RufusAtticus

6000-10,0000 is the range of dates given by young earth creationists for the flood.

The wasn't much difference in the pollen spectrum a million years ago either, other then slightly different species being represented.

You keep jumping through hoops and throwing out situations that you think might prove science wrong. Have you ever stopped to think that you might be wrong?

-RvFvS

Quetzal

Ed:

INRE: Michael Denton. You may not be aware that the book you referenced is out of date. Dr. Denton has refuted/retracted nearly all of what he wrote in "Theory in Crisis" with his latest book, "Nature's Destiny". Here's an exerpt:

Better check your sources...

GunnerJ

Only if you're a pitiful debater who is too dense to realize when your arguments are totally and utterly demolished.

Wishful thinking doesn't make a baseless assertion anything more than a baseless assertion.

lpetrich

Which is a dumb decision; an omnipotent, omniscient being ought to be aware that there will be some who want a reasonable degree of precision and not hand-waving.

Which leads to the question of what would *not* be an example of such an event.

However, that does not indicate the existence of big caverns full of water that would one day flood the Earth.

Retrovirus genes, certainly, but ALL pseudogenes? Many of them had clearly originated in place, as copies of existing genes that got disabled by some mutation. And their locations and disabling mutations are all consistent, just like real genes.

Check out "29 Evidences for Macroevolution", at <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org" target="_blank">http://www.talkorigins.org</a> for more.

An ingenious, all-purpose excuse.

I'm saying that if eating Urey-Miller primordial soup is cannibalism, then eating the flesh of animals (beef, pork, chicken, fish, shrimp, clams), plants (bread, cereals, vegetables, fruits), fungi (mushrooms), and protists (seaweed) is even worse cannibalism.

Read the Negative Confession in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. When one is judged in the next world, one is supposed to assert that one has not committed any of a long list of sins. And the god Osiris will check if you are telling the truth. Sins which include

Adultery
Homosexual acts
Theft
Violence
Blocking of water supplies
Disrespect for the Gods
Malicious sorcery
Anger
Talking too much

Whatever one is supposed to find by doing so.


However, the same dog can chase a cat and then a squirrel, or there can be two dogs, one who chases a cat and one who chases a squirrel.

Gene duplications correspond to the two-dog case, where one dog can continue chasing cats, and the duplicate dog can start chasing squirrels.

How is DNA supposed to have a "languagelike" code?

And as Michael Turton will tell you, archeologists don't work that way. They don't have some criterion for separating designed from non-designed objects; they instead try to consider if some object could reasonably have been made by human beings.

I've yet to see any evidence for such supposed additional specificity.

Ed, what brings you to that conclusion? It seems too much like you are evading critical questions. Real scientists don't evade like that; they accept that their hypotheses have gotten falsified.

And I wonder what evasions Ed will do next? Will he someday claim that he had never considered the Bible to be completely infallible?

However, that concept is never used by any mainstream SETI researcher. Can you explain why it seems to be useless to them?

In which case they could not have been able to get pollen to each other and reproduce.

Also, Ed, you have now reverted to your old implied claim that Noah's Flood had produced much of the Phanerozoic sediments. And if that is not your real view, then what excuse do you have for making statements that imply otherwise? Do you have a real view on the nature of Noah's Flood, or are you expecting to win arguments by being evasive?

Ed, can you show us that you know what mutation saturation is? I know what it is, and I know that it does not divide species into "natural kinds".

Ed, what difference does that make?

Wimping out is wimping out, O Ed. Tell us why we ought to spend any time on that hypothesis when there are much better hypotheses for the origin of junk DNA.

Which has some serious misunderstandings of molecular-evolution research.

Because of being incorporated into the genome of some ancestor of both those species. Ed, I'd be surprised if you really understood that article; such incorporated viruses can be used to work out evolutionary family trees -- which agree with those worked out from other sources.

Ed

How can you be so certain? Great scientists of the past showed more humility. They would say "that at present it appears to have no function."

