There is the forgotten book Shattering the Myths of Darwinism written by a non-creationist agnostic Richard Milton. Milton expressed his skepticism of mainstream claims of the old-age of the fossil record. His work further motivated me toward the idea that there could an empirically driven critique of the accepted ages of the fossils.
This is a short bio of Milton:
Richard Milton is a science journalist and design engineer based in London. He is a member of Mensa, the international high-IQ society, and writes a column for Mensa Magazine. He has been a member of the Geologists’ Association for twenty years, and did extensive geological research for this book. He has been featured on the BBC, NBC, and other television networks.
Like the agnostic Denton, Milton seems to draw much admiration from creationists.
The fact Milton was an agnostic suggested to me that considerations of facts and following the evidence wherever it leads might lead one to a different conclusion than the accepted mainstream view of fossil ages. One does not have to begin with the premise of YEC to conclude that the claims of the old ages of fossils have serious empirical difficulties.
But what about radiometric dating? That serious issue will be covered in another post, but suffice to say, on evidential grounds alone, it seems there are serious unresolved conflicts. If physics and chemistry are invoked to defend the old ages of fossils, physics and chemistry can also be invoked to falsify it. Neither side, creationist or evolutionist, has a conflict-free model of history. But that is not to say that one side might not prevail on empirical grounds eventually in the light of future scientific discoveries.
My aim then is not to argue that the accepted mainstream model of the history of life is definitely wrong, but rather it can’t be definitely right given what we already know. Skepticism is in order, and thankfully it doesn’t stop there, skepticism might lead to novel, innovative research to settle the conflicts.
We have the conceptual notion of a geological “column”. The idea is that if you dig a hole, you are essentially traversing down a conceptual column that provides a recorded history of life. Conceptually this is depicted in the following image:
In such a column, older fossils are buried beneath younger fossils. Even supposing this is a reasonable interpretation, it does not immediately affix the ages of the fossils. One fossil may be older than another, but it doesn’t immediately tell us that the oldest fossils are 500 million years old! So for the sake of argument, let us assume that on average deeper means older, what can we say about the oldest layer based on empirical considerations?
When I asked a geologist common sense questions about the process of fossilization, he threw a fit. I asked “how are fossils fossilized?” I pointed out if you leave a dead organism out in the open it decomposes or is eaten by scavengers. So really good fossilization can’t happen by ordinary processes but rather by catastrophic process such as rapid burial, and often a burial that involves water. He threw a fit at the suggestion but reluctantly conceded that to get really good fossils, one needs water and rapid burial. He didn’t like where the discussion seemed to be headed. 🙂
Here are the boring considerations. Suppose we have intact geological column which can be found in one location such that you get to dig and find fossils in the order prescribed by the diagram above (and there are some who argue there is no such place on Earth, only in the conceptual imaginations of paleontologists). Suppose we give a generous height to this column of 200 miles spanning a history of 500 million years, what would be the average rate of deposition (accumulation of sediments on top of each other). I calculated that it would be .667 millimeters a year.
The geologist then fumed at my figure of a 200-mile deep geological column and argued it could be less than that. Of course, he didn’t realize he actually strengthened my argument. So I said, “fine, 14 miles, since that’s the farthest man has ever drilled into the Earth, that yields a deposition rate of .046 millimeters a year,” which is about half the thickness of a sheet of paper. That would mean a dinosaur that is lying 5 meters high will take about 100,000 years to bury, and thus it becomes very doubtful that it will fossilize because it is exposed to scavengers and decomposition and other environmental effects.
From Darwin-loving pages of Wiki we read:
Fossilization processes proceed differently according to tissue type and external conditions.
Permineralization is a process of fossilization that occurs when an organism is buried. The empty spaces within an organism (spaces filled with liquid or gas during life) become filled with mineral-rich groundwater. Minerals precipitate from the groundwater, occupying the empty spaces. This process can occur in very small spaces, such as within the cell wall of a plant cell. Small scale permineralization can produce very detailed fossils. For permineralization to occur, the organism must become covered by sediment soon after death or soon after the initial decay process. The degree to which the remains are decayed when covered determines the later details of the fossil. Some fossils consist only of skeletal remains or teeth; other fossils contain traces of skin, feathers or even soft tissues.
What? The organism needs to buried with sediments and water quickly. Of note, many layers of the geological “column” indicated mass extinction events, such that it could also be interpreted to be rapid simultaneous burial over large geographical regions by water and sediments, if not rapid simultaneous burial over the entire globe! But whatever the details, the fact remains that large sections of the geological column that contain fossils, could not, even in principle be assembled over millions of years. At best we have one catastrophe that creates a bed of fossils followed by a long era of stasis (no activity) and then followed another catastrophe, etc.
The geologist fumed, and said something to the effect, “You’re analysis is silly. Deposition doesn’t happen at steady rates like you imply.” Of course he was fuming so badly, he didn’t realize he was making my point, namely most of the fossil rich geological column didn’t take hundreds of millions of years to form. 🙂 Steady deposition could not have created the fossil record even in principle and even as Darwin and Lyell supposed. At best we have layers created by catastrophes, and then long periods of stasis in between. The bottom line is, the formation of most of the fossil layers of “column” could not have taken place over millions of years even in principle. We have to imagine the long periods of stasis are actually represented, because the fossil layers themselves must have formed in a few years if not a few minutes!
For the Darwinian story to hold, one has to fortuitously interleave highly fotuitous catastrophes followed by long eras of stasis and do this for each of the layers.
Recording of geological history via a process of slow, steady change is represented by a school of thought known as uniformitarianism (founded by Lyell). In contrast, recording of geological history by a process of catastrophes is known as catastrophism. The recording process for the fossil layers based on the considerations above, is then mostly the product of catastrophes. This catastrophist school of thought was highly anti-Darwinian:
Lyell encapsulated his philosophy in a doctrine later called “uniformitarianism”—a complex set of beliefs centered on the catechism that “the present is the key to the past.”….Lyell viewed this principle as a methodological reform to eliminate fanciful (and quasi-theological) “catastrophic” causes and to render the full magnitude of past change by the slow and steady accumulation of ordinary small changes (deposition and erosion grain by grain) extended over vast times.
And yet, from two different standpoints (theoretical and empirical), Lyell’s credo makes little sense, and its status as dogma can only reflect our social and psychological preferences. First, what is the probability that our tiny slice of observable time should include the full range of potential processes that might alter the earth? What about big, but perfectly natural, events that occur so infrequently that we have only a remote chance of observing even one occurrence in historical time? Second, how can Lyellian gradualism account for the fundamental fact of paleontology–extensive, and appparently rapid, faunal turnovers (“mass extinctions”) occurring several times in the history of life? (Traditional explanations over at least a few million years and attributing them to over intensification of ordinary causes–changes in temperature and sea level, for example–but the arguments have always seemed forced.)
…
Yet, until recently, extinction received much less attention than its obvious prominence warranted. In an overly Darwinian world of adaptation, gradual change, and improvement, extinction seemed, well, so negative–the ultimate failure, the flip side of evolution’s “real” work, something to be acknowledge but not intensely discussed in polite company.This odd neglect has been reversed in the last decade…the primary architect of this shift is my brilliant colleague David M. Raup….Dave Raup is the best of the best.
Stephen J. Gould
Bad Genes or Bad Luck by David Raup
Amen brother Gould!
But that is not the end of problems, only the beginning. We have the paradoxical situation where the fossil record accumulates, but then this must happen against the contrary forces of erosion. Thus, the fossil record must:
1. fortuitously form one fossil layer via a fortuitous catastrophe
2. have that layer separated from the layer above it by a long era of stasis (no activity)
3. then another fortuitous catastrophe creates the next layer
4. etc.
All this must happen while miraculously avoiding the problem of erosion. This leads to a mechanical contradiction. Is this contradiction resolved? No, just obfuscated away and swept under the rug and defended by ridicule of those who would dare to ask common sense questions.
Ariel Roth of Geoscience Research points out that reasonable estimates of erosion rates of 6 centimeters/1000 year would wipe out not only the geological “column” but even the continents above sea level in short order.
By noting the rates at which the surfaces of the continents are eroded and carried away by rivers to the oceans (see section 2 for specific values), one can calculate the length of time required to remove a given thickness of the continents. Judson and Ritter (1964) have estimated that for the United States the rate of erosion averages 6.1 cm/1000 years. At this rate of denudation the continents, which average 623 m above sea level, would be eroded to sea level in a mere 10.2 Ma [million years]
….
It has been suggested that mountains still exist because they are constantly being renewed by uplift from below. However, this process of uplift could not go through even one complete cycle of erosion and uplift without eradicating the layers of the geologic column found in them. Present erosion rates would tend to rapidly eradicate evidence of older sediments; yet these sediments are still very well-represented, both in mountains and elsewhere.
….
There is little question that there is some difficulty in reconciling present erosion rates with standard geochronology.
On top of that, why aren’t the oceans saturated solutions of salt and minerals? If rain has been pouring on land and pumping salt and other minerals into the oceans, why aren’t they saturated? That complication may be resolvable, but one does not get the feeling the questions are even welcome, much less attempts at resolution.
When I’ve asked geologists, PandasThumbsters about these difficulties, I get just get rude rebuffs. I think to myself, “if not for my sake, won’t they want to answer these questions for the sake of curious aspiring Darwinists?”. Maybe they won’t answer these questions because they have none.
NOTES:
1. The title contains the word: “Cocktail” to emphasize the speculative, informal nature of this essay. I elaborate more about the relevance of such topics to ID in The relevance of YEC to ID
2. here is the link to Ariel Roth’s paper:
http://www.grisda.org/origins/13064.htm
and a long excerpt
By noting the rates at which the surfaces of the continents are eroded and carried away by rivers to the oceans (see section 2 for specific values), one can calculate the length of time required to remove a given thickness of the continents. Judson and Ritter (1964) have estimated that for the United States the rate of erosion averages 6.1 cm/1000 years. At this rate of denudation the continents, which average 623 m above sea level, would be eroded to sea level in a mere 10.2 Ma. In other words, at this rate the present continents would be eroded over 340 times in the 3500 Ma assumed for the age of the continents. The observation by the famous geologist Powell that “mountains cannot long remain mountains” certainly seems appropriate. The estimate of 10 Ma given above has been a well-accepted figure (Schumm 1963) and has subsequently been referred to in a number of publications including Dott and Batten (1971, p. 136) and Garrels and Mackenzie (1971, pp. 114-115). Earlier, Dole and Stabler (1909) gave figures indicating that it would take about twice as long. Judson (1968), while correcting for human activity, suggests 34 Ma for complete erosion of the continents. None of these figures does much to alleviate the discrepancy which is especially significant when one considers mountain ranges such as the Caledonides of western Europe and the Appalachians of North America which are assumed to be several hundred Ma old. Why are these ranges here today if they are so old?
Rates of erosion are greater in high mountains and lower in regions of less relief (Ahnert 1970, Bloom 1971, Ruxton and McDougall 1967, and Schumm 1963). Ruxton and McDougall (1967) report erosion rates of 8 cm/1000 years near sea level and 52 cm/1000 years at an altitude of 975 m in the Hydrographers Range in Papua. Rates of 92 cm/1000 years are reported for the Guatemala-Mexico Border Mountains (Corbel 1959), 100 cm/1000 years for the Himalayas (Menard 1961), and in the Mt. Rainier region of Washington Mills (1976) documents erosion rates of up to 800 cm/1000 years. Probably the highest recorded regional rate is 1900 cm/1000 years from a volcano in New Guinea (Ollier and Brown 1971).
It has been suggested that mountains still exist because they are constantly being renewed by uplift from below. However, this process of uplift could not go through even one complete cycle of erosion and uplift without eradicating the layers of the geologic column found in them. Present erosion rates would tend to rapidly eradicate evidence of older sediments; yet these sediments are still very well-represented, both in mountains and elsewhere.
Other attempts to reconcile average present erosion rates to geologic time include suggestions that man’s activities, especially agricultural practices, have increased the rate of erosion, making present rates uncharacteristically rapid. Such an explanation seems inadequate to account for a several hundred-fold discrepancy. Gilluly et al. (1968, p. 79) propose that farming may have increased average erosion rates by a factor of less than 2, while Judson (1968) suggests about 2½ times. Others have suggested that the climate of the past may have been more dry or the relief flatter, resulting in slower erosion rates. We now have some interior basins such as central Australia where there is no drainage and no removal of sediment, but these are exceptions. The lush vegetation evident in significant sections of the fossil record suggests at least some wetter conditions in the past. Characteristically, current erosion rates in hot, dry lowlands with gradients 0.001 or less, are not sufficiently slower. Corbel (1959) indicates rates of 1.2 cm/1000 years for the hot dry plains of the Mediterranean region and New Mexico. The lowest rates found in a study of 20 river basins (Ahnert 1970) was 1.6 cm/1000 years for basins in Texas and England. These slower rates do not solve a discrepancy of several hundred-fold, and one would have to postulate different past conditions for a major area of the earth during a significant proportion of earth history to provide a resolution to the problem.
A different context can serve to emphasize the question of rates of erosion. If it is assumed that 2.5 km of continents have been eroded in the past (our present continents average about one fourth that thickness above sea level) and if it is assumed that erosion proceeds at the rate of 3 cm/1000 years (half of the presently observed rate to correct for the effects of modern agricultural pursuits), then it would take about 83 Ma to erode a 2.5 km thickness of continental crust. In other words, at present rates of erosion, continents 2.5 km thick could have been eroded 42 times during the assumed 3500 Ma age for the continents, or continents 106 km thick would have been eroded once. There is little question that there is some difficulty in reconciling present erosion rates with standard geochronology.
scordova:
Interesting post.
Just brainstorming here a bit:
Are there known areas that preserve most, or perhaps all, of the column? If not, how much of a column actually exists in any particular location — a couple of layers, a handful?
If the column, rather than existing in reality, is really just a representation of what “would exist,” but for things like erosion, uneven deposition and so on, that in itself is not necessarily problematic. But then the question is whether radiometric dating is consistent across multiple finds. For example, if a cretaceous-like fossil is found in location A, buried at say 10M, and a similar fossil is found in location B, buried at say 1000M, but they both give nearly identical radiometric dating, this would tend so support the traditional view, would it not?
Well, yes and no. If we’re thinking of animals lying around on the bare ground, true, they are not likely to fossilize. But if we think of local situations, like the La Brea tar pits, then there could be plenty of local circumstances in which an organism could be preserved — especially small organisms — without a large catastrophic event.
I realize evolutionists shamelessly point to the paucity of the fossil record whenever it doesn’t conform to their storyline, and I do tend to think that enough fossils have been found to provide a decent glimpse of what kind of life was around (at least in terms of types of organisms, where they lived, etc.). But certainly we don’t have anything even close to the number of individual organisms preserved in the fossil record that actually lived. With that in mind, couldn’t the traditionalist argue that the number of fossils that we do have (compared with the number of organisms that actually lived) is well within small percentage of organisms that would have been preserved by isolated local situations, and even pure luck, without having to invoke mass catastrophes?
I’m having trouble making out what you are saying there, but this would seem to suggest that you think that typically (or at least much of the time) we find a massive number of fossils coinciding with the time that there are mass extinctions.
Do you have any examples of this sort of thing? What “rapid simultaneous burial” events are you referring to?
The only thing in the fossil record that suggests or “indicates” an extinction event, is that we stop finding fossils of certain species.
For instance, we hardly see a mass worldwide burial of dinosaurs at the time they went extinct. In fact, it so difficult to find dino fossils just before the formation of the Chicxulub crater, that for years many argued that the crater could not be related to the dino extinction since dinos were already extinct. It took years of searching to find dino fossils that establish that they still existed at the time of asteroid strike.
We actually see dino numbers dwindle up to their extinction (which is why I’m pretty sure most paleontologists believe that dinos were already in some sort of trouble at the time the Chicxulub asteroid hit, and so the asteroid was just the final nail in the coffin.)
That would be consistent with Dr. Larson’s interpretation of the evidence. We actually have a pretty firm idea what happened to the dinosaurs.
http://farm3.staticflickr.com/.....896567.jpg
or perhaps Regan was right:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_5cLm.....xtinct.jpg
It’s a possibility, and obviously I can’t say for sure.
But certain radiometric dates date rocks, not biological artifacts. What do I mean? A horse might die in a layer of rocks, and the rocks are a few hundred million years old, but the horse fossil is only a few thousand. It doesn’t mean radiomentric dates of the rocks are wrong, just inappropriate to date the strata!
It could be more complicated than what we might suppose. Problematic first off is that discordant dates are fixed to match prevailing paradigms such that there are no published disagreements. This isn’t necessarily dishonest, just that people might toss out an anomaly supposing an experimental error or procedure.
