Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Cornelius Hunter now has a YouTube channel, Darwin’s God

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Karsten Pultz’s writes to mention that Cornelius Hunter has a YouTube channel now, called Darwin’s God — after his book and blog of the same name.

Here’s the most recent broadcast from yesterday:

The Genetic Code Part VIII: Evolution Goes Hard Anti Science

Not only is there no compelling scientific explanation for how the genetic code could have evolved, there also are significant problems with the theory. Nonetheless, evolutionists contradict the science and claim that the genetic code is powerful evidence for evolution. There is no scientific evidence for their claims. [new version: 3/6/2021]

Links to the earlier videos:

Part I: https://youtu.be/XQ5qPtKFze4

Part II: https://youtu.be/oQ9tAL2AM6M

Part III: https://youtu.be/3LfczAnL490

Part IV: https://youtu.be/CY61INxqWJY

Part V: https://youtu.be/cf-pn1nmsOU

Part VI: https://youtu.be/Ip95juU0FqI

Part VII: https://youtu.be/wj6bcu1dat0

Comments
I work in software development. We re-use code and adapt code copied from one application to another. We routinely get on people for taking the time to re-invent wheels. The observation that pretty much all life uses the same genetic code proves absolutely nothing at all. And we all know exactly how it would play out if it were discovered that alien life used the same genetic code: The Darwinists would either claim that some cosmic event caused a transfer of living material, or they would suddenly "discover" that the genetic code we have is optimal and claim that it all evolved in parallel, and they would maintain whichever explanation they chose in the face of all poverty of evidence.EvilSnack
March 8, 2021
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After watching a couple, these are excellent videos. Short and clear, with good use of visuals. Most video lectures might as well be audio.polistra
March 8, 2021
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Moreover, in their assumption that God would not create a universal genetic code, Darwinists are unwittingly assuming that they have access into God's thoughts as to why and when He would create specific genetic codes. i.e. They, apparently, assume they have sole propriety access into the omniscient Mind of God so as to be able to discern His reasoning for creating the genetic code. Which is, needless to say, Theistic hubris of the highest order. Moreover, there is a good scientific reason for why life should be able to communicate with each other. i.e. for life to have, basically, the same genetic code. For instance, "major groups of microbes perform their metabolic activities in a coordinated and predictable way.,,," so as to ensure the heath and success of the microbial community as a whole.
Oceanic microbes behave in a synchrony across ocean basins - March 16, 2015 Excerpt: Researchers have found that microbial communities in different regions of the Pacific Ocean displayed strikingly similar daily rhythms in their metabolism despite inhabiting extremely different habitats -- the nutrient-rich waters off California and the nutrient-poor waters north of Hawai'i. Furthermore, in each location, the dominant photoautotrophs appear to initiate a cascade effect wherein the other major groups of microbes perform their metabolic activities in a coordinated and predictable way.,,, The bacterial groups common to both ecosystems displayed the same transcriptional patterns and daily rhythms -- as if each group is performing its prescribed role at a precise time each and every day, even though these communities are separated by thousands of miles. "Our work suggests that these microbial communities broadly behave in a similar manner across entire ocean basins and that specific biological interactions between these groups are widespread in nature,",,, "Surprisingly, however, our work shows that these extremely different ecosystems exhibit very similar diel cycles, driven largely by sunlight and interspecies microbial interactions," said Aylward, "This suggests that different microbial communities across the Pacific Ocean, and likely waters across the entire planet, behave in much more orderly ways than has previously been supposed," http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150316102112.htm
This extremely coordinated activity in a community of different microbes simply would not be possible unless the different microbes had the capability within themselves to communicate with each other. Hence, there is a good scientific reason for why life would share a common genetic code. i.e. They need to share at least one common language in order to be able to communicate with each other. In fact, this finding of mutually cooperating microbes, besides giving us a good scientific reason for why the genetic code is, for the most part, universal, also falsifies the Darwinian belief that life is dominated by competition.
