As an ID proponent and creationist, the irony is that at the time in my life where I have the greatest level of faith in ID and creation, it is also the time in my life at some level I wish it were not true. I have concluded if the Christian God is the Intelligent Designer then he also makes the world a miserable place by design, that He has cursed this world because of Adam’s sin. See Malicious Intelligent Design.
Jesus prophesied of the intelligently designed outcome of humanity: “wars and rumors of wars..famines…pestilence…earthquakes.” If there is nuclear and biological weapons proliferation, overpopulation, destruction of natural resources in the next 500 years or less, things could get ugly. If such awful things are Intelligently Designed for the trajectory of planet Earth, on some level, I think it would almost be merciful if the atheists are right….
The reason I feel so much kinship with the atheists and agnostics at TSZ and elsewhere is that I share and value the skeptical mindset. Gullibility is not a virtue, skepticism is. A personal friend of Richard Dawkins was my professor and mentor who lifted me out of despair when I was about to flunk out of school. Another professor, James Trefil, who has spent some time fighting ID has been a mentor and friend. All to say, atheists and people of little religious affiliation (like Trefil) have been kind and highly positive influences on my life, and I thank God for them! Thus, though I disagree with atheists and agnostics, I find the wholesale demonization of their character highly repugnant — it’s like trash talking of my mentors, friends and family.
I have often found more wonder and solace in my science classes than I have on many Sunday mornings being screamed at by not-so-nice preachers. So despite my many disagreements with the regulars here, because I’ve enjoyed the academic climate in the sciences, I feel somewhat at home at TSZ….
Now, on to the main point of this essay! Like IDist Mike Gene, I find the atheist/agnostic viewpoint reasonable for the simple reason that most people don’t see miracles or God appearing in their every day lives if not their entire lives. It is as simple as that.
Naturalism would seem to me, given most everyone’s personal sample of events in the universe, to be a most reasonable position. The line of reasoning would be, “I don’t see miracles, I don’t see God, by way of extrapolation, I don’t think miracles and God exists. People who claim God exists must be mistaken or deluded or something else.”
The logic of such a viewpoint seems almost unassailable, and I nearly left the Christian faith 15 years ago when such simple logic was not really dealt with by my pastors and fellow parishioners. I had to re-examine such issues on my own, and the one way I found to frame the ID/Creation/Evolution issue is by arguing for the reasonableness of Black Swan events.
I will use the notion of Black Swans very loosely. The notion is stated here, and is identified with a financeer and academic by the name of Nasim Taleb. I have Taleb’s books on investing entitled Dynamic Hedging which is considered a classic monograph in mathematical finance. His math is almost impenetrable! He is something of a Super Quant. Any way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.
The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain:
1.The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology.
2.The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities).
3.The psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and to a rare event’s massive role in historical affairs.Unlike the earlier and broader “black swan problem” in philosophy (i.e. the problem of induction), Taleb’s “black swan theory” refers only to unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history. Such events, considered extreme outliers, collectively play vastly larger roles than regular occurrences.[1] More technically, in the scientific monograph Silent Risk , Taleb mathematically defines the black swan problem as “stemming from the use of degenerate metaprobability”.[2]
….
The phrase “black swan” derives from a Latin expression; its oldest known occurrence is the poet Juvenal’s characterization of something being “rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno” (“a rare bird in the lands and very much like a black swan”; 6.165).[3] When the phrase was coined, the black swan was presumed not to exist. The importance of the metaphor lies in its analogy to the fragility of any system of thought. A set of conclusions is potentially undone once any of its fundamental postulates is disproved. In this case, the observation of a single black swan would be the undoing of the logic of any system of thought, as well as any reasoning that followed from that underlying logic.Juvenal’s phrase was a common expression in 16th century London as a statement of impossibility. The London expression derives from the Old World presumption that all swans must be white because all historical records of swans reported that they had white feathers.[4] In that context, a black swan was impossible or at least nonexistent. After Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh discovered black swans in Western Australia in 1697,[5] the term metamorphosed to connote that a perceived impossibility might later be disproven. Taleb notes that in the 19th century John Stuart Mill used the black swan logical fallacy as a new term to identify falsification.[6]
The very first question I looked at when I was having bouts of agnosticism was the question of origin of life. Now looking back, the real question being asked is “was OOL a long sequence of typical events or a black swan sequence of events.” Beyond OOL, one could go on to the question of biological evolution. If we assume Common Descent or Universal Common Ancestry (UCA), would evolution, as a matter of principle, proceed by typical or black swan events or a mix of such events (the stock market follows patterns of typical events punctuated by black swan events).
If natural selection is the mechanism of much of evolution, does the evolution of the major forms (like prokaryote vs. eukaryote, unicellular vs. multicellular, etc.) proceed by typical or black swan events?
[As a side note, when there is a Black Swan stock market crash, it isn’t a POOF, but a sequence of small steps adding up to an atypical set of events. Black Swan doesn’t necessarily imply POOF, but it can still be viewed as a highly exceptional phenomenon.]
Without getting into the naturalism vs. supernaturalism debate, one could at least make statements whether OOL, eukaryotic evolution (eukaryogenesis), multicellular evolution, evolution of Taxonomically Restricted Features (TRFs), Taxonomically Restricted Genes (TRGs), proceeded via many many typical events happening in sequence or a few (if not one) Black Swan event.
I personally believe, outside of the naturalism supernaturalism debate, that as a matter of principle, OOL, eukaryogenesis, emergence of multicellularity (especially animal multicellularity), must have transpired via Black Swan events. Why? The proverbial Chicken and Egg paradox which has been reframed in various incarnations and supplemented with notions such as Irreducible Complexity or Integrated Complexity or whatever. Behe is not alone in his notions of this sort of complexity, Andreas Wagner and Joe Thornton use similar language even though they thing such complexity is bridgeable by typical rather than Black Swan events.
When I do a sequence lookup at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center of Biotechnology Information (NCBI), it is very easy to see the hierarchical patterns that would, at first glance, confirm UCA! For example look at this diagram of Bone Morphogenetic Proteins (BMP) to see the hierarchical patterns:
From such studies, one could even construct Molecular Clock Hypotheses and state hypothesized rates of molecular evolution.
The problem however is that even if some organisms share so many genes, and even if these genes can be hierarchically laid out, there are genes that are restricted only to certain groups. We might refer to them as Taxonomically Restricted Genes (TRG). I much prefer the term TRG over “orphan gene” especially since some orphan genes seem to emerge without the necessity of Black Swan events and orphan genes are not well defined and orphan genes are only a subset of TRGs. I also coin the notion of Taxonomically Restricted Feature (TRF) since I believe many heritable features of biology are not solely genetic but have heritable cytoplasmic bases (like Post Translation modifications of proteins).
TRGs and TRFs sort of just poof onto the biological scene. How would we calibrate the molecular clock for such features? It goes “from zero to sixty” in a poof.
Finally, on the question of directly observed evolution, it seems to me, that evolution in the present is mostly of the reductive and exterminating variety. Rather than Dawkins Blind Watchmaker, I see a Blind Watch Destroyer. Rather than natural selection acting in cumulative modes, I natural selection acting in reductive and exterminating modes in the present day, in the lab and field.
For those reasons, even outside the naturalism vs. supernaturalism