Quote:

OC: As for your 'it may have been different in the past' (flowering plants, junk DNA etc): all the evidence suggests not. How might you go about providing evidence for your position? How is it at all refutable? How can we tell, in other words, that it isn't total bollocks? Ed: Its called research, we need more of it. Though as I stated to lp it may be very difficult to discover such evidence given that we would probably need exhaustive knowledge of ancient environments and unless we have a time machine such a thing is nearly impossible. lp: Actually, there has been an abundance of paleoecological research; just consult the professional literature.

We will need more than just an abundance.

Quote:

lp: And Ed, why don't you start doing research into your pet hypothesis?

It is not my pet hypothesis, as I stated before this thread was just a sidelight to my main point on the EOG thread, ie that there is strong logical evidence that the Christian God exists. I was forceably removed to this thread.

Quote:

(mutations and information...) Ed: Yes, but in doing so it becomes less specific thereby resulting in a loss of information. lp: What do you mean by being "specific"?

The gene only codes for a certain protein. If it becomes less specific it can code for other proteins.


[b] No, the Piltdown fraud was perpetrated by evolutionary scientists and as I stated above the Paluxy tracks were carved by local pranksters not creation scientists. That is a pretty significant difference.

lpetrich

Some noncoding DNA is likely involved in gene regulation, but much of it does appear to be junk. Pseudogenes, for example, are genes that are missing starting sequences, and thus cannot be expressed. Short repeated sequences, which are sometimes present in enormous numbers, are most likely present only because they can get themselves copied in great abundance.

So I won't lose much sleep over the possibility that essentially all noncoding DNA will someday be discovered to be functional.

And what, specifically, will we need?

But you are presenting it as if it was. Ed, take responsibility for your statements.

Only genes don't work that way -- each gene codes for one and only one protein, or more precisely, peptide sequence.

Who? Be specific. This is a very serious accusation.

Oolon Colluphid

That is quite ridiculous. There has been a hell of a lot of research into this stuff, and none of it suggests functionality. Some of it we can be extremely certain about: satellite DNA, for instance, is tiny pieces, just a few base pairs long, that do not code for anything, and that are repeated millions of times. It’s not just that it lacks ‘start’ and ‘stop’ codons: it ‘reads’ as nonsense even if it were read. In Drosophila, just three bits of satellite DNA seven bp long make up 40% of the entire genome.

Sure, it might have a function. But despite all the research and all we know about genome function, it really really doesn’t seem to. It is perfectly possible that it doesn’t have one, and we have good ideas about how it came to be. In the absence of a single scrap of evidence suggesting a function, the only option -- for now -- is to say that it doesn’t have one. It is possible that it might. But it doesn’t seem to. It is also possible that there are fairies at the bottom of gardens throughout the world. But in the absence of credible evidence for them, we are safest assuming there are not. We’ve looked, we’ve tried really hard, and there ain’t. Therefore the burden of proof is now on those who propose the existence of fairies -- or of functions for junk DNA. IOW, you think it has (as yet unknown) functions: you show us why you think so.

Ed, get over it. Piltdown was controversial even in its time. Its time has long past. Piltdown is irrelevant to our modern understanding of human evolution. I refer you back to my points and questions above, as yet unanswered. Of course scientists, being human, make mistakes, and a few may even make up data. But they will be found out. It was scientists, not creationists, who confirmed Piltdown as a hoax. It was scientists, not creationists, who confirmed Archaeoraptor as a hoax -- though the two fossils it was made from turned out, individually, to further support evolution. And it was scientists, not creationists, who showed the Paluxy tracks to be a hoax. Are you saying that, whoever made them, they were not taken up with glee by creationists? Science is self-correcting; creationism refuses to budge regardless of evidence.

Now please answer my questions.

