Unintelligent Design?

[Notedstrangeperson]

I think you are familiar with the GULOP vitamin C gene? How do you see that playing into this topic? Is that the best design?
...
So if the bad design can be compared to an even worse design, it is easier to overlook that it is a bad design?

So suppose God designed all the spacer DNA for the sole purpose of absorbing the impact of mutations on the genome. And in the process of designing all the spacer DNA, He decides to throw a bit into the primate genome that looks exactly like a misshapen copy of GULO (and make it follow the phylogenetic tree at that). Would that be bad design? It would be utterly tricksy, of course, but if the GULOPseudogene truly was designed as spacer DNA, its near-identical similarity to the GULO gene doesn't in the slightest affect its (non)functionality.

I agree with Shernren on this one - we shouldn't dismiss a gene or trait as useless just because it seems to have no purpose. Maybe it does have a use we just don't know about, or maybe it will be useful in the future.

Of course, this not does it disprove evolution (in fact having seemingly "useless traits" makes more sense in an evolutionary context), but I don't think the idea of God as a bad designer could be used as an argument against Creationism.

 

[Papias]

NSP wrote:

Maybe it does have a use we just don't know about, or maybe it will be useful in the future.

NSP, what you are saying is that God intentionally made a broken GULOP gene (even if it had some other function) , in literally hundreds of species, with scattered mutations following the hierarchy of the phylogenic tree, with each gene being literally 22,000 bases long, in the same genomic location as other mammals, right?

Doesn't that show beyond a doubt that God had to have done it intentionally - in other words, that God was intentionally being deceptive, since, even without omniscience, it's obvious that anyone seeing that would conclude that they are broken, formerly functional, vitamin C genes, even if they had some function now (which there is no evidence for)?

So to preserve the idea of a micromanager God, God is made to be deceptive too.

If you prefer the deceptive micromanager God to the idea that God allowed evolution to make sub-optimal designs (like the other ones mentioned already), then that's OK, we'll agree to disagree.

Do you see why I'd prefer the idea that God allowed evolution to make sub-optimal designs to the idea that God is a deceptive micromanager, even if you don't agree?

Papias

 

[SkyWriting]

Here are 470 of them, which arose through frameshift mutations, causing new and useful cellular proteins to be produced.

Really? We can't continue a rational conversation if you're going to say you found a list of 470 "Beneficial Mutations" from this sentence:

"Here, we employ a strategy using simulated protein sequences and identify 470 human and 108 mouse frameshift events that originate new gene segments."

Frequent appearance of novel protein-coding sequenc... [Genomics. 2006] - PubMed - NCBI

But I DO appreciate you being specific with your claims. It helps nail down your thought process.
I could go on.....( meaning : I'm so right that it goes without further effort on my part)

 

[SkyWriting]

I hope that statement actually means something. Is there any part of our bodies which you can point out as being perfectly designed for a world without sin and death but not fitting well into our current world?

Top to bottom. The entire system is failing due to an improper environment.
Those living the longest do so because of exposure to the most natural environment
for the longest length of time. This shows that the least spoiled in nature
has the greatest of it's original design left. Nutrients, antioxidants and such.

 

[SkyWriting]

...that the flaws in the design are obvious, and that even a 6 year old kid could come up a better design. That's independent of the fact that the 6 year old, or anyone else can physically form the animal themselves.

Don't be obtuse. Just show me one design improvement.
Not one has ever been found.
And 6 year olds don't know all the facts, so please find an older surgeon with to fix your windpipe "problem."

No, I don't mean multiple environments. I only mean the one the animal lives in. Whales live in one environment, the ocean. So you are saying that having ocean living creatures have to breathe air is better than if they can breathe water? Really?

Yes. They are well suited for their niche. Really. You are the first person I've ever heard who thought different.
That doesn't prove I'm right. Just that you need to support your position more fully for me to comprehend it.

Or that for the giraffe, stringing a nerve through 15 extra feet in it's body is better than running the nerve directly from the brain to the destination? Or that a giraffe that has to practically do yoga to get a drink is a better design than simply making more neck vertebrae so it can bend it's neck to drink? One environment - the savanna.

Or that an optimal design for a fully aquatic sea turtle is to make it clamber onto land to lay land eggs? The same goes for sea snakes. (those are both in one environment - the ocean). And on and on through all kinds of stupid designs.

They are most obvious when an animal has "recently" evolved from one environment to another, as applies to all the examples above. This applies to humans in spades - for instance, why design humans to mature sexually at 14, when they have around another decade of school, when these sexual desires mostly cause problems? Why not design humans to mature sexually at 25, with the schooling out of the way? It didn't happen that way because for nearly all of our evolution from apes, we didn't have school, and marrying and having kids at 16 worked fine.