So yes we could find dates in agreement, but what do we do with dates that disagree? Suppose somone found one anomalous radiometric date. Would that be sufficient to overturn the geological column? How many discordant dates do we need to find before we declare radiometric dating unreliable.
We do have some examples reported by creationists of discordant dates. The problem is both sides (and I don’t mean to smear either side), have extreme reasons to be prejudiced. So even if the results were gathered in good faith by each side, it doesn’t command a lot of trust.
Thankfully, certain measurements can be repeated if one is really determined. The problem is that it is expensive. Say a creationist organization put out a million dollars to do a study, would anyone but creationists find it believable even if the results were gathered in good faith?
YECs have acknowledge radiometric isotopic ratios are a serious problem. Like I said, neither side seems to be free of serious conflicts. Each side can write a laundry list critical of the other, and unline the ID vs. Darwin debate or ID vs. mindless OOL, there is no clear victor.
I have some notes you might find interesting.
http://justpaste.it/2q1a
First are some interesting inconsistencies with K/Ar dating with examples in mainstream literature about finds that are redated a few times until the expected numbers are returned. Particularly I don’t know how to explain why dinosaur bones consistently C14 date to tens of thousands of years (all C14 should be gone after a 100k), or why the same fossils have biomolecules that likewise couldn’t have survived that long.
The geological “column” tells a story that finds an explanation to accommodate any discovery but is not able to successfuly predict anything.
For example, it’s been demonstrated in lab experiments (at Colorado State University?) that stratification can occur rapidly through lateral motion of a sand mixture propelled by fast moving water. The angle of the strata in these conditions depend on the velocity of the water.
Any fossils in these strata must be contemporary with each other–although Darwinists will probably maintain that under these conditions, previously fossilized remains must have been redeposited, or in other cases involving fossils in strata supposedly millions of years apart, the cause must have been “repeated evolution.” There’s always a speculative explanation available.
The whole argument makes one feel like an involuntary participant in a Monty Python “Dead Parrot” skit.
Joe Coder,
From your link:
LOL!
Thanks!
JoeCoder,
Man what a Gold Mine! You made my day!
Here is a report of rapid burial as I described:
The World’s Largest Fossil Wilderness
1. it is only speculated it was an earthquake that caused the sudden death of this forrest
2. it is widely agreed that the fossilzation process did not take millions of years, weeks is the figure provided
3. a deposition of 15 to 30 feet in a few weeks at most, not millions of years
4. what of the other presumed layers in the “column”. From what I hear, this is typical, the other layers of the “column” aren’t usually found at a dig site.
5. the fossilization was the result of an accident, a catastrophe, not slow gradual process
6. what is depicted is the snapshot of weeks at the most, not hundreds of millions of years, it is only presumed that the samples are hundreds of millions of years old.
7. no mention of c-14 dating, if c-14 is present, then these are recent fossils not fossils hundreds of millions of years old. That is a testable hypothesis. 🙂
Here is a curious admission from TalkOrigins:
So TalkOrigins claims there were no plants in the Cambrian about 500 million years ago but the flowering plants appeared 140 million years ago.
But that is contraverted by this 1952 article from Nature ““Spores and Tracheids from the Cambrian of Kashmir,”
http://www.nature.com/nature/j.....056a0.html
Which means we have fossils making a surprise apperacnce about 360 million years before they were supposed to appear. So did the paleo community just decide we can’t assume plants existed in the Cambrian, that the 1952 paper in nature was a mistake, and any future discoveries of Cambrian plants is just a contamination error?
So any time we get an anomaly, is it just swept under the rug as some sort of contamination rather than a counterexample to the prevailing paradigm? Whenever observations can just be cherry picked to conform to a prevailing story, it effectively immunizes itself from any possibility of falsification.
If this sort of cherry picking is routine, no falsification is possible.
And last but not least, from the NCSE website:
Man Contemporary with Dinosaurs
So the thought isn’t outrageous to the Russians. Credit the NCSE for being transparent for a change about possible, radical developments.
AMEN AMEN AMEN
The fossil sequences, descent and process, are based on deposition events.
Evolutionary biology is nothing without the geology. Nothing but a hunch.
There is no column anywhere but only segregated types of fossils here and there overlying each other. Then they add them up from different areas and behold a column is invoked to be holding a story of evolution.
Great post here but it can go further.
if the geology is being questioned on UD here then why not reason as follows.
That if the geology is wrong then the biology conclusions are wrong.
If the biology conclusions are wrong then it means these conclusions were NEVER based on biological investigation but only were using biological data points and then using geological presumptions of strata/time and the dots were connected.
I n short geology has been used by evolution to make biological conclusions that are not made by the mere evidence from biology.
Its been a grand logical fallacy.
Evolutionary biology is not a biological theory but only a hypothesis.
Its main points are geological points with minor data points of biology thrown in.
if evolution didn’t have the fossils and the ideas about where they are found would evolution have any evidence??
No!!
I highly recommend picking up Milton’s book; I have my own copy at home. It’s a fascinating read. As I pointed out in another thread, Darwin seized on Lyell’s interpretation of geology for his “Origin of Species” because this offered him what he needed for evolution to have occurred: unlimited time. Uniformitarianism provided that. Afterwards, geology and biology became intertwined with geologists explaining their discoveries in light of evolution.
The problem with this theory was noted in 1958. Further observing that there is no actual “record of the rocks” in their assumed order is the following admission from the work Introduction to Geology (1958; p. 11) by H. E. Brown, V. E. Monnett and J. W. Stovall:
“Whatever his method of approach, the geologist must take cognizance of the following facts. . . . There is no place on the earth where a complete record of the rocks is present. Some areas have been the sites of deposition of sediment for millions of years, whereas other regions have been subjected to the wearing action of natural agencies for equal periods of time. To reconstruct the history of the earth, scattered bits of information from thousands of locations all over the world must be pieced together. The results will be at best only a very incomplete record. If the complete story of the earth is compared to an encyclopedia of thirty volumes, then we can seldom hope to find even one complete volume in a given area. Sometimes only a few chapters, perhaps only a paragraph or two, will be the total geological contribution of a region; indeed, we are often reduced to studying scattered bits of information more nearly comparable to a few words or letters.”
In other words, the entire geologic column, with its high-sounding eras, periods and epochs, is merely a matter of guesswork, a hypothetical structure. There is no place on earth where such a succession of rock strata exists.
But not only that. Often geologists have found rock layers resting on one another in the reverse order; that is, a stratum having fossils of simple organisms on top of one having more complex ones.
Byron C. Nelson, in his book The Deluge Story in Stone, refers to an area comprising part of Montana, Alberta and British Columbia, fully 7,000 square miles, where Precambrian rock (said to be formed over a thousand million years ago) lies above “Cretaceous” strata (which are supposed to be less than two hundred and fifty thousand years old).
Two contributions to the discussion:
(1) If you haven’t heard or read about it, here’s an impressive catastrophic evidence. Steve Austin’s findings on vast stretches of nautiloid fossils with similar directional orientation.: http://youtu.be/RaOhaNO9cP0
(2) Some key problems with the evolutionary interpretation of the fossil record is questioned well in this video. (note ideas pertaining to living fossils – don’t assume you know what will be said about that as an issue). Presented by Ian Juby: http://youtu.be/lTWZJBXAZJA
One of my favorite fossil record mind-benders (if one were to accept the old gradual geologic column hypothesis):
Source: http://www.detectingdesign.com/fossilrecord.html
Ref in source:
56. http://www.grisda.org/origins/09067.htm
Sal,
You liked Joe Coder’s report. Here is a video on the carbon 14 data (same or related). Watch it this one before it’s taken down:
http://youtu.be/QbdH3l1UjPQ
This one is by a creationist on the same (or similar) data:
http://youtu.be/q7Yp2Psykfw
Finally, here’s the actual call to Jack Horner:
http://youtu.be/8T3rEX4zq_4
Hi Barb,
Imagine that we actually found a place on Earth that has geologic layers representing every geologic time period. That would mean that that location has been experiencing steady (more or less) sedimentation, essentially non-stop, and never erosion, nor any other disruption, for about a billion years. Such a thing is so remarkable, that if such a thing were found, it would surely be used as evidence against “old earth” theories of geology.
Also, that numerous spots on Earth have different layers speaks against the idea that a single event like the “Flood” can explain earth’s geology. This is, of course, one reason that even catastrophists long rejected that a single event could explain most geology, but instead proposed numerous large scale events.
Yes, but that’s due to processes that have been understood going back hundreds of years. Steno spoke about such processes, and the ideas were further refined by catastrophists long before the uniformitarians or evolutionists arrived on the scene. The uniformitarians and catastrophists disagreed on many things, but among the things they agreed on was the chronological order of the geologic layers.
The global flood recorded in Genesis would not be merely a single watery/flood event. The biblical model would account for an ‘ice-age’ and hundreds of years of subsequent regional scale catastrophes.
Even-so, specifically proving or not the global flood isn’t the aim of Sal’s blog posting here. Numerous catastrophic watery events events would be just as consistent with his argument, as I understand it.
There are some claims the entire (Phranezoic from 600 million years to today) “column” exists in some spots. At issue how well represented every layer is.
I think one can make credible arguments against specific old fossils without having to invoke a Young Earth. The dino fossils, living bacteria in amber, that bothers me a lot.
Long term radiometric dating rests on a solid theoretical basis, and barring a serious development in physics (which I hope transpires), the YECs know their case faces challenges because of long half-life radio isotopes and the absence of medium-life radio isotopes.
But as far as I can seen, one can still falsify the age of specific fossils without having to invoke a Young Earth. It’s not the victory that the YECs want, but this is one case, I think a valid, non-religious, secular, skeptical, scientific critique can be made about the validity of the age of certain fossils, if not entire layers of the “column”.
C-14 dating is a double edged sword, it can be used on “old” fossils as well, if paleontologists are willing to allow it. Of course they could always claim contamination, but well, it seems like the respectable thing to do is at least try. If we get systematic “errors” indicating youth, that is still a data point that must be accounted for if we want a rigorous inquiry.
http://www.detectingdesign.com.....tamination
AWESOME!!!!
Thanks. Man, I’m behind the curve in terms of recent developments. All the comments here are getting me back up to speed. Thanks JGuy, thanks everyone else too.
I decided to download real player and save this lecture. This is the first time I’ve ever saved a video. I don’t want to lose this one!
Sal
Sal,
Glad you liked it. This is the article that original pointed – or lead – me to the video. Apparently, the data/slides associated with this portion of the conference were removed from public view. You can read a bit of background on the presentation from there:
http://creation.com/c14-dinos
p.s. just noticed this reference from the creation.com article… it has some data:
http://newgeology.us/presentation48.html
Why did he concede your point? Dinosaurs are not used as index fossils.
Thanks for having the courage to honestly examine this matter. It seems you haven’t totally forsaken your YEC roots.
True. However, when we give up that premise, then it becomes just opinion and whose just so story makes more sense. There is the red blood cell find in dinosaur fossils, but most evolutionists just ignore it or deny it or claim contamination because they already KNOW it is an impossibility.
Plus, they KNOW the earth is old because they have mountains of evidence for evolution already. This precludes them from honestly considering this idea of a young earth. Any just so story is rationalized and accepted because they already KNOW the earth is old.
So I don’t see much of a difference.
True. Neither side has all the answers. That is to be expected because we are dealing with history – unobservable, unrepeatable, untestable history.
So I seriously doubt either side can prevail on empirical grounds alone. How can you fight a just so story?
Creationists would agree with the importance of skepticism, but like I mentioned, we might question whether the dispute can actually be indisputably settled by empirical means alone. But who knows? Maybe irrefutable proof or very strong proof might be found some day. Lots of other scientific certainties have been overturned in the past. Why not this?
Even some of the responses you got show that you can find a story to explain the evidence if you try hard enough. So given the fact that an old earth is overwhelmingly the dominant view of scientists, just so stories to explain the creationist evidence will always be preferable I think.
Here is a specific example of this very problem: CEH: What Is the Evidence for Feathers Before Flight?
http://crev.info/2013/05/what-.....re-flight/
So where does that leave uniformitarianism? If not falsified(something hard to do in evolutionary theory), it should certainly be brought into question at least.
You have brought to light a lot of the empirical evidence creationists point to in support of their view here and for that I am grateful. Too often people are ignorant of what evidence actually does exist!
By the way, along those lines, I would be curious as to what you think of this article: “101 Evidences for a Young Age of the Earth and the Creation”
creation.com/age-of-the-earth?
I’m assuming you are familiar with it.
Good article!
I agree with you that this is a serious challenge for YEC ideas, but here is where theories about the global flood come in that might help to show the decay rate was not always consistent. This becomes a creationist just so story I guess, but if we take the biblical record as true, there must be an explanation somewhere. That is our approach.
But I agree that we should be able to prove that certain fossils are NOT millions of years old like claimed. And if not, that has serious implications for evolutionary theory!
Again, you are probably familiar with these arguments against radiometric dating and the problems with radiometric dating, but just for fun, here are a bunch of articles on it from a creationist perspective:
http://creation.com/radiometri.....nd-answers
See especially the section entitled: Is there any evidence that the radioactive decay rate might not have been constant?”
I didn’t find anything about the “absence of medium-life radio isotopes” though.
DiEb,
Did you just gloss over the fossilization process? Quality fossilization such as permineralization happen quickly. I gave an example in the comment section of the fossil forrest that even professionals admit formed in a matter of weeks at most, maybe 15 to 30 feet, rapid burial (rapid relative to hundreds of thousands of years). See comment #10. The point isn’t really discussed in the mainstreams is it, but it ought to be obvious. 🙂
So the point is conceded by your side, permineralized fossils happen quickly.
That doesn’t change the fact permineralization happens quickly and not over millions of years. But now that you have pointed out that Dino’s aren’t used as index fossils, the fact that C-14 dates for several dinos indicate they are young, and outher quantum phenomenon back this up (such as lack of sufficient chemical racemization which I’ll post on later), then you’ve just provided potential counter examples to suggest index fossils provide misleading ages.
As far as I can tell, assuming an old ages for the Earth, rocks are difficult to use to date strata because a billion year old rock could be buried with a creature that died 100 years ago. So all one really has left are C-14 dates and index fossils, but C-14 could be the undoing of the geological column. Live by the sword of C-14, die by the sword of C-14.
Thanks for you comment.
Sal
My roots were old-Earth Darwinism, not YEC. I was raised in a Catholic home and learned and accepted evolutionism through the teachings of science in public school.
I decided Darwinism was false, but when I learned of the possibility of variable speed of light cosmologies (see: VSL) I became open to YEC. What I posted in this thread are my reason to have doubts about the geological column.
Thanks for your comments.
Wow! Thanks for pointing that out! And to make this worse, we know any permineralized fossils in the Cretacious layer had to have been fossilized quickly. Thus the Cretacious layer itself could have be formed in less than an year, yet they are in reverse order, 7000 square miles no less! Glorious. Glorious!
DiEB @24:
Just curious: How do we know the lifespan of an extinct species? Is it not by examining the fossil record?
I’m just wondering if the “index fossil” idea isn’t a bit circular . . .
Regarding that, here is a bibliography by Walt Brown. Anyone is welcome to cross check the quotations and post their thoughts in this discussion:
I always wonder how this could be since we have radiomentric dating, but then it dawned on me after I wrote the original article above, that radiometric dating of rocks can’t affix the date of a strata of fossils, C-14 is the best IF (and emphasize IF) there are remaining trace amounts of C-14. But if there are remaining trace amounts of C-14 not due to contamination, the fossils are young. QED.
JGuy,
Man, I’ve been so out of the loop. Developments happening so quickly I can’t keep up. This has been the most fun I’ve had at UD in a long time.
From your link:
The facts are not cooperating with the geological column, and it would seem, repeatable testable observations can overthrow an entire cottage industry of paleontology and Darwinian evolution.
If an idea like the geological column lives by the sword of science, it can die by the sword of science.
FYI, creation.com has a critique of Walt Brown’s Hydroplate theory: http://creation.com/hydroplate-theory . I’m skeptical because he’s never attempted to publish anything about it even in creation journals, and all data on it is in his non peer-reviewed book.
He’s become an outcast in the YEC community, but one can’t run away from the fact he’s very smart, very educated, and taught at secular universities.
For what its worth, I can’t publish in creation journals either, and I’m supposedly more qualified in certain topics than some of those who’ve published there (which isn’t saying much since I don’t know squat). They may not like me saying it, but creationist journals are often run like a church not a scientific enterprise where doubt and skepticism and pointed criticism from non-creationists quarters are not welcome. Oh well.
