Evolution/Creation on Trial

[Smidlee]

I am so sorry that you can't understand a concept that is not that hard to understand. And I see that you are still clutching at straws. PROJECT Encode hyped their work. Even at best over 90% of our genome is still junk:

http://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/08/05/how-much-of-human-dna-is-doing-something/

Oh so when the scientific evidence goes against the "blind watchmaker" then obviously the science is wrong. They are just beginning to understand the loads of information contain in the DNA. The more they learn the more they find the DNA is not haphazardly slap together and the phenotype can move DNA around called "jumping genes."

Junk DNA is an argument of ignorance. It basically saying we have no idea exactly what 90% of our DNA does so it must be junk in order to support our theory but they know "evolution did it". It's "Evolution of the gaps" as we fill those gaps with understand the blind Evolution is pushed back.

So all those scientist are working on the Encore project can't be trusted. They hype up their work but not those scientist who believes in the Blind Watchmaker nor those at Talkorigins website.

 

[The Cadet]

Junk DNA is an argument of ignorance. It basically saying we have no idea exactly what 90% of our DNA does so it must be junk in order to support our theory but they know "evolution did it". It's "Evolution of the gaps" as we fill those gaps with understand the blind Evolution is pushed back.

At no point since its discovery was it ever assumed that non-coding DNA was entirely or even mostly useless.

 

[Smidlee]

At no point since its discovery was it ever assumed that non-coding DNA was entirely or even mostly useless.

Yes there were some scientist who didn't jump of the Junk DNA bandwagon but the majority did. As so many article admits what they thought was Junk DNA and DNA haphazardly slapped together has been proven wrong. Even Collins tried to use Junk DNA as evidence for evolution as God wouldn't do that in "The Language of God".
IIRC the woman who wrote about "jumping genes" did so in the 80's. There is even some scientist admitted the Neo-Darwinism has known to be wrong since the 50's as it was known we inherit more than just DNA.

 

[The Cadet]

Yes there were some scientist who didn't jump of the Junk DNA bandwagon but the majority did.

Great. Cite 'em.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Oh so when the scientific evidence goes against the "blind watchmaker" then obviously the science is wrong. They are just beginning to understand the loads of information contain in the DNA. The more they learn the more they find the DNA is not haphazardly slap together and the phenotype can move DNA around called "jumping genes."

And yet no one from your side has ever presented any of this supposed "evidence". And the theory of evolution does not predict that DNA would be haphazardly stuck together. Though the problem of "junk DNA" is huge for your "blind watchmaker".

Junk DNA is an argument of ignorance. It basically saying we have no idea exactly what 90% of our DNA does so it must be junk in order to support our theory but they know "evolution did it". It's "Evolution of the gaps" as we fill those gaps with understand the blind Evolution is pushed back.

Actually it isn't. The more we learn of how evolution occurred the better we understand how "junk DNA" formed. For example one of the most common observed mutations is that of gene duplication. Gene duplication occurs at times when an entire gene is repeated sometimes as a mutation, you start out with one gene and you end up with two. This allows one of the two copies to evolve even if it is a crucial gene. Not all of those mutations would work out and often one ends up with a mutated deactivated gene in ones DNA.

So all those scientist are working on the Encore project can't be trusted. They hype up their work but not those scientist who believes in the Blind Watchmaker nor those at Talkorigins website.

Not all of them, and maybe not the scientists doing the work at all. That was more the work of administrators and those looking for more funding to keep the project going. Other scientists that look at their work, which was impressive, point out that the claim of "eighty percent functionality" was way over blown. Even finding that 10% of the human genome is functional was an amazing find.

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/09/fighting-about-encode-and-junk.html

http://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/08/05/how-much-of-human-dna-is-doing-something/

And a couple of simple questions should tell you whether junk DNA exists or not:

Are you more complex than an onion?

Are you more complex than an amoeba? Part 2 of this question, how much more complex than an amoeba are you?

 

[Oncedeceived]

Human designs also show similarity to things we know are produced by natural processes.

True, except I am speaking about things that humans could not have known existed and designed something similar.

 

[Oncedeceived]

I just did. No one can come up with a single reason why common design would necessarily produce a nested hierarchy. Therefore, it is not a prediction of common design.