Doubting Darwin: Algae Findings Surprise Scientists - April 28, 2014 Excerpt: The scientists did not set out to disprove Darwin, but, in fact, to learn more about the genetic and ecological uniqueness of fresh water green algae so they could provide conservationists with useful data for decision-making. "We went into it assuming Darwin to be right, and expecting to come up with some real numbers for conservationists," Cardinale says. "When we started coming up with numbers that showed he wasn't right, we were completely baffled.",,, Darwin "was obsessed with competition," Cardinale says. "He assumed the whole world was composed of species competing with each other, but we found that one-third of the species of algae we studied actually like each other. They don't grow as well unless you put them with another species. It may be that nature has a heck of a lot more mutualisms than we ever expected. ",,, Maybe Darwin's presumption that the world may be dominated by competition is wrong." http://www.livescience.com/45205-data-dont-back-up-darwin-in-algae-study-nsf-bts.html
Thirdly, although the genetic code may be, for the most part, universal, the genetic sequences within DNA itself certainly does not support the Darwinian notion of common ancestry. Winston Ewert has an excellent paper that makes this point abundantly clear.
New Paper by Winston Ewert Demonstrates Superiority of Design Model - Cornelius Hunter - July 20, 2018 Excerpt: Ewert’s three types of data are: (i) sample computer software, (ii) simulated species data generated from evolutionary/common descent computer algorithms, and (iii) actual, real species data. Ewert’s three models are: (i) a null model which entails no relationships between any species, (ii) an evolutionary/common descent model, and (iii) a dependency graph model. Ewert’s results are a Copernican Revolution moment.,, Third, for the actual, real species data, the dependency graph model is astronomically superior compared to the common descent model. Where It Counts Let me repeat that in case the point did not sink in. Where it counted, common descent failed compared to the dependency graph model. The other data types served as useful checks, but for the data that mattered — the actual, real, biological species data — the results were unambiguous. Ewert amassed a total of nine massive genetic databases. In every single one, without exception, the dependency graph model surpassed common descent. Darwin could never have even dreamt of a test on such a massive scale. Darwin also could never have dreamt of the sheer magnitude of the failure of his theory. Because you see, Ewert’s results do not reveal two competitive models with one model edging out the other. We are not talking about a few decimal points difference. For one of the data sets (HomoloGene), the dependency graph model was superior to common descent by a factor of 10,064. The comparison of the two models yielded a preference for the dependency graph model of greater than ten thousand.,,, Ten thousand is a big number. But it gets worse, much worse.,,, Ewert reports the logarithm of the number. Remember logarithms? Remember how 2 really means 100, 3 means 1,000, and so forth? Unbelievably, the 10,064 value is the logarithm (base value of 2) of the quotient! In other words, the probability of the data on the dependency graph model is so much greater than that given the common descent model, we need logarithms even to type it out. If you tried to type out the plain number, you would have to type a 1 followed by more than 3,000 zeros. That’s the ratio of how probable the data are on these two models! By using a base value of 2 in the logarithm we express the Bayes factor in bits. So the conditional probability for the dependency graph model has a 10,064 advantage over that of common descent. https://evolutionnews.org/2018/07/new-paper-by-winston-ewert-demonstrates-superiority-of-design-model/
Of related interest, mitochondria DNA sequences reveal that "species have very clear genetic boundaries, and there’s nothing much in between. “If individuals are stars, then species are galaxies,” said Thaler. “They are compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space.”
Sweeping gene survey reveals new facets of evolution – May 28, 2018 Excerpt: Darwin perplexed,,, And yet—another unexpected finding from the study—species have very clear genetic boundaries, and there’s nothing much in between. “If individuals are stars, then species are galaxies,” said Thaler. “They are compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space.” The absence of “in-between” species is something that also perplexed Darwin, he said. https://phys.org/news/2018-05-gene-survey-reveals-facets-evolution.html
Fourthly, although the genetic code may be, for the most part, the same across life, (with a few notable exceptions that falsify that rule), the alternative splicing codes are indeed unique to each species. In fact, "“The alternative splicing patterns are very different even between humans and chimpanzees,”
Evolution by Splicing – Comparing gene transcripts from different species reveals surprising splicing diversity. – Ruth Williams – December 20, 2012 Excerpt: A major question in vertebrate evolutionary biology is “how do physical and behavioral differences arise if we have a very similar set of genes to that of the mouse, chicken, or frog?”,,,?A commonly discussed mechanism was variable levels of gene expression, but both Blencowe and Chris Burge,,, found that gene expression is relatively conserved among species.?On the other hand, the papers show that most alternative splicing events differ widely between even closely related species. “The alternative splicing patterns are very different even between humans and chimpanzees,” said Blencowe.,,, http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view%2FarticleNo%2F33782%2Ftitle%2FEvolution-by-Splicing%2F?
