Author Archives: stcordova

Working out a gentleman’s agreement between TSZ and my publishing activities

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As much as the TSZ regulars may have sharp disagreement with many of my views, I actually have a vested interest in seeing TSZ survive and prosper and attract participation with talent and brains. TSZ is valuable because of the quality of the participants, namely, professors (like Joe Felsenstein, Jeff Shallit), textbook authors (like Larry Moran), specialists (Tom English, John Harshman, Mark Frank, Mike Elzinga, etc.), academics, practicing scientists, etc. I suspect JohnnyB and VJTorley might have comparable reasons for their participation at TSZ.

The purpose of me posting here is to see what sort of INFORMAL gentleman’s agreement can be worked out to the mutual benefit of TSZ and my publishing efforts.
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For VJ Torley: Christianity’s consistency with Evolutionary Theory, JB Peterson’s Interview

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Various creationists and ID proponents, myself included, have raved about the work of elite scholar and clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson who connected the rise of Christianity with concepts in evolutionary theory. His recent 2.5-hour interview was profound on many levels. I provide a link to the interview below.

Even though Peterson is an die-hard evolutionist, many ID proponents and creationists have said they were blessed to hear what he had to say. I know I was. Since I know VJ studied the topic of animal intelligence, I thought Peterson’s work might be of interest to him since Peterson ties the rise of Christianity to behavioral and neurological traits he sees deeply conserved in the mammalian kingdom.
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My presentation at Lipscomb University in front of faculty and deans of several universities available for free online (expense for live attendance is $390)

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Below is a link to a 22.5-minute video which is a rehearsed version of a speech (with power point and video and animation) to be delivered before several faculty and deans of various Christian Universities at the Christian Scholar’s Conference at Lipscomb University June 7, 2017.

My talk addresses the design of chromatin and the problem of evil.


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When did nylon-eating proteins actually evolve the ability to eat nylon?

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It has been widely advertised that nylon eating genes evolved after 1940. I have no problem with that claim in principle since new antibiotic and malaria resistances have evolved since 1940. Even though I can easily accept the possibility of post-1940 nylon-eating evolution in principle, where is the slam dunk evidence that this is actually the case? Did a significant portion of the ability for bacteria to digest nylon take place after 1940 (or 1935 when nylon was first created)?
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Mind blowing presentation by George Church at the NIH

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Last week, George Church talked at the school where I take part-time evening classes. I provide a link to that talk. He talked about re-engineered codons (something I’m grateful to Rumraket for introducing me to), stem cell research, human animal chimeras, aging therapies, human genome re-engineering, and just a little bit about ENCODE. Though I have ethical concerns about human/animal chimeras, and human genome re-engineering (like what happens if you mess up), Church goes into the technologies and raises questions as to what our world may look like in the not too distant future. Not that I’m trying to make a point about ID or God by linking this video, but it shows how rapidly we may be forced to deal with certain issues.

I personally don’t have too much problem with GMO foods. After all, my YEC friend John Sanford created the gene gun through which a large fraction of genetically engineered crops on the planet were made at one time. But one thing that bothers me is genetically engineered bacteria. Church discussed super bacteria created for research applications. I can imagine an accident where germs are created accidentally that become really hard to kill and we basically have an apocalypse. Maybe that will be the fulfillment of prophecy by Jesus, “there will be famines and pestilence”.

Here is the video (with Francis Collins speaking at the start):
https://videocast.nih.gov/summary.asp?Live=21803&bhcp=1

Here is a description of the talk:
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Larry Moran’s Exit Exam

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Attached is Larry Moran’s exit exam for biochemistry and molecular biology. Exit Exam for Biochemistry.

I probably will not get a lot of these right on the first try, but it is a good learning experience. When I don’t know the answer, I can look it up, so this is a good chance to review important concepts.

I will provide answers I think Professor Moran wants students to give, and then I’ll provide my own answers which I think he might dock points for if he were grading. I always try to give the answer the professor is expecting even if I disagree. It shows that I am trying to understanding of what he was trying to teach. It’s not a confession of belief on my part.

For example:

21.How much of your genome is functional?

