Uncommon Descent gets mail: From Christianity Today. Mad at me.

_{Denyse O'Leary
June 1, 2011

Intelligent Design

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Intelligent Design}

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[images.jpg] Yesterday, I received a note from a high-ranking editor at Christianity Today who was pretty annoyed at what I wrote about the magazine’s June cover story on BioLogos. He hasn’t replied to my suggestion that I publish his note and my reply. So I will publish my reply here, with a couple of comments, and link to the pieces posted here at UD.

First, one comment: He thought it a “slur” to predict that the magazine could end up endorsing euthanasia. I confess to not knowing why it is a slur. Consider abortion and other traditionally prohibited lifestyle practices many nominally Christian groups do end up endorsing by word or silence: They believe themselves to be moral people, and some members have informed me that they are more moral than me. I am not inclined to dispute the matter. One wonders how many Evolution Sunday churches sing those tunes?

At any rate, many folk have told me over the years that they thought Christianity Today, for which I used to write, was slowly heading to the junction of Aimless and Liberal. The cover story’s apish Adam and Eve feels like that sort of watershed. I rarely read the mag any more and the mag isn’t important enough to the folk who told me that to justify the trouble of slander. They simply sense it is true, and change the subject. Anyway, I wrote:

I was sent the story and tried to make sense of it for what it is. For the message it gives, taken by itself, as I have every right to do, since most readers will.

And if you end up where I suggested, you’ll think it right to be there, little by little and step by step. So it won’t even be a slur. Look what Francis Collins endorses! And he is Mr. US Evangelical Scientist. If you doubt that personally, can I quote you? Can I quote this correspondence? [Apparently not. – d.]

A friend, a faithful Christian in science, was dismayed by the story. He is an information theorist. … The genome, to take one small point, is full over overlapping codes. (It’s as if a short story read backwards is a flawless different short story, and sections of it, read letter by letter down the right hand side are a flawless paragraph.)

Then I turn to Giberson and Collins and – straw men jousting at straw enemies. 78% of evolutionary biologists are “pure naturalists” (No God and no free will).And G and C are telling us that we should defer to the authority of science about what random processes can do, when I am hearing so much real science showing conclusively what they can’t do.

I thought Ostling did a superb job of allowing people to realize what they are choosing to embrace, and I especially loved the artist’s grotesques. It figures, in the new view, that God, if he exists and if he created Adam and Eve, would create them like that, so that we are superior to them instead of inferior.

And isn’t that the real point of Christian Darwinism?

Okay, so I am not on that guy’s Christmas list.

My posts on Christianity Today here:

Christianity Today on the BioLogos vs. orthodoxy “crisis”

Christianity Today article on BioLogos: A
Darwinian, not a Christian view of evil is floated, in defense of Christian Darwinism

Dumped Biologians could make own film

Ninety-nine per cent chimpanzee rides again? In a Christian rag? Well, maybe only 96%?

Prediction: Based on Christianity Today’s article on Darwin-friendly Adam and Eve

