Evolution/Creation on Trial

[The Cadet]

No you can not. The son of a friend of mine ate whatever he wanted. He had disableing arthritis, morbid obesity and diabetes at the age of 31. He has 2 very small boys

You seem to have made my point for me.

 

[TillICollapse]

You'll have to look at the evidence and decide what is biased or inaccurate yourself. The wiki page is a good place to start. I've read a couple books on the subject but I wouldn't recommend any of them. At least not as viable sources of evidence or information. Evidence for Christianity by Josh McDowell is a good example of the kind of nonsensical apologetics you'll come across in this endeavor. The Internet is probably your best resource. Just stay away from conspiracy theorists and apologetics and stick with what you can prove. Good luck.

Those independent sources are few and very far between.

Bart Ehrman has book on the subject and he concludes Jesus was likely a real historical figure. Ehrman is actually an agnostic and does not believe the gospels in general, are credible when it comes to accurately describing Jesus' life, but he sees enough to conclude he was likely a real person.

Okay so the vibe I'm getting is Carrier is a good starting place in the against category, Ehrman is a good starting place for the for category. And of course Al Gore and teh internets, goes without saying .

 

[joshua 1 9]

Then please tell me on what day of the passover was jesus crucified?

Passover begins at sunset on Friday. He had to be in the grave at that point. That is the end of the first day. He rose from the dead at the beginning of the third day. If a day is a thousand years then we are very close to the Beginning of the third day when the church will rise up.

 

[Goonie]

Passover begins at sunset on Friday. He had to be in the grave at that point. That is the end of the first day. He rose from the dead at the beginning of the third day. If a day is a thousand years then we are very close to the Beginning of the third day when the church will rise up.

Anybody tell john that? He declares the crucification to occur the day before the passover.

 

[joshua 1 9]

Anybody tell john that? He declares the crucification to occur the day before the passover.

Yes

 

[briquest]

On the human gene PYGB, Phosporomylase Glycogen, a non-coding transposon, holds a linguistic sequence that translates as “At first break of day, God formed sky and land.” This bears a stunning similarity to Gen 1:1 “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Gene Bmp3 has a Retrotransposon sequence which translates to the well-known 1 Cor 6:19 “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own.” This is repeated over and over throughout the entire sequence of human DNA: embedded equivalent genetic code of ancient Aramaic that seems to translate as the word of god to his people.

Matthew Boulder, chief linguist for the project and professor of applied creation sciences at Bob Jones University, issued this statement: “As for the evidence- it is there and it is, to my view, undeniable. The very word of God, elegantly weaved in and out of our very bodies and souls, as plain as day. And the beauty of it, that God would lay down the words of truth in our very beings, shows his love and The Miracle.”

Scientists at W.I.T. await replication of our own research extracting and sequencing “Junk” DNA and verification of translation into Aramaic by independent sources before we move forward on the peer review process and the release of our total research and discovery to date.
http://witscience.org/
http://www.bju.edu/

 

[Gracchus]

If He hates figs, why did He go to the tree in the first place?

Well, maybe he didn't know that figs weren't in season But wait! He was omniscient. So maybe he was just feeling peevish and just wanted to kill something. That did seem to happen now and then. There was Noah's flood, for instance. Or maybe he just had to win an argument. That was why he tortured Job and killed Job's children. Or maybe it was just "mysterious ways". Whenever the obvious fact is pointed out that the Christian god is omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent, but he still does things that would make anyone capable of shame ashamed, those "mysterious ways" are trotted out.

I'm afraid that Christianity will never make sense to anyone who is not a Christian, nor will any Christian ever be able to recognize that.

But this thread is about evolution and creation, and the teaching and existence of Jesus is off-topic.

 

[AV1611VET]

Well, maybe he didn't know that figs weren't in season

What would it matter?[VERSE=Mark 11:13,KJV]And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet.[/VERSE]If you hated apples, and you saw an apple tree afar off, would you "haply" go to the apple tree for apples?

 

[The Cadet]

On the human gene PYGB, Phosporomylase Glycogen, a non-coding transposon, holds a linguistic sequence that translates as “At first break of day, God formed sky and land.” This bears a stunning similarity to Gen 1:1 “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Gene Bmp3 has a Retrotransposon sequence which translates to the well-known 1 Cor 6:19 “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own.” This is repeated over and over throughout the entire sequence of human DNA: embedded equivalent genetic code of ancient Aramaic that seems to translate as the word of god to his people.

Matthew Boulder, chief linguist for the project and professor of applied creation sciences at Bob Jones University, issued this statement: “As for the evidence- it is there and it is, to my view, undeniable. The very word of God, elegantly weaved in and out of our very bodies and souls, as plain as day. And the beauty of it, that God would lay down the words of truth in our very beings, shows his love and The Miracle.”

