has ever seen such a thing, and it would make no sense for such a thing to exist, regardless of whether you accept a creationist or an evolutionist outlook. Why would there be a mechanism to ruin a gene in a specific way? The mechanism that we do know that exists is random point mutation, and there is simply no reason to assume that anything else is at work here, and certainly no evidence to that effect.[/b]

Actually sickle cell anemia is gene specific, so theoretically there could be others.

Quote:

Originally the cDNA may not have been inserted randomly, there may be some type of malfunction in the transcription process.

yeti: There has been tons of research done on this. All of the evidence shows conclusively that they insert randomly, though sometimes with bias towards G/C poor sites. There are no known consensus sequences that are inserted into, and laboratory observation has borne out that insertion is indeed random. See for example this recent paper:

Genome Res 2001 Dec;11(12):2050-8 Genomic characterization of recent human LINE-1 insertions: evidence supporting random insertion.

Futhermore, it's a matter of identical insertion sites. Nonrandom insertion still wouldn't cause humans and apes to have the same locations for the same processed pseudogenes.

A recent article in Natural History magazine (10/01) states that pseudogenes may be the result of viral insertion. Some viruses can cross species and have identical impacts. This may be the case with junk DNA and pseudogenes.

[b]

Quote:

Ed: Again as I stated above whatever caused the malfunction of the transcription process may have been genome specific.

yeti: It's not a matter of "malfunction" really. Reverse transcriptases are present in the cell due to endogenous retroviruses, and one will occasionally latch on to a mature mRNA, starting at the poly A tail and working its way back creating a complementary cDNA. It usually falls off before completing the cDNA, which is why most processed pseudogenes have truncated 5' ends. Of course, the cDNA must become inserted into the genome in some manner (there are integrase enzymes that can help do this), and then this must have occured in a germ cell line that gets passed on. So you're talking about a relatively rare string of events that is very unlikely to be repeated in identical fashion in independant genomes. In fact, we don't even see identical independant insertions in members of the same species. It does no good to expect them in humans and apes. They can only come through common descent.

theyeti

See above about viruses.

Ed · 04-03-2002, 06:47 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Automaton:
Here is a prime example of how creationists must invent insane fantasies for their "theories" to hold any water.

quote:
Ed: It may be that the original mutagenic source was gene specific and since apes share a very similar genetic code with humans, then such a thing as you describe would be very likely to occur.

Auto: What on earth is a gene-specific mutagen? No such thing exists, except say highly specialized retrovirii that must be kept under laboratory conditions. Even if this magical "gene-specific mutagen" existed (and you can be sure if such a thing existed plentifully enough in the enivornment, the biotechnology/genetic engineering croud would have tapped into this resource long ago) it would have to contain a great deal of specific information (as a retrovirus genome does). Considering the mutagen would not be subject to evolution (and you IDers deny that evolution is even capable of generating specific information), it would have to be designed. Yes, preordained by your god, a miracle. And that puts us right back where we started, leaving you to explain why your god would go out of his way to trick and deceive us.

See my post to the yeti above.

Ed · 04-03-2002, 07:16 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by lpetrich:
[QB]
(A lot of haggling about genealogies...)
Ed:
The essentials of Christianity such as the plan of salvation and moral laws are obvious, but some of the other teachings of the scriptures require expert knowledge of greek and hebrew plus knowledge of ancient history.

lp: It is thus not the ideal instruction book, because the ideal instruction book ought not to need such background -- it ought to be as self-contained as possible.[/b]

Well a god that was not invented by men is not going to do things that we think he ought to do.

Quote:

lp: Have you ever tasted Urey-Miller primordial soup?
Ed:
Nah, I don't engage in cannibalism.

lp: It's no worse than eating plant or fungus or animal flesh.

Which one? Cannibalism or the primordial soup?

Quote:

(about whether God has various human physical features...)
Ed:
Huh? No, God is a spiritual being, he does not have a body and is neither male nor female. We are made in is image in that we are personal beings and he is a personal being.

lp: However, the Bible is rather vague about that.

Hardly, Jesus came right out and said it "God is spirit."

Quote:

lp: Xenophanes was right: people create gods in their likeness.
Ed:
It is unlikely that the Christian God is man made given his high moral standards. A man made god would let you have sex with whomever you want and let you lie whenever you want and etc.

lp: That's baloney. Simply check out the moral codes of different societies, especially societies whose members had never heard of the Bible.

Name one.

Quote:

lp: 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.
Ed:
He didnt mean that literally, his teaching is what is called rabbinic hyperbole. ...

lp: How does one determine that? Is it with any criterion other than "If I like it, it's literal; if I don't like it, it's allegorical"?