Common design would predict that one organism which did not share ancestry with another organism would share similar features or functions. Common design would predict the same information system in all living things...DNA. Common design would show certain features or functions that would arise simultaneously giving the question which came first the chicken or the egg scenario. Common design predicts intelligent organisms from an Intelligent agent rather than intelligence from a mindless process. Common Design predicts information and language in organisms. Where does information or language arise from a mindless random process?

 

[Subduction Zone]

Common design would predict that one organism which did not share ancestry with another organism would share similar features or functions. Common design would predict the same information system in all living things...DNA. Common design would show certain features or functions that would arise simultaneously giving the question which came first the chicken or the egg scenario. Common design predicts intelligent organisms from an Intelligent agent rather than intelligence from a mindless process. Common Design predicts information and language in organisms. Where does information or language arise from a mindless random process?

And how does it predict the exact same location of ERV's?

 

[Oncedeceived]

I just did. No one can come up with a single reason why common design would necessarily produce a nested hierarchy. Therefore, it is not a prediction of common design.

No you didn't. In fact, a nested hierarchy reflects just what one would expect with a common Designer. Organisms would show features and functions that are similar or exactly the same even in life forms that share no common ancestry. Organisms would all share common design and material makeup which is seen all through the nested hierarchy which requires new explanations such as horizontal transfer, convergent evolution, independently evolved and linage sorting.

 

[Oncedeceived]

Please note that the word "appearance" is a qualifier. "Appearance of design" does not mean "designed" if someone meant "designed" they would drop the qualifier "appearance

If they dropped appear or appearance they would be claiming actual design which would not fit with a naturalistic worldview. What if Richard Dawkins had claimed that organisms are designed, or Frances Crick had said that they must act as if things were not designed even though it is apparent that they were?

 

[Oncedeceived]

I also strongly recommend watching those C0nc0rdance videos I linked earlier. It goes into a lot of detail of how evolution was used to combat HIV.



The concept of gene conservation has to do with the evolution of organisms. Basically, a gene is highly conserved if mutations to that gene tend to be highly problematic for the creature in question, and as a result it is very unlikely to mutate significantly. In the case of HIV, it turns out that therapies that mess with this gene are highly significant to the disease's ability to spread. This makes no sense with intelligent design. If these were all separately designed kinds, the entire concept of "gene conservation" would be incoherent. There would not be any reason for similar species to show similarly conserved genes, or for them to form a similar nested hierarchy. This is yet another prediction which ID can account for, but not in any intellectually satisfying manner (as it can just as equally account for the opposite explanation).

That is what I thought you meant. What do you mean by separately designed kinds?

 

[Oncedeceived]

Because they can't. It naturally would produce a nested hierarchy, Just like we know the hierarchy exists for family lineage, the hierarchy for dog breeds (which prevents them from naming them as separate species). When two things mate and produce offspring - a hierarchy is the natural consequence. All they have is strawmen.

Yes, they want to claim the creative processes that God used and that are engineered into all organisms are not able to produce the nested hierarchy when in fact, the nest hierarchy is a reflection of it organized by mankind to classify it all. The fact that there are those organisms that share features and functions which share no common ancestry in the man's idea of this process, it fits perfectly from a Common design standpoint.

 

[Oncedeceived]

I am not the one claiming that ID would necessarily produce a nested hierarchy. That would be Oncedeceived.

Are you also incapable of explain how a nested hierarchy is a necessary outcome of ID/creationism? We see mammal-like reptiles, so why not mammal-like birds?

Actually, it was YOU that claimed that ID WOULD NOT create a nested hierarchy and have as of yet not provided a valid reason as to why that would be the case.

 

[The Cadet]

@stevevw You coming back any time soon?

Common design would predict that one organism which did not share ancestry with another organism would share similar features or functions.

Or not. Because, you know, the designer could make all flight apparatuses the same way... Or it could make some one way, some another way, and some yet another different way. So while the design hypothesis accommodates a situation where all eyes are formed the exact same way, it equally accommodates a situation where each species has a completely distinct, completely non-homologous eye that did not form any sort of nested hierarchy. If your hypothesis can equally accommodate both a prediction and that prediction's negation, then it does not make that prediction.

Common design would predict the same information system in all living things...DNA.