That said, when I spoke to Walt a few years ago he was working on explaining long term radioactivity. So even supposing there is a different explanation than Hydroplate theory, there is a lot of good informational stuff in his website.
It is very refreshing to actually see YECs writing competing theories. That is a good thing rather than everyone agreeing, imho. Whatever is true that God wants us to know will eventually come to light. It is inevitable, it is by Design.
Whatever happens to Walt’s theories, he was the most influential in bringing over to the YEC camp (but barely).
goodusername@17:
Well, some may wonder if the story of the whole earth being covered with water is a myth or at least an exaggeration. To some extent the earth is still flooded. Seawater covers about 71 percent of the earth’s surface. So in reality the floodwaters are still here. And if the glaciers and polar ice caps were to melt, the sea level would rise to cover cities like New York and Tokyo.
Geologists studying the landscape of the northwestern United States believe that as many as 100 ancient catastrophic floods once washed over the area. One such flood is said to have roared through the region with a wall of water 2,000 feet [600 m] high, traveling at 65 miles an hour [105 km/hr]—a flood of 500 cubic miles [2,000 cu km] of water, weighing more than two trillion tons. Similar findings have led other scientists to believe that a global flood is a distinct possibility.
I mentioned this in another thread, but my problem is not the evidence, it’s the interpretation of the evidence. I believe that to be the case here. If we grant that a great flood could have happened, why have scientists found no trace of it? Perhaps they have, but they interpret the evidence some other way. For example, orthodox science teaches that the surface of the earth has been shaped in many places by powerful glaciers during a series of ice ages. But apparent evidence of glacial activity can sometimes be the result of water action. Very likely, then, some of the evidence for the Flood is being misread as evidence of an ice age.
Concerning the time when scientists were developing their theory of ice ages, we read: “They were finding ice ages at every stage of the geologic history, in keeping with the philosophy of uniformity. Careful reexamination of the evidence in recent years, however, has rejected many of these ice ages; formations once identified as glacial moraines have been reinterpreted as beds laid down by mudflows, submarine landslides and turbidity currents: avalanches of turbid water that carry silt, sand and gravel out over the deep-ocean floor.”
An editorial in the magazine Biblical Archaeologist observed: “It is important to remember that the story of a great flood is one of the most widespread traditions in human culture . . . Nevertheless behind the oldest traditions found in Near Eastern sources, there may well be an actual flood of gigantic proportions dating from one of the pluvial periods . . . many thousands of years ago.” The pluvial periods were times when the surface of the earth was much wetter than now. Freshwater lakes around the world were much larger. It is theorized that the wetness was caused by heavy rains associated with the end of the ice ages. But some have suggested that on one occasion the extreme wetness of the earth’s surface was a result of the Flood.
Geology professor John McCampbell once wrote: “The essential differences between Biblical catastrophism [the Flood] and evolutionary uniformitarianism are not over the factual data of geology but over the interpretations of those data. The interpretation preferred will depend largely upon the background and presuppositions of the individual student.”
I’d like to add, if not merely emphasize, that though the creationist scientists assume (for reasons) the bible, they do not avoid the hard questions. Or even try to brush them under the rug.
For example, in the zircon experiments, the RATE team did not try to argue that radioactive decay did not happen. They followed the evidence and argued that it DID happen. Even more, they went a step further to substantiate stronger evidence – in the case of zircons – that it actually did contain evidence of radioactive decay – i.e. that the radioactive parent:daughter ratios were not contaminants. In this case, they used the fissure track counts to prove this. Granted, it worked in their favor, in the long run, but such is also the case a YEC would expect & hope to find following the evidence beyond early hurdles.
I’ve even read some ICR literature that suggested there does seem to exist a real/general trending of increased radioactive decay as we go deeper into strata. I’m not sure on the entire context of that thought though. Even so, the point here is, they don’t ignore the data that some anti-creationist or evolutionists might think happens.
JGuy,
A testable thesis is to dig really deep, say 20 miles. Walt says we ought to see a scarcity of Uranium and other long term radioisotopes. 🙂 If so, he’ll have the edge over other creationists, but more importantly, it will redefine the debate over radioisotopes as it will show radiation originated from something other than the Big Bang, Steller Evolution, and Supernovas. It is speculative to be sure, but, well…..I came across some interesting observations where radiation could created by electricity.
See:
http://www.nature.com/nature/j.....773a0.html
and
http://cer.ucsd.edu/sbott/pape.....review.pdf
Say what? Chemical and Electrical process creating neutrons? I’ve also hear them generating proton flows and transmutation! Nuclear alchemy with electricity!
href=http://www.22passi.it/downloads/Roma2012.pdf
If this is true, it’s not too much of a stretch to suppose certain radio isotopes are recent. If there were a global catastrophe under specialized conditions, lots of elements, radioisotopes could be synthesized. It would be interesting what this sort of “nucleosynthesis” would generate in terms of elements, but what if it accorded with the isotope ratios of interest?
Too hard to tell right now, but this is heartening.
Sal
Sal,
This is off topic, but since you claimed to be out of the loop on some recent creationist relevant studies. This paper is something worth noting if you haven’t seen it, and keeping track of any studies relevant to it.
Especially since sequencing technology has advanced over the past couple years to enable sequencing entire genomes in just a few days for about $1000. What I’m eagerly waiting for is redone tests on a wide range of chimps to compare to humans… to confirm further the argument of this paper:
http://www.answersingenesis.or.....chromosome
If done… Haldane’s Dilemma will be super-charged, and I doubt even ardent evolutionists could comfortably ignore the problem.
It’s exciting to be a YEC 🙂
JGuy,
WOW! Thanks. Tomkins is a real scientist. Former faculty of Clemson University (a secular university).
What Walter ReMine told me was the DNA comparisons between humans and Chimps was not really legitimate. It would be akin to taking words in one book and seeing that 99% of the words in that book can be found in another book. That would be an obviously illegitimate comparison, but evolutionists have not been doing much better with their “optimized alignments” where they compare genes (analogous to words) versus actual comparison of sentences, paragraphs and chapters.
No kidding, not just Haldane’s dilemma, but Muller’s Ratchet, Nachman and Crowell’s Paradox, Kondrashov’s Question, Crows concerns, Walker/Keightley Degeneration, etc.
They can’t, that’s why they are beginning the rumbling for large scale eugenics to stem the tide of genetic deterioration because Darwinian evolution obviously isn’t working to save the human race from dying.
Unfortunately Tomkins essay was at a creationist site. It’s always more fun to hear it from the Darwinists themselves. 🙂
Sal, I’ve read what your referring to before, at least on of those. You have a good point and it would challenge the common explanation of the origin of the radioactive elements.
Side thought: Never really thought much about it, but it’s interesting that fusion and fission reactions are both exothermic. Not sure what to do with that at the moment.
…Anyway…
My question is how we can account for the heat of the apparent radioactive decay. So far, for me, the best explanation is purely intuitive, and is that perhaps the expansion of space absorbs the excess energy. R.Humphreys suggests a possible explanation just like that in one of the RATE books. Even though Humphreys might have issue with a changing speed of light, this fundamental change in space is one reason I have had no problems with considering changing ‘constants’ in the past. The problem is, how to test this explanation. As you know, I’ve always been interested in the idea of things like cdk. Not to re-open that discussion, but it has an intuitive resonance with me…at least while I consider the notion of some kind of expansion (temporary or otherwise) of the fabric of space.
As for Brown’s ideas and possibly testing them… I think the Japanese have drilled the deepest in one of their projects. If I’m not mistaken it’s called the Moho project or something like that. Maybe, they will come up with some samples to validate this. Sorry..kinda typing off the cuff here.
LOL! No doubt. That’s why I’m waiting eagerly for some published results… I will be difficult to hide. Akin to hiding an elephant in a bathtub.
I received an email from Dr. Robert Carter (via creation.com) on this, and he is also waiting for new sequencing reports. They have an inquiry option on their website.
Also, the measured modern mutation rates of the y-Chromosome. This was another thing I mentioned I’m waiting for published results on. The prediction I’m making – based on obvious YEC ideas – is that observed (modern) mutation rates will place y-Chromosomal Adam (I prefer Y-Chromosomal Noah) to about 4000 years ago. This will be a perfect fit for the YEC model, especially as mitochondrial Eve is already placed at about 6000 years ago using observed (modern) mutation rates.
http://www.popsci.com/science/.....cean-floor
http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/01/.....ll-mission
http://www.icr.org/article/7525/
A bit ashamed at myself in comment 41 for being or even sounding prideful (and too many I’s) … That prediction should be obvious in the YEC community – it’s not an independent prediction of mine. It is one I’m eager to see tested though.
Just found this. Remine interviewed back in July 2012:
http://kgov.com/Walter-ReMine
http://kgov.s3.amazonaws.com/b.....BEL135.mp3
There are a series of arguments in this thread that do not help address the words of the title. Yes, fossilisation requires rapid burial, and the rates of burial do not match up to the slow sedimentation rates invoked by uniformitarians. scordova writes: “We have to imagine the long periods of stasis are actually represented, because the fossil layers themselves must have formed in a few years if not a few minutes!” This is fair enough – but it does not address the issue of the validity of the Geological Column. Ariel Roth is quoted to show that present erosion dates do not map onto the timescales associated with the Geological Column. But to my knowledge, Roth does not set out to falsify the Geological Column concept, but to develop a catastrophist understanding of it. There are many other points that can be made here, especially relating to comments that go further than the original post. I recommend that issues raised are defined more clearly and kept distinct. The point of my comment is to say that catastrophism in geology does not falsify the Geological Column concept. I also recommend that a greater effort is made to relate this topic to ID. If geological timescales can be shown to be shorter, then it is easier to show that Darwinian gradualism is NOT demonstrated by the fossil record.
David,
Thank you for the constructive criticisms and taking time to read both the original post and the comment section. The next iteration of this (to be posted elsewhere, not at UD) will incorporate your suggestions.
Thanks!
Sal
“LOL! No doubt. That’s why I’m waiting eagerly for some published results… I will be difficult to hide. Akin to hiding an elephant in a bathtub.
I received an email from Dr. Robert Carter (via creation.com) on this, and he is also waiting for new sequencing reports. They have an inquiry option on their website.
Also, the measured modern mutation rates of the y-Chromosome. This was another thing I mentioned I’m waiting for published results on. The prediction I’m making – based on obvious YEC ideas – is that observed (modern) mutation rates will place y-Chromosomal Adam (I prefer Y-Chromosomal Noah) to about 4000 years ago. This will be a perfect fit for the YEC model, especially as mitochondrial Eve is already placed at about 6000 years ago using observed (modern) mutation rates.”
I predict that they will find human and chimpanzee DNA will remain as close as ever when they are done the new comparisons confirming 150 years of rigorous study. I also predict that IDists and creationists will try to spin the results to match their ideology and tell their followers that the Darwinists were trying to deceive the public.
JLAfan2001 you state:
“I predict that they will find human and chimpanzee DNA will remain as close as ever when they are done the new comparisons confirming 150 years of rigorous study.”
Would this be the 99% similarity figure you are betting your eternal soul on JLAfan2001? If so, I don’t think this bet is going to work out well for you.
Guy Walks Into a Bar and Thinks He’s a Chimpanzee: The Unbearable Lightness of Chimp-Human Genome Similarity – 2009
Excerpt: One can seriously call into question the statement that human and chimp genomes are 99% identical. For one thing, it has been noted in the literature that the exact degree of identity between the two genomes is as yet unknown (Cohen, J., 2007. Relative differences: The myth of 1% Science 316: 1836.). ,,, In short, the figure of identity that one wants to use is dependent on various methodological factors.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....think.html
Even ignoring the subjective bias of ‘various methodological factors’ that Darwinists introduce into these similarity studies, the first inkling, at least for me, that something was terribly amiss with the oft quoted 99% similarity figure was this,,,
Humans and chimps have 95 percent DNA compatibility, not 98.5 percent, research shows – 2002
Excerpt: Genetic studies for decades have estimated that humans and chimpanzees possess genomes that are about 98.5 percent similar. In other words, of the three billion base pairs along the DNA helix, nearly 99 of every 100 would be exactly identical.
However, new work by one of the co-developers of the method used to analyze genetic similarities between species says the figure should be revised downward to 95 percent.
http://www.caltech.edu/content.....arch-shows
and then this,,,
Chimps are not like humans – May 2004
Excerpt: the International Chimpanzee Chromosome 22 Consortium reports that 83% of chimpanzee chromosome 22 proteins are different from their human counterparts,,, The results reported this week showed that “83% of the genes have changed between the human and the chimpanzee—only 17% are identical—so that means that the impression that comes from the 1.2% [sequence] difference is [misleading]. In the case of protein structures, it has a big effect,” Sakaki said.
http://cmbi.bjmu.edu.cn/news/0405/119.htm
this had caught my eye in 2008,,,
Chimpanzee?
10-10-2008 – Dr Richard Buggs – research geneticist at the University of Florida
…Therefore the total similarity of the genomes could be below 70%.
http://www.idnet.com.au/files/pdf/Chimpanzee.pdf
And then this caught my eye in 2011:
Study Reports a Whopping “23% of Our Genome” Contradicts Standard Human-Ape Evolutionary Phylogeny – Casey Luskin – June 2011
Excerpt: For about 23% of our genome, we share no immediate genetic ancestry with our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. This encompasses genes and exons to the same extent as intergenic regions. We conclude that about 1/3 of our genes started to evolve as human-specific lineages before the differentiation of human, chimps, and gorillas took place. (of note; 1/3 of our genes is equal to about 7000 genes that we do not share with chimpanzees)
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....47041.html
In late 2011 Jeffrey P. Tomkins, using an extremely conservative approach, reached the figure of 87% similarity:
Genome-Wide DNA Alignment Similarity (Identity) for 40,000 Chimpanzee DNA Sequences Queried against the Human Genome is 86–89% – Jeffrey P. Tomkins – December 28, 2011
Excerpt: A common claim that is propagated through obfuscated research publications and popular evolutionary science authors is that the DNA of chimpanzees or chimps (Pan troglodytes) and humans (Homo sapiens) is about 98–99% similar. A major problem with nearly all past human-chimp comparative DNA studies is that data often goes through several levels of pre-screening, filtering and selection before being aligned, summarized, and discussed. Non-alignable regions are typically omitted and gaps in alignments are often discarded or obfuscated.
In an upcoming paper, Tomkins and Bergman (2012) discuss most of the key human-chimp DNA similarity research papers on a case-by-case basis and show that the inclusion of discarded data (when provided) actually suggests a DNA similarity for humans and chimps not greater than 80–87% and quite possibly even less.
http://www.answersingenesis.or.....n1/blastin
Genomic monkey business – similarity re-evaluated using omitted data – by Jeffrey Tomkins and Jerry Bergman
Excerpt: A review of the common claim that the human and chimpanzee (chimp) genomes are nearly identical was found to be highly questionable solely by an analysis of the methodology and data outlined in an assortment of key research publications.,,,
Based on the analysis of data provided in various publications, including the often cited 2005 chimpanzee genome report, it is safe to conclude that human–chimp genome similarity is not more than ~87% identical, and possibly not higher than 81%. These revised estimates are based on relevant data omitted from the final similarity estimates typically presented.,,,
Finally, a very recent large-scale human–chimp genome comparison research report spectacularly confirms the data presented in this report. The human–chimp common ancestor paradigm is clearly based more on myth and propaganda than fact.
http://creation.com/human-chim.....-evaluated
Then earlier this year, 2013, with better resolution of data, and still using an extremely conservative approach, Tomkins reached the figure of 70% genetic similarity between chimps and humans:
Comprehensive Analysis of Chimpanzee and Human Chromosomes Reveals Average DNA Similarity of 70% – by Jeffrey P. Tomkins – February 20, 2013
Excerpt: For the chimp autosomes, the amount of optimally aligned DNA sequence provided similarities between 66 and 76%, depending on the chromosome. In general, the smaller and more gene-dense the chromosomes, the higher the DNA similarity—although there were several notable exceptions defying this trend. Only 69% of the chimpanzee X chromosome was similar to human and only 43% of the Y chromosome. Genome-wide, only 70% of the chimpanzee DNA was similar to human under the most optimal sequence-slice conditions. While, chimpanzees and humans share many localized protein-coding regions of high similarity, the overall extreme discontinuity between the two genomes defies evolutionary timescales and dogmatic presuppositions about a common ancestor.
http://www.answersingenesis.or.....chromosome
Though outliers, I’ve even found studies for percent similarity figures as low as 62%,,
A simple statistical test for the alleged “99% genetic identity” between humans and chimps – September 2010
Excerpt: The results obtained are statistically valid. The same test was previously run on a sampling of 1,000 random 30-base patterns and the percentages obtained were almost identical with those obtained in the final test, with 10,000 random 30-base patterns. When human and chimp genomes are compared, the X chromosome is the one showing the highest degree of 30BPM similarity (72.37%), while the Y chromosome shows the lowest degree of 30BPM similarity (30.29%). On average the overall 30BPM similarity, when all chromosomes are taken into consideration, is approximately 62%.