Answer I think Larry is expecting:

10%, because of the limits mutational load imposes on a genome the size of a human’s and their reproductive excess. But even the 10% number is likely high since the Muller Limit of 1 mutation/person/generation might allow even less than 10% function for the human genome.

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The Glories of Global Warming and the Faint Young Sun Paradox

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It is a little known fact that scientists who argue that the paleontological record of life is hundreds of millions of years old, when confronted with astrophysical facts, must eventually rely heavily on the hypothesis of finely tuned, large scale global warming. The problem is known as the Faith Young Sun Paradox. A few claim they have solved the paradox, but many remain skeptical of the solutions. But one fact remains, it is an acknowledged scientific paradox. And beyond this paradox, the question of Solar System evolution on the whole has some theological implications.

Astrophysicists concluded that when the sun was young, it was not as bright as it is now. As the sun ages it creates more and more heat, eventually incinerating the Earth before the sun eventually burns out. This is due to the change in products and reactants in the nuclear fusion process that powers the sun. This nuclear evolution of the sun will drive the evolution of the solar system, unless Jesus returns…
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Mouse Utopia, Mutational Meltdown, Extinction by Natural Selection

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The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) sponsored the work of John Calhoun on social behaviors. Here were the results of one of his experiments:

On July 9th, 1968, eight white mice were placed into a strange box at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Maybe “box” isn’t the right word for it; the space was more like a room, known as Universe 25, about the size of a small storage unit. The mice themselves were bright and healthy, hand-picked from the institute’s breeding stock. They were given the run of the place, which had everything they might need: food, water, climate control, hundreds of nesting boxes to choose from, and a lush floor of shredded paper and ground corn cob.

This is a far cry from a wild mouse’s life—no cats, no traps, no long winters. It’s even better than your average lab mouse’s, which is constantly interrupted by white-coated humans with scalpels or syringes. The residents of Universe 25 were mostly left alone, save for one man who would peer at them from above, and his team of similarly interested assistants. They must have thought they were the luckiest mice in the world. They couldn’t have known the truth: that within a few years, they and their descendants would all be dead.
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How Comfortable is Naturalism with Highly Atypical Events?

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There are numerous definitions of naturalism. Here is one definition with some additional observations from infidels.org:

As defined by philosopher Paul Draper, naturalism is “the hypothesis that the natural world is a closed system” in the sense that “nothing that is not a part of the natural world affects it.” More simply, it is the denial of the existence of supernatural causes. In rejecting the reality of supernatural events, forces, or entities, naturalism is the antithesis of supernaturalism.
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In Slight Defense of Granville Sewell: A. Lehninger, Larry Moran, L. Boltzmann

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The basic biochemistry textbook I study from is Lehninger Prinicples of Biochemistry. It’s a well regarded college textbook. But there’s a minor problem regarding the book’s Granville-Sewell-like description of entropy:

The randomness or disorder of the components of a chemical system is expressed as entropy,

Nelson, David L.; Cox, Michael M.. Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry (Page 23). W.H. Freeman. Kindle Edition.

Gag!

And from the textbook written by our very own Larry Moran:

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The Sternberg-Collins Paradox for non-random SINE insertion mutations

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One of the most brilliant evolutionary biologists of the present day, Richard Sternberg, PhD PhD was ousted and permanently blacklisted by the National Institutes of Health and the Smithsonian Museum for his ID sympathies.

Sternberg is neither a Creationist nor Darwinist but classifies himself as a Process Structuralist which means he is not much involved in the ultimate questions of how things came to be, he just appreciates the amazing patterns of similarity and diversity in biology.

He was labelled by some of his former supporters as an intellectual terrorist after he used his position as editor of a journal to publish an ID-friendly article by Stephen Meyer in 2004. He paid dearly for that decision, and his subsequent dismissal from the NIH and Smithsonian precipitated special investigations by members of Congress and the White House a decade ago. Unfortunately, nothing of consequence was done for Sternberg and he was destroyed professionally and personally.