The same goes for our taste for fats and sweets, or the fear of the dark among children. All of them make perfect sense in the light of evolution, but don't fit our world today.

No comment.

Doctors generally fix the problem through surgery, instead of explaining how a simple design change would have prevented the problem. However, here is a link describing the anatomy, and you can see for yourself that the urethra is routed through the prostate. The Male Urethra - Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body - Yahoo! Education

NO THEY DO NOT re-route the urethra to fix your imaginary design flaw! Sheesh.

Of course my neice herself isn't in medical journals, as the problem caused by our gill cleft genes is common enough, happening in many births every year. Here is a link about it:
[/INDENT]Medscape: Medscape Access

Nope. Cleft formation problems are not due to gill genes. As your link explains, the cleft problems are considered to be the structures where gills are formed. But that is a historical name for the structure. Not a genetic one.
The idea that the fetus passes through a fish stage has been rejected. I'm sure your doctor was not updated. His medical terminology books are famous for being pretty static and conservative.

This is similar to the fact that baleen whales, which lack teeth, grow teeth in the womb, then reabsorb them before birth. That's a stupid design, but at least one with minimal impact besides wasted resources. Evolution shows why it makes sense (due to their toothed ancestors). Do you agree that evolution explains that, or do you think God micromanaged the design of the whale, including the growth of teeth in pre-natal toothless whales?

Wales may well be able to grow four limbs and walk under enough environmental stress. Maybe reproduce without mates. Animal have scores of features built into their DNA to be expressed when needed. Not one unengineered mutation needed. Yes, mutations happen by design. And there are scores of dna repair mechanisms to keep such aberrations within design engineering limits. They are well engineered & designed biological machines.

 

[SkyWriting]

I've only had a quick read through the thread so apologies if this point has been made already.


What we need to realise is that these are disorders - they are symptoms of genes which have gone wrong. They do not represent the human genome as a whole.

We know this for two reasons: the first is sexual recombination, which helps filter out harmful genes. This explains why individuals degenerate over their lifetimes, but our species as a whole gets better.

The second reason is that we know what happens when harmful mutations are not erased with each generation. Experiments on genetically-modified mice showed that by removing a particular enzyme, with each generation their offspring grew old more and more quickly, until by the sixth generation they could no longer breed.

If mutations accumulated as quickly as you suggest and were not erased with each generation, our species would be dead not within a few thousand years or even a few centuries - we'd be extinct within a few generations.

My claim is that very few mutations go uncorrected, and those that do are by design. Just like any engineering process, it has some flexibility built in and even the constraining processes that do the repairs have flexibility in how much they screen and what they let through.

 

[SkyWriting]

I still disagree with the "inefficient design" argument, for the simple reason that efficiency is specified completely by one's design goals. A car is a relatively inefficient way to produce motive power from the burning of fossil fuels, because it's made out of so much metal which is very heavy. But the metal is necessary if a car is seen as a way to transport people. The two goals are related, and yet what is an inefficiency according to one goal is a required feature according to another goal.
Similarly, are Rube Goldberg designs inefficient? Of course! And yet they are singularly efficient at making us laugh. Rube Goldberg wasn't unintelligent, he just had a different design goal.
Is it inefficient for the giraffe to have a nerve that loops around through its neck? Not if God, designing the giraffe, was actually saying to Himself: Hmm, I wonder how long I can make this nerve? From that point of view, the design is pretty darn near to optimal.
Of course, one could take issue with God's supposed design criteria in that case. One could (rightly) ask if God is being capricious, whimsical or just plain immoral in choosing His design criteria. But that is quite different from saying God doesn't know how to design.

There is no "inefficient design" argument. One would have to show a design improvement to support such a claim. Genes have been artificially modified in many cases, but no one has even claimed that the results were universally improved. They ONLY claim to have made improvements in some particular aspect of a living system. Usually with clear knowledge and documentation of capacities lost somewhere else.

 

[shernren]

To be fair, NSP was affirming my argument, so I'll respond to this post. (Also, for what it's worth, he's an evolutionist.)

NSP, what you are saying is that God intentionally made a broken GULOP gene (even if it had some other function) , in literally hundreds of species, with scattered mutations following the hierarchy of the phylogenic tree, with each gene being literally 22,000 bases long, in the same genomic location as other mammals, right?

Junk DNA must have some function. Otherwise, why would evolution have preserved it? After all, DNA reproduction costs resources, and every little saving in DNA reproduction represents nutrients which an organism can put to better use elsewhere - unless the reproduction of even "non-coding" DNA serves the organism some purpose.

Also, there are mechanisms for the excision of non-coding DNA from genomes, the obvious one of which is naturally-selected deletion - since deletions of functional regions are obviously harmful and deletions of non-functional regions not, deletions of non-functional regions should be selectively preferred whenever deletions happen at all (and they do).