Scientists at W.I.T. await replication of our own research extracting and sequencing “Junk” DNA and verification of translation into Aramaic by independent sources before we move forward on the peer review process and the release of our total research and discovery to date.
http://witscience.org/
http://www.bju.edu/

So, basically, imposing a self-described code onto the genome and waiting for something to seem to pop out. What a remarkable non-discovery.

EDIT: whoops, didn't realize this was satire.

 

[joshua 1 9]

Anybody tell john that? He declares the crucification to occur the day before the passover.

Usually when people make a claim they offer up some evidence to substantiate what they are saying. Just like science needs some evidence or proof.

 

[The Cadet]

On the human gene PYGB, Phosporomylase Glycogen, a non-coding transposon, holds a linguistic sequence that translates as “At first break of day, God formed sky and land.” This bears a stunning similarity to Gen 1:1 “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Gene Bmp3 has a Retrotransposon sequence which translates to the well-known 1 Cor 6:19 “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own.” This is repeated over and over throughout the entire sequence of human DNA: embedded equivalent genetic code of ancient Aramaic that seems to translate as the word of god to his people.

Matthew Boulder, chief linguist for the project and professor of applied creation sciences at Bob Jones University, issued this statement: “As for the evidence- it is there and it is, to my view, undeniable. The very word of God, elegantly weaved in and out of our very bodies and souls, as plain as day. And the beauty of it, that God would lay down the words of truth in our very beings, shows his love and The Miracle.”

Scientists at W.I.T. await replication of our own research extracting and sequencing “Junk” DNA and verification of translation into Aramaic by independent sources before we move forward on the peer review process and the release of our total research and discovery to date.
http://witscience.org/
http://www.bju.edu/

Um... You do realize that WITScience.org is a satire site, right?

 

[Goonie]

Usually when people make a claim they offer up some evidence to substantiate what they are saying. Just like science needs some evidence or proof.

Apologies, here is a link http://www.askelm.com/doctrine/d050401.htm
I regret posting in haste, and a tad inaccurately.

 

[Gracchus]

What would it matter?[VERSE=Mark 11:13,KJV]And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet.[/VERSE]If you hated apples, and you saw an apple tree afar off, would you "haply" go to the apple tree for apples?

We would be forced to conclude then that either God is not omniscient, or Jesus is not God. In any case, it would be downright silly to kill a tree because it was not bearing fruit out of season. That would not be reasonable.

 

[AV1611VET]

We would be forced to conclude then that either God is not omniscient, or Jesus is not God. In any case, it would be downright silly to kill a tree because it was not bearing fruit out of season. That would not be reasonable

What about those who conclude: GOD HATES FIGS?

 

[Gracchus]

What about those who conclude: GOD HATES FIGS?

If he hates figs, why would he be angry that there are no figs on the tree??? And if he could turn water into wine, and feed five thousand with five loaves and two fishes, how is it that he couldn't just conjure up a few figs? Of course he could convince people that he exists, or stop them before they did bad things, but, apparently, he would rather send people to hell, and surely, people are worth more than figs. Or maybe he doesn't give a fig about people? Dealing with religious people can be very confusing.

 

[HitchSlap]

What about those who conclude: GOD HATES FIGS?

Because sane people do not kill things for reasons that are beyond their control. Why Jesus would have become so angry as kill, leads one to reasonably conclude some degree of hate was involved. Ergo, Jesus hates fig tree (albeit, only when they're out of season?)

 

[stevevw]

Care to define "fly"? I mean, biology defines a "true fly" as any member of the order Diptera, which is home to some 240,000 species. You wanna get a little more vague? I've heard Lenski's long-term E.Coli experiment dismissed under the pretext of "it's still a bacterium", but there are two entire domains of life dedicated solely to bacteria! Literally everything alive that is not a bacterium belongs to a single domain!

Thats rights everything that is not a microorganism is in another domain. But also microorganisms are prolific at exchanging genetic material horizontally. So as far as I have read and understand a lot of their ability can come from sharing genetic material and not creating new info through evolutionary processes. So how do we tell what is what. There are also limits to what can be evolved and there have been tests to show this.
Horizontal gene transfers in insects
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214574515000371
Genes that leap from one species to another are more common than we thought. Does this shake up the tree of life?
http://aeon.co/magazine/science/how-horizontal-gene-transfer-changes-evolutionary-theory/

As with a fly. Well a fly is a fly is a fly. As far as I understand it all the different fly species are still flies and are still part of what makes up a fly. They may be able to make many species but all the genetic info that is used to create the variations is still part of the fly genetics. If you look at all the different flies or bat species or any species you will see that they are primarily the same shape and makeups. But when it comes to morphing into new body plans, systems, organs ect that is something again and needs new genetic info to make these things.