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....nd-chimps/
and even as low as 49%
Do Human and Chimpanzee DNA Indicate an Evolutionary Relationship?
Excerpt: the authors found that only 48.6% of the whole human genome matched chimpanzee nucleotide sequences. [Only 4.8% of the human Y chromosome could be matched to chimpanzee sequences.]
No JLAfan2001, I don’t see this bet going well for you at all.
BA77
A good portion of those cites were from creationists and IDists. Show me the cites from mainstream science that supports the same conclusion. If Tompkins really did find those results, why were they put forth by Answers In Genesis, a group that NO ONE takes seriously? He can single handedly over turn the human-chimp ancestry if they were published in Nature. Oh, that’s right, mainstream science is out to disprove God and bury any evidence against evolution. Has it occurred to you that maybe the reason that Darwinism stands is because it produces the best results and not because of some anti-religion conspiracy? If the goal was to get rid of God using evolution, there wouldn’t be any theistic evolutionists. Every Christian would be against it knowing that it’s goals are to undermine faith. Instead they are viewed as traitors and compromisers rather than looking at the evidence. If the results produced by mainstream science come up the same, I will personally issue an apology to all at UD. In fact, I’m hoping that they find the same results but I doubt it. I can admit when I’m wrong. Can creationits and IDist do the same?
So JLAfan2001, since ‘real’ scientists don’t take creationist websites seriously are you still sticking to your 99% figure even though I listed a few sites from ‘real’ scientists that call that original 99% figure into severe doubt? Shoot even Jerry Coyne, who probably hates Christians more than you do, does not hold to the 99% figure any longer:
JLAfan2001, It sure seems to be a highly dubious figure to bet your eternal soul on, especially given the relative merits of evidence for each position:
I don’t know JLAfan2001, but from my perspective, it sure seems certain that you are making a fools bet if you think that dubious 99% similarity figure disqualifies the fact that you have an eternal soul and that there is an afterlife.
verse and music:
Matthew 16:26
What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?
One Thing Remains [Lyrics] – Kristian Stanfill
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYCJ8EvkGCs
JLAfan2001 @ 48
The ‘closer than ever’ prediction has already been challenged in the literature. If the chimp and human genomes were closer than ever (i.e. >99% similar) as discussed in the literature and media, then there wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) be any published results – by even evolutionists – that indicate anything less. However, that’s not the case:
http://www.pnas.org/content/99/21/13633.full
BUT… I’d agree with you that if it were closer than ever reported. Then both camps would claim some kind of victory.
In my opinion, the percentage difference between human and chimp would have little to no negative bearing on ID or creation as models. In contrast, the percentage will affect Darwinism at least some, and very possibly greatly. Some, in the sense that a nearly identical genome would be arguably a more enigmatic problem than one that remained in the public eye at the 97%-98% mark, because explaining all the morphological & behavioral differences in humans and chimps with less – if say 99.7% similar – would be more difficult… On the other end of the spectrum, Darwinism could not handle a 70% difference.
BA77
I don’t hate Christians. In fact, I haven’t completely left my faith but this makes my point. I was making a case for similar DNA and against Christians who reject it outright for their faith and you accuse me of hatred against all Christians. This is the very thing that you have rallied against Darwinists for. Also, maybe there is an afterlife. I certainly hope there is and there is evidence to support it. However, one can be an atheist and still believe NDEs happen. Perhaps there is a natural reason for ti that science hasn’t investigated because of it’s roots in religion.
Jguy
Thanks for the cite from a mainstream science page. However, if the DNA shows 95, or 97 or 98 or 99% similarity, the fact still remains that they are our closest living relatives. This would be overturned with 70% but that hasn’t been found except by Answers in Genesis which is dubious.
“In my opinion, the percentage difference between human and chimp would have little to no negative bearing on ID or creation as models. In contrast, the percentage will affect Darwinism at least some, and very possibly greatly. Some, in the sense that a nearly identical genome would be arguably a more enigmatic problem than one that remained in the public eye at the 97%-98% mark, because explaining all the morphological & behavioral differences in humans and chimps with less – if say 99.7% similar – would be more difficult… On the other end of the spectrum, Darwinism could not handle a 70% difference.”
This tells me that you are already thinking of way to reject the test results should they not favor your expectations. Earlier you were happy that science was possibly pointing away form the 99% similarity and now you are saying that it would pose more of a problem for evolution than creation. This is why creationism isn’t taken seriously. It holds to hard to it’s beliefs rather than letting them go and it’s what makes them look dishonest.
JLAfan2001, “you accuse me of hatred against all Christians.”
So you only hate ‘some’ Christians? Sorry if I misread you, the majority of times, as with CharlieD right now, I’m dealing with people who hate all Christians not just some Christians.
So NDE’s can be ‘natural’ in your book? Man I sure wish you Darwinists would at least stay consistent on what you consider ‘natural’. 🙂 ,,, Can God be considered natural too?
I dont hate anybody, in fact I was raised a Christian and I still go to church every so often with my family. I have outgrown the blind belief that religion pushes on its followers and have found science to be a much more wonderful world than that of religion.
Well CharlieD if you truly love science then you should reject the pseudo-science of Darwinism since it undermines the scientific worldview (Plantinga):
notes:
Founders of Modern Science Who Believe in GOD – Tihomir Dimitrov
http://www.scigod.com/index.ph.....File/18/18
50 Nobel Laureates and other great scientists who believed in God by Tihomir Dimitrov
http://www.nobelists.net/
The following is a good essay, by Robert C. Koons, in which the popular misconception of a war between science and religion, that neo-Darwinists often use in public to defend their, ironically, pseudo-scientific position, is in fact a gross misrepresentation of the facts. For not only does Robert Koons find Theism, particularly Chistian Theism, absolutely vital to the founding of modern science, but also argues that the Theistic worldview is necessary for the long term continued success of science into the future:
Science and Theism: Concord, not Conflict* – Robert C. Koons
IV. The Dependency of Science Upon Theism (Page 21)
Excerpt: Far from undermining the credibility of theism, the remarkable success of science in modern times is a remarkable confirmation of the truth of theism. It was from the perspective of Judeo-Christian theism—and from the perspective alone—that it was predictable that science would have succeeded as it has. Without the faith in the rational intelligibility of the world and the divine vocation of human beings to master it, modern science would never have been possible, and, even today, the continued rationality of the enterprise of science depends on convictions that can be reasonably grounded only in theistic metaphysics.
http://www.robkoons.net/media/.....ffd524.pdf
The Origin of Science
Jaki writes: Herein lies the tremendous difference between Christian monotheism on the one hand and Jewish and Muslim monotheism on the other. This explains also the fact that it is almost natural for a Jewish or Muslim intellectual to become a patheist. About the former Spinoza and Einstein are well-known examples. As to the Muslims, it should be enough to think of the Averroists. With this in mind one can also hope to understand why the Muslims, who for five hundred years had studied Aristotle’s works and produced many commentaries on them failed to make a breakthrough. The latter came in medieval Christian context and just about within a hundred years from the availability of Aristotle’s works in Latin..
As we will see below, the break-through that began science was a Christian commentary on Aristotle’s De Caelo (On the Heavens).,,
Modern experimental science was rendered possible, Jaki has shown, as a result of the Christian philosophical atmosphere of the Middle Ages. Although a talent for science was certainly present in the ancient world (for example in the design and construction of the Egyptian pyramids), nevertheless the philosophical and psychological climate was hostile to a self-sustaining scientific process. Thus science suffered still-births in the cultures of ancient China, India, Egypt and Babylonia. It also failed to come to fruition among the Maya, Incas and Aztecs of the Americas. Even though ancient Greece came closer to achieving a continuous scientific enterprise than any other ancient culture, science was not born there either. Science did not come to birth among the medieval Muslim heirs to Aristotle. ….
The psychological climate of such ancient cultures, with their belief that the universe was infinite and time an endless repetition of historical cycles, was often either hopelessness or complacency (hardly what is needed to spur and sustain scientific progress); and in either case there was a failure to arrive at a belief in the existence of God the Creator and of creation itself as therefore rational and intelligible. Thus their inability to produce a self-sustaining scientific enterprise.
If science suffered only stillbirths in ancient cultures, how did it come to its unique viable birth? The beginning of science as a fully fledged enterprise took place in relation to two important definitions of the Magisterium of the Church. The first was the definition at the Fourth Lateran Council in the year 1215, that the universe was created out of nothing at the beginning of time. The second magisterial statement was at the local level, enunciated by Bishop Stephen Tempier of Paris who, on March 7, 1277, condemned 219 Aristotelian propositions, so outlawing the deterministic and necessitarian views of creation.
These statements of the teaching authority of the Church expressed an atmosphere in which faith in God had penetrated the medieval culture and given rise to philosophical consequences. The cosmos was seen as contingent in its existence and thus dependent on a divine choice which called it into being; the universe is also contingent in its nature and so God was free to create this particular form of world among an infinity of other possibilities. Thus the cosmos cannot be a necessary form of existence; and so it has to be approached by a posteriori investigation. The universe is also rational and so a coherent discourse can be made about it. Indeed the contingency and rationality of the cosmos are like two pillars supporting the Christian vision of the cosmos.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/aug.....rigin.html
Christ and Science – Stanley L. Jaki
http://www.realviewbooks.com/c.....l#chriscie
The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity – book
http://books.google.com/books?.....38;f=false
Christianity Is a Science-Starter, Not a Science-Stopper By Nancy Pearcey
http://www.pearceyreport.com/a.....post_4.php
Bruce Charlton’s Miscellany – October 2011
Excerpt: I had discovered that over the same period of the twentieth century that the US had risen to scientific eminence it had undergone a significant Christian revival. ,,,The point I put to (Richard) Dawkins was that the USA was simultaneously by-far the most dominant scientific nation in the world (I knew this from various scientometic studies I was doing at the time) and by-far the most religious (Christian) nation in the world. How, I asked, could this be – if Christianity was culturally inimical to science?
http://charltonteaching.blogsp.....-wife.html
CharlieD:
So you’ve made science your god.
Good one guys. Cmon, Im not that stupid. You both have no idea what you are talking about. You talk about the current theory of evolution and next thing ya know you’re trying to prove that modern science is a product of religion? Get real. Yeah everybody back then was religious, you didnt have much of a choice. Science eventually outgrew the blind faith of religion and started questioning things. This is where science branches from religion; it does not blindly accept what others present, it does not fit facts to theories like you guys do. Science fits theories to facts.
Science is my god? No I dont worship science, I study it and think for myself. You should try it sometime.
There is no question that chimps and other primates are closely related to humans, that was evident even to creationists and that’s why the creationist Linnaeus placed humans along with primates in his taxonomical grouping.
At issue is the number of changes that have to take place, not the percentage. Say we have to account for 27,000,000 changes. How long will that take?
But if the geological column is false and represents far shorter time scales, all the claims of Darwinism are moot. One does not have to invoke a Young Earth to see the geological “column” could be young.
Thanks for you comments.
Yes, you are very stupid. Can you point us to the alleged currect theory of evolution? Provide a link, perhaps?
CharlieD:
Again, we see the logical fallacy of ad hominem. You state that you’re not that stupid, which I’m willing to believe, but you rely a lot on faulty thinking. That is unintelligent.
Modern science isn’t a product of religion. But evolution and its controversies arises almost religious zeal in people from both sides. Evolution is used as more than a scientific theory (social Darwinism, anyone?); it’s a worldview that states that God is irrelevant.
You do know that atheists have always existed, right? In fact, ironically, the early Christians were viewed as atheists because they only worshiped one God.
Science does question things, and that’s good. You do know that many of the greatest scientists in the world were religious, right? Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, Mendelev, etc. You do realize that belief in God does not preclude one from practicing science, right? You are also falling victim to the logical fallacy of hasty generalization.
Not all religions require blind faith. You are now using the logical fallacy of hasty generalization again. You obviously have no knowledge of all religions. You have no evidence to show that all religious people believe according to blind faith. The Bible itself condemns blind faith.
Ad hominem. I probably do more critical thinking that you give me credit for. And yes, you have made science your god. Look at its definition:
Definition of GOD
1
capitalized : the supreme or ultimate reality: as
a : the Being perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness who is worshipped as creator and ruler of the universe
b Christian Science : the incorporeal divine Principle ruling over all as eternal Spirit : infinite Mind
2
: a being or object believed to have more than natural attributes and powers and to require human worship;specifically : one controlling a particular aspect or part of reality
3
: a person or thing of supreme value
4
: a powerful ruler
I’d say that #2 and 3 describe you pretty well.
Hmm, my standardized test scores, GPA, etc all say different.
Try reading a general biology book, that will get you the basics of the theory, if you understood any of it then may I suggest you open a book more specialized in evolutionary biology. You can read right?
CharlieD, you do understand what “ad hominem” means, right?
And youd be completely wrong to say that number 2 and 3 describe me.
You guys have no clue what you are talking about. You should look into getting a decent science education before you try to talk about it.
Although mtEve’s date based on observed (not inferred by phylogeny) mutation rates of mtDNA seems to square quite well with YEC predictions, I can’t see a way to do the same with Y-Adam. I discuss the problems without a solution on reddit here.
I’m cautious about accepting Thompkin’s 70% similarity study because other YEC biologists such as Todd Wood oppose such low estimates. Ironically, Wood and Thompkins used to be colleagues, so I expect Wood is familiar with Thomkins work–although he hasn’t yet commented on the recent paper.
JLAfan2001 @50
Creationists are often blacklisted from mainstream journals simply for being creationists. For example Marcus Ross as quoted in Scientific American: “I have had chapters of my (decidedly conventional) dissertation rejected from journals and special publications for no other reason than the fact that I am a creationist, sometimes in very explicit terms.”. By conventional he means taking an unquestionably evolutionary perspective. Or Todd Wood (mentioned above)’s response to critic Phil Senter was “declined without review by 4 different journals”. Without Review. On his blog, Todd Wood tends to argue more against creationist points than for them. He’s the most cautious and reserved scientist I know of.
To All,
The thread is now open to all topics, I think we hashed through the original point well enough for now. It’s been a pleasure.
Just keep it civil and family friendly.
Sal
Charlie chokes!:
I have read several. A scientific theory should be found in a peer-reviewed journal. That’s how Einstein did it.
Alan Fox suggested that I read several popular books, textbooks, essays, etc and formulate it myself from those texts.
So perhaps you can tell me what predictions are borne from unguided evolution- what are the testable hypotheses- tell us Charlie.
And please do not be vague and say evolution this and evolution that, ID is not anti-evolution. Even YEC’s baraminology accepts speciation.
Ya see Charlie, I have read all those books and all we have is some vague descent with modification, void of specifics as to what gets modified. And evos thinks that DNA is some sort of magical molecule responsible for all of the “endless forms, most beautiful”, yet that hasn’t panned out. Oops.
So really, where is this alleged theory? Or are you just like really sure that it exists?
That may change with the deep pedigree study where we retrieved DNA from a tomb 24 generations back. I linked to it in the Felsenstein thread. We have a definite mutation rate with the deep pedigree study.
JLAfan2001 @ 53
More accurately, from that, the only actual fact would be that chimps had the most simiilar DNA known. It would still not indicate that it is a fact that they were living relatives.
What you think it tells you is a mistake then. I’m not trying to mold any outcome to fit my view. It really has little effect on the falsity or not of ID or creation. I held this notion long ago. I don’t see similarity as a measure of how probable chimps are as relatives. For me, it’s more about two things: (1) How can differences be accounted for chimps and humans given the measured differences. (2) How could evolution account for the amount of differences in the given timeline since the supposed most recent common ancestor.
There’s no change of position. I can show you prior arguments against overly high similarity would be a problem.
Any joy in seeing the similarity potentially reduced to 70% in published literature is explainable by the fact that it will mortally harm Darwinism (the bane of society) in an unavoidable way. Well, unavoidable to the numerate at least.
That said, you did cause me reconsider something. An overly high similarity (e.g. 99.7%) would actually be a problem for anyone trying to reconcile the chimp/human differences using purely genetics. So, some Darwinists could slip by less than scathed in the public eye. However, the persons that would be most affect in some negative sense are specifically neo-Darwinists and anyone else that thinks DNA determines all development of an organism.