Remember that the term "junk DNA" was born in quotation marks: the original paper by Susumu Ohno here gave the explanation I first described, namely that junk DNA allows our genomes to sustain a fixed mutational load per generation without all of it hitting coding DNA.

Doesn't that show beyond a doubt that God had to have done it intentionally - in other words, that God was intentionally being deceptive, since, even without omniscience, it's obvious that anyone seeing that would conclude that they are broken, formerly functional, vitamin C genes, even if they had some function now (which there is no evidence for)?

The whole argument is reminiscent of miamited's periodic ramblings on the importance of the word "day" in Genesis 1. "If God had wanted us to reach the conclusion that the whole shebang was completed in six 24-hour-periods, that's exactly the word He would have used, isn't it?" Yes, certainly, but six 24-hour-periods is just one interpretation of the textual data, and the fact that the word "day" fits your interpretation doesn't mean that it doesn't fit another interpretation better.

In the same way, yes, if God had wanted us to conclude that GULOP is strong evidence for evolution, this is what He would have done (and hence been deceptive). But that is again just one interpretation of the genetic data.

After all, another possible interpretation is that God was simply making a sequence to soak up mutational load (in creatures which are at little dietary risk of running out of Vitamin C), and so it matters not one whit what sequence He actually uses as long as it is initially non-coding. That's not a particularly strong assumption, is it? If you are aware that DNA will undergo mutation, you might want to create buffers, and if you create buffers, it doesn't matter what their actual non-coding sequence is. Also notice that I am assuming nothing about evolution's validity (God may specially create DNA sequences in creatures which otherwise evolve). But based on my assumption (that junk DNA is created by God to soak up mutation, which again says nothing about ancestry), I know that I cannot use junk DNA to determine ancestry; therefore, when I see homologous GULOP sequences, I don't automatically assume a phylogenetic tree; and since I don't assume a phylogenetic tree, and (in the creationist case) there isn't actually a phylogenetic tree, which means I haven't assumed something God didn't want me to assume and I didn't reach a conclusion which turns out to be wrong. Huzzah! No deception involved.

Now I must instantly add that my assumption ("God specially created junk DNA to soak up mutation") is untestable and unscientific, and that is the entire problem with the design argument, whether for (good design) or against (bad design) creationism: the design specs are outside scientific testing. There is no way of knowing, for example, that when God made the giraffe He did not in fact intend to make the longest vertebrate nerve ever. It would be whimsical, but it would not be wrong. And there is no way of knowing that God did not in fact intend to make pseudogene sequences with no bearing on ancestry. It is an unscientific assumption, but it is certainly possible to imagine a world in which it were valid, in which case it would simply mean that scientific methods happened to be unable to reach this valid conclusion - and aren't Christians required to believe that there are valid conclusions which science is not empowered to reach?

So no, I've never believed that our allegedly deceptive God would actually have been deceptive in many of the cases TEs put forth.

 

[Papias]

SW wrote:

Don't be obtuse. Just show me one design improvement.

I did, over and over. I mentioned that the epiglottis could be placed higher up, that the whales could have gills, that sea snakes could give live birth in the ocean (which some do, showing that it is possible, and confirming that those that have to go on land to lay eggs have a stupid deisign), that the giraffe nerve could be rerouted more effectively, and so on.

So you are saying that having ocean living creatures have to breathe air is better than if they can breathe water? Really?

Yes. They are well suited for their niche. Really. You are the first person I've ever heard who thought different.
That doesn't prove I'm right. Just that you need to support your position more fully for me to comprehend it.

It's obvious to anyone that a fully aquatic creature is better off breathing water than having to come up for air, right? I mean, you really think that it's better for a fully aquatic creature to have to come up for air? You know that there are deaths every year by whale babies that don't make it up after birth. You think dead babies is a good design?

​

Or that for the giraffe, stringing a nerve through 15 extra feet in it's body is better than running the nerve directly from the brain to the destination? Or that a giraffe that has to practically do yoga to get a drink is a better design than simply making more neck vertebrae so it can bend it's neck to drink? One environment - the savanna.

Or that an optimal design for a fully aquatic sea turtle is to make it clamber onto land to lay land eggs? The same goes for sea snakes. (those are both in one environment - the ocean). And on and on through all kinds of stupid designs.

They are most obvious when an animal has "recently" evolved from one environment to another, as applies to all the examples above. This applies to humans in spades - for instance, why design humans to mature sexually at 14, when they have around another decade of school, when these sexual desires mostly cause problems? Why not design humans to mature sexually at 25, with the schooling out of the way? It didn't happen that way because for nearly all of our evolution from apes, we didn't have school, and marrying and having kids at 16 worked fine.

