cryptoguru
Posts: 53
Joined: Jan. 2015
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| Quote | | And which of Noah's family carried syphilis, which one had gonorrhea, who had AIDS, who had chlamydia, who carried smallpox, who had measles, who had chickenpox, who carried rubella, who had tapeworms, who had guinea worm, who had HPV, who had genital herpes, who had trichomoniasis, who had all the pubic lice and head lice, etc., etc., etc. and how did they manage to care for the animals while suffering from all those diseases and parasites, let alone walk off the ark and repopulate the planet? |
Hehe that's the stupidest logic I've heard so far on this thread .. maybe next to the guy who talks about the "flud".
The HIV virus that causes AIDS in humans came from a different species, where it wasn't harmful. I don't believe that viruses that are harmful to an organism originated in that organism, observation backs that up. This is similar to bacteria ... which are very useful (good) in certain applications (e.g. digestion, plant decomposition etc), but can be very bad if the wrong bacteria is carried by the wrong organism, or if the balance of a specific bacteria is violated. So no, I don't think all these negative-effect viruses, parasites were carried by Noah & family etc (some may have been) ... but much more likely, they were carried by animals that had a symbiotic relationship with them. (as is the case now)
| Quote | | Which person's or animal's skin did that pair live in/on during the flud and how did noah know that he was taking just one pair of one species on the ark? |
Man ... this is so off-topic it hurts, so very quick answer. Noah was never commanded to take one of every species on the ark, he was told what kinds of animals to take. He wasn't instructed to take fish or microscopic organisms or sea-dwelling mammals or molluscs etc. etc.
| Quote | | If you pay attention to my words, I never claim "direct ancestry" when dealing with fossils, precisely because that cannot be known. I claim degrees of similarity from which I infer degrees of relatedness, and I use words like "structural intermediate" and "stem members" and "basal forms", and I will say that one animal is the closest candidate that we currently know of to the ancestry of a group. If you are going to argue over something, get your facts right and don't argue about strawmen. |
OK, so you don't know then ... it isn't hard fact that birds came from dinos? You simply know that there are "degrees of similarity" upon which you are inferring descent.
| Quote | | You keep saying that biologists assume evolution, and people keep replying that it's a conclusion, not an assumption. Just as in day-to-day physics people do not go about re-proving Newtonian mechanics and the electron theory of electricity, biologists find the evidence in favor of evolution to be so overwhelming that they spend very little time directly testing the overall idea and instead spend most of their time trying to expand on the theory of evolution and to test its predictions and implications and find some new wrinkles. In that sense one could say that there is a sort of an assumption of evolution. |
A conclusion based on a faulty premise is the wrong conclusion, and holding to it as fact in the face of challenges to the faulty premise is an assumption. Common Descent was assumed to be true by Darwin, this has been accepted as an atheistic axiom. i.e. if you don't believe there's a God, then there was no creation. Therefore, everything must have happened spontaneously and the unlikely spontaneous arrival of life must have started off as a simple cell that natural processes worked on to create the diversity of life that we now see. This is an assumption ... based on the belief in no creator. When you start with that assumption you look at similarities as proof of your assumption, but THAT is circular reasoning. There is no hard evidence to show ancestry from one kind of animal to another, except that you believe it did and you interpret any data in that light. Even when the data disagrees (ORFan genes, no junk DNA, no clear transitional forms in fossils, no observed DNA mutation to produce a fundamentally different organism) you will simply state that perceived contradictions don't actually contradict Common Descent and you will adapt your argument to accommodate the new data somehow without challenging the core assumption.
I am simply pointing out that none of the science you've mentioned proves anything; it only supports your view when you hold to the assumption of Common Descent and a purely natural explanation of all variation must be adhered to. This does not make what you are believing science ... just because you say it is objective, does not make it so.
| Quote | | Also, if it were false, standard ongoing research would be generating endless quantities of enigmas and contradictions each year, and that is just not happening. |
Well yes it does, but unsurprisingly they don't get published as contradictions ... these are the things that creationists comment on that annoy evolutionists. Evolutionists will defend their view of the world irrespective of the data, you seem to have a romantic view of scientists as objective, impartial and purely truth-seeking ... when in fact scientists are human with the need to be recognised, the desire for fame and wealth, the fear of being ridiculed and mocked, the need to fit in and be accepted. Funding is not available to people who have evidence that contradicts the primary axiom that all life can be explained through random mutation and natural selection. Academics who already have influential position and change their mind and reject evolution on the basis of their research are shunned, mocked, sacked from their positions and denied the ability to publish or share their results in the scientific community. This level of censorship and ethnic cleansing has driven most professional scientists who are creationists to keep their mouths shut and toe the party line in fear of not having a job. Some areas of academia will humour anti-evolutionists (e.g. mathematics, engineering), but it is not tolerated in any area of science that has an influence in origins.
| Quote | One: Does Sequence X1 qualify as "new and novel genetic material"? It's a yes-or-no question, cryptoguru; either yes, Sequence X1 does, in fact, qualify as "new and novel genetic material", or no, Sequence X1 does not, in fact, qualify as "new or novel genetic material". It's all well and good to go on about "probability" and "scale" and yada yada, but I really would like to see a yes or a no, and thus far, I ain't seen a yes or a no.
Two: Does Sequence X1 contain any "new and novel genetic material"? Again, it's a yes-or-no question, to which either yes, it does or no, it doesn't would both be relevant responses. Going on about "scale" and "probability" and yada yada, contrariwise, is not a particularly relevant response, as best I can tell. |
This is the fallacy of many questions (e.g. Do you still beat your wife?) ... it is the rhetorical trick of asking a question that cannot be answered without admitting a presupposition that may be false.
I defined what I meant by "new and novel" ... I am qualifying new material as that which is quantifiably non-trivial. A small change can occur by chance, so can a few small changes. A lot of change in a short period of time that is quantifiably useful for new purpose and not pre-existant is what we observe in ORFan genes. Scale is important and is affected exponentially. So when you use a single symbol mutation to try and demonstrate how an entire program could arise, you have missed the mark by a catastrophic proportion.
Let me expose your argument with a similar analogy:-
I present to you a piece of sheet metal ... I show you that if I drop it on the floor it bends a corner of it. I show you that the angle that the corner is bent at matches a bend on an Aston Martin Vantage, you agree. I claim that if I drop that piece of metal enough times, I will eventually get an Aston Martin Vantage body. Now you would agree that is stupid reasoning .. that is what you are doing here. You want me to agree that X1 is different to X, yes it is ... but you're wanting to claim that just applying a single mutation multiple times will produce the complexity ... well it maybe would if you had a big enough population size and low enough mutation rate and an intelligent scoring mechanism so that the problem becomes a stochastic search algorithm with an in-built target. This is not the problem we are trying to solve, it is a different problem to what you claim is happening in Biology
You are conflating the idea of any change ... with specific, substantial and complex change that solves a complex problem.
It seems that the assumption of purely natural processes being able to create new information is making it difficult for you guys to be able to argue rationally.
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