Comments

Ms. O'Leary, as to this quote of yours: 'The genome, to take one small point, is full over overlapping codes. (It’s as if a short story read backwards is a flawless different short story, and sections of it, read letter by letter down the right hand side are a flawless paragraph.)' Notes: DNA - Evolution Vs. Polyfuctionality - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4614519 Poly-Functional Complexity equals Poly-Constrained Complexity http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AYmaSrBPNEmGZGM4ejY3d3pfMjdoZmd2emZncQ Scientists Map All Mammalian Gene Interactions – August 2010 Excerpt: Mammals, including humans, have roughly 20,000 different genes.,,, They found a network of more than 7 million interactions encompassing essentially every one of the genes in the mammalian genome. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100809142044.htm Astonishing DNA complexity demolishes neo-Darwinism - Alex Williams Excerpt: Not only has the ENCODE project elevated UTRs out of the ‘junk’ category, but it now appears that they are far more active than the translated regions (the genes), as measured by the number of DNA bases appearing in RNA transcripts. Genic regions are transcribed on average in five different overlapping and interleaved ways, while UTRs are transcribed on average in seven different overlapping and interleaved ways. Since there are about 33 times as many bases in UTRs than in genic regions, that makes the ‘junk’ about 50 times more active than the genes. http://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j21_3/j21_3_111-117.pdf Here, we show that the universal genetic code can efficiently carry arbitrary parallel codes much better than the vast majority of other possible genetic codes.... the present findings support the view that protein-coding regions can carry abundant parallel codes. http://genome.cshlp.org/content/17/4/405.full The data compression of some stretches of human DNA is estimated to be up to 12 codes thick (12 different ways of DNA transcription) (Trifonov, 1989). (This is well beyond the complexity of any computer code ever written by man). John Sanford - Genetic Entropy The multiple codes of nucleotide sequences. Trifonov EN. - 1989 Excerpt: Nucleotide sequences carry genetic information of many different kinds, not just instructions for protein synthesis (triplet code). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2673451 "In the last ten years, at least 20 different natural information codes were discovered in life, each operating to arbitrary conventions (not determined by law or physicality). Examples include protein address codes [Ber08B], acetylation codes [Kni06], RNA codes [Fai07], metabolic codes [Bru07], cytoskeleton codes [Gim08], histone codes [Jen01], and alternative splicing codes [Bar10]. Donald E. Johnson – Programming of Life – pg.51 - 2010 Human Genome “Infinitely More Complex” Than Expected - April 2010 Excerpt: Hayden acknowledged that the “junk DNA” paradigm has been blown to smithereens. “Just one decade of post-genome biology has exploded that view,” she said,,,, Network theory is now a new paradigm that has replaced the one-way linear diagram of gene to RNA to protein. That used to be called the “Central Dogma” of genetics. Now, everything is seen to be dynamic, with promoters and blockers and interactomes, feedback loops, feed-forward processes, and “bafflingly complex signal-transduction pathways.” http://www.creationsafaris.com/crev201004.htm#20100405a Most Detailed Annotation of Fruit-Fly Genome Points Way to Understanding All Organisms’ Genomes – December 2010 Excerpt: “We also found an order-of-magnitude increase in the ways that genes are spliced and edited to produce alternate forms of known proteins, thus significantly increasing the complexity of the proteome.”,,, Despite the scrutiny to which the Drosophila genome has been subjected, the researchers found new or altered exons or splice forms in almost three-quarters of Drosophila’s previously annotated genes,,, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101222131131.htm Bill Gates, in recognizing the superiority found in Genetic Coding compared to the best computer coding we now have, has now funded research into this area: Welcome to CoSBi - (Computational and Systems Biology) Excerpt: Biological systems are the most parallel systems ever studied and we hope to use our better understanding of how living systems handle information to design new computational paradigms, programming languages and software development environments. The net result would be the design and implementation of better applications firmly grounded on new computational, massively parallel paradigms in many different areas. Do you believe Richard Dawkins exists? Excerpt: DNA is the best information storage mechanism known to man. A single pinhead of DNA contains as much information as could be stored on 2 million two-terabyte hard drives. Comprehensive Mapping of Long-Range Interactions Reveals Folding Principles of the Human Genome - Oct. 2009 Excerpt: At the megabase scale, the chromatin conformation is consistent with a fractal globule, a knot-free, polymer conformation that enables maximally dense packing while preserving the ability to easily fold and unfold any genomic locus. 3-D Structure Of Human Genome: Fractal Globule Architecture Packs Two Meters Of DNA Into Each Cell - Oct. 2009 Excerpt: the information density in the nucleus is trillions of times higher than on a computer chip -- while avoiding the knots and tangles that might interfere with the cell's ability to read its own genome. Moreover, the DNA can easily unfold and refold during gene activation, gene repression, and cell replication. Quantum Dots Spotlight DNA-Repair Proteins in Motion - March 2010 Excerpt: "How this system works is an important unanswered question in this field," he said. "It has to be able to identify very small mistakes in a 3-dimensional morass of gene strands. It's akin to spotting potholes on every street all over the country and getting them fixed before the next rush hour." Dr. Bennett Van Houten - of note: A bacterium has about 40 team members on its pothole crew. That allows its entire genome to be scanned for errors in 20 minutes, the typical doubling time.,, These smart machines can apparently also interact with other damage control teams if they cannot fix the problem on the spot. semi OT: New DI podcast "ID Scientist Douglas Axe Responds to His Critics" http://intelligentdesign.podomatic.com/entry/2011-06-01T15_59_43-07_00bornagain77_{June 1, 2011