The same goes for our taste for fats and sweets, or the fear of the dark among children. All of them make perfect sense in the light of evolution, but don't fit our world today.

No comment.

So we both agree these are additional examples of bad designs?


​

Doctors generally fix the problem through surgery, instead of explaining how a simple design change would have prevented the problem. However, here is a link describing the anatomy, and you can see for yourself that the urethra is routed through the prostate. The Male Urethra - Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body - Yahoo! Education

NO THEY DO NOT re-route the urethra to fix your imaginary design flaw! Sheesh.

No, they remove the prostate to fix the bad design (or similar solutions. I didn't say they re-routed the urethra - doing so, though it would fix the original stupid design, is not as easy as simply removing a part.

Enlarged prostate: MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia

​

Of course my neice herself isn't in medical journals, as the problem caused by our gill cleft genes is common enough, happening in many births every year. Here is a link about it:
​

Medscape: Medscape Access
[/INDENT]

Nope. Cleft formation problems are not due to gill genes. As your link explains, the cleft problems are considered to be the structures where gills are formed.

I didn't say "Gill genes", now did I? I said "Gill Cleft genes" and those are the genes that cause the formation of gill clefts - it is important to note that developement is much more complicated that simply thinking that there are "gill genes". The genetic machinery is there, from our fish ancestors, to result in gill clefts, and later mutations have caused them to be obliterated. It is mutations that cause the malfunction of these obliterating mutations that cause the problem. A smarter design woud have been to avoid making gill clefts in the first place.

So, you said "as you link explains" - can you please point to where in the link it says that "cleft formation problems are not due to gill genes"?

But that is a historical name for the structure. Not a genetic one.

waiting for a source.......

The idea that the fetus passes through a fish stage has been rejected.

I didn't say the fetus passed through a fish stage. Please read carefully. The fetus passes through stages that overlap with the formation stages of fish, including the formation of structures that are needed in fish and not humans, like gill clefts. Please read "your inner fish", by Dr. Shubin, and expert in this area.

This is similar to the fact that baleen whales, which lack teeth, grow teeth in the womb, then reabsorb them before birth. That's a stupid design, but at least one with minimal impact besides wasted resources. Evolution shows why it makes sense (due to their toothed ancestors). Do you agree that evolution explains that, or do you think God micromanaged the design of the whale, including the growth of teeth in pre-natal toothless whales?

Wales may well be able to grow four limbs and walk under enough environmental stress. Maybe reproduce without mates. Animal have scores of features built into their DNA to be expressed when needed. Not one unengineered mutation needed. Yes, mutations happen by design. And there are scores of dna repair mechanisms to keep such aberrations within design engineering limits. They are well engineered & designed biological machines.

All that verbage and you didn't answer my question. I asked : "Do you agree that evolution explains that, or do you think God micromanaged the design of the whale, including the growth of teeth in pre-natal toothless whales?"

Papias

 

[Papias]

Shernren wrote:

Junk DNA must have some function. Otherwise, why would evolution have preserved it? After all, DNA reproduction costs resources, and every little saving in DNA reproduction represents nutrients which an organism can put to better use elsewhere - unless the reproduction of even "non-coding" DNA serves the organism some purpose.

Except that the strength of natual selection is in proportion to the amount of harm caused. Selection is very weak on things that aren't too harmful. Making twice as much DNA isn't very costly because it is a extremely small fraction of the material in a cell. I think there is evidence that there is some selective pressure to reduce extermely long genomes, but not much to prevent a lot of useless DNA. Do you know about the different paramecia, which are pracitically identical, but one has an enormous genome compared to the other?

In the same way, yes, if God had wanted us to conclude that GULOP is strong evidence for evolution, this is what He would have done (and hence been deceptive). But that is again just one interpretation of the genetic data.

After all, another possible interpretation is that God was simply making a sequence to soak up mutational load (in creatures which are at little dietary risk of running out of Vitamin C), and so it matters not one whit what sequence He actually uses as long as it is initially non-coding.

But then why make it look exactly as if it were a broken vitamin C gene?
Sorry, I think this is where we'll have to disagree - I don't think God would "just happen" to pick the exact base pairs needed, for 99.9 % of the time for 22,000 base pairs, if this was just an empty section to soak up mutational load, while knowing that to any rational human, this would make descent an obvious and unavoidable conclusion. I don't think all interpretations are equal.

Sequences like that do show ancestry, and the GULOP ancestry conclusion is based on literally hundreds of times more evidence that a simple paternity test, which I hope you aren't doubting. By your logic, it is rational for a paternity defendant to say "but your honor, that's just one interpretation. Another one is that God made the baby's DNA to just happen to match mine, as a place to soak up mutational load, and that's not being deceptive".

