afdave
Posts: 1621
Joined: April 2006
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| Quote | | Dave, are errors in broken genes part of a design? |
No. According to YEC theory, organisms were designed perfectly in the beginning. The Creator then put a curse on all of nature to remind humans of sin and the need for a Saviour, and to remind us that this world is not our true home. God will at a future time RE-create the heavens and the earth and they will once again be perfect. Humans who choose to believe God will be with Him eternally in the newly created heavens and earth. Those who do not will be eternally separated from Him. Mutations are assumed by creationists to be a part of this "curse."
Drew Headley ... | Quote | | I will come out and say you have not convinced me at all. In fact, all the books I have read on the topic say that the only significant French influence on Portuguese came much later than the years you gave. |
Drew, my friend, World Book and Brittanica and Wiki are not going to have enough detail to show you the enormous French influence on a tiny country such as Portugal during the 12th century. Go to your local public library and look up Portugal in a Medieval Encyclopedia. There you will find the "thousands of French knights" coming in, the intermarriage with French nobility, the conquest of Lisbon, and the subsequent adoption of the dialect of Lisbon as Standard Portuguese. Now, if all that is unconvincing to you, then I can't help you. I've accomplished my goal of refuting Rilke and that's good enough for me. Maybe you and Arden and Rilke and Faid can start a whole thread to in effect prove me wrong when I say the sky is blue. I hope it's an enjoyable enterprise for you.
| Quote | | Why should evolution lead to there being multiple hominid societies today? If they were out-competed by homo sapiens early on why do they need to be here today? This seems to have been what happened to the neanderthals. |
Not only should there be multiple hominid 'societies' in existence today, there should be many, many living 'transitional' species. The fact that there is not throws all of 'macro-evolutionary theory' (as Theobald calls it) into huge doubt.
BWE ... | Quote | | -In the Portuguese/French thing: I could have let it go. I understand why you said what you said and I could coherently argue your case to some extent. |
Thanks. Would you tell this to Drew Headley?
Russell ... | Quote | | Ah, the old "the lurkers support me in e-mail" gambit. Pretty sad. Heck. Why not just be done with it, and claim that Max privately agrees with you? |
Careful reading, Russell. You got two things wrong. I din't say lurkers and I wasn't talking about Dr. Max. I was talking about the participants on these threads and I was talking about the Portuguese thing. If you go look at that discussion, you see an embarrassing "changing of the subject" by many participants. Even Steve Story didn't have the guts to challenge my statement after I shot Rilke down. He chose rather to jump on a silly little side statement I made which had nothing to do with the main discussion. It's funny how you guys admonish me to admit when I am wrong, which I do, but you guys never do, even though this one was so obvious its hilarious.
There was a good lesson in the little Portuguese dialog. Namely, that some people are so committed to being right that they will dismiss mountains of evidence that is literally hitting them in the face. I wonder what other areas there might be where people here are doing this same thing? The whole origins question, maybe? Michael Denton calls it "The Priority of the Paradigm." Hmmmm .....
Jstockwell ... | Quote | Now, as a solitary exercise, this isn't rock solid. As explained, you make an assumption of parsimony, and the vagaries of chance could always throw that off.
But the key is that you then compare the phylogeny generated from analysing this stretch of DNA, to a completely independent stretch elsewhere. And what we've found is that they are almost identical. The vitamin C gene is just one example, and the sequence I posted above is another. It's pretty hard to argue against that.
Common design does not explain nested hierarchical relationships, unless you hypothesize that the designer did his design work by making modifications to a prototype, keeping that, using it as the next prototype, making successive modifications, etc.
At that point your hypothesis is indistinguishable from common descent, except for the intervention of the designer at every step. Is that your hypothesis?