No, by studying 1st century Judaism.

Quote:

lp: 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.
Ed:
No, duplication does not usually increase information. For example DNA is like a sentence. "The dog chased the cat." If one gene is duplicated "The The dog chased the cat." This may still be understandable but if another is duplicated "The the dog chased chased the cat." It starts losing its meaning or information.

lp: Ed, you clearly don't know what you are talking about. Duplicating a gene would be like duplicating the whole sentence: "The dog chased the cat. The dog chased the cat." Now imagine a mutation: "The dog chased the cat. The dog chased the squirrel." You have both the original information, the dog chasing the cat, and some new information, the dog chasing the squirrel. And the new info does not destroy the old info.

You can use either one, genes can be represented by words or sentences. Your example shows how mutations cancel out the information. Which one is the dog chasing? He cant chase both so they cancel each other out as a contradiction.

Quote:

lp: What is "specified complexity", and how does it differ from what might be called "unspecified complexity"?
Ed:
Complexity ensures that the object in question is not so simple that it can readily explained by chance. Specification ensures that the object exhibits the type of pattern characteristic of intelligence.

lp: What, exactly, is "specification" in this context?

Specification in this context is the complex languagelike code of DNA. Another example is what archaeologists do everyday, differentiating an arrowhead shaped rock from an arrowhead.

Quote:

Ed:
... time travel is logically impossible.
lp: 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.
Ed:
As I stated above if go into the past before you were born then you would both be and not be which is a logical impossibility. Now if just go into the past of your own life, say when you were a child then that is not logically impossible.

lp: That is absurd -- does that mean that if one tries to go before one's birth or one's conception, one will fail?

In my opinion, yes.

Quote:

lp: The same way that many people have experienced the deities of Mt. Olympus, the Virgin Mary and medieval saints, ghosts, and so forth?
Ed:
Not exactly, there are certain characteristics and boundaries around that experience that are recognizable as God and also none of those beings are sufficient to have created the universe.

lp: How so?

I went over this in the EOG thread. Remember?

Quote:

LP on numerous examples of limited distribution...
Ed:
Animal habitat requirements are much more complex than your examples. Even the amount of heavy metals in soil can determine whether a burrowing animal will burrow and etc. There are a multitude of environmental factors can impact an animal's choice of habitat.

lp: Which does not seem to have kept rabbits from spreading in Australia when they were introduced. Something also true of many other introduced species.

And how do amounts of heavy metals mean wombats in Australia and woodchucks and marmots in the northern continents?

Organisms may have been more ecosystem specific in the past.

Ed · 04-03-2002, 07:30 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Jack the Bodiless:

As has already been pointed out, substituting "ancestor of" for "son of" doesn't help you, because the genealogies clearly state how old each person was when he "became the ancestor of" the next in the series.

Going back to your "Robert E. Lee" example: If you are descended from Lee, then Lee was your ancestor. It's that simple. If you point to a portrait of Lee and say "that's my ancestor", the statement is valid regardless of how old Lee was when the portrait is painted: you wouldn't check the date and say "Oops, he hadn't had kids by then, therefore he is not my ancestor".

According to your distictly odd interpretation, when Lee's son was ten years old, Lee was your ancestor but his son was not![/b]

No, as I stated in my post to lp ancient genealogies often only mentioned the famous members of the family tree. IOW, Lee was famous and a man of renown, his son was not.

[b]

Quote:

lp: Please give evidence that ANY culture, anywhere on Earth at any time in history, has ever used such a bizarre definition of "ancestor". Please give evidence that the Hebrew word translated as "begat" refers to this practise. If I require "expert knowledge of greek and hebrew plus knowledge of ancient history", please quote an expert in Greek, Hebrew, or ancient history who has actually verified that this is true by any means except "I need to make this up because otherwise we're screwed".

Not being a historian, I dont know of any. But as far as the hebrew meaning "ancestor of" look it up in Strong's Concordance. But even if the intended meaning is "son of" in this genealogy, the next big genealogy in Genesis 10 is definitely indefinite, some the names are plainly nation names not persons so these are the founders of nations and societies not always fathers in the biological sense.

Ed · 04-03-2002, 07:34 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Rimstalker:


Ed: "Not exactly, there are certain characteristics and boundaries around that experience that are recognizable as God and also none of those beings are sufficient to have created the universe."

Rim: Which brings us right back to this discussion's original topic. Ed is just running you guys around in circles on a wild goose chase for nothing.

