There is a strong suspicion the coronavirus is an escaped specimen from a Chinese lab.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1.full.pdf
An Indian scientist has purportedly discovered HIV inserted into the coronavirus. If true, this is pretty conclusive evidence the virus is humanly engineered, i.e. intelligently designed.
So, herein lies the conundrum. According to popular imagination, ID is both bad science and false (remember, good science is the falsifiable sort ;). If true, then it should not be possible to detect intelligent intervention in the genetic code.
Yet, this recent news item purports to be exactly that: identification of intelligent intervention in the genetic code.
Please explain this to me like I am 5: how can ID be both bad science and false, yet at the same time it is possible to identify intelligent intervention in the genetic code? If we can do so for the recent past, why can’t we do the same for the distant past?
Thanks!
Okay now listen here little Eric, and I will tell you a story. You see, some times there are some people who make stuff up, and they refuse to follow the rules of science. They call themselves proponents of ID. They don’t have any actual hypotheses or models that make qualitative or quantitative predictions about what we should expect to find having been produced, if the kind of ID they believe in, is true.
But instead of coming up with predictions and models of ID, all they ever do insist that evolution can’t produce X. They never tell us how X is produced except by some mindlessl declaration that “it was designed because the designer wanted to design it”. And it’s always after the fact they do this, there are no actual predictions.
That would be possible if you had a hypothesis that predicts something about what “intelligent intervention in the genetic code” should look like. But you see little Eric, you do not. You are once again coming here with something, after the fact of it’s discovery, and declaring this is evidence of ID(or in this case, as previously noted by others “id”). And to make matters worse, your personal ignorance about biology has confused and mislead you. You are using the term “genetic code” incorrectly (nothing in the article you cites speaks about alterations to the genetic code), and further, genetic recombination between different strains or “species” of viruses is a rather normal phenomenon.
To make matters worse, the paper we are reading isn’t even peer reviewed. It’s on the Arxiv, which makes your bringing it here as if design of the virus has at all been demonstrated, extremely irresponsible and misguided.
Well little Eric you’d be welcome to submit your model of ID that actually predicts something yet-to-be-discovered, make sure to explain why that yet-to-be-discovered-thing is expected on ID, and then we can go look for it. If you’re nice and you can do that, maybe you can get an icecream and a Nobel prize!
Yes. I worked for a short time at one of Denmark’s viral monitoring and research institutes, characterizing and sequencing virus genomes. It was not at all unusual to find fragments of viral genes having horizontally transferred between different viruses. Both humans and animals can be hosts to multiple simultaneous viral infections, and those things toss our their genomes left and right “like you wouldn’t believe”(to quote Trump).
Here is one of many piece of news that I will be pasting here regarding coronavirus:
“This is a classic case of searching for lost keys only under a lamppost,” he said. “A fearful world does not need to fuel conspiracy theories with bad analyses.”
Will we probably never know whether coronavirus was intelligently design, or it evolved?
Even if not, the obvious, biased thinking of the supporters of evolution is priceless…
All those who are tired of the materialists nonsense can now use the examples here as proof that intelligent design in the genome can be easily detected whether coronavirus evolved or was manipulated by intelligent designer…
I will drink a Corona to this and have a Danish too lol
So what are you saying Eric? That coronavirus stands out for being engineered? As compared to what? The rest of the lifeforms that “are not”?!?
Here is the David R. Liu’s full quote on twitter:
“The mere claim that such short inserts support nCoV origins “unlikely to be fortuitous in nature” [sic] is already highly suspect. This is a classic case of searching for lost keys only under a lamppost. A fearful world does not need to fuel conspiracy theories with bad analyses.”
A more recent tweet from David R. Liu (@davidrliu)
“New paper on #nCoV online at Nature (spoiler: it appears to have evolved from a very closely related bat coronavirus, not from the lab of Dr. Evil, and enters human cells using the same receptor as 2003 SARS). #coronavirus http://rdcu.be/b07Tf“
Apparently the SARS epidemic faded quickly, and Vaccine development funding evaporated.
frobert,
What’s your point quoting the same article I did???
You didn’t read mine? Or you’re blind like newton?
What is this? The Twilight Zone?
I give up!
I notice that frobert quoted more than you did, so he provided more complete illustration. THEN you go on to say
“Will we probably never know whether coronavirus was intelligently design, or it evolved?
Even if not, the obvious, biased thinking of the supporters of evolution is priceless… ”
You are clearly emphasizing the point that we simply can’t tell engineered from natural, except through evolution-colored blinders, which you mock.