Despite his circumstances, he continued to publish excellent essays such as the one that highlights the non-random patterns of SINES (presumed by some to be junkDNA) which are present in mice and rats (link below).
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Some evidence ALUs and SINES aren’t junk and garbologists are wrong

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Larry Moran, Dan Graur and other garbologists (promoters of the junkDNA perspective), have argued SINES and ALU elements are non-functional junk. That claim may have been a quasi-defensible position a decade ago, but real science marches forward. Dan Graur can only whine and complain about the hundreds of millions of dollars spent at the NIH and elsewhere that now strengthens his unwitting claim in 2013, “If ENCODE is right, Evolution is wrong.”

Larry said in Junk in Your Genome: SINES
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Thorp, Shannon: Inspiration for Alternative Perspectives on the ID vs. Naturalism Debate

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The writings and life work of Ed Thorp, professor at MIT, influenced many of my notions of ID (though Thorp and Shannon are not ID proponents). I happened upon a forgotten mathematical paper by Ed Thorp in 1961 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that launched his stellar career into Wall Street. If the TSZ regulars are tired of talking and arguing ID, then I offer a link to Thorp’s landmark paper. That 1961 PNAS article consists of a mere three pages. It is terse, and almost shocking in its economy of words and straightforward English. The paper can be downloaded from:

A Favorable Strategy for Twenty One, Proceedings National Academy of Sciences.

Thorp was a colleague of Claude Shannon (founder of information theory, and inventor of the notion of “bit”) at MIT. Thorp managed to publish his theory about blackjack through the sponsorship of Shannon. He was able to scientifically prove his theories in the casinos and Wall Street and went on to make hundreds of millions of dollars through his scientific approach to estimating and profiting from expected value. Thorp was the central figure in the real life stories featured in the book
Fortune’s Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System that Beat the Casino’s and Wall Street by William Poundstone.
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Non-DNA Structural Inheritance

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If the DNA codes primarily for proteins and helps regulate protein quantities, then where is the developmental or structural information? I’ve never gotten a straight answer from most evolutionists I’ve encountered, for that matter anyone on planet Earth. Maybe no one really knows. I think Creationist biologist Arthur Jones is right about Non-DNA inheritance.
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Does Naturalism Exclude Exceptional Phenomenon?

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Would naturalism insist 500 fair coins 100% heads on a table could not possibly emerge from a random process (like random coin flipping)? How about a buzzillion fair coins being 100% heads after an explosion from a terrorist event at a bank? If naturalism won’t exclude such improbable events (events statistically indistinguishable from miracles), then naturalism doesn’t exclude miracles.
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Godless Intelligent Design Theory

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Moderator Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the museum’s Hayden Planetarium, put the odds at 50-50 that our entire existence is a program on someone else’s hard drive. “I think the likelihood may be very high,” he said…Somewhere out there could be a being whose intelligence is that much greater than our own. “We would be drooling, blithering idiots in their presence,” he said. “If that’s the case, it is easy for me to imagine that everything in our lives is just a creation of some other entity for their entertainment.”
…

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-we-living-in-a-computer-simulation/

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Impractical Naturalism of Dan Graur vs. the NIH

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I’ll be making a presentation at AM-NAT 2016, and Dan Graur will be the poster boy of impractical naturalism. Below are some things I collected from his websites, some of which I view as highly anti-science. The aim of my presentation isn’t to settle the question of God or no God or ultimate questions of whether godless naturalism is the best description of reality. The goal is to suggest there are some unspoken naturalistic creeds that often take priority over experiments and observations. In a manner of speaking, there are some interpretations of naturalism that actually go against dispassionate examination of how the natural world actually operates.
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Epigenetic Memory Changes during Embryogenesis

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DNA is not just a static read-only memory (ROM) for coding proteins, but hosts dynamic random access memory (RAM) in the form of methylations and histone modifications for regulation of gene expression, cellular differentiation, learning and cognition, and who knows what else. The picture below depicts how rapidly the RAM aspect of DNA is changed during embryogenesis.
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Philosophy and Complexity of Rube Goldberg Machines

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Michael Behe is best known for coining the phrase Irreducible Complexity, but I think his likening of biological systems to Rube Goldberg machines is a better way to frame the problem of evolving the black boxes and the other extravagances of the biological world.
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