If YECs were serious about fighting deceptive science-based metaphysics they'd be busy taking apart Zen Buddhism's favourite quantum physics masks. They aren't.
What udder nonsense. Coming from you Im not surprised.
Go read books like
The Tao of Physics, or
The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and then look at how quickly and rampantly Buddhism is growing and going professional in Asia. It scares the living daylights out of me, honestly, even more than Muslim moderateism. Christians should spend more time speaking out against yoga and martial arts than abiogenesis.
How do you call it "falling apart"? Based on creationist logic, the Fall represented a loss of biological information, right? Well, so now it seems that it took a loss of biological information to change
Wow more misrepresentation, when does it ever stop! One strawman after another, well at least I will be very warm this winter! Plenty of strawmen to burn! Please tell me your not getting your creationist resources from Dr. Dino - are you?
The fall may have brought on changes but even creationists who know there stuff will say no such thing! What is falling apart is that which God has made to be very good or havent you noticed that as you get older things just increasingly dont work. In fact the many useful things break down ever so quickly, and the useless things one cant get rid of!
Actually, I get my creationist sources from AiG and ICR. Close enough to Dr. Dino.
So let me ask
you: did the Fall represent a loss, gain, or no change in the amount of biological information in the world? Interesting question, actually. Many creationists say that during the Fall God withdrew His sustaining power from the world and caused the Second Law to run havoc. These same creationists would also say that mutations lose information because of the Second Law running things down. The logical conclusion would be that the Fall accelerated the Second Law (whatever that's supposed to mean) and thus accelerated the loss of biological information via mutations.
It doesnt take a lot to amaze an evolutionist does it? Becoming a self sufficient organism would be an increase in complexity, to become dependent on another organism is nothing less than a blood sucking parasite.
Define a self-sufficient organism? All animals eat, therefore for an animal to change from ingesting passive plants to actively stalking down and penetrating another animal for food must represent an increase of complexity.
Not rigor enough to say the least. If its anything like your thread on the bible condoning slavery I wont hold my breath.
I know when I'm pursuing a fruitless argument, thank you. I hope you'd have read my thread on sensitive posting.
a) Loss of information increases biological complexity
I am using a reductio ad absurdum argument beginning from the observation that the Fall was a decrease in information that caused an increase in biological complexity, assuming that the Fall was a decrease in information. Your rebuttal shows that you didn't get that.
The reason for this is that enzymes function on the bases of discontinuity between shape and amino acid sequence. If I remember correctly continuity in mathematics tells us that when one has a specific target in mind which is controlled by another entity, the nearer the controlling entity gets to the correct value, the nearer the target value also becomes. However in the discontinuous function of enzymes the smallest change in the controlling entity can and will result in a wild, uncontrolled and unrelated change in the target value rendering the new protein useless or less efficient.
Oh dear. Both protein conformations, protein amino acid sequences and protein functions are
discrete sets. You cannot use the language of calculus and limits which describes
continuous mathematical sets (i.e. real variables / complex variables) to evaluate the relationships between discrete sets like you just did. In mathematics a function is continuous at x if the limit of the function as it approaches x from both sides is equal to the actual value of the function at x. And it is possible for a function to be continuous at x and yet wildly fluctuate on its way to it, for example the sine function is just one big fluctuation and yet it is continuous everywhere. I don't know any analogous formulation of continuity for protein state space.
It is unwise to say something you don't understand.
Although the changing of only one nucleotide sequence is known to have detrimental effects on its host, still lets suppose that a random mutation occurred which caused a stop condon to be deleted causing to sequences to be fused and transcribed into a protein. What functions if any will it now possess that it did not have before - after all such change was never planned? From what we know about enzymes, which require exact assembly instruction in that of dna, if it is assembled incorrectly it wont fold correctly and will serve no function. As such it will not select for the correct molecule it is to catalyze. If the shape of an enzyme isnt near enough to select for the right molecule, it does not matter how close the sequence may be to the correct function. Lets take an enzyme that is half of the average length - say two hundred amino acids. A single deviation at a single point along this amino acid chain can render it useless.