Frobert, meanwhile, provides some things you most carefully omitted:
“The mere claim that such short inserts support nCoV origins “unlikely to be fortuitous in nature” [sic] is already highly suspect… it appears to have evolved from a very closely related bat coronavirus, not from the lab of Dr. Evil”
So the actual thrust from Liu is that the fears of human engineering are almost surely bogus. The actual thrust from your cherry-picking is that, golly, could have been intelligently designed, how could we ever know? Liu provides two pieces of evidence: that the segments were too short, and that the whole virus is very similar to one found in bats. In contrast, you support your position with insults. Do you seriously think nobody notices these things?
Hardly blind , just wary of a false impression.
In a sense I was blind. You neglected to say who you were quoting, and did not cite your source for the article you read. I read Dr. Lui’s quotes on Twitter, not the TwilightZone.
At this point the honest thing to do would be for you to ask yourself, why the hell is this even possible to create a pretty good story with fossils? If life was wished into existence, which is actually and factually what you believe, then why the hell is it possible to create a story with fossils?
This is patently false. there’s whole scientific journals presenting case after case, reconstructed evolutionary history after reconstructed evolutionary history of molecules after molecules. Just google for journals on molecular evolution. You should rather say that you, yourself, have no idea about how evolution happens at the molecular level.
Now, let’s imagine that we really had no idea how evolution happens at the molecular level. Does that make the evidence that life evolved in the fossil record and in biogeography, for example, disappear? Well, it doesn’t. It’d just make us ignorant about what happened at the molecular level. That’s it. If we didn’t have Einstein’s take on gravitation would gravitation be false because we only had Newton’s take? Nope. It would just make our models and explanations less precise. Our ignorance does not make things false. Our ignorance doesn’t make gods real either. Our ignorance just makes us ignorant. Do you understand that at all?
Bill has no idea how evolution happens at any level.
Sadly that concept is beyond Bill’s ability to grasp too. All he knows is evolution threatens his religious beliefs so it somehow someway must be wrong.
EricMH seems to have done a runner from his own thread.
Entropy,
If there was a good explanation you would give it and not quote thousands of speculative articles.
1. Good explanation for what Bill?
2. You have shown no understanding of the most basic molecular biology, let alone molecular biology of evolution. You’re not equipped to judge any of it. So don’t.
3. Did you even try and read the whole thing for comprehension?
If you don’t really want to engage why do you post at all?
Entropy,
Engage in what? “Just so” stories? You question my understanding in molecular biology and still don’t make an argument for your case. I recognize this is not due to your capability but due to the weakness of your case. There is no theory here beyond simple adaptions at the molecular level. We all agree that simple adaptions are real. What I am offended by are the thousands of published papers that assume that simple adaptions are evidence for complex adaptions and they are not. This is indeed pseudo science.
What distinguishes a “simple” adaptation from a “complex” adaptation?
It is evidence if their assumption is correct , you are assuming that “ they are not”. What is the evidence that your assumption is correct?
There might also be ahem, other reasons too.
Alan Fox,
Are you implying they are the same? if so please explain.
Is it not the case that adaptation occurs on a continuum across time? Maybe the distinction is that if it happens quickly enough for people to observe, it’s simple. If it accumulates across multiple human lifetimes, it’s complex. Just a guess. The implication is that complex adaptations are composed of multiple simple ones.
No he’s asking you to show what separates them because ID proponents have a long history of waving their hands in the direction of “complex adaptations” without ever bothering to define what they mean by complex or simple.
You introduced the concept of simple vs complex as applied to adaptations, implying there was a distinction to be made. I’m just asking what your threshhold is.
Exactly!
Cumulative works for me.
Alan Fox,
I am wondering what you are trying to imply by your question? Are you trying to imply that evolution is a complete explanation for life’s diversity? Josh Swamidass recently posted that it was not which went unopposed over at peaceful science. If you agree with Josh we have common ground.
See, told you Bill doesn’t understand anything at all about evolutionary biology. 🙂
Bill quit being an ass and twisting every question you get asked. Try being honest for Jesus for once.
I’m quite open about the fact that evolutionary theory is the only explanation we have that fits the facts.
I’d agree that evolutionary theory is not a complete explanation, it’s just the only one we have.
Bill’s going for his tried and true Creationist hand-wave “science can’t explain everything therefore science can’t explain anything!“.
Alan Fox,
Are you agreeing with Swamidass?
Bill try really hard to not be such a disingenuous dick. Do it just this once.