DNFTT.

BTW, I wonder why the self-proclaimed "wildlife biologist," Ed, has yet to reply to Morpho's querry?

Actually you are right Rim. Ultimately, all this talk about creation and evolution and etc, goes back to the big question "Does the Christian God exist?" And I think I demonstrated in the EOG thread that there is strong logical evidence that He does.

Ed · 04-03-2002, 07:38 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by RufusAtticus:


Angiosperm pollen is found everwhere in 6,000-10,000 year old geology. I understand that you are preforming mental gymnastics to justify your biblical faith. But maybe you should look into the scientific data for yourself before you make such statements as the one above. Do you not trust the scientific method to give you honest answers?

-RvFvS

Who said anything about a 6000-10,000 year old geology? We don't know when the flood was, it may have been a million years ago.

Ed · 04-03-2002, 07:46 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by theyeti:


Ed, you must have missed my earlier posts on SC. What archaeologists do is absolutely not the recognition of SC. Archaeologists, like any other scientist, proceed with the assumption that they can only detect natural causes, since "detectability" is written into the definition of "natural"; the supernatural, by its own definition, can't be detected. SC is defined as something that is not able to come about by natural means. Therefore, if archaeologists were to discover SC, they would be discovering something that came about by supernatural means. When has this ever happened?

Given the way that Dembski has chosen to define SC, nothing that humans do, if we have evolved naturally, whether it's an arrow head or Mt. Rushmore, can count as SC. SC is then really nothing more than an exercise in question begging. Of course, you can't be blamed for not knowing that (though you could have read my other posts), since Dembski seems to have intentionally made it as obfuscatory as possible.

theyeti

Have you read any of Dembski? He uses the SETI program in his book "Intelligent Design" as an example of specified complexity. Intelligent design and SC can be natural or supernatural. The point is that we can recognize intelligent design whether or not the designer is physically present. The ancient indian is no longer physically present yet we can deduce his existence by the intelligently designed arrowhead and correctly deducing that the arrowhead shaped rock was not intelligently designed.

Ed · 04-03-2002, 08:10 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by lpetrich:

RufusAtticus: (on flowering plants)
Yes, so rare that the didn't actually exist yet.
Ed:
Maybe they didn't occur at lower elevations at the time of the flood.

lp: And maybe Noah's Flood didn't happen. Ed, think long and hard about that possibility. The ecological-zonation hypothesis simply does not work. Lots of present-day flowering plants prefer lowlands; at least some of them would have become fossilized in the lower strata.[/b]

Not if their populations in the lower elevations were very low at the time.

Quote:

Ed:
Not necessarily. The DNA strand in one human may have had many more versions than one human today. Some of those may be what we call junk DNA today.
lp: Which means that an enormous amount of genetic evolution must have happened along the way.
Ed:
Yes, but within limits.

lp: WHAT limits? Ed, if you can successfully identify those biochemical or molecular-biological limits, you'll win a Nobel Prize. Think about it. Wouldn't you enjoy discovering one day that there's a trip to Stockholm waiting for you?

Actually, Automaton, I think it was, posted an interesting article that talks about mutation saturation limits in specific organism's DNA. Those may the limits we see in lab. See above if you can find it.

Quote:

Ed:
No, I just don't have the time to write huge rebuttals to websites. But also not being a geologist I am not really qualified to answer the critics of Flood geology.

lp: Ed, you have no trouble finding the time to post here. And if you don't consider yourself truly competent in geology, then why are you pushing Flood Geology?

If you remember, I was transferred to this thread against my will

Quote:

LP: (proving that all junk DNA had once been functional...)
Ed:
It would be very difficult to do since we would need an exhaustive knowledge of ancient environments.

lp: I take it that you are wimping out, O Ed.

No, just stating the facts.

Quote:

Ed:
... just because apes and man have similar outward appearances does not necessarily mean they are closely related.

lp: You've ignored evidence of molecular relatedness. Why don't you take up molecular biology some time and see for yourself?

Read Michael Denton's "Evolution:A Theory in Crisis" for some of the problems in that area.

[b]

Quote:

Ed: (broken Vitamin-C-synthesis gene...)
Apparently both apes and man encountered similar mutagenic agents that damaged the same gene as I stated above.
lp: In the same place??? Ed, I suggest that you think about your statements before posting them.
Ed:
Yes. Why not?

lp: That asks too much of coincidence, O Ed.

See the 10/01 Natural History magazine, it has an interesting article theorizing that junk DNA was the result of viral attacks on the DNA. Often viruses have the same impacts on two different species.

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