Shernren, I respect you a lot, and so I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one.

Papias

 

[Assyrian]

Wales may well be able to grow four limbs and walk under enough environmental stress. Maybe reproduce without mates.

Wales?

Oh you mean whales

 

[shernren]

Except that the strength of natual selection is in proportion to the amount of harm caused. Selection is very weak on things that aren't too harmful. Making twice as much DNA isn't very costly because it is a extremely small fraction of the material in a cell. I think there is evidence that there is some selective pressure to reduce extermely long genomes, but not much to prevent a lot of useless DNA. Do you know about the different paramecia, which are pracitically identical, but one has an enormous genome compared to the other?

I didn't; point taken.

But then why make it look exactly as if it were a broken vitamin C gene?
Sorry, I think this is where we'll have to disagree - I don't think God would "just happen" to pick the exact base pairs needed, for 99.9 % of the time for 22,000 base pairs, if this was just an empty section to soak up mutational load, while knowing that to any rational human, this would make descent an obvious and unavoidable conclusion. I don't think all interpretations are equal.

Sequences like that do show ancestry, and the GULOP ancestry conclusion is based on literally hundreds of times more evidence that a simple paternity test, which I hope you aren't doubting. By your logic, it is rational for a paternity defendant to say "but your honor, that's just one interpretation. Another one is that God made the baby's DNA to just happen to match mine, as a place to soak up mutational load, and that's not being deceptive".

There is a key logical difference between paternity testing and phylogenetic tree reconstruction. In paternity testing, the known sequence of an alleged ancestor is being matched to the known sequence of an alleged descendant. There is an observed genetic phenomenon (i.e. reproduction) which tends to make those sequences match up, complete with fairly good empirical evidence that God tends not to interfere in that process.

In phylogenetic tree reconstruction, on the other hand, the known sequences of descendants, and only descendants, are being matched to one pattern or another of ancestry. A child of unknown paternity must still have some paternity; but must a species of unknown paternity have any paternity at all? Perhaps no species have paternities, and any supposed pattern in their genomes is in fact simply an artifact of certain (unknowable, untestable) design specifications which God had in mind when He created everything.

In retrospect, though, I think I overstated my previous post a little bit. I do actually believe that GULOP phylogeny is good evidence for evolution; but my version of why the argument works is different from your version. I also do actually believe that the design argument is a bad argument for creationism, but you clearly believe that it is a bad argument because it is wrong (and therefore that bad design is a good argument for evolution); I believe that it is a bad argument, rather, because it is unfalsifiable - all one needs to do is to claim that God has a charming predilection for feature X, or even that feature X is on the Devil's list of design specifications, and who is the lowly scientist to challenge a statement about the will of God or the desires of the Devil?

The way I think the GULOP argument works is Bayesian in nature. Either GULOP sequences across species follow the phylogenetic tree (A) or they do not (B). Now evolutionism finds it much easier to explain situation A rather than situation B; creationism, on the other hand, finds it much easier to explain situation B given certain assumptions (GULOP's function does not depend on its exact sequence, since it doesn't code for anything, and there are far more possible sequences that don't follow the phylogenetic tree than do).

Therefore, situation A forms evidence favoring evolutionism and disfavoring creationism, and vice versa - and in fact we find situation A in nature. Why is it more compelling for a pseudogene to follow the phylogenetic tree than a proper coding sequence? Because, since the function of the coding sequence depends on the actual sequences, it may be that the only feasible sequences are those which obey the phylogenetic tree, so that creationism might find it equally difficult to explain situation B (for a coding sequence), in which case finding situation A does little to help us choose between evolutionism and creationism.

I must admit that my formulation is much more rarified. It touches on the same nerves as yours (GULOP's sequences don't matter, so why should they be phylogenetically ordered?) but what I like is that I don't need to cast aspersions on God's character in order to get the conclusion I like: "See, creationist, God may have some strange, inscrutable motive in getting us to believe that all life is phylogenetically related in some way that it actually isn't. I can even give it to you that it might not contradict His holy character. But until you can actually tell me what that motive might be, the argument is really of no use to us when it comes to learning more about creation or more about God, no?"

 

[Assyrian]

Except that the strength of natual selection is in proportion to the amount of harm caused. Selection is very weak on things that aren't too harmful. Making twice as much DNA isn't very costly because it is a extremely small fraction of the material in a cell.

Apparently cell size is proportional to the size of the genome, all the junk DNA means cells are going to be significantly larger. The problem with snipping out the junk is that it is difficult to be precise and snipping out coding DNA by mistake can be lethal. So there needs to be a significant cost benefit before it is worthwhile, birds, who need to keep their weight down for flight have smaller genomes and smaller cells.