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Ms. O'Leary, as to this quote of yours: 'The genome, to take one small point, is full over overlapping codes. (It’s as if a short story read backwards is a flawless different short story, and sections of it, read letter by letter down the right hand side are a flawless paragraph.)' Notes: DNA - Evolution Vs. Polyfuctionality - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4614519 Poly-Functional Complexity equals Poly-Constrained Complexity http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AYmaSrBPNEmGZGM4ejY3d3pfMjdoZmd2emZncQ Scientists Map All Mammalian Gene Interactions – August 2010 Excerpt: Mammals, including humans, have roughly 20,000 different genes.,,, They found a network of more than 7 million interactions encompassing essentially every one of the genes in the mammalian genome. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100809142044.htm Astonishing DNA complexity demolishes neo-Darwinism - Alex Williams Excerpt: Not only has the ENCODE project elevated UTRs out of the ‘junk’ category, but it now appears that they are far more active than the translated regions (the genes), as measured by the number of DNA bases appearing in RNA transcripts. Genic regions are transcribed on average in five different overlapping and interleaved ways, while UTRs are transcribed on average in seven different overlapping and interleaved ways. Since there are about 33 times as many bases in UTRs than in genic regions, that makes the ‘junk’ about 50 times more active than the genes. http://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j21_3/j21_3_111-117.pdf Here, we show that the universal genetic code can efficiently carry arbitrary parallel codes much better than the vast majority of other possible genetic codes.... the present findings support the view that protein-coding regions can carry abundant parallel codes. http://genome.cshlp.org/content/17/4/405.full The data compression of some stretches of human DNA is estimated to be up to 12 codes thick (12 different ways of DNA transcription) (Trifonov, 1989). (This is well beyond the complexity of any computer code ever written by man). John Sanford - Genetic Entropy The multiple codes of nucleotide sequences. Trifonov EN. - 1989 Excerpt: Nucleotide sequences carry genetic information of many different kinds, not just instructions for protein synthesis (triplet code). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2673451 "In the last ten years, at least 20 different natural information codes were discovered in life, each operating to arbitrary conventions (not determined by law or physicality). Examples include protein address codes [Ber08B], acetylation codes [Kni06], RNA codes [Fai07], metabolic codes [Bru07], cytoskeleton codes [Gim08], histone codes [Jen01], and alternative splicing codes [Bar10]. Donald E. Johnson – Programming of Life – pg.51 - 2010 Human Genome “Infinitely More Complex” Than Expected - April 2010 Excerpt: Hayden acknowledged that the “junk DNA” paradigm has been blown to smithereens. “Just one decade of post-genome biology has exploded that view,” she said,,,, Network theory is now a new paradigm that has replaced the one-way linear diagram of gene to RNA to protein. That used to be called the “Central Dogma” of genetics. Now, everything is seen to be dynamic, with promoters and blockers and interactomes, feedback loops, feed-forward processes, and “bafflingly complex signal-transduction pathways.” http://www.creationsafaris.com/crev201004.htm#20100405a Most Detailed Annotation of Fruit-Fly Genome Points Way to Understanding All Organisms’ Genomes – December 2010 Excerpt: “We also found an order-of-magnitude increase in the ways that genes are spliced and edited to produce alternate forms of known proteins, thus significantly increasing the complexity of the proteome.”,,, Despite the scrutiny to which the Drosophila genome has been subjected, the researchers found new or altered exons or splice forms in almost three-quarters of Drosophila’s previously annotated genes,,, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101222131131.htm Bill Gates, in recognizing the superiority found in Genetic Coding compared to the best computer coding we now have, has now funded research into this area: Welcome to CoSBi - (Computational and Systems Biology) Excerpt: Biological systems are the most parallel systems ever studied and we hope to use our better understanding of how living systems handle information to design new computational paradigms, programming languages and software development environments. The net result would be the design and implementation of better applications firmly grounded on new computational, massively parallel paradigms in many different areas. http://www.cosbi.eu/index.php/component/content/article/171 Do you believe Richard Dawkins exists? Excerpt: DNA is the best information storage mechanism known to man. A single pinhead of DNA contains as much information as could be stored on 2 million two-terabyte hard drives. Comprehensive Mapping of Long-Range Interactions Reveals Folding Principles of the Human Genome - Oct. 2009 Excerpt: At the megabase scale, the chromatin conformation is consistent with a fractal globule, a knot-free, polymer conformation that enables maximally dense packing while preserving the ability to easily fold and unfold any genomic locus. 3-D Structure Of Human Genome: Fractal Globule Architecture Packs Two Meters Of DNA Into Each Cell - Oct. 2009 Excerpt: the information density in the nucleus is trillions of times higher than on a computer chip -- while avoiding the knots and tangles that might interfere with the cell's ability to read its own genome. Moreover, the DNA can easily unfold and refold during gene activation, gene repression, and cell replication. Quantum Dots Spotlight DNA-Repair Proteins in Motion - March 2010 Excerpt: "How this system works is an important unanswered question in this field," he said. "It has to be able to identify very small mistakes in a 3-dimensional morass of gene strands. It's akin to spotting potholes on every street all over the country and getting them fixed before the next rush hour." Dr. Bennett Van Houten - of note: A bacterium has about 40 team members on its pothole crew. That allows its entire genome to be scanned for errors in 20 minutes, the typical doubling time.,, These smart machines can apparently also interact with other damage control teams if they cannot fix the problem on the spot. semi OT: New DI podcast "ID Scientist Douglas Axe Responds to His Critics" http://intelligentdesign.podomatic.com/entry/2011-06-01T15_59_43-07_00bornagain77_{June 1, 2011
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They are Christians. They can't be mad at you.Mung_{June 1, 2011
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