As the following article notes, "Alternatively spliced isoforms of proteins exhibit strikingly different interaction profiles and thus, in the context of global interactome networks, appear to behave as if encoded by distinct genes rather than as minor variants of each other.,,, ,, As many as 100,000 distinct isoform transcripts could be produced from the 20,000 human protein-coding genes, collectively leading to perhaps over a million distinct polypeptides obtained by post-translational modification of products of all possible transcript isoforms."
Widespread Expansion of Protein Interaction Capabilities by Alternative Splicing - 2016 In Brief Alternatively spliced isoforms of proteins exhibit strikingly different interaction profiles and thus, in the context of global interactome networks, appear to behave as if encoded by distinct genes rather than as minor variants of each other.,,, Page 806 excerpt: As many as 100,000 distinct isoform transcripts could be produced from the 20,000 human protein-coding genes (Pan et al., 2008), collectively leading to perhaps over a million distinct polypeptides obtained by post-translational modification of products of all possible transcript isoforms (Smith and Kelleher, 2013). http://iakouchevalab.ucsd.edu/publications/Yang_Cell_OMIM_2016.pdf
Moreover, as Jeffrey Tomkins explains in this following article, "the human 3-D genome is distinctly unique to humans, confirming previous research that showed it is as different compared to chimp as it is to mouse."
3-D Human Genome Radically Different from Chimp - Jeffrey Tomkins, PH.D. - Jan. 7, 2021 Excerpt: Now a new study published in Trends in Genetics evaluates research in this emerging field that shows the human 3-D genome is distinctly unique to humans, confirming previous research that showed it is as different compared to chimp as it is to mouse.1,,, One important aspect of 3-D genome structure has to do with the epigenetic modification of proteins called histones that the DNA is wrapped around. A 2011 study showed that a specific type of histone modification had only about a 70% overlap or similarity between humans and chimps.4 Remarkably, another study in 2012 showed that humans had about a 70% similarity for the same feature with mice.5 In other words, humans were as different to mice as they were to chimps for this particular genome conformation metric. In the Trends in Genetics study, scientists wanted to take a closer look at this evolutionary anomaly to see if it held true for one of the most important features of genome conformation—TAD similarity. They found that in comparing humans and chimps, “only ~43% of TADs conserved [similar] between these species, but across many different parameters (e.g., resolution, window size, genome assembly) and different downstream analysis decisions, no more than 78% of domains and 83% of TAD boundaries were found to be shared between humans and chimpanzees.” This huge evolutionary discrepancy led them to conclude, “In our mind, there is no strong basis for the common and often unchallenged notion that TADs are highly conserved.”1 ,,, https://www.icr.org/article/human-genome-radically-different-from-chimp
Thus, the Darwinist's genetic argument for common ancestry, i.e. "If God created the species independently, then they would have different Genetic Codes", fails on many different levels. Dr. Hunter's observation that there are "significant problems with the theory' is a severe understatement. I have seen few theories of science fail this badly on so many different levels as this genetic theory of common ancestry has. In fact, off the top of my head, I can think of no other theories in science that have failed this badly on so many different levels. (And, in this post, I have not even listed all the arguments that can be mustered against the Darwinian assumption of 'genetic reductionism'!) If Darwinian evolution were a normal science instead of, basically, being an unfalsifiable religion for atheists, this should count as yet another catastrophic falsification of their theory that forever renders Darwinian evolution to the dustbin of failed scientific theories.
John 1:1-4 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.
bornagain77
March 8, 2021
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As to premise 1 of the Darwinist's genetic argument for common ancestry,
"1: If God created the species independently, then they would have different Genetic Codes." https://youtu.be/ARd01yHbD74?t=335
First off, contrary to the belief that all life shares the same genetic code, there are several notable exceptions to that belief that falsify the Darwinian in a universal genetic code.