Or not. I'm sure you'd posit that it is not somehow beyond your "designer" (read: YHWH) to create a taxon of beings with a different information system. Ergo, while the design hypothesis accommodates a situation where all living things have the same information system, it equally accommodates a situation where some species have different systems. Again, your hypothesis accommodates both the prediction and its negation, and thus it cannot be said that intelligent design makes this prediction.

Common design would show certain features or functions that would arise simultaneously giving the question which came first the chicken or the egg scenario.

This may or may not be relevant to the topic, but...

As far as predictions go, this one has been falsified. Or maybe not; I'm honestly not sure what you're trying to say here.

Common design predicts intelligent organisms from an Intelligent agent rather than intelligence from a mindless process.

Congratulations, the first real prediction of intelligent design! So... how do we test this? How could we falsify it? How could we find corroborating evidence for it?

...

...

...Get back to me on that one, will you?

Common Design predicts information and language in organisms.

And that's another proposition that is either false or so widely drawn as to be meaningless.

Where does information or language arise from a mindless random process?

Chemistry? Constantly? I mean, if we want to stretch DNA to be a language with "information" (rather than a series of chemical interactions), then why not refer to all of chemistry as a "language"? After all, 4H+O2 -> 2H2O + E is just as easily understood as a language or code or "instruction" as DNA is. Do you disagree? Because what's going on in DNA is exactly that. Every single interaction taken by DNA can be boiled down to chemical reactions of that sort.

But of course, the mechanics of DNA is only very loosely analogous to language. It's a useful analogy in some regards, but in this regards, it leads us down the wrong road. There is no reason to believe that DNA arose through anything other than random processes.

 

[Oncedeceived]

And how does it predict the exact same location of ERV's?

When determining ERV's in chimp and humans are evidence for common ancestry there are two assumptions made, the first is that they lack function and secondly that they are rare random events. ERV's have now been shown to possess an anti-retroviral function, which serves to frustrate retroviral assembly via competitive inhibition. And LTR's are now recognized as critical elements in gene regulation. Add to this that retroviral insertions many not be random at all but instead may take place at well-defined locations in the genome.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18535086
We report the existence of 51,197 ERV-derived promoter sequences that initiate transcription within the human genome, including 1743 cases where transcription is initiated from ERV sequences that are located in gene proximal promoter or 5' untranslated regions (UTRs). A total of 114 of the ERV-derived transcription start sites can be demonstrated to drive transcription of 97 human genes, producing chimeric transcripts that are initiated within ERV long terminal repeat (LTR) sequences and read-through into known gene sequences. ERV promoters drive tissue-specific and lineage-specific patterns of gene expression and contribute to expression divergence between paralogs. These data illustrate the potential of retroviral sequences to regulate human transcription on a large scale consistent with a substantial effect of ERVs on the function and evolution of the human genome.

Why are closely related ERV elements found in supposedly non-related species?

 

[Loudmouth]

Noble does in fact mentions the phenotype making changes to it's DNA.

Examples?

 

[Loudmouth]

First, why would you think that designed things don't fit into a nested heirarchy?

Because they don't. Cars don't fall into a nested hierarchy. Paintings don't fall into a nested hierarchy. Buildings don't fall into a nested hierarchy. No human designs fall into a nested hierarchy.

Also, it makes zero sense from a design standpoint. If you have designed the mammalian middle ear with these three little tiny bones that works really well, why wouldn't you use it elsewhere? Why would a designer be limited to using this middle ear only in species that also had the ability to produce milk? How does that make sense?

The problems for common design get even worse when we move to DNA. Take a protein like cytochrome c. It functions the same in humans and in organisms as diverse as yeast, so much so that you can replace the yeast protein with the human version and the yeast do just fine. So why change the yeast protein by 40% to perform the same function? Moreover, why change all cytochrome c proteins in all species so that they produce a nested hierarchy?

With DNA sequence we also get what is called genetic equidistance. This is where you get about an equal number of differences between genes as determined by evolutionary distance. For example, a chicken is equidistant to both mice and humans. The common ancestor for chickens and mice is the same common ancestor for humans and chickens since humans and mice share a more recent common ancestor. Therefore, we should see that there is about as much difference between human and chicken genes as there are between mouse and chicken genes. This is exactly what we see. Here are the figures for cytochrome c:

Human v. Mouse = 90.5% similarity
Mouse v. Chicken = 81.9% similarity
Human v. Chicken = 81.6% similarity
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/homologene?cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AlignmentScores&list_uids=133055

Exactly the pattern we should see if evolution is true. All of the divergence matches the predicted evolutionary relationships.