 

[Notedstrangeperson]

My claim is that very few mutations go uncorrected, and those that do are by design. Just like any engineering process, it has some flexibility built in and even the constraining processes that do the repairs have flexibility in how much they screen and what they let through.

Sorry if I missed your original point, I've been somewhat lazy with my posts lately.

Your earlier comments intrigue me:

Yes, there are mutations that help a species survive and cope with a deteriorating environment and limit the deaths of a species as things fall apart. That's what exactly what God designed evolution for. To sweep up the garbage and keep species going for a while.
...
No, what I said was "that they all are harmful and that not one is an improvement."
The only examples in opposition to my claim is when observers "move the goal posts" and use a degrading and less than optimal environment to the equation. Lets say by adding sulfur dioxide fumes to the environment of the population. Then as the population dies off, evolutionists point to the 2 people standing with a mutant gene that doesn't allow for sulfur dioxide to be absorbed quite as quickly. By ignoring the information that they were already compromised in some other way, and moving the goal posts of the failing environment, they can call such a mutation "beneficial".
...
The only way to claim one is beneficial is by killing off the remaining population and see if any are left standing.

Your profile says you're an OEC, but what you're describing (and seem to agree with) is evolution by natural selection - whenever a disease or something equally horrible comes along, some people are usually left standing. Whatever gene(s) they had which spared their lives, those genes will probably be passed on to their children.

But you're mistaken about what a "beneficial mutation" is. It can simply be described as mutations which increase your chances of having offspring. So to use your example, the genes which prevent people from absorbing too much sulphur dioxide are beneficial mutations.

This isn't "moving the goalposts" - we aren't able to see in to the future, therefore it's not always possible to predict which mutations will be helpful. In fact that was my original argument: God is not necessarily a bad designer because seemingly useless traits may have some benefit in the future.

 

[Papias]

Shernren wrote:

I didn't; point taken.

Knowing how often we both come up against unsupported claims, I felt I needed to provide support, if for nothing else than precedent. The two paramecia are P. aurelia and P. caudatum, with genomes of 0.2 Gb, and 9 Gb (200% bigger than the human genome!)

Li, W.-H. (1997) Molecular Evolution. Sunderland, MA, Sinauer Associates. ​

A child of unknown paternity must still have some paternity; but must a species of unknown paternity have any paternity at all?

It seems to me that it is exactly equally absurd to propose that an animal species might not have a paternity as it is absurd to propose that a human animal might not have a paternity. In either case, a supernatural intervention of God is required. In fact, if I had to choose, I'd say that the human without paternity is a smaller intervention - the poofing of a single spermatozoan as opposed to the poofing of a whole reproducing population of whole animals.

Anyway, it looks like our differences are small, and we are discussing minutae. Blessings- Papias


***********************************************

Assyrian wrote:

Apparently cell size is proportional to the size of the genome, all the junk DNA means cells are going to be significantly larger.

No. That's exactly the opposite of what I had just stated. The two paramecia (species names listed above) are about the same size, even though the genome of one is more than an order of magnitude bigger than the other).

Have a fun day-

Papias

 

[Assyrian]

No. That's exactly the opposite of what I had just stated. The two paramecia (species names listed above) are about the same size, even though the genome of one is more than an order of magnitude bigger than the other).

Have a fun day-

Papias

I was working from a New Scientist article I read a while back but a quick google on the two paramecia threw up:

http://www.enviroliteracy.org/pdf/lablpop2.pdf
P. caudatum and P. aurelia are usually easily distinguished. P. caudatum is at least twice the size of p, aurelia; it moves more slowly and contains a noticeably large nucleus.
​

and

Modern Text Book of Zoology ... - Prof. R.L.Kotpal - Google Books
P. caudatum, the largest species measures between 170μ and 290μ. The greatest diameter of the cylindrical body is about two-third of its entire length. P. Aurelia is about 120μ to250μ long.​

 

[Papias]

Assyrian -

Thanks for getting numbers - it's always good to check. As you point out, they are different in size (2-3X, it sounds like), but not anywhere near 45 times as big (9/0.2=45, the proportional size difference in the genomes). So their size is not mainly a function of their genome size, though genome size may well affect cell size, and appears to clearly affect nucleus size. It would be interesting to find out how much bigger the nucleus is - I wonder if that is 10X, 20X, 45X?

Papias

 

[someguy14]

Anyone ever wonder why much of creation seems to be made by a very poor designer?

Take for instance the human body: why would God place a procreation/entertainment system (penis, vagina) with a sewage system (urinary tract)? Why would God not give us different orifices to breath and eat/drink? Just imagine, there would never have been anyone to die of choking.

Evil designed the fail.

Good is always good.

 

[someguy14]

Step by step.

The foundation increases in strength the further you go.