If you read all these books on evolution supposedly, then you shouldnt have to ask me for testable hypotheses. I know very little about evolution and yet I can already tell that you know nothing of what you speak of. Youre not fooling anybody except the scientifically illiterate. What you guys do here will continue so long as there are idiots to listen to you on this planet, and unfortunately there seem to be a lot.
“And youd be completely wrong to say that number 2 and 3 describe me.
You guys have no clue what you are talking about. You should look into getting a decent science education before you try to talk about it.”
You’ve said that repeatedly. Yet you’ve done nothing but call other people here names, which proves nothing.
Most of us have a decent science eduction. It’s easy to tell which ones because they aren’t the ones going around using faulty logic to try and prove their points.
“If you read all these books on evolution supposedly, then you shouldnt have to ask me for testable hypotheses. I know very little about evolution and yet I can already tell that you know nothing of what you speak of. Youre not fooling anybody except the scientifically illiterate. What you guys do here will continue so long as there are idiots to listen to you on this planet, and unfortunately there seem to be a lot.”
Excuse me? You set yourself up as an expert not too long ago, and now you claim that you know very little? Not surprising, but you should now that you’ve shredded what little credibility you had.
Why is that? I ask because those books don’t have any testable hypotheses wrt unguided evolution.
I have read many bald assertions that natural selection is the only process known to produce adaptations, and then they show you adaptations and see, see, natural selection!
And yes, you do know very little- obvioulsy.
This is how I see it. There is a lot of evidence to support evolution and an old earth. Those two theories refute the book of Genesis in a literal way. I am ope to the fact that it may have been written as a metaphor for the people of the time and should not be taken literally but where does one draw the line? Where does metaphor end and history start? Also, why would Jesus die for metaphor? It seems to me that the metaphor approach may be a last ditch effort to giving up one’s faith. I said it before—no first couple, no fall or sin, no need for a saviour. Fossils, genetics, geology and cosmology all prove Genesis false.
Barb
I would like to continue a conversation with you via email if you are willing. You seem well read and would like to ask you some questions away from the debates.
I know very little about evolution. I took one class on it. Im still willing to bet I know more than any of you about it. You guys should stop getting your information on evolution from books written by Kent Hovind and his pals. Getting a C in your high school bio class is not a “decent science education.” Sorry.
scordova @68
Are you talking about Human Y Chromosome Base-Substitution Mutation Rate Measured by Direct Sequencing in a Deep-Rooting Pedigree where “The Y chromosomes of two individuals separated by 13 generations were flow sorted and sequenced” ? The mutation rate given there and rates close to it are what are used to get a Y-chromosome Adam age of 100-300k years. I go into more detail in the reddit thread I linked.
Yes. Apologies.
CharlieD, regardless of whether you find it silly or not, there were and are certain theistic presuppositions that were and are necessary for the founding and practice of modern science to be successful. For instance, the presupposition that you have a transcendent ‘mind’ that can reason independently of the material events of the universe or your brain:
“One absolutely central inconsistency ruins [the popular scientific philosophy]. The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears… unless Reason is an absolute, all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based.”
—C.S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry (aka the Argument from Reason)
Comprehensibility of the world – April 4, 2013
Excerpt: I have to deduce that Einstein hadn’t an understanding of traditional metaphysics. Otherwise he would neither have spoken about the comprehensibility of the universe as “the most incomprehensible thing” or a “miracle”, nor he would have been surprised that math is so “appropriate to the objects of reality”. In fact metaphysics postulates “universal intelligibility”,,,
,,,So, for materialism, the Einstein’s question remains unanswered. Logic and math (that is fully based on logic), to be so effective, must be universal truths. If they are only states of the brain of one or more individuals – as materialists maintain – they cannot be universal at all. Universal truths must be objective and absolute, not just subjective and relative. Only in this way can they be shared among all intelligent beings.,,,
,,,Bottom line: without an absolute Truth, (there would be) no logic, no mathematics, no beings, no knowledge by beings, no science, no comprehensibility of the world whatsoever.
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....the-world/
“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter”.
J. B. S. Haldane [“When I am dead,” in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209.
“If you do not assume the law of non-contradiction, you have nothing to argue about. If you do not assume the principles of sound reason, you have nothing to argue with. If you do not assume libertarian free will, you have no one to argue against. If you do not assume morality to be an objective commodity, you have no reason to argue in the first place.”
– William J Murray
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ent-442117
further notes:
In a recent debate in which Dr. Craig totally decimated the atheist Dr. Rosenberg, Dr Craig stated that Dr. Rosenberg blurs together:
Epistemological Naturalism: which holds that science is the only source of knowledge and, Metaphysical Naturalism: which holds that only physical things exist
As to, Epistemological Naturalism, which holds that science is the only source of knowledge, Dr. Craig states it is a false theory of knowledge since,,,
a). it is overly restrictive
and
b) it is self refuting
Moreover Dr Craig stated, epistemological naturalism does not imply metaphysical naturalism.,, In fact a Empistemological Naturalist can and should be a Theist, according to Dr. Craig, because Metaphysical Naturalism is reducto ad absurdum on (at least) these eight following points in this video: I strongly suggest watching Dr. Craig’s short presentation, that I have linked, to get a full feel for just how insane the metaphysical naturalist’s position actually is.
Is Metaphysical Naturalism Viable? – William Lane Craig – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzS_CQnmoLQ
============
The Heretic – Who is Thomas Nagel and why are so many of his fellow academics condemning him? – March 25, 2013
Excerpt: Neo-Darwinism insists that every phenomenon, every species, every trait of every species, is the consequence of random chance, as natural selection requires. And yet, Nagel says, “certain things are so remarkable that they have to be explained as non-accidental if we are to pretend to a real understanding of the world.”
Among these remarkable, nonaccidental things are many of the features of the manifest image. Consciousness itself, for example: You can’t explain consciousness in evolutionary terms, Nagel says, without undermining the explanation itself. Evolution easily accounts for rudimentary kinds of awareness. Hundreds of thousands of years ago on the African savannah, where the earliest humans evolved the unique characteristics of our species, the ability to sense danger or to read signals from a potential mate would clearly help an organism survive.
So far, so good. But the human brain can do much more than this. It can perform calculus, hypothesize metaphysics, compose music—even develop a theory of evolution. None of these higher capacities has any evident survival value, certainly not hundreds of thousands of years ago when the chief aim of mental life was to avoid getting eaten. Could our brain have developed and sustained such nonadaptive abilities by the trial and error of natural selection, as neo-Darwinism insists? It’s possible, but the odds, Nagel says, are “vanishingly small.” If Nagel is right, the materialist is in a pickle. The conscious brain that is able to come up with neo-Darwinism as a universal explanation simultaneously makes neo-Darwinism, as a universal explanation, exceedingly unlikely.,,,
,,,Fortunately, materialism is never translated into life as it’s lived. As colleagues and friends, husbands and mothers, wives and fathers, sons and daughters, materialists never put their money where their mouth is. Nobody thinks his daughter is just molecules in motion and nothing but; nobody thinks the Holocaust was evil, but only in a relative, provisional sense. A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions—understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots—wouldn’t just be a materialist: He’d be a psychopath.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/.....tml?page=3
The Great Debate: Does God Exist? – Justin Holcomb – audio of the 1985 debate available on the site
Excerpt: The transcendental proof for God’s existence is that without Him it is impossible to prove anything. The atheist worldview is irrational and cannot consistently provide the preconditions of intelligible experience, science, logic, or morality. The atheist worldview cannot allow for laws of logic, the uniformity of nature, the ability for the mind to understand the world, and moral absolutes. In that sense the atheist worldview cannot account for our debate tonight.,,,
http://theresurgence.com/2012/.....-god-exist
Presuppositional Apologetics – easy to use interactive website
http://www.proofthatgodexists.org/index.php
JLAfan2001: You can send me an email here: bl3206@gmail.com
And CharlieD continues to prove that he is little more than a troll. Back under your bridge!
Sorry ladies, I didnt mean to rock the boat too much, sometimes I just need a good laugh. Your army of pseudoscience psycho-babblers usually provides me with plenty.
JLAfan2001 states:
“Fossils, genetics, geology and cosmology all prove Genesis false.”
yet these guys certainly found correlation in cosmology:
The best data we have [concerning the Big Bang] are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the bible as a whole.
Dr. Arno Penzias, Nobel Laureate in Physics – co-discoverer of the Cosmic Background Radiation – as stated to the New York Times on March 12, 1978
“Certainly there was something that set it all off,,, I can’t think of a better theory of the origin of the universe to match Genesis”
Robert Wilson – Nobel laureate – co-discover Cosmic Background Radiation
“There is no doubt that a parallel exists between the big bang as an event and the Christian notion of creation from nothing.”
George Smoot – Nobel laureate in 2006 for his work on COBE
“Now we see how the astronomical evidence supports the biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy.”
Robert Jastrow – Founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute – Pg.15 ‘God and the Astronomers’
,,, ‘And if you’re curious about how Genesis 1, in particular, fairs. Hey, we look at the Days in Genesis as being long time periods, which is what they must be if you read the Bible consistently, and the Bible scores 4 for 4 in Initial Conditions and 10 for 10 on the Creation Events’
Hugh Ross – Evidence For Intelligent Design Is Everywhere; video
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4347236
“I now believe that the universe was brought into existence by an infinite intelligence. I believe that the universe’s intricate laws manifest what scientists have called the Mind of God. I believe that life and reproduction originate in a divine Source. Why do I believe this, given that I expounded and defended atheism for more than a half century? The short answer is this: this is the world picture, as I see it, that has emerged from modern science.”
Anthony Flew – world’s leading intellectual atheist for most of his adult life until a few years shortly before his death
The Case for a Creator – Lee Strobel (Nov. 25, 2012) – video
http://www.saddleback.com/mc/m/ee32d/
Methinks someone is being unfairly biased against Theism, Genesis in particular!
Remember JLAfan2001, I’m NOT a YEC and find the position untenable both Biblically and empirically. But for the sake of argument, let’s see how the alternative worldview, materialism, stacks up against the evidence for Theism:
1. Materialism predicted an eternal universe, Theism predicted a created universe. – Big Bang points to a creation event. –
2. Materialism predicted time had an infinite past, Theism predicted time had a creation. – Time was created in the Big Bang. –
3. Materialism predicted space has always existed, Theism predicted space had a creation (Psalm 89:12) – Space was created in the Big Bang. –
4. Materialism predicted that material has always existed, Theism predicted ‘material’ was created. – ‘Material’ was created in the Big Bang.
5. Materialism predicted that the basis of physical reality would be a solid indestructible material particle which rigidly obeyed the rules of time and space, Theism predicted the basis of this reality was created by a infinitely powerful and transcendent Being who is not limited by time and space – Quantum mechanics reveals a wave/particle duality for the basis of our reality which blatantly defies our concepts of time and space. –
6. Materialism predicted that consciousness is a ’emergent property’ of material reality and thus has no particularly special position within material reality. Theism predicted consciousness preceded material reality and therefore consciousness should have a ‘special’ position within material reality. Quantum Mechanics reveals that consciousness has a special, even a central, position within material reality. –
7. Materialism predicted the rate at which time passed was constant everywhere in the universe, Theism predicted God is eternal and is outside of time – Special Relativity has shown that time, as we understand it, is relative and comes to a complete stop at the speed of light. (Psalm 90:4 – 2 Timothy 1:9) –
8. Materialism predicted the universe did not have life in mind and life was ultimately an accident of time and chance. Theism predicted this universe was purposely created by God with man in mind – Every transcendent universal constant scientists can measure is exquisitely fine-tuned for carbon-based life to exist in this universe. –
9. Materialism predicted complex life in this universe should be fairly common. Theism predicted the earth is extremely unique in this universe – Statistical analysis of the hundreds of required parameters which enable complex life to be possible on earth gives strong indication the earth is extremely unique in this universe. –
10. Materialism predicted much of the DNA code was junk. Theism predicted we are fearfully and wonderfully made – ENCODE research into the DNA has revealed a “biological jungle deeper, denser, and more difficult to penetrate than anyone imagined.”. –
11. Materialism predicted a extremely beneficial and flexible mutation rate for DNA which was ultimately responsible for all the diversity and complexity of life we see on earth. Theism predicted only God created life on earth – The mutation rate to DNA is overwhelmingly detrimental. Detrimental to such a point that it is seriously questioned whether there are any truly beneficial mutations whatsoever. (M. Behe; JC Sanford) –
12. Materialism predicted a very simple first life form which accidentally came from “a warm little pond”. Theism predicted God created life – The simplest life ever found on Earth is far more complex than any machine man has made through concerted effort. (Michael Denton PhD) –
13. Materialism predicted it took a very long time for life to develop on earth. Theism predicted life to appear abruptly on earth after water appeared on earth (Genesis 1:10-11) – We find evidence for complex photo-synthetic life in the oldest sedimentary rocks ever found on earth –
14. Materialism predicted the gradual unfolding of life to be self-evident in the fossil record. Theism predicted complex and diverse life to appear abruptly in the seas in God’s fifth day of creation. – The Cambrian Explosion shows a sudden appearance of many different and completely unique fossils within a very short “geologic resolution time” in the Cambrian seas. –
15. Materialism predicted there should be numerous transitional fossils found in the fossil record, Theism predicted sudden appearance and rapid diversity within different kinds found in the fossil record – Fossils are consistently characterized by sudden appearance of a group/kind in the fossil record, then rapid diversity within the group/kind, and then long term stability and even deterioration of variety within the overall group/kind, and within the specific species of the kind, over long periods of time. Of the few dozen or so fossils claimed as transitional, not one is uncontested as a true example of transition between major animal forms out of millions of collected fossils. –
16. Materialism predicted animal speciation should happen on a somewhat constant basis on earth. Theism predicted man was the last species created on earth – Man himself is the last generally accepted major fossil form to have suddenly appeared in the fossil record. –
Barb
Thanks for the email and for the trust in providing it. I look forward to our exchanges soon.
Jguy
Although I’m not convinced, you do bring up an interesting point. If the DNA is so similar, why is there a huge difference between us and the chimps? Would 6 million years be enough time for the differences to occur and why only 1% in that time? But if the DNA falls to 70%, wouldn’t it be feasible that we are related to them now because the lower percentage would explain the difference? The problem now arises that either way relations can’t be proven which seems to create a paradox of sorts.
BA77
Thanks for the Hugh Ross link. I have listened to it before but I don;t think he quite goes into detail what the 4 for 4 and the 10 for 10 is. I would be interested to know. The list that you provided for materialism and that Chance provided against naturalism is why I’m not a full blown atheist. It doesn’t make sense to me either. Believe me, I’m not trying to be biased against theism as some are but I am biased against Genesis because it doesn’t line up with science. That’s why I want to know what Hugh Ross means. I find it interesting that Todd Wood seems to side with Denis Venema more so than Fuz Rana. I think that he sees the evidence for evolution but is afraid to embrace it because of his faith.
Huge difference between us and chimps? Get your head out of your ass. Ive met plenty of people I think a chimp could outsmart, some are running this site actually!
I thought this might be of some interest. It’s not realkly the kind of thing you would expect to find in a creature supposedly dead for so long. Or is it?
http://www.newser.com/story/16.....-find.html
Some can. I’ve stopped being a Darwinist, so does that count as admitting a mistake?
If you feel comfortable answer the following question, it would help me understand where you are coming from. “What amount of formal science education have you had?” If you feel uncomfortable answering I respect that.
The reason I ask is that even though you’ve expressed your belief in evolution, even though we’ve had technical discussions at UD, you’ve never volunteered contrary technical points that would overturn some of the assertions at UD, particularly on discussions I’ve been hosting.
Felsenstein’s thread is an excellent example to contrast your beliefs with the technical claims of the ID community.
You may rely on peer-reviewed literature, or you may rely on your own knowledge base and critical thinking skills. I’m not saying you should accept ID. I respect it if you don’t, but it would be nice to hear you offer more technical and specific criticisms than generalities.
For example, in this thread I’ve laid out a lot of technical issues regarding the geological column. None of those points have gone challenged. Are you just trusting the mainstream because they are mainstream?
Thank you for your comments.
@JLAfan2001, 83, on human/chimp similarity
You can calculate how much difference there should be. Per Larry Moran’s excellent overview, humans have 112-160mutations per generation based on phylogeny, or 56-103 based on direct measurements of the mutation rate. Assume an average generation time of 25 years, and 6m years divergence time. Them multiply by 2 to get 12 million since both chimps and humans would have been evolving for 6m each.
So you can see how you can play with the numbers to get different amounts. Traditionally I believe it’s assumed there have been 35 million substitutions + 5 million insertions and deletions that separate us from chimps. 3 billion base pairs * 1.23% (traditionally cited difference) is 36.9 million differences. So that is how the classic numbers are achieved.