And lastly, I've been following the linguistic argument, and I've noticed that you haven't given any linguistic evidence for your position. Your 2 pieces of evidence are historical and anecdotal. Those aren't very compelling. |
I agree with you that they are very close, probably somewhere around 95% close. But remember ... Dr. Max was arguing in his article that the broken GULO is sort of the "case maker" which favors common descent over common design. He says ... | Quote | | Can "errors" in modern species be used as evidence of "copying" from ancient ancestors? In fact, the answer to this question appears to be "yes," since recent molecular genetics investigations have uncovered some examples of the same "errors" present in the genetic material of humans and apes. |
He then goes into the GULO 'error' and other pseudogenes. Apparently, people at this forum place heaviest weight on the GULO pseudogene judging from the numerous admonitions I received to investigate this particular one.
Where we are now is that you all are admitting that the GULO pseudogene is NOT in fact a "case maker" for common descent. This is quite different than the impression I was given about this issue when we started. You all are simply saying that it is one of many "pieces of evidence" which I agree with, but I would simply say "this gene is similar" and "all the genetic material is similar."
But the silly thing is that I already knew this before we started this exercise. We did not need to go slogging through all the intricacies of the GULO gene to prove to me that Humans are genetically similar to Apes. I agree and this is perfectly consistent with Design Theory. As I have said many time, the similarities between a Ford Aerostar and a Ford Fiesta point to common design, not common descent.
As for nested hierarchical relationships, my view is that Common Design explains them better that Common Descent. As Denton has pointed out, the really striking fact about nested hierarchies is the separateness and non-sequential relationships of living things. I'm sure you are already aware of Colin Patterson's statements such as | Quote | | In a way, I think we are merely rediscovering pre-evolutionary systematics: or if not rediscovering it, fleshing it out. |
and | Quote | | that much of today's explanation of nature, in terms of neo-Darwinism, or the synthetic theory, may be empty rhetoric. |
because you have all read Denton, right?
You also need to read Ashby Camp's response to Theobald regarding the 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution. <a href=""http://www.trueorigin.org/theobald1b.asp" target="_blank">Link to article</a> He says | Quote | | It is not a corollary of the hypothesis of common descent that organisms will have features by which they can be classified as groups within groups. Common descent can explain or accommodate nested hierarchy (though not without difficulty in the specific case of Neo-Darwinism), but it does not predict it. There are mechanisms of descent from a common ancestor that would yield a different pattern. If common descent can yield either nested hierarchy or something else, then the presence of nested hierarchy does not count as evidence of common descent. |
and points out what Biophysicist Cornelius G. Hunter had to say ... | Quote | | It has been known since Aristotle that species tend to cluster in a hierarchical pattern, and in the eighteenth century Linnaeus saw it as a reflection of the Creator’s divine plan. Obviously this pattern does not force one to embrace evolution. Also, Darwin’s law of natural selection does not predict this pattern. He had to devise a special explanation—his principle of divergence—to fit this striking pattern into his overall theory. To be sure, evolution can accommodate this hierarchical pattern, but the pattern is not necessarily implied by evolution. (Hunter, 108.) |
My position is the same as Camp's when he says ... | Quote | | It may be that the nested hierarchy of living things simply is a reflection of divine orderliness. It also may be, as Walter ReMine suggests, that nested hierarchy is an integral part of a message woven by the Creator into the patterns of biology. (See, e.g., ReMine, 367-368, 465-467.) The point is that the hierarchical nature of life can be accommodated by creation theory as readily as by evolution. Accordingly, “[i]t is not evidence for or against either theory.” (Brand, 155.) |
Once again, it is clear to me that Apes are Apes and Humans are Humans, and as far as anyone really knows, that's the way it's always been.
Common Design explains nested hierarchies better than Common Descent and this is not to mention the innumerable difficulties that Common Descent theory encounters everywhere one looks.
I will now be abandoning this thread since I have established my point. Please bring any further discussion of this issue over to the "Creator God Hypothesis" thread.
Thanks,
AFD
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A DILEMMA FOR THE COMMITTED NATURALIST
A Hi-tech alien spaceship lands on earth ... DESIGNED.
A Hi-tech alien rotary motor found in a cell ... NOT DESIGNED.
http://afdave.wordpress.com/....ess.com
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