Universal Genetic Code? No! - January 18, 2016 Excerpt: “To date, the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), which houses all published DNA sequences (as well as RNA and protein sequences), currently acknowledges nineteen different coding languages for DNA… “,,, This was a shock to me. As an impressionable young student at the University of Rochester, I was taught quite definitively that there is only one code for DNA, and it is universal. This, of course, is often cited as evidence for evolution.,,, In the end, it seems to me that this wide variation in the genetic code deals a serious blow to the entire hypothesis of common ancestry, at least the way it is currently constructed. Perhaps that’s why I hadn’t heard about it until reading Dr. Rossiter’s excellent book. http://blog.drwile.com/?p=14280
Secondly, as Dr. Hunter pointed out, Darwinists have no clue how the genetic code came about in the first place, i.e. 'they assume the existence of the genetic code', thus they have no proof that genetic codes can occur naturally. In fact, there is now a 10 million dollar prize being offered to the first person who can prove that a code, any code, can be generated by a naturalistic process.
Evolution 2.0 Prize: Unprecedented $10 Million Offered To Replicate Cellular Evolution - January 2020 Excerpt: An incentive prize ten times the size of the Nobel – believed to be the largest single award ever in basic science – is being offered to the person or team solving the largest mystery in history: how genetic code inside cells got there, and how cells intentionally self-organize, communicate, then purposely adapt. This $10 million challenge, the Evolution 2.0 Prize can be found at www.evo2.org. https://www.prnewswire.com/in/news-releases/evolution-2-0-prize-unprecedented-10-million-offered-to-replicate-cellular-evolution-875038146.html
Moreover, there are far more codes now found in life than just the genetic code,
What is Code Biology?,,, A world of organic codes In addition to the genetic code and the signal transduction codes, a wide variety of new organic codes have come to light in recent years. Among them: the sequence codes (Trifonov 1987, 1989, 1999), the Hox code (Paul Hunt et al. 1991; Kessel and Gruss 1991), the adhesive code (Redies and Takeichi 1996; Shapiro and Colman 1999), the splicing codes (Barbieri 2003; Fu 2004; Matlin et al. 2005; Pertea et al. 2007; Wang and Burge 2008; Barash et al. 2010; Dhir et al. 2010), the signal transduction codes (Barbieri 2003), the histone code (Strahl and Allis 2000; Jenuwein and Allis 2001; Turner 2000, 2002, 2007; Kühn and Hofmeyr 2014), the sugar code (Gabius 2000, 2009), the compartment codes (Barbieri 2003), the cytoskeleton codes (Barbieri 2003; Gimona 2008), the transcriptional code (Jessell 2000; Marquard and Pfaff 2001; Ruiz i Altaba et al. 2003; Flames et al. 2007), the neural code (Nicolelis and Ribeiro 2006; Nicolelis 2011), a neural code for taste (Di Lorenzo 2000; Hallock and Di Lorenzo 2006), an odorant receptor code (Dudai 1999; Ray et al. 2006), a space code in the hippocampus (O’Keefe and Burgess 1996, 2005; Hafting et al. 2005; Brandon and Hasselmo 2009; Papoutsi et al. 2009), the apoptosis code (Basañez and Hardwick 2008; Füllgrabe et al. 2010), the tubulin code (Verhey and Gaertig 2007), the nuclear signalling code (Maraldi 2008), the injective organic codes (De Beule et al. 2011), the molecular codes (Görlich et al. 2011; Görlich and Dittrich 2013), the ubiquitin code (Komander and Rape 2012), the bioelectric code (Tseng and Levin 2013; Levin 2014), the acoustic codes (Farina and Pieretti 2014), the glycomic code (Buckeridge and De Souza 2014; Tavares and Buckeridge 2015) and the Redox code (Jones and Sies 2015). The living world, in short, is literally teeming with organic codes, and yet so far their discoveries have only circulated in small circles and have not attracted the attention of the scientific community at large. http://codebiology.org/
And many times these different codes overlap the standard genetic code in an irreducibly complex manner that random mutations to DNA simply have no hope of ever explaining.
Multiple Overlapping Genetic Codes Profoundly Reduce the Probability of Beneficial Mutation George Montañez 1, Robert J. Marks II 2, Jorge Fernandez 3 and John C. Sanford 4 - published online May 2013 Excerpt: In the last decade, we have discovered still another aspect of the multi- dimensional genome. We now know that DNA sequences are typically “ poly-functional” [38]. Trifanov previously had described at least 12 genetic codes that any given nucleotide can contribute to [39,40], and showed that a given base-pair can contribute to multiple overlapping codes simultaneously. The first evidence of overlapping protein-coding sequences in viruses caused quite a stir, but since then it has become recognized as typical. According to Kapronov et al., “it is not unusual that a single base-pair can be part of an intricate network of multiple isoforms of overlapping sense and antisense transcripts, the majority of which are unannotated” [41]. The ENCODE project [42] has confirmed that this phenomenon is ubiquitous in higher genomes, wherein a given DNA sequence routinely encodes multiple overlapping messages, meaning that a single nucleotide can contribute to two or more genetic codes. Most recently, Itzkovitz et al. analyzed protein coding regions of 700 species, and showed that virtually all forms of life have extensive overlapping information in their genomes [43]. 