However, “It is now clear that the genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees are far more extensive than previously thought; their genomes are not 98% or 99% identical”, per a paper published in PNAS, 2012. With the estimates now being placed all over the map from 70% to 96%, I’m not sure who is correct.
CharlieD
FUCK OFF!!!!
I know that this is unwelcome on this site and I do accept evolution but I haven’t read one scientific argument from you yet. You claim that you are smart but only an idiot would contradict himself and not realize it. You claimed you were an expert in biology and then said that you have little knowledge of it but you came here to refute people who have PHDs in their field. What do you have? You are one of those people that a chimp can clearly outsmart. You claim to have a high GPA but I haven’t read anything scientifically credible from you. We all know that you just came here to stir up trouble rather than talk intelligently.
I wish there was a way to edit posts. My 3 results above should be double what they are, since I forgot to multiply by 2.
CharlieD
“Sorry ladies, I didnt mean to rock the boat too much,”
Your not rocking the boat Carlie, your just not contributing anything worthwhile to the discussion.
JoeCoder
Do you believe in common descent? Just curious
Sal
Unlike a lot of people who post here, I will admit that I have no training in biology. I have believed the evidence based on some things that I have read and observed on the internet.
My own rejection of naturalistic evolution isn’t based on the number of differences between humans and chimps, but rather what those differences entail.
Consider observed evolution among the microbes. HIV (radically different from cellular life, but the best evolver I know of) took a population of 10^20 all mutating random combinations to evolve a few new binding cites, malaria (p falciparum) 10^20 before finding the right two nucleotides to flip to gain chloroquine resistance under strong selective pressure, and all other examples among hundreds of well-studied microbial species are as slow or slower. Yet among about 10^12 ancestors since a chimp divergence, millions of times fewer mutations and selections than the microbes, we would’ve had to evolve something like 280-1400 new genes/proteins through duplications, fusions, de novo from non coding DNA, and some without homologs at all. These are members of over 20 new gene families and are found active in our neocortal development among other areas, and have little homology to existing genes.
Attempting a crude quantification, that gives homo a million times less mutational search but a thousand times the result–meaning we would have had to evolve a billion times faster than any observed rate. Observation tells us functional variants are too rare and it requires vast mutational search to find even very small gains.
This is on top of the problem that large genome animals with low reproductive rates should not be able to undergo long-term adaptive evolution at all, since our high mutation rate causes deleterious mutations to arrive much faster than even artificial selection can remove them.
JoeCoder,
Apologies for glossing over your reddit thread. Part of the problem is the format of the discussion is hard to read and I got confused.
You raise some points that I can’t contest and are problematic for the YEC model.
For myself, for what it’s worth, YEC would be nice, but even a partial break in the chronology, as attempted in this discussion, though not proving YEC, would be substantive at casting even more doubt on evolution.
If you feel comfortable talking about it, where do you stand on the issues? I hope its moderately clear where I stand, I’m YEC-sympathetic, but I don’t think the case is very defensible at this time compared to the ID case.
Thanks.
@JLAfan2001
I don’t believe in common descent. I believe shared disabling mutations in pseudogenes can be explained by mutational hotspots, and that rapidly mutating retroviruses that have high sequence identity to ERV’s from tens of millions of years ago can only be explained if ERV’s offer a selectable benefit to their host–otherwise the sequence couldn’t be maintained that long. Some unmodified retroviruses have been shown to specifically target and destroy cancer cells. Based on this I think that ERV’s are designed, retroviruses have their origin from them and not the other way around, and pathogenic RNA viruses evolved have evolved from simbiotic ones to have more selfish roles.
Here’s another article from a news site about the oldest ancestor to the bird. Or is it?
http://www.newser.com/story/16.....maybe.html
@scordova, 93
I’m agnostic on the age of the earth. If I were to pick either side there would be lines of evidence I couldn’t explain. I used to be exclusively old-earth.
It’s funny. I find the reddit comment format much easier to follow than @ UD. I often think we should get our own subreddit there, which would also allow anyone to create a new top-level post.
“The list that you provided,, is why I’m not a full blown atheist.”
Well, that list (evidence) ought to make you lean heavily towards Theism no matter how you view Genesis. I simply find atheistic materialism to be completely incoherent as to rationally explaining the evidence we now have in hand. Their worldview is not only wrong but preposterous, laughable, even insane.,,, If you want to learn more about Ross’s views I suggest his books ‘Why The Universe Is The Way It Is’, ‘A Matter Of Days’ and ‘Creation As Science – A Testable Approach to End The Creation-Evolution Wars’,,
There are some possible explanations to the Y chromosome Adam problem:
1. Suppose every now and then humans mutate errors in DNA repair–they persist for several generations but then are selected away. But they would still accumulate more mutations in the Y chromosomes, which do not recombine.
2. Humans living in areas of high radiation mutate faster.
3. Perhaps not all Y chromosomes share a common ancestor. Gen 6:2, “the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose.” The Nephilim are mentioned before and after the flood.
But unfortunately none of these are the most direct interpretation of the evidence, so I’m hesitant to invoke them.
I’m in the same boat. I have my sympathies, but on evidential and theoretical grounds, for me it looks like a tough stalemate.
Thanks for responding.
I’m not at a stalemate. There’s just too much I haven’t explored yet.
Explaining things scientifically to these guys is like talking to a wall. I tried it a month ago, they ignored and copied/pasted their typical bullshit in response. Im just here for the laughs now. No need to get all bent out of shape though Ill be on my way, out of fear catching the stupidity that runs rampant here.
Cheerio
@BA77
In your own words, what do you think of RTB’s view that humans and neanderthals don’t share a common ancestor? I’ve read a couple articles on their site but didn’t find them compelling. The DNA and cultural evidence just seem too similar.
I have no formal training in biology either, but I do have training in other scientific disciplines that have some bearing on the questions raised. I’m not a scientist but a financeer.
The similarity of organisms to one another (something even creationists were aware of) is superficially a good reason to accept evolution. Children look like parents, and by way of extrapolation, it would seem reasonable that this idea could be extrapolated all the way back to the first cell.
Even today, there are a good minority ID proponents who accept common descent (like Behe, Sternberg, Mike Gene, John Davison, etc.)
What changed my mind was the question of the origin-of-life. Even assuming we all evolved from the same first cell, the barriers to reaching that first cell from non-living matter don’t seem to accord with anything I know in science. If you look at the TalkOrigins website, you’ll see an extreme scarcity of discussion regarding the origin of life. That is because the peer-reviewed literature has no answers, and some peer-reviewed literature argues specifically against any sort of scientifically provable mechanism for the origin of life.
I can provide links to some of this literature, but its very very technical. I’d be willing to write something on the matter someday if it interests you that will be moderately technical, however, Don Johnson’s the programming of life is probably the best. He has a PhD in Chemistry and a PhD in computer science. He did work on recombinant DNA. He is extremely qualified, and for what its worth, he was an evolutionist.
Once I began from that starting point of the origin of life, it opened up the possibility for criticizing other things like evolution, the geological column, etc.
Thanks for your response.
Sal
CharlieD: “No need to get all bent out of shape though Ill be on my way, out of fear catching the stupidity that runs rampant here.
Cheerio”
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
Well Joe, I don’t buy the neanderthal argument now, but it took A LOT of persuading to give up that position because I falsely thought Darwinists had a much stronger case than it turned out they had. But as turns out to be the situation so often with dogmatic Darwinian claims, their claim was found to be premature and not nearly as strong as they made it out to be:
On a personal note, apart from the swing in evidence, I’m personally glad that the evidence swung persuasively towards unification, as it makes the gap between apes and humans that much wider and the problem for atheists that much more insurmountable. As to Ross’s overall position, I always felt a bit uneasy with that particular prediction of his, and always thought it was his weakest prediction, and always felt his strongest suit was and is his predictions in cosmology and ancient ‘terra-forming’ for the earth.
Sal
“I have no formal training in biology either, but I do have training in other scientific disciplines that have some bearing on the questions raised. I’m not a scientist but a financeer.”
So you’re more or less in the same boat as me. If that’s the case, why did you challenge me on my level of science? Also, why would UD allow anyone who has no science training post here? How and why should I trust any of the evidence you have posted then? I mean no disrespect to you but isn’t his dangerous?
“The similarity of organisms to one another (something even creationists were aware of) is superficially a good reason to accept evolution. Children look like parents, and by way of extrapolation, it would seem reasonable that this idea could be extrapolated all the way back to the first cell.”
I think this is why I believe evolution. We have observed it within species so it would be reasonable to extrapolate macro-evolution from the similar DNA and the fossil record happening over a period of time. Add all the other evidences and what other explanation even comes close? It’s got to be right even if there are still questions. I guess the million dollar question is was it purposeless or purposeful? That question could be the difference between atheism and theism.
If Neanderthals are essentially human, why would God let them go extinct if they were presumably made in his image? The same could be said for cro-magnon. Genesis just gets harder and harder to believe.
JLAfan2001, excuse but,,
“We look like our parents thus everything evolved from a first cell”
,,,has to be just about one of the lamest argument for evolution I’ve ever seen. 🙂 I mean really, It’s up there with Dawkins argument in “the blind watchmaker”:
Darwinism Not Proved Impossible Therefore Its True
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/10285716/
JLAfan2001 why are you always arguing against Genesis instead of addressing the bankruptcy inherent in materialism? Are you more interested in debunking YEC Theology or in science?,,,
Biblical literalism is not the issue. The issue is whether materialism and rationality are the same thing. Darwinism is based on an a priori commitment to materialism, not on a philosophically neutral assessment of the evidence. Separate the philosophy from the science, and the proud tower collapses.”
Phillip Johnson – The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism, First Things, 77 (Nov. 1997), pp. 22 – 25.
http://www.firstthings.com/art.....rialism-26
There are two definitions of Science in our Culture – Phillip E. Johnson – audio
http://www.youtube.com/watch?f.....Xo#t=1596s
I suggest you completely separate your arguments against Biblical literalism from the science at hand, for no matter what your Theological position, materialism is insane
@JLAfan2001
On this, what do you think about my post @92? Even the small functional differences seem insurmountable given what we observe how evolution works.
I disagree that the fossil record supports Darwinian evolution. In the words of paleontologist and outspoken ID critic Don Prothero, it’s “one vast monument to stasis, with relatively few cases where anyone had observed gradual evolution”. In his Skeptic Magazine article he describes how the stasis is real and not merely a product of inadequate sampling, “I could point to this data set and make the case for the prevalence of stasis without any criticism of bias in my sampling”. Stasis is maintained even through changing selective pressures, since “the fossil mammals showed no sign of responding to the biggest climate change of the past 50 million years”
As for the proposed transitional sequences, I disagree that their signal overpowers the noise of false sequences, or that morphology is a reliable indicator of relatedness. Take a look at the convergence between placental and marsupial mammals and especially the canine/marsupial wolf. Given common descent, each on the left would be more closely related to humans, giraffes, whales, and bats than to their twins on the right. Yet they’re closer than anything on the proposed transitional sequences rejected by creationists.
However the fossil record does have a general ordering of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds/mammals. The YEC’s argue that this matches the vertical position where they live their lives and the order in which they would have been destroyed by the flood. But so far nobody has found any Devonian dolphins or Jurassic jackrabbits, so it doesn’t quite work. Personally, I have no idea what the fossil record shows.
Because I see us as the same species, I see this question as being the same as, “Why does God let people die?” For Christians who believe that people are eternal, physical death isn’t a hammer god’s gonna zap you with; it’s graduation to what’s next, with an element of accountability for what we’ve done with what we started with.
I’m glad you asked.
1. UD is discussion blog, it is not an outlet for formal science.
2. I do have some nominal scientific training, I just received a Master’s in Applied Physics.
3. My undergrads were in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Mathematics. I was approached by Bill Dembski to be a student of Robert Marks in the Evolution Informatics Lab at Baylor. Computer Science and math are extremely relevant to questions of origins, the problem is biologists don’t like the fact engineers criticize their work, but biologists are more and more relying on engineers to help them understand biology because biology is evidently very analogous to machines, hence engineering is a very good discipline to understand biology. 1/3 of MIT engineers are working on biological projects.
4. Don’t trust anything I post, trust the facts. My postings are to point you to where to look. You may decide for yourself. If these topics really mean that much to you, you’ll find a way to learn more and more on your own.
5. The reason I asked about your background is I’ve found that people more versant in the facts are easier to communicate with if they are truly open. For example, I found it difficult to argue the case for ID if someone has zero knowledge of chemistry or is uncomfortable with probability and statistics. Given that ID relies a lot on probability and statistics and chemistry, it’s awfully hard to make that case if the audience doesn’t feel comfortable with those concepts. I wasn’t challenging you on your level of understanding science, I was asking because if you fit into the category of feeling comfortable in these topics, important discussions at UD will be of little value to you. Without that, you won’t be able to appreciate ID’s challenge in the origin-of-life.
I personally know a professor of biology from my undergrad university at GMU. She was expelled when she decided, late in her career, that Darwin was wrong. A similar thing happened to Richard Sternberg who was/is an evolutionary biologist. They have better credentials in biology than I, and Don Johnson has better credentials as well. Their works are in the public domain, so you don’t have to listen to what published at UD if you’d rather hear it from double-PhD scientists like them. That’s fine, and that may even be better.
I post at UD because this is a volunteer site, and all the contributors keep the discussion alive. People visit for the discussion like they visit each other in real life, in order to meet and converse. My postings are conversations to the public, not scientific dissertations. The benefit of UD over just reading books is you get to interact with people who have the same questions as you.
How so? So what if I’m wrong or all of UD is wrong, it’s not really going to change things much in terms of every day life. If there is no ID, if ID is false, then belief in ID will be little more than a mistaken belief. Hardly fatal, imho.
Look at Ben Carson and John Hartnett. Suppose ID is false, did it really affect their ability to do science? No.
But if ID is true, and especially if creationism is true, and if there is a Christ, it is MORE dangerous that you reject Christianity because of evolution. Do you really want to trust you eternal future with people like Richard Dawkins or PZ Myers? So I’d argue, in practical matters, it is far more dangerous to accept Dawkins ideas of evolution than ID.
The reason these discussion are carried out with such passion is not because of the science, but because of the philosophical implications. Whether ID or evolution is true is not of immediate impact on most of science (maybe in the future, we’ll see).
If ID is wrong, and you come to accept it, you have little to lose. If however ID is true, and you lost your soul believing in evolution, then that seems far more dangerous from a practical standpoint.
I’ll give you really sad story to that effect. The Urey-Miller experiment was widely accepted as explaining the origin of life. It turns out it was an utter failure. However one high school teacher taught it to many students and deChrsitianized many of them. The teacher eventually committed suicide. Though it’s hard to say for sure why the teacher committed suicide, it would seem, superficially if one thinks life is meaningless and has no design, it is hard to make a case from science that life has meaning. There is a chance that teacher might have decided to live if he thought life had intrinsic meaning. I met one of that teachers students who related the story to me.
If the Urey-Miller experiment contributed to the teacher’s suicide that is sad, because that experiment has since been overturned.
JLAfan2001:
Except that:
1. It has never been observed.
2. There is good reason to think it cannot occur on a naturalistic basis given the timeframe and the available resources.
3. Extrapolation from minor changes within species to large-scale changes is not logically sound. (After all, what if A + B doesn’t add up to Z?)
Wow. This is a wonderful example of the evolutionary mindset. Even if all the major questions are still open, something like Darwin’s theory just has to be right.
Except that when we escape from that intellectual trap we see that it isn’t obvious at all.
scordova @111:
The Miller-Urey experiment has a soft place in my heart.
Years ago when I first became interested in the design/evolution debate one of the first areas I spent a lot of time researching was the Miller-Urey experiment. I participated in quite a few debates online with materialist abiogenesis proponents who were all enamored with the Miller-Urey experiment and it quickly became clear that: (i) they didn’t know, or wilfully ignored, the limitations and drawbacks of the experiment, and — more importantly — (ii) even if the experiment had demonstrated what its most ardent proponents claimed, it still would do essentially nothing to solve the OOL challenges.
I appreciate those early exchanges for the chance it gave me to cut my teeth in the debate and start thinking critically about the received evolutionary wisdom.
“,has to be just about one of the lamest argument for evolution I’ve ever seen. I mean really, It’s up there with Dawkins argument in “the blind watchmaker”:”
Actually, BA, I came from my parents because I “evolved” from a cell from my parents. If can do it in nine months, why not all life in 3 – 4 billion years?
“Biblical literalism is not the issue. The issue is whether materialism and rationality are the same thing. Darwinism is based on an a priori commitment to materialism, not on a philosophically neutral assessment of the evidence.”