TTFN, Oolon

ps418

Denton goes even further in his comment on the Phillip Johnson/ Denis Lamaeoreax "debate," in Darwinsim Defeated? The text below is from a previous post:


Michael Denton comes out even more forcefully for CD. Actually I wish Johnson's worthless rebuttals had been ommitted to make more room for Denton or Miller or anyone else who, unlike Johnson, was prepared to discuss "detailed evidentiary issues." Denton strongly criticizes Johnson's use of gaps in the paleontological record as evidence against descent with modification. He writes:

To a very large extent the arguments of Johnson, and indeed of special creationism throughout the past 150 years, depend critically on the claim that the gaps between the different groups of organisms are absolute, could not have been closed via a series of functional intermediates, and are prima facie evidence against common descent and can be taken as evidence for divine intervention.

A primary problem with this strategy is obviously, How can we be absolutely sure that the gaps are as real as they appear? If there is even the slightest room for doubt, the whole strategem collapses. And one reason for doubt is . . . that gaps that once seemed unbridgable have been closed as knowledge has advanced. . . p.143

Denton also briefly discusses biogeographic evidence, and how impotent special creation is to explain any of the data in this field. One example he discusses is the concordance of divergence ages estimated from molecular evidence and divergence ages as estimated from geologic evidence. Discussing Gondwana, Denton states:

The relative implausibility of the creationist model grows further when we examine the DNA sequences of the modern descendents of the ancient fauna and flora of the supercontinent. What we find is fantastically difficult to account for on creationist terms. By comparing the DNA of the various related species stranded in Australia, South America, and Africa as Gondwanaland fragmented, and extrapolating backwards using molecular clock estimates to the time when the sequences converge into ancestral sequences, we get a date of approximately 100 million years . . much the same date that we derive from geological and geophysical evidence for the initial splitting of the supercontinent.

Denton concludes his bried discussion of biogeography, saying:

I think that in the face of the facts of geographical distribution, the inference to descent with modification is inescapable, and I suggest that if indeed special creation is true, then it is evident that God must have created life to appear as if evo9lution had occurred. p.149

[ April 05, 2002: Message edited by: ps418 ]

EDIT: To add another quote from Denton's Nature's Destiny:

"One of the most surprising discoveries which has arisen from DNA sequencing has been the remarkable finding that the genomes of all organisms are clustered very close together in a tiny region of DNA sequence space forming a tree of related sequences that can all be interconverted via a series of tiny incremental natural steps".

"So the sharp discontinuities, referred to above, between different organs and adaptations and different types of organisms, which have been the bedrock of antievolutionary arguments for the past century (3), have now greatly diminished at the DNA level. Organisms which seem very different at a morphological level can be very close together at the DNA level" (p. 276).

[ April 05, 2002: Message edited by: ps418 ]</p>

ps418

Ed:
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.

We dont know when the flood was? Perhaps you could explain why you believe this, and why the following analysis is (potentially) wrong by many orders of magnitiude:

I Kings 6:1 says that 480 years passed from the start of the Exodus to the start of construction on the first temple by Solomon. Gal 3:17 says that 430 years passed from the covenant with Abraham to the delivery of the Law to Moses. Yahweh establishes the covenant with Abram about 135 years after he was born (11:32, 26). Abram was born when Terah was 70 (11:26). Terah was born when Nahor was 29 (11:24). Nahor was born when Serug was 30 (11:22). Serug was born when Re'u was 30 (11:20). Re'u was born when Peleg was 30 (11:18). Peleg was born when Eber is 34 (11:16). Eber was born when Shelah was 30 (11:14). Shelah was born from a 35 year-old Arpach'shad (11:12). Arpach'shad was born from Shem 2 years after the flood (11:10).

Since the date of Solomon's reign is agreed to be about 950[+/- 50]BCE, we can calculate the time of the flood using this chronology. Starting with Solomon and working backward, we have:

950BCE +480 +430 +135 +70 +29 +30 +30 +30 +34 +30 +35 +2= 2285BCE

Where does this analysis, which would seem to constrain the flood to a definite historical period about 4300yrs ago, go wrong? Where could that million years be 'hiding'?

unworthyone

Maybe between verses 1 and 2?

Genesis
1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

I mean where did the water come from? It means it was there before he decided to change Earth.

[ April 05, 2002: Message edited by: unworthyone ]</p>