Can you prove it could not happen?

No more so than I can disprove God planting a murder suspect's DNA and fingerprints at a crime scene. Does this mean that we throw out forensic evidence because God could plant the fake evidence without us knowing?

Second. Unless you do DNA tests of all fossils, how do you know which are related but don't look alike or which look similar but are totally unrelated?

We don't assume any direct relatedness. Rather, the theory of evolution makes predictions about mixtures of physical features in fossils. It predicts that if we find fossils that have human features in them that they should also have less derived ape features. This is exactly what we find. We find fossils with a mixture of modern human and basal ape features. We DON'T find mixtures of features that the theory of evolution predicts we shouldn't see, such as fossils with a mixture of mammal and bird features.

 

[Loudmouth]

When determining ERV's in chimp and humans are evidence for common ancestry there are two assumptions made, the first is that they lack function . . .

No such assumption is made, nor is it needed.

and secondly that they are rare random events.

We directly observe that retrovirus insertion is random. This has been done in several very real experiments done in real labs. For example:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC509299/

Each of the brownish bars is a different human chromosome. Each colored dot is a mapped insertion of HIV, ASLV, and MLV that were produced in the experiment. They inserted all over the place, not in just one spot.

ERV's have now been shown to possess an anti-retroviral function, which serves to frustrate retroviral assembly via competitive inhibition. And LTR's are now recognized as critical elements in gene regulation. Add to this that retroviral insertions many not be random at all but instead may take place at well-defined locations in the genome.

None of which changes how they were produced (i.e. retroviral insertion), or the randomness of retroviral insertion. Those are the two features that make ERV's a genetic marker. The function or lack of function of ERV's is irrelevant to their usage as genetic markers for common ancestry.

Why are closely related ERV elements found in supposedly non-related species?

All species are related.

Also, are we talking orthologous or non-orthologous ERV's?

 

[Loudmouth]

Agreed. But that's why 90% of the fossil record is incorrectly classified by them.

You have never shown that australopithecines and H. erectus have been incorrectly classified as transitional hominids.

 

[Loudmouth]

Simple deduction. Do you know how radiometric dating works? How it is supposed to work, anyway?

You measure the sample for the presence of isotopes 1 and 2. (different isotopes for different methods) The ratio of i1:i2 is supposed to show how much time has elapsed since the sample was made.

Problems:
A) For it to work, the sample must begin with 100% isotope 1 and no isotope 2.
B) Over time, neither isotope can enter or leave the sample.
C) The rate at which i1 degrades into i2 cannot have changed.

There is no way to prove any of the three.

C has actually been shown to change.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/august/sun-082310.html

Supposed problems:

A) We observe that when zircons form they exclude Pb and include U. This is due to the basic laws and rules of chemistry. Also, methodologies such as isochoron dating can actually measure the amount of isotope 2 that the rock started with. For isochron dating, no assumption of 0% isotope 2 is needed.

B) We can show in the lab that they don't leave the sample. This isn't assumed. This is a conclusion drawn from experiment.

C) The half life of the isotopes used in radiometric dating are determined by the fundamental laws of the universe. In order for these half-lives to change you would have to change the fundamental rules of the universe. This would show up in distant stars, but it doesn't. Also, there are many ways to test past decay rates:

Supernovae are known to produce a large quantity of radioactive isotopes (Nomoto et al. 1997a, 1997b; Thielemann et al. 1998). These isotopes produce gamma rays with frequencies and fading rates that are predictable according to present decay rates. These predictions hold for supernova SN1987A, which is 169,000 light-years away (Knödlseder 2000). Therefore, radioactive decay rates were not significantly different 169,000 years ago. Present decay rates are likewise consistent with observations of the gamma rays and fading rates of supernova SN1991T, which is sixty million light-years away (Prantzos 1999), and with fading rate observations of supernovae billions of light-years away (Perlmutter et al. 1998).

The Oklo reactor was the site of a natural nuclear reaction 1,800 million years ago. The fine structure constant affects neutron capture rates, which can be measured from the reactor's products. These measurements show no detectable change in the fine structure constant and neutron capture for almost two billion years (Fujii et al. 2000; Shlyakhter 1976).
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CF/CF210.html​

So as you can see, none of those are problems.