The Foundation is Love.

 

[iambeeman]

Except that comes at serious costs that make 8% cleaning a bad trade off. Let's see, increased UTI's, putting a waste stream through a recreational area, urinary problems during pregnancy, and so on, all so you can get 8% cleaning in of a reproductive tract that you claim has sufficient cleaning through other mechanisms? And you call that a good design?

Why not simply put the urinary opening in a different location, thus avoiding the UTIs, sexual activity concerns, and urinary problems during pregnancy, (since you have claimed the cleaning of the other 92% of the reproductive area works fine, making urine "washes" unneeded)?

I don't, but the simple fact that UTIs are common in women shows that the current design is not good.

So your assertion is hearsay.

Thanks for providing solid, reliable evidence from a well controlled study. However, I've never disagreed with the fact that such activity exists (in fact, you can see from both my post and the quote above that I've always been aware of the selective activity). You can see that your evidence doesn't support your claim. You claimed that there was an antibiotic that kept the whole system bacteria free. Your cited study only shows that it acts against some bacteria, and most importantly, that it is active against them, which is far different from always completely eliminating them (that's what "keeps" means). It's good that those secretions evolved, but they are far from perfect, as there are literally millions of women suffering from bacterial infections at any given moment.

Sorry I wasn't clear in communicating my meaning. I was meaning that the female reproductive system has several different ways of keeping it from having bad bacterial growth. Most times I'm writing late at night and don't always do as good a job as I want to.

Your post is simple relativistic lazyiness. You are claiming that because we can't know everything, we can't know anything. That attitude would have us still living like neanderthals. We can't investigate antibiotics, since we can't know everything and they may be deadly over time. We can't look into fertilizing our crops, since we don't know everything about plants, and God must have had some perfect reason to design plants the way he did without fertilizer. We can't administer anesthetic during childbirth, since we don't have perfect knowlege, and that could hurt the child or mom, and we don't want to interfere with God's perfect plan for childbirth. And so on. All human technology is initially conjecture, and all of it is a deviation from what you see as God's perfect design.

No it isn't actually. I have never claimed "that because we can't know everything we can't know anything". We're dealing with a fallen corrupted world, not the perfect world God built for us. God want's us to research the various ways of protecting the sacred gift of human life. What is conjecture is to point at one thing or another and say "See God did it wrong because I can imagine a way I think might be done better." Which of course ignores that we don't know entirety of any given organism from conception to maturity, their environment and any environment they will encounter through their lives and the environments that subsequent generations will have to contend with.

Besides, it's not just conjecture. There are many cases where we did, in fact, change things in animals, and have them work better.

I'm only aware of 5 things mankind has changed on any sort of scale, corn, soy beans, canola, rice and cotton. And if one doesn't use the required chemicals in the tech. agreement you won't get a contract to grow them so it's hard to say if they are really improved in a natural setting. Other than that I'm not sure what your talking about.

The whole field of medicine does that.

No, not really. The vast majority of time doctors are merely (and when I say "merely" please don't think I am belittling their contribution) helping keep the body going until it can repair itself. Of course there are reconstructions that take place but the goal is to restore as much of the original function as possible.

In case after case, biologists, engineers, and even just plain people like you and I can see that many "designs" in the animal kingdom are just plain brain-dead.

If this is true any God who uses evolution is just as responsible for the so called "brain-dead" design and is therefore equally "brain-dead" or possibly deistic and apathetic to the creatures he is ultimately responsible for creating.

You don't need perfect knowlede to see that, because you don't need to know everything to know at least something.

Without that context misinterpretation is inevitable.

I see no reason to think that - muscle to muscle connections can be quite strong.

But not nearly as strong as muscle to bone connections. If God had done like you suggest it would have been a weak connection and you would have pointed to it and said "look what a brain dead designer God is."

Besides, to make that claim, you are saying that God cannot make an orifice away from bone?

I at no time claimed he "couldn't", I do however claim one wouldn't be as strong so God very wisely chose to girdle such an orifice in bone.

And this is an all powerful God that can't do what humans do literally thousands of times every day, with every abdominal surgical procedure?

Are you seriously suggesting that a C-section is preferred to natural child birth?

You are saying all kinds of contradictory stuff.

Only if your mind is mired in an evolutionary paradigm, or one has never taken the time to comprehend the creation paradigm.

Are you saying that current designs are good, or not good?

I'm saying that God's designs are prefect, but we do not live in the world God intended for us for and that is where the problems arise.

Are you saying that God intended to make designs good enough so that only millions of people die from them, when he could have made it so that those millions didn't die, and that we should be happy he decided to kill millions and not billions?

And the God of evolutionary theism is just as responsible and magnitudes more besides, so it would seem this question isn't nearly the problem for a creation paradigm as it is an evolutionary paradigm.