I Genesis is not true, what else have you got to debunk materialism? Debunk it with Islam or Hinduism or Sikhism or New Age or Mormonism. If the account is not true, what separates it from any other creation account? If the none of the creation accounts are true, what can debunk materialism as in nature alone counts for our origin?
Sal
“I’ll give you really sad story to that effect. The Urey-Miller experiment was widely accepted as explaining the origin of life. It turns out it was an utter failure. However one high school teacher taught it to many students and deChrsitianized many of them. The teacher eventually committed suicide. Though it’s hard to say for sure why the teacher committed suicide, it would seem, superficially if one thinks life is meaningless and has no design, it is hard to make a case from science that life has meaning. There is a chance that teacher might have decided to live if he thought life had intrinsic meaning. I met one of that teachers students who related the story to me.”
This is indeed sad but what if the truth is there is no meaning? What if Nihilism is the ACTUAL truth? I know if feels uncomfortable but it could be real.
Eric
“1. It has never been observed.
2. There is good reason to think it cannot occur on a naturalistic basis given the timeframe and the available resources.
3. Extrapolation from minor changes within species to large-scale changes is not logically sound. (After all, what if A + B doesn’t add up to Z?)”
Then why does mainstream science including Christians accept this? It should have been rejected but hasn’t. Why? The lecture that Denis Noble gave a few weeks ago should have killed it but didn’t.
Eric @113 you might like this from Robert Shapiro
http://www.edge.org/documents/life/Life.pdf p.91
I evolved Windows XP from an installation CD in 30 minutes. Why did it take all those engineers at microsoft 4 years? 😛
Answer: Because OS installation and human development are a matter of executing pre-existing instructions. We’re contesting how those instructions could have come about on their own. My post @92 offers details for why I don’t see evolution as a capable cause, based on benchmarks of observed evolution.
If I might suggest, why don’t you ask them. Prior to posting at UD, I used to argue a lot with professional scientists at ARN. I asked them those questions, and when they couldn’t defend their claims, it looked like protecting of their reputations and wanting to save face.
You have the opportunity to pose some of the questions we’ve raised at UD to some of these discussion boards. You can go visit PandasThumb or numerous other places where there are professional scientists willing to teach you evolution.
You can ask them about the origin of life. About the Urey-Miller experiment. Find out for yourself why they believe non-living chemicals can evolve into life.
If you really want to, you can enroll in a secular school, endure hundreds of hours of boring classes to give you access to science professors. That’s what I did, and I learned. If it means that much to you, I think you’ll find a way to do it. If however, you feel your time is better spent on practical matters, I respect that as well.
I didn’t come to my current set of beliefs by hanging out with ID folk, I came to them by hanging out with evolutionists who got really nasty when I raised basic questions. CharlieD’s behavior was typical of many, but I kept asking and probing.
Eventually I’d just throw up assertions to see how they’d try to tear them down (since they were so eager). Sometimes I was mistaken and had to make a retraction, but one thing I noticed is even when the other side was caught with a falsehood, they were incapable of retracting. On top of that, I’ve experienced the persecution of the Darwinists first hand.
Don’t believe me? Enroll in a secular school, take a biology classes and express interest in debating the pros and cons of evolution. You’ll get a first hand view of why the mainstream is the way it is.
If you choose not to do this, I respect that as it will take a huge part of time from your life. I chose to take that path because the question really mattered to me.
I say this because I think you won’t really learn hanging around here, you need to ask people in the mainstream.
We can suggest some of the questions you might ask like:
“Assuming the results of the Urey-Miller experiment, how did racemic monomers polymerize into homochiral monomers with alpha-peptide bonds”
If you don’t understand yet the significance of this claim it might be worth learning and struggling to understand. Too bad for the teacher that killed himself, there is a chance if he appreciated such questions, he might be alive today and still seeking to learn the truth, but instead an over-hyped and fallacious experiment appeared to have possibly contributed to his suicide.
Please, please tell us this was in jest. If not, I nominate it for the Absurd Comment of the Year award.
JLAfan2001:
Are you referring to a strictly materialistic account (I was)? If so, then we could certainly debate just how widespread the support is. In contrast, if you are allowing for intelligent input into the origin and history of life on Earth, then, yes, you will get lots more people to buy into that.
Regardless, there are lots of reasons why people believe what they do. Interesting discussion in its own right, but, frankly, I’m more interested in the scientific particulars. And as soon as we start digging into those, the whole storyline starts to look pretty shaky.
To be sure, there is some evidence that is consistent with the traditional evolutionary storyline. However, the evidence as a whole, and viewed without the bias of materialistic philosophy, points quite strongly in another direction.
JLAfan2001 you state:
JLAfan2001, the issue is not Biblical interpretation of Geneisis, (and I’m sure their are many people, here on UD and elsewhere, that can run circles around me and you both on that score), but the real issue is why must you, and other Darwinists, rely so heavily on theological argumentation in the first place to try to make your case? (Darwin’s God: Cornelius Hunter) ,,, Ask yourself, Why can’t you come on this site, lay out 1, 2, 10, 20, or even a hundred examples of molecular machines being evolved from scratch by neo-Darwinian processes in the lab, and then state “case closed’ and walk away and go watch a movie or whatever??. Why is it so important for you to rely on theological argumentation in order to make your case. This is simply insane for you to do so. Nobody in the hard sciences tries to prove General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, or the Big Bang, true by debunking certain interpretations of the Bible. Only Darwinists think this actually a legitimate form of scientific argumentation when in reality it is about as insane as can be as to trying to establish a legitimate scientific foundation!
to be more specific to this question:
“what else have you got to debunk materialism?”
Quantum Mechanics, specifically Quantum Teleportation and Quantum Entanglement. Here’s one recent experiment where they closed the last loop hole that materialists were clinging to:
Let’s not be too hard on our critics, lest we run them all off and have nobody left to debate. JLAfan2001 seems to be seeking out answers in an honest and genuine manner.
@BA77
I don’t see how the photon study shows a conflict with materialistic naturalism? They say “the quantum world is in conflict with our everyday experience”, but does’t that just mean that small things behave differently than big things?
JoeCoder, but alas, I think he may be serious in his statement about the miracle of his gestation from a single being proof of evolution, he has no less than Cameron Diaz backing him up on that score::
but note the new proof of Darwinian evolution she (Diaz) offers: the fact that a baby grows up into an adult.
As she explains this, Dr. Krauss is nodding his head vigorously in apparent agreement and other participants on the stage, who are all men — including Dawkins and novelists Ian McEwan and Cormac McCarthy — listen with rapt attentiveness. You see, it’s really true that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, including pediatrics. And we have this now on the authority of Miss Diaz.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....71881.html
on the flip side of that flippant comment:
FLIGHT: The Genius of Birds – Embryonic development – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ah-gT0hTto
A Piece from the Developmental Symphony – February 2012
Excerpt: Embryonic development is an astounding process that seems to happen “automatically.”,,, The timing of each step is too precise and the complexity is too intricate to assume that these processes are the mere accumulation by happenstance of changes to regulatory genes. Each gene plays its role at a certain time, and like a symphony, each is activated and silenced in turn such that the final result is a grand performance of orchestrated effort that could only have occurred through design.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....55921.html
The Miracle of Development Part 1 – Origins with Dr. Paul A. Nelson – video – April 2013
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JD9qMvz6T90
correction: I think he may be serious in his statement about the miracle of his gestation from a single CELL being proof of evolution
Well JoeCoder, as long as the materialists does not appealing to a non-local, beyond space and time cause, to explain finding massive amounts of quantum entanglement within molecular biology, then I guess you could be right about it presenting no problem for materialists. 🙂
Looking Beyond Space and Time to Cope With Quantum Theory – (Oct. 28, 2012)
Excerpt: To derive their inequality, which sets up a measurement of entanglement between four particles, the researchers considered what behaviours are possible for four particles that are connected by influences that stay hidden and that travel at some arbitrary finite speed.
Mathematically (and mind-bogglingly), these constraints define an 80-dimensional object. The testable hidden influence inequality is the boundary of the shadow this 80-dimensional shape casts in 44 dimensions. The researchers showed that quantum predictions can lie outside this boundary, which means they are going against one of the assumptions. Outside the boundary, either the influences can’t stay hidden, or they must have infinite speed.,,,
The remaining option is to accept that (quantum) influences must be infinitely fast,,,
“Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,” says Nicolas Gisin, Professor at the University of Geneva, Switzerland,,,
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re.....142217.htm
Quantum Information/Entanglement In DNA – Elisabeth Rieper – short video
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/5936605/
Quantum entanglement between the electron clouds of nucleic acids in DNA – Elisabeth Rieper, Janet Anders and Vlatko Vedral – February 2011
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxi.....4053v2.pdf
Well yes do think he pulled a Cameron Diaz. But despite that I still think this forum could use more respect from both sides.
correction: as the materialists does not MIND appealing to a non-local, beyond space and time cause, to explain finding massive amounts of quantum entanglement within molecular biology
In DNA is entanglement merely a consequence of having the molecules close to each other, or is there evidence of design/functional information being carried there and is it of a nature more difficult than any other tasks attributed to Darwinian evolution?
JoeCoder, quantum entanglement, regardless of distance between molecules, is reliant upon a beyond space and time cause to explain its effect. ,,, As to the separate question of “is there evidence of design/functional information being carried there?” Yes, there is evidence. as to “is it of a nature more difficult than any other tasks attributed to Darwinian evolution?” Now Now JoeCoder, you no that no task is too difficult for Darwinian evolution! 🙂 But seriously, when you get into the details of what is going on, it is at least several orders of magnitude more complex than what we normally toy around on UD with, trying to get Darwinists to explain the origin of,, i.e. proteins and molecular machines.
Sal,
Another relevant goodie that you might have missed – even though the topic was posted on UD. In fact, it may have flew under a many YEC radars. The peak of intellect, ‘conveniently’ friendly with YEC [bold emphasis mine]:
Source: http://fc08.deviantart.net/fs7.....5mlyaq.pdf
UD thread:
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....enerating/
JGuy,
THANKS for that article! Man I am out of the loop.
I stopped reading UD for about several months before returning. Unfortunately, I could start getting real busy soon, so it’s been nice hanging out this past month.
Btw, thanks for your friendship and support all these years from days at ARN to today. If you decide to go to the ICC:
http://creationicc.org/
feel free to look me up. I’m one of the few non-white guys there, and you have my photo here:
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....s-of-2013/
I should be easy to find.
God bless you,
Sal
JoeCoder, you brought up the human Y-Chromosome problem that says males are up to 300,000 years old.
This article doesn’t deal with that aspect of it specifically, but the article you referred to is quoted in this article I found on the ICR website:
http://www.icr.org/article/7413/
Any thoughts?
So his claim or take home from that article is that “this new data unequivocally proves that Neandertals and Denisovans were well within the DNA variability range of modern humans—not extinct primitive evolutionary offshoots of the human lineage.”
Probably you would agree with that as well.
He doesn’t address the age part of it. I would be interested in hearing how they handle that part of it.
I just read in a 2002 article of new scientist that we share 97% DNA with mice. Is that right or am I misunderstanding? I thought I heard Dawkins in a debate with a Rabbi saying something along the lines how this discovery is humbling to humans so I decided to look into it. Has this been overturned or is it a comparison in the same way as the chimp?
@tjguy
Thompkins sure has a talent for spinning any discovery to somehow support YEC. First, molecular clocks put that new divergent Y chromosme at about 330k years ago, and second I don’t think anybody has compared it with neanderthals or denisovans yet. The neanderthal Y data just appeared about a month ago and I don’t think anyone has published a study on it yet.
However he’s right about the lack of similarity between human and chimp Y’s. So if you base the mutation rate on phylogeny (assuming common descent is true), then that would put Y Adam at only thousands of years ago. The problem is the observed mutation rate puts him at 150-330k.
@JLAfan2001
Here is the mouse genome paper published in 2002. According to there:
So I don’t think it would be possible to have 97% similarity. Also:
Do you have a link to the new scientist article?
JLAfan2001,
Unlike many creationists, I’m not uncomfortable saying humans are close to chimps and rats in many ways. Creationists before Darwin saw that, and you can see it in your own eyes. Look how similar we are compared to chimps versus trees!
Similarity depends on what you are looking at. A favorite comparison used by ID sympathizers (like Denton) and evolutionists alike is the protein Cytochrome-C.
I gathered the following statistics just for you a few minutes ago from this website:
http://www.uniprot.org/blast/u.....sort=score
Look at the percent resemblance between the protein in humans (homo sapiens) and other creatures. I highlighted humans, chimps, mice, and rats:
Gorilla gorilla gorilla (Lowland gorilla) 100.0%
Pan troglodytes (Chimpanzee) 100.0%
Hylobates lar (Common gibbon) (White-handed gibbon) 100.0%
Hylobates agilis (Agile gibbon) 100.0%
Pongo sp. 100.0%
Gorilla gorilla (western gorilla) 100.0%
Pan paniscus (Pygmy chimpanzee) (Bonobo) 100.0%
Homo sapiens (Human) 100.0%
Pongo abelii (Sumatran orangutan) (Pongo pygmaeus abelii) 100.0%
Pan troglodytes (Chimpanzee) 100.0%
Homo sapiens (Human) 100.0%
Gorilla gorilla gorilla (Lowland gorilla) 100.0%
Macaca fascicularis (Crab-eating macaque) (Cynomolgus monkey) 99.0%
Macaca mulatta (Rhesus macaque) 99.0%
Lophocebus aterrimus (Black crested mangabey) (Cercocebus aterrimus) 99.0%
Cercocebus galeritus (Tana river mangabey) 99.0%
Cercopithecus cephus (Moustached monkey) 99.0%
Papio anubis (Olive baboon) 99.0%
Theropithecus gelada (Gelada baboon) 99.0%
Mandrillus leucophaeus (Drill) (Papio leucophaeus) 99.0%
Macaca sylvanus (Barbary macaque) 99.0%
Macaca arctoides (Stump-tailed macaque) 99.0%
Macaca cyclopis (Taiwan macaque) 99.0%
Macaca nemestrina (Pig-tailed macaque) 99.0%
Chlorocebus aethiops (Green monkey) (Cercopithecus aethiops) 99.0%
Chlorocebus aethiops (Green monkey) (Cercopithecus aethiops) 99.0%
…
Nasalis larvatus (Proboscis monkey) 99.0%
…
Macaca fascicularis (Crab-eating macaque) (Cynomolgus monkey) 98.0%
Papio hamadryas (Hamadryas baboon) 97.0%
Macaca mulatta (Rhesus macaque) 96.0%
Trachypithecus cristatus (Silvered leaf-monkey) (Presbytis cristata) 97.0%
Ateles sp. (Spider monkey) 95.0%
Macaca mulatta (Rhesus macaque) 95.0%
Macaca fascicularis (Crab-eating macaque) (Cynomolgus monkey) 94.0%
Heterocephalus glaber (Naked mole rat) 92.0%
Tupaia chinensis (Chinese tree shrew) 91.0%
Pongo abelii (Sumatran orangutan) (Pongo pygmaeus abelii) 94.0%
Pongo abelii (Sumatran orangutan) (Pongo pygmaeus abelii) 94.0%
Saimiri sciureus (Common squirrel monkey) 92.0%
Brachyteles arachnoides (Southern muriqui) (Woolly spider monkey) 92.0%
Ateles paniscus (Black spider monkey) (Red-faced black spider monkey) 92.0%
Saimiri sciureus (Common squirrel monkey) 92.0%
Oryctolagus cuniculus (Rabbit) 91.0%
Oryctolagus cuniculus (Rabbit) 91.0%
Callithrix jacchus (White-tufted-ear marmoset) 91.0%
Macropus giganteus (Eastern gray kangaroo) 90.0% 523 3.0×10-66 CYCS CYC
Mus musculus (Mouse) 91.0%
Otolemur garnettii (Small-eared galago) (Garnett’s greater bushbaby) 91.0%
Mirza coquereli (Coquerel’s mouse lemur) (Microcebus coquereli) 91.0%
Propithecus verreauxi (White sifaka) (Verreaux’s sifaka) 91.0%
Hapalemur griseus (Gray gentle lemur) (Eastern lesser bamboo lemur) 91.0%
Rattus norvegicus (Rat) 91.0%
Mus musculus (Mouse) 91.0%
Perodicticus potto (potto) 90.0%
Daubentonia madagascariensis (Aye-aye) (Sciurus madagascariensis) 91.0%
Lagothrix lagotricha (Brown woolly monkey) (Humboldt’s woolly monkey) 92.0%
Ovis aries (Sheep) 90.0%
Sus scrofa (Pig) 90.0%
Bos taurus (Bovine) 90.0%
JLAfan2001,
Now, given what I wrote above, you may wonder why I still accept creation.