38. Sanford J (2008) Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome. FMS Publications, NY. Pages 131–142. 39. Trifonov EN (1989) Multiple codes of nucleotide sequences. Bull of Mathematical Biology 51:417–432. 40. Trifanov EN (1997) Genetic sequences as products of compression by inclusive superposition of many codes. Mol Biol 31:647–654. 41. Kapranov P, et al (2005) Examples of complex architecture of the human transcriptome revealed by RACE and high density tiling arrays. Genome Res 15:987–997. 42. Birney E, et al (2007) Encode Project Consortium: Identification and analysis of functional elements in 1% of the human genome by the ENCODE pilot project. Nature 447:799–816. 43. Itzkovitz S, Hodis E, Sega E (2010) Overlapping codes within protein-coding sequences. Genome Res. 20:1582–1589. Conclusions: Our analysis confirms mathematically what would seem intuitively obvious - multiple overlapping codes within the genome must radically change our expectations regarding the rate of beneficial mutations. As the number of overlapping codes increases, the rate of potential beneficial mutation decreases exponentially, quickly approaching zero. Therefore the new evidence for ubiquitous overlapping codes in higher genomes strongly indicates that beneficial mutations should be extremely rare. This evidence combined with increasing evidence that biological systems are highly optimized, and evidence that only relatively high-impact beneficial mutations can be effectively amplified by natural selection, lead us to conclude that mutations which are both selectable and unambiguously beneficial must be vanishingly rare. This conclusion raises serious questions. How might such vanishingly rare beneficial mutations ever be sufficient for genome building? How might genetic degeneration ever be averted, given the continuous accumulation of low impact deleterious mutations? http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9789814508728_0006
Moreover, we have good reason to believe that God did indeed create the genetic code.
“The genetic code’s error-minimization properties are far more dramatic than these (one in a million) results indicate. When the researchers calculated the error-minimization capacity of the one million randomly generated genetic codes, they discovered that the error-minimization values formed a distribution. Researchers estimate the existence of 10^18 possible genetic codes possessing the same type and degree of redundancy as the universal genetic code. All of these codes fall within the error-minimization distribution. This means of 10^18 codes few, if any have an error-minimization capacity that approaches the code found universally throughout nature.”? - Fazale Rana - From page 175; 'The Cell’s Design'
DNA is simply 'engineering sci-fi' as far as man's best engineering capabilities thus far are concerned. In terms of information storage capacity and efficiency, man's best engineering efforts don't hold a candle to DNA
The World's Ideal Storage Medium Is "Beyond Silicon" - January 20, 2017 Excerpt: it's easy to see why DNA is "one of the strongest candidates yet" to replace silicon as the storage medium of the future. The read-write speed is about 30 times faster than your computer's hard drive. The expected data retention is 10 times longer. The power usage is ridiculously low, almost a billion times less than flash memory. And the data density is an astonishing 10^19 bits per cubic centimeter, a thousand times more than flash memory and a million times more than a hard disk. At that density, the entire world's data could fit in one kilogram of DNA,,, Scientists are seeking to match the same level of functional coherence that can be observed every second in the (DNA of our) cells of our own bodies, and of the simplest microbes. The conclusion to draw from this hardly needs to be stated. https://evolutionnews.org/2017/01/the_worlds_idea/
As well, the 'quantum computation' capability of DNA trounces anything that man has thus far accomplished in terms of building a quantum computer.
"What happens is this classical information (of DNA) is embedded, sandwiched, into the quantum information (of DNA). And most likely this classical information is never accessed because it is inside all the quantum information. You can only access the quantum information or the electron clouds and the protons. So mathematically you can describe that as a quantum/classical state." Elisabeth Rieper – Classical and Quantum Information in DNA – video (Longitudinal Quantum Information resides along the entire length of DNA discussed at the 19:30 minute mark; at 24:00 minute mark Dr Rieper remarks that practically the whole DNA molecule can be viewed as quantum information with classical information embedded within it) https://youtu.be/2nqHOnVTxJE?t=1176
bornagain77
March 8, 2021
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Good. I enjoy Hunter's thoughts, but for some reason I never get around to reading his blog. Might be easier if I can listen while doing something else.polistra
March 7, 2021
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