It sounds like you are saying bad things about God, which as I've pointed out, can be avoided if you stop calling God a micromanager.

Theistic evolution is saying far worse things that the most corrupt interpretation of YE creation ever could, which could be avoided by admitting we don't know the entirety of any given organism from conception to maturity, their environment and any environment they will encounter through their lives and what environments their progeny will be faced with.

What data do you have that shows "a pretty consistent population growth" for the past 4,000 years? The data is clear, the population growth was very slow, and sometimes zero, for long periods before science, and then rapidly accelerated as science gave us plant fertilizers, and modern medicine. Do we agree on that? Here is some data:

If I was forced to guess I'd say about 2% growth over the past 4000 years reasonably consistently. Of course some valleys but over all yes reasonably consistent. You've gotta remember too there is quite a bit of guess work going into these figures as well.

​

Ok, I guess. I contend that is better than saying that God directly and purposefully built in all the problems and suffering we both agree that we see. At least my approach is less directly tied to God, right?

Wrong, evolution doesn't insulate God from being responsible for your supposedly bad designs, he is still responsible and more over he's uncaring. I do agree that this world contains suffering but God isn't responsible, rather man is.

OK, then what exactly are you saying? I copied the whole discussion on Gen. 1:29, where it seems that you are saying that Gen 1:29 gives instructions that if followed would prevent UTI's.

I'm saying that most problems we see in humans could very well stem from improper diet, the remainder of problems could possibly be due to genetic degradation.

You've fallen for quack medicine - snake oil. Please read the American Cancer Society's view of Gerson "therapy"

No, I haven't. As I said "I'm not really convinced of all the claims these folks make". Though I'm not convinced, I do think that at the very least some of what they recommend is a reasonably good idea. Definitely I think the coffee enemas are a bad idea.

OK, so it looks like we both don't agree that we should rely on documented evidence and controlled studies. For me, I'm not one to go to conspiracy theories and quack medicine.

I'm not saying controlled studies and what not aren't important, I, and my family are involved in at least 2 differant studies right now, but guess what? The scientists in charge are relying in our observations, along with their own. And no, right now I can't provide a link to the studies, they aren't published yet and I don't know the time line they are working with.

OK, then please allow me to give my understanding. Just as evolution predicts, chimp organs are indeed closest to human organs. Too close, in fact, because the closeness of our bodies to chimp bodies allows pathogens that infect the chimp organs to infect our bodies. Pigs are chosen specifically because they are NOT as close as chimps. Chimps also aren't used because they are endangered, aren't as easy to breed in large numbers, and so on.

Do you have a link or is that just hearsay?

The esophagus.

Okay? Your still stuck with not having a way to rid yourself of excess mucus other than expulsion, and spreading the sickness that caused you to have excess mucus in the first place.
​

OK, you can't, and we are back to hearsay. As with the other stuff, all we have is your assertion.

Sorry but it's a little hard to find an inventors inspiration from hundred years ago. But the functions are as I explained virtually identical.

First, not being an omnipotent God, even if I didn't know of many obvious ways, my point would still stand.

No, it wouldn't stand. That's just tossing a criticism out into a vacuum of your own making.

However, many are obvious. How about nanotechnological (or larger) hairs that move the dust out as is seen in plenty of other biological systems?

You mean cilia? Already have that, but it works in conjunction with mucus to keep our air ways clean - Ciliated Epithelium . So you still need mucus.

Or filters, as are also seen in many other biological systems?

We got those too, look inside your nose, only problem is they only work on relatively course particles, if you have a fine enough filter then you run into plugging problems, so your going to need mucus to clean the fine stuff out.

One of the many ways that evolution makes sense of the natural world is that it shows why obviously good and useful designs that are seen in one lineage are not seen outside of that lineage.

Your post is simple relativistic lazyiness. You......

See above.

Simply saying that "God knows what he is doing" gets you nowhere.

Good thing that's not what I said then.

Every single advance of human technology is a case where we rejected the idea that "God knows what he is doing".

Do you have source for your assertion? Like the Write brothers studying bird to figure out how to fly? Wilbur and Orville Wright

Even in the case of cancer, one could argue that we should not try to treat it, because obviously "God knows what he is doing", and we should instead try to figure out why he built cancer the way he did because we can learn a lot from his handy work, instead of telling God that he built cancer wrong.

This shows a profound misunderstanding of the creation paradigm.

Can you not see that some designs are obviously sub-optimal, like making aquatic creatures with lungs instead of gills? Are you seriously saying that whales would not be better off with gills,

For now let's stick to the OP. If I time for rabbit trails I may follow them later.

and that we should all go back to living in caves?

I have NO idea why you keep going on so.