Before getting into that, you might be curious to see how I argued that we can’t be descended from fish using data like I presented above.
See:
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ent-454760
Apologies for it being technical, but this is your chance to ask questions. I’m willing to answer to the best of my knowledge if you are willing to ask. I also invite you to ask evolutionists if the similarities are as I say.
JoeCoder
“Thompkins sure has a talent for spinning any discovery to somehow support YEC”
This is what I was saying earlier. Creationists are the ones that spin the data to match their faith, not evolutionists. They can’t be trusted and this is evidence of that. This is also why I think the new comparisons will not yield 70% similarities and the YEC will try to spin or misrepresent the data rather than admit they are wrong.
Excerpt: Mice and men share about 97.5 per cent of their working DNA, just one per cent less than chimps and humans. The new estimate is based on the comparison of mouse chromosome 16 with human DNA. Previous estimates had suggested mouse-human differences as high as 15 per cent.
http://www.newscientist.com/ar.....o-men.html
Sal
Forgive me but I’m really stupid when it comes to this. Are you saying that protein Cytochrome-C is evidence that we descended from chimpanzees? If so, this is one of the things I brought up as evidence for it and BA77 bombed me with links that go against it. Who do I trust?
JoeCoder
Thought you would like this article. What do you think?
http://www.reasons.org/article.....-adam-live
@JLAfan2001
You have to figure out who you can trust. Both sides of the debate are equally overflowing with those that exaggerate claims. Tompkins tends to be in this camp, but unlike many of his outside-creation-journal claims, I don’t yet know of a problem with his 70% paper.
On genome similarities:
1. Keep in mind that scordova’s numbers above are only for cytochrome C, which is about one ten-millionth of the total genome. It tends to be well conserved.
2. The new scientist mouse article is only talking about protein coding genes, which also tend to be more conserved and only constitute about 1.5% of the total genome. We now know it’s incorrect to say anything outside of protein coding genes is junk. It also predates the publication of the full mouse genome by 7 months.
At this stage I would encourage you to trust no one, not even yourself. Be skeptical, struggle to learn, struggle to understand.
Now what can we actually say just looking at the data. Our Cytochrome-C proteins is 100% identical to that of a chimp and 91% similar to that of mouse. That is a fact, what it means is another thing.
Do you at least agree this is a fact that our cytochrome-C proteins are 100% identical to chimps (and other apes) and 91% similar to a mouse?
Now the question is did we evolve. To make things easy, let us assume we evolved.
Assuming evolution is true, would you say then that the common ancestor of primates (chimps, humans, gorillas) is an ape since we share 100% similarity in cytochrome-c?
It’s probably fair to say, the cytochrome-C comparison will hold very much true for most proteins, I’d hazard to guess in the ballpark of 98%, but you’d have to go through about 30,000 of these protein exercises to see it. [There are some caveats which are topics for advanced discussions, but I’d like to keep things simple.]
If you were a researcher assuming evolution, would you assume the ancestor of primates (humans, chimps, gorillas) is a mouse or something like a primate? Look at the data, ponder it. Ask, argue, challenge, be skeptical.
Truth rarely is clear, and the lack of clarity, imho, is by design. You have to struggle hard to get close to it. I’m grateful you are taking the time to challenge and be skeptical and learn.
And, frankly, I’d be delighted if you start asking evolutionists some of the question I suggest.
Yes, indeed the creationists spin, and it’s rather obvious I have a lot of resentment with my own family, but the other side spins as well. You won’t see it until you scrutinize the facts. The facts will make things a little clearer, you won’t have all the answers at the end of your quest, but you’ll know more. Unfortunately, learning will come 1 inch at a time…but I’m glad you are asking.
JLAfan2001 @140
Thank you, but I’ve actually read it before. I don’t dispute anything Dr. Rana says about the Y-Adam dates–they’re the most straightforward interpretation of the data and I don’t know how to reconcile it with a YEC view.
Warning, long rant on mtEve ahead:
However on mtEve, what he doesn’t tell you is that the observed mutation rate of mtDNA is 20 times faster than the values given by fossil dates, which puts mtEve at only several thousand years ago. As Ann Gibbons reported in Science:
From there, hilarity ensues:
1. Talk Origin cites Mitochondrial genome variation and the origin of modern humans, Nature, 2000; as “more recent” evidence that mtEve lived a very long time ago, but they don’t tell you that paper ignores the observed rate and simply goes back to comparing to chimp mtDNA to get a rate of 1.7 x 10^-8 substitutions per site per year.
2. Wikipedia actually cites the Ann Gibbons article above (source 28) for an ancient mtEve, even though it directly contradicts the sentence they cite it for.
What on earth, right? Well, in 2010 we got the neanderthal genome, used fossil dates to estimate the sapian/neanderthal divergence at 500k years ago, counted the differences between our mitochondira, and came up with a mutation rate of 2.5 × 10^-8 mutations per site per year, reasonably close to the rate calibrated from chimps:
After this the carousel of data omission continues. ScienceDaily conclusively headlines Mother of All Humans Lived 200,000 Years Ago, not even mentioning that the rate was calibrated from neanderthal fossil dates or the contradiction with observed rates.
But all during this time studies have continually put the actual observed mutation rate 20-50 times faster: A 2012 pedigree study put it 50 times faster than the 2010 fossil calibrated rate:
Conclusions:
1. I have no idea when mtEve lived and neither does anybody else. Either the fossil dates are grossly incorrect, molecular clocks are meaningless, or both.
2. In at least this area, there is a large disconnect between peer reviewed journal articles and how it is summarized in popular media.
I think your numbers here are too high 🙂
Note that they only compared 231 genes out of 20k+ total, and that this predates the sequencing of the chimp genome in 2005. The 83% difference means that at least one letter was different, so only those in the 20% category are significant changes. But:
@JLAfan2001
I agree with scordova. Don’t trust us and don’t trust those that disagree with us. Follow sources, take biology classes, keep lots of notes, and put it all together for yourself.
Of somewhat related note: Richard Dawkins claimed that the FOXP2 gene was among ‘the most compelling evidences’ for establishing that humans evolved from monkeys, yet, as with all the other evidences offered from Darwinists, once the FOXP2 gene was critically analyzed it fell completely apart as proof for human evolution:
Dawkins Best Evidence (FOXP2 gene) Refuted – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfFZ8lCn5uU
As well, the primary piece of evidence, at the Dover trial, trying to establish chimp human ancestry from SNP (Single Nuecleotide Polymorphism) evidence was overturned:
Dover Revisited: With Beta-Globin Pseudogene Now Found to Be Functional, an Icon of the “Junk DNA” Argument Bites the Dust – Casey Luskin – April 23, 2013
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....71421.html
@BA77
I didn’t like ENV’s coverage of the beta-globin pseudogene because (as Coyne argues), even if a pseudogene’s transcript is doing something, that still doesn’t explain why it has a stop codon but is otherwise highly identical to protein coding genes in other animals.
So even if has some remaining function, I don’t think it defeats the argument for common descent. Rather, I think a better argument is to appeal to mutational hotspots causing the same mutation to arise independently in each lineage. For example here:
Phylogenists have no trouble invoking multiple independent but identical mutations as explanation when pseudogene patterns violate common descent. From a 2011 study:
JoeCoder
If I understand correctly, mtDNA Eve was older than Y-Chromosome Adam now you are saying that Adam is older than Eve? If Rana is correct, the average age of the two based on the clock is 150,000 years which lines up with the fossils. Do you agree with that?
I appreciate the help guys but this stuff is just way over my head. I think the main reason why I am leaning towards Darwinian evolution is because of mainstream science accepts it otherwise it would be rejected. I know that’s a pretty ignorant reason. I just can’t believe that all the independant lines of evidence pointing in one direction is false. It’s too much to be a coincidence. If that’s the case, why not challenge everything in science like the earth’s age or the size of the universe or the big bang or the fine-tuning. Why only accept what falls in line with theology but reject what doesn’t? I am open to a higher power starting the laws that lead up to life and to us but how does what test that? I can only trust that you guys have done your research the best that you can and have found evolution wanting but I have to side with the people who have been trained in this and study it everyday. I think Dennett is right. Darwinism is the universal acid that killed God and humanity.
Not quite, I’m saying the data is inconclusive and contradictory. If you take the observed rate of mtDNA mutation, mtEve lived about 6,000 years ago. If you assume radiometric dating is accurate then she lived 100-200k years ago. So either radiometric dating is wrong or molecular clocks are wrong, or both, and I don’t know which.
In comment 98 I offer some factors that would cause the Y-Adam date to be much older than it really is. But they’re speculative and I don’t have supporting evidence.
JLAfan @ 107
Among all the YEC that I’m aware of, so-called neanderthals were as human as any of us. Also, most that have looked into it any further probably find it likely that they were people that lived very long lives. This is consistent with the ages of the people that lived just after the flood. Ages in the several hundreds of years… lifespans decaying down over many subsequent generations closer to ages more like those we see today.
http://www.amazon.com/Buried-A.....0890512388
http://www.icr.org/article/nea.....an-babies/
Common Descent is NOT the same as Darwinism. Darwinism needs common descent, but common descent doesn’t need Darwinism. There are a notable minority of evolutionists that think Darwin was wrong.
ID critques Darwinism, creationism critiques both Darwinism and common descent. Darwinism can be falsified without falsifying common descent. The Felsenstein thread is one example of attempting to falsify Darwinism but not necessarily common descent. I’ll have more threads where I attempt to falsify Darwinism but not common descent.
That’s why I encourage you to talk to them. And the more you learn the more intelligent questions you can ask. What you may find in terms of their ability to answer may shock you. Consider the Felsenstein thread, Matzke is a professional biologist, did you notice his reluctance to volunteer an answer. 🙂
Now, you might say Matzke left because UD behaves badly toward critics, but you can find out for yourself by getting the courage to talk to them. Notice carefully if they try to confuse you, talk over your head, make you feel like your uneducated and stupid. Look at how Matzke responded to me versus the way I and JoeCoder tried to sift through the data and even old scientific papers which we struggle to understand and decipher.
IMHO, trying to find evidence of Creation is a big leap. Try something smaller like the origin of life. Ask a question like this:
“how can lifeless chemicals spontaneously assemble into a living form”.
Ask them. See how they treat you and see if they give a good answer. If the stuff is too technical, what better way to figure it out than to learn. They pulled the usual stunt of linking me to irrelevant papers and throwing as much complicated vocabulary so as to confuse me. They didn’t count on the fact I was persistent and willing to learn. 🙂
The process of learning will be hard but you can learn if you really want to. As I said, if there are more pressing things in your life, I totally respect that. These aren’t easy topics and studying them takes away from practical living.
And by the way, I can almost guarantee you, many biologists are so specialized they know little about the topics we talk about at UD. I mingled with the bio faculty at one university and asked if they taught population genetics (the subject of the Felsenstein thread), and they said, “No, it’s hard to find biologists who can do the math!” 🙂
You asked what qualifies some of those at UD to argue these topics, one thing is the collective engineering talent at UD that has a modest math background. Most engineers have a better understanding of math than most professional biologists, and that’s the crux of a lot of arguments.
Did you see the Cytochrome-C sequences. Careful study of that sequence with a little math will lead you to conclude we probably didn’t descend from fish. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Rather than arguing against universal common descent, how about starting with the question of the origin of life. That is a far easier topic.
And finally, Dennett was wrong. I’ll have more to say in other threads, but several respectable evolutionists like Allen Orr thinks Dennett’s book should be called “Dennett’s strange idea”. If you didn’t know it, Dennett is a philosopher, not a scientist! I have more scientific background than he does and that’s not saying much!!!
See for yourself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett
JLAfan2001
You made two points here. One that the main reason you accept it is because mainstreamers accept it. The other is that all the independent lines of evidence point in that direction.
I don’t want to come off as critical, but I just want to probe this a bit, if you don’t mind…
If you believe all the evidence point towards it, then why would your main reason for accepting it be that mainstreamers accept it? If I believed all the evidence pointed at it, that would be my main reason. Think about that a bit. Or perhaps, you think all the evidences points towards Darwinism because you might hear mainstreamers making that claim.
I’m willing to bet that if you listed bullets of the top 5 to 10 lines of evidence, you will find that they will not hold up to scrutiny using simple reasoning.
JLAfan2001:
But you’re falling victim to faulty thinking. Truth isn’t determined by how many people believe a particular concept. That’s the logical fallacy of jumping on the bandwagon. It’s used extensively in advertising (“everyone loves to eat at Joe’s, for example).
Mainstream science may accept Darwinian evolution as being true, but just remember than mainstream science also accepted phlogiston, bloodletting, and Piltdown Man.
Good, you’re thinking for yourself. And you realize that you might be wrong. Like I stated before, it’s not necessarily the evidence but rather the interpretation of the evidence; that, to me, is the real issue.
Everything in science can and should be challenged; science isn’t dogma.
You can’t. If God exists and is a spirit, then you can’t perform experiments to test his power. Then again, I can’t experimentally test to see how the first fish evolved legs and walked out of the ocean, either.
Science, to a degree, is built on faith (or trust, if you prefer). Scientists trust that the natural laws will perform as they always have, i.e., gravity will work today like it did when Newton formulated his laws.
I would encourage you to keep an open mind and examine both sides of the issue.
Urey was a Nobel Prize winner in physics for his discovery of deuterium. When his name was mentioned in class, my eyes almost popped out. Wow! I didn’t know Urey was independently famous.
No doubt, Urey’s reputation (even though Miller did all the work) was leveraged to make the theory popular. However, Urey conceded that he found it incredible that life could form from lifeless chemical, but there seemed no other explanation than a chemical origin!
The debate over experiment has a soft place in a lot of people’s hearts, especially for people like me that once accepted the inflated claims.
UDAT
Thanks for that quote from Robert Shapiro. Great info!
Sal @ 133
Thanks for the kind words. Likewise, and it’s been nice, fun & helpful reading your comments over the past 8? or 9? years.
And thanks for the invite to meet-up. I’m sure I could find ya if I were there. Unfortunately, I think I’ll be working in Japan in September, and Philadelphia is a bit out of my neighborhood…but you never know. 😀 The conference looks like it will be a lot of fun. Send me an email if you’re in the San Diego area anytime by chance.
God bless you too.
Sal,
Looking at the schedule fo the ICC. This looked intriguing:
http://creationicc.org/more.php?pk=19
This idea has some parts (e.g. units of space) that remind me very much of my intuitions regarding space. It’ll be interesting to read more on that.
JLAfan2001 @ 83
Sorry, missed this:
If you consider Haldane’s Dilemma, which Water ReMine added to over the past years, it’s not possible to fix that much genetic change into the population in 6 million years. I think Sal described this once as a ‘speed limit’ for evolution. That limit would be a maximum of 1667 genetic mutations could be fixed into a supposed population since chimp and human had some supposed common ancestor to the time of modern humans. Keep in mind that that figure was calculated while giving the evolution myth benefit of the doubt – i.e. it’s therefore a conservative high estimate. This is why if similarity drops to 70%, it will be an absolute death knell to Darwinism (as we know it). What I predict would happen is that Darwinist will try to label it all as junk. However, that will be stymied by further data from the ENCODE project.
It’s a really bad time to be a Darwinist.
Yeah, 70% would make more sense for trying to account for the observed differences in chimps and humans. However, for reasons stated above, it will ruin Darwinism. Expect to see very high resistance to such published lowering of the similarities.
BTW: Side note. In the book ‘Signs of Intelligence’, Dr. Wells wrote an interesting chapter on DNA and development. Apparently, DNA is not enough to explain development… as illustrated in one experiment he described. Where I think a lizards DNA was substituted into a chicken egg. The morphological development followed the species of the egg, not the source of the DNA as Hollywood movies would probably lead us to think. And it developed only so far as there was available common/correct protein coding to progress in development. The creature apparently died. He provides other reasons and evidence why/how the structure of the egg itself contributed to morphological development.
This is a great YEC video by Ian Juby on falsifying the evolutionary geologic column. Love this guy’s work.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTWZJBXAZJA
The graves in my local English churchyards disappear under vegetation in less than one hundred years thanks to the wet climate favouring grass growth which attracts birds looking for seeds and small mammals seeking food and both fertilising as they go. Thus England is elevating while USA is sinking or eroding simply because much of it lacks the rain and seed to starts growth which will attract wildlife which will fertilise and spread the growth.
God created earthworms especially to turn dead vegetation and animals droppings into fertile soil and He put aquatic worms in the bottom of the seas to recycle all the detritus that drifts down.
To stop America blowing away just needs some earthworms?