Experiments have done all sorts of things to change, add and take away parts of the fly but no experiment has added any new body parts or anything else it couldn't get from its existing genetics. Even the bacteria that is able to eat nylon is only able to because it was something to do with an existing gene that was also needed.

How in the world does "extra wings" or "extra eyes" not count? What, do you want them to grow a fingdongle or a schlinwangle or something? As for features it didn't already have, how about the E.Coli that evolved to digest citrate, or the bacteria that evolved to digest nylon?

Because as far as I have read the extra wings come from the same genetics that made the first set of wings. No new genetic info has been added that may for example make a body part that the fly didn't have to begin with ie (generates new biological structures from less ordered material). The second set of wings do not have all the needed other parts that will make them work properly so they become a liability. As I said before the bacteria used existing genetics to be able to do this.
http://www.uncommondescent.com/evolution/why-scientists-should-not-dismiss-intelligent-design/

It's because it's easy for anyone to understand and immediately illustrative, whereas other examples may involve requiring a little bit of understanding of genetics.

I would have thought if it is so obvious that there would be some more examples that could be cited. Its like transitional fossils. They cite a few examples but if the gradual evolution of one type of animal into another happens then we would have more transitional fossils than we would have fully formed ones. But what we see is completely formed creatures with no parts on the way to becoming something else. Does a set of wings completely form in one generation from mutations and natural selection.

This is about as meaningful as saying "It's still an animal" to an experiment that used temporal magic to make a real-world example of the simulation in this video. Actually, less so - the kingdom of "Animalia" is way, way less diverse than the domain of "Bacteria". Yeah, they're still bacteria. Do you have any idea how much genetic diversity there is in the domain "bacteria"? It's the single most genetically diverse category you could bring up without calling "living organisms" a category!

Bacteria have a great ability for HGT. How do you tell what has been transferred horizontally or what has been transferred vertically. But because of that HGT they can have a great amount of genetic diversity. But still this may be the great variety of genetics that bacteria have to draw upon and were made with. Within that great genetic diversity they probably have a great capacity to add variations which can help them adapt to their environments. Nobody is denying that creatures dont have some ability to adapt through genetic variations. Its the amount of ability they have thats in question.

I'm just saying that through all the experiments and tests they have never been able to produce anything but bacteria type organisms. If bacteria at one point in evolutionary history evolved into other things besides bacteria then you would expect to see something like that in the tests.

You seem to be playing fast and loose with "information" in this case. If a gene is duplicated and reinserted with a modification, there is now new genetic "information". This is exactly what evolution predicts to happen: new functions arise from the existing genetic information, gene duplication, and a handful of other factors.

I thought it was evolutionists who played with the ,meaning of info. Where they use the ability for a creature to micro evolve and then use that same criteria to say that it also creates macro evolution events. So the meaning of info in micro evolution events is transferred to macro evolution which requires more complex info. The info that is being transferred in micro events is pre existing. But Darwinian evolution says that the same mechanisms can create new abilities.

I am not a geneticist but how could a creature that has the blue prints for making its own body parts such as a dino then add all the genetic info needed to make bird parts when it didn't have that genetic info to start with. Mutations cannot create a set of wings or the muscles, nerves, tendons, bone structures and connections to the brain ect etc etc that all go together to make it work. Wings without the supporting structures are useless. Because evolution is a blind process in that it doesn't know what it needs in a step wise fashion it is impossible to build the complex structures of things like wings without either prior info thats there to tap into or it is a guided process that knows whats needed and is there as a guide. If you look at wings they are not some mutated deformity that may have somehow molded itself into that shape. They are precise and detailed. Perfectly designed to be aerodynamic and work with a number of other perfectly designed systems all in place.

What an odd thing for you to cite, given that it's presenting yet another way that completely novel new genes can arise. It's also odd given that Susumu Ohno basically spearheaded the study of gene duplication. I'm kind of left wondering why you're citing 30-year-old papers by someone who completely disagrees with you that you very obviously did not read even a sentence past the abstract!

Seriously, did you actually read this paper, or did you just see that sentence and say, "Yep, got my quote for the box blurb" and leave it at that? The very first paragraph, the very first sentence after the abstract makes it very clear what Ohno actually thinks about gene duplication, and if you actually read the introductory paragraph, you find out that he's talking about specifically the diversification at the dawn of life, and that he considers gene duplication responsible for virtually all diversification.

Given that Professor Ohno really was one of the great luminaries in genetics, you besmirching his work like this is really disappointing. When you cite papers, read them first. Otherwise you end up completely misrepresenting the work of people whose interns know more about the subject than you do.

As far as i understand it the paper is saying that the ability fro bacteria to evolve nylon digesting enzymes so quickly is to do with existing genetics. He is amazed that evolution can work so fast. He only mentions the evolution at the beginning of time because he asks the question how can so many complex and diverse proteins have evolved simultaneously without any pre existing ones to draw upon.

Professor Ohno
Thus, one wonders if this mechanism alone sufficed at the very beginning of life when a large variety of polypeptide chains with Divergent functions had to be created almost simultaneously.

As an alternative to the customary process of the birth of unique Gene from a redundant copy of the preexisted gene of related function, I suggest that each of these unique genes for degradation of nylon by-products arose de novo
independently from an alternative reading frame of the preexisted, internally repetitious coding sequence.

This is what I am basically saying. That there is a lot of doubt about Darwinian evolution being able to evolve these complex genetics and traits without any previous information for them already there.

Here is another paper from Ohno who seems to be saying that all creatures relied on a single set of genes at the beginning of time to duplicate everything. So all new genetics stem from pre existing genes already there.
Evolution is condemned to rely upon variations of the same theme: the one ancestral sequence for genes and spacers.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6820135

This is not a legitimate scientific journal but rather a 0-impact pay-to-play journal produced by the discovery institute. As such, I will read it the same way I would read any article published by the discovery institute: I won't bother.

This is legitimate peer reviewed papers that also appear in other places such as NCBI. They are done by qualified experts who have just as much knowledge as anyone else. It seems when something shows evidence to the contrary you attack the source. Here are some other papers which are along similar lines and which appear in non religious sites. Not that this should disqualify them. I would hope that the info is being assessed on its content rather then where its from or who did it. That is a fundamental discrimination.
Estimating the prevalence of protein sequences adopting functional enzyme folds.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15321723

Neither of these seem to have anything to do with what we were talking about, so I'm not sure why you brought them up.

Mainly to show that overall there may be a fitness cost to evolution. Mutations working together can have a negative affect as this evidence is showing. Like I said the evidence is showing that mutation are mainly a harmful or at best neutral thing.
It was found that the beneficial mutations allowing the bacteria to increase in fitness didn't have a constant effect. The effect of their interactions depended on the presence of other mutations, which turned out to be overwhelmingly negative.

Let's point something out here right off the bat. This is a scientific paper supposedly challenging a major aspect of the theory that is the cornerstone of all of modern biology. It was published in an open-access (read: the person submitting the manuscript pays, rather than the reader) journal which currently has an impact factor of 1. That's... nothing. It's been cited... once. By another article published in the same journal five years later. For all intents and purposes, this essay (which is a 20-page slog that is about as concise as an Ayn Rand novel) has had no impact whatsoever. Why is that, I wonder? Could it be because there's just straight-up nothing there of value? Because the argument it puts forward in its conclusions runs directly contrary to everything found in the field over the last 40-odd years? Because it's just more junk science published in a vanity journal?

Well when you consider that what is being said is also backed by other papers and evidence from other sources it isn't so on its own.

Other papers are saying more or less the same things. The one example that is always being promoted as proof of gained info through evolution is the nylon eating bacteria. Yet this has been found to be a modification of existing genetics. Still there is little else evidence to show that evolution can create complex new info. The evidence points the other way that the complex info seems to be there already and was there since the early days. Much to early for evolution to have had time to evolve this by a random and chance process that is blind to what it needs and where it is going.

In fact if anything the evidence from what I understand shows that mutations mainly have a negative effect and if anything take away fitness rather than make it better. There is a small accumulation of negative mutations over time. So its a very high price to pay for evolution to create anything. So maybe I am misunderstanding what this info is saying. But it seems to me that there is a lot of doubt for Darwinian evolution.
The probability of preservation of a newly arisen gene duplicate.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11779815
Most mutations in the genes of the Salmonella bacterium have a surprisingly small negative impact on bacterial fitness.
http://phys.org/news/2010-11-unexpectedly-small-effects-mutations-bacteria.html#jCp
Reductive Evolution Can Prevent Populations from Taking Simple Adaptive Paths to High Fitness
http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2010.2
Simulating evolution by gene duplication of protein features that require multiple amino acid residues.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15340163

 

[AV1611VET]

If he hates figs, why would he be angry that there are no figs on the tree???

Who said He: 1) hates figs and 2) got angry?

I have a feeling the fig tree parable is brought up as GOD HATES FIGS because it allows for a whole range of ridicule & insults.

As is being demonstrated here.

 

[AV1611VET]

Because sane people do not kill things for reasons that are beyond their control. Why Jesus would have become so angry as kill, leads one to reasonably conclude some degree of hate was involved. Ergo, Jesus hates fig tree (albeit, only when they're out of season?)

Thanks for the QED of post 218.

 

[TillICollapse]

Who said He: 1) hates figs and 2) got angry?

I have a feeling the fig tree parable is brought up as GOD HATES FIGS because it allows for a whole range of ridicule & insults.

As is being demonstrated here.

It's funny.