You have no right to call anything a “just so story.” You believe in one yourself, remember? (“A magical being in the sky wished it so.”)
My case? What are you talking about? It’s not my case. It’s what scientific evidence and analyses indicate. It’s not mine at all. I’m but a tiny little player in a huge endeavour.
If your’re referring to whether or not I offer explanations to those big questions. well, you have a very short memory. I have offered quite a bit. But you just won’t try and read for comprehension. You’ll ignore everything each and every time. And it’s not just my explanations you ignore. A good reader could write an excellent textbook about molecular biology and evolution from all the answers that have been give to you and to other illiterate creationists in this blog.
You don’t recognize anything. You really don’t know what you’re talking about, even though you already should.
Of course there’s plenty of theory. Again, you have not been paying attention.
You continue repeating the very same misconceived versions of “evolution” despite numerous attempts at correcting you. So you have no idea, thus no reason and no right, to be offended.
Given your profound, self inflicted, ignorance, and given that you blindly accept anything by the IDiots, you have no grounds and no moral stance to call anything else pseudo science. So stop it already. Have a tiny bit of self-respect. Yes. Self-respect.
Clearly a simple adaptation is one for which the appropriate adjective has six letters, while a complex adaptation is one for which the appropriate adjective has seven letters.
Bill appears to have thought through all this exactly as far as he needed to to reach his preferred conclusion. Any additional thinking can only cause confusion.
That’s what I was trying to get Bill to understand. Whether we have a complete picture, and a complete history, of each and every feature across all life forms doesn’t make a dent in the parts we have already figured out. One of them that life has and continues to evolve. Our understanding, or lack thereof, doesn’t change the fact that evolution happened, happens and continues to happen. Evolution has gone on for eons before there was any human to try and figure it out.
Bill- Instead of defining complex adaptation show us an example. Point to the earliest known organism to have a particular complex adaptation, and then show us what its latest known ancestor that did not have that adaptation looked like. And tell us how many years passed between the ancestor’s life and the descendant’s.
Alan Fox,
Thanks. We have common ground here.
Wonderful Bill. You agree with an idea held by every single evolutionary biologist on the planet.
Now what’s the dividing line between simple adaptation and complex adaptation? You’ll never answer because you have no clue. You were just mindlessly regurgitation ID-Creationist talking points again.
colewd,
Name a simple adaptation and a complex adaptation?
If you can’t explain why they are simple or complex you presumably have already classified some as simple and complex? So just name them.
And then the game becomes to find the previous step to any complex adaptation. And given your ignorance of the literature you’ll lose that game every time and I suspect that’s why you don’t want to be specific.
And, colewd, that’s the thing. Science is all about the specifics…..
Well, except you, because you are taking issue with fitness variation.
No fitness variation, no adaptations. Not even simple ones.
Corneel,
I think using the more specific word function also works ie functional variation.
OMagain,
This is already defined. The more changes required the more complex the adaption is.
colewd,
Did you read the paper you cite, Bill ? It addresses your question very effectively.
Alan Fox,
Can you spot the circular reasoning in the abstract?
I disagree. “Function” is not a more specific, but an extremely vague term. A biological function becomes an adaptation only if it serves to increase an organisms ability to survive and reproduce in its environment. This is emphasized by the fact that many gain-of-function mutations are deleterious, not adaptive. In using “fitness” this aspect is made explicit. Mere use of “function” obscures it.
So what purpose is served by “function” sensu Bill Cole, that is not covered by “fitness”? And how can you be sure that “function” contributes to adaptation, simple or not?
Why didn’t you provide the source of that quote? A paper which answers your lame Creationist objections quite nicely.
Evolution of complex adaptations in molecular systems
Fat, dumb, and stupid is no way to go through life Bill.
Corneel,
You appear to be ignoring neutral mutations and genetic drift.
Function can be made into specific biological claims. Fitness cannot. Fitness also appears to be reducing diversity as a mechanism of population genetics. The myh 7 discussion is showing this as we see divergence in sub populations which gets reduced in the overall population.
Heh. Bill strings together more sciencey sounding words he’s heard before while still having zero understanding of what the words actually mean. But as long as Bill throws up some poo, any poo, he has “answered”.
Bill said he doesn’t have a problem with simple adaptations because as usual, he’s mindlessly parroting Gpuccio, who is on record for admitting natural selection can do simple adaptations, but of course it never occurred to Bill that implies accepting fitness is real, even if only at a microevolutionary scale. Watch him squirm now trying to save face LMAO