Of course, you have considered the possibility that this new enzyme will serve a radically different but suddenly useful purpose?
Because relationship between enzyme shape and amino acid sequence is a discontinuous function and by nature a single step process meaning that it all had to be there at once or it wont work. Hence the idea of new enzymatic protein functions being acquired through the process of gradual single steps as evolution teaches is very much ludicrous not to mention for the birds.
You are obviously well-versed in biology and I am curious to see how you rebut the case of the nylon bug.
c) Evolution causes an increase of biological complexity!
Again if it cannot account for the complexity in terms of gain in purposeful information, evolution causes nothing.
Again, you did not answer my reductio approach.
In fact, since viruses are biologically inert without causing disease in host organisms, therefore viruses went from being non-life (since there was no disease before the Fall, apparently) to being life (since there is disease after the Fall, obviously).
You must have a different definition of a virus than what I understand. Outside its living host a virus is completely inert - however when a virus comes into contact with a suitable host it is able to replicate itself causing illness or disease. Why do you suppose the term virus means, just a harmless particle of nucleic acid enclosed in a protein coat? It is for the very reason that they exploit the metabolism of the host cell in order to multiply that they are a threat to their host and often the cause of diseases.
Now, viruses are classified as between life and non-life or "half-alive" because they display reproduction, irritability and response to stimuli, but do not display other characteristics like respiration, excretion, (debatably) nutrition and growth. However a virus would have displayed
none of these characteristics before the Fall if there was no viral disease then. In that case before the Fall a "virus" really
was just a harmless particle of nucleic acid enclosed in a protein coat, since it could not cause disease. The Fall however changed that harmless particle into a killer.
Therefore the Fall's loss of information actually caused the abiogenesis of viruses! Who says complexity needs information? Not creationists.
A most disingenuous misrepresentation - even if it does have the stench of sarcasm.
Again, you didn't get that it was a reduction ad absurdum argument.
What we consistently observe is that present day biological systems are assembled using genetic information. Information then is not only an essential part of all living organisms it is required before a new function or structure can be added or assembled and then passed on. And so in order for evolution to be scientifically valid it must account for the increases of information something in which mutations no matter how numerous fail to show this increase.
Go on, refute the nylon bug. Lee Spetner himself said it was an increase in information.
But if information and complexity is what you want to discuss then by all means lets do so. It is after all observable that the more complex an organism is the more cell types it requires to perform vital functions. For instance a single celled eukaryote though internally it is specialized with a nucleus and various organelles it is a self sustaining organism. A trilobite, on the other hand, has dozens of specific tissues and organs which require functionally dedicated and specialized cell types.
Are you sure? I could ask you to compare, say, the computers of the 40s which filled entire rooms to today's PDA. Which has more complexity? Which performs better?
Miniaturization could also be taken as complexity, which nobody has rigorously defined. Don't diss bacteria. Give a bacterium the right conditions and within a few days his descendants could fill the earth, something no vertebrate can do.
But what happens when genetic copy mistakes do occur? What we see is that mutations when they do occur are quickly corrected - to the point where living organisms as that of bacteria only make about .1 to 10 copy errors in about a billion transcriptions! (Drake, J.W. Spontaneuos Mutation Annual Reviews of Genetics, Vol. 25 p.1132. 1991) In more complex organisms it is believed to be even smaller somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.01 to 1 copy errors in a billion transcriptions. I wonder why even evolve a three level correction system when it is those mistakes that are needed to generate the millions upon millions of mutations which will add any beneficial nucleotide sequence to its own genome to finally reach man in the short amount of time that the earth is speculated to be some 4.6 billion years (if I remember my evolutionary timeline correctly). What isnt surprising is that the fossil record is pretty silent about this matter - hence the curtains open for the punctuationists.
And of course, this means that the 6000 years since the Fall has been enough time to generate enough mutations to cause all the genetic diseases and disease-likelihood-increases that man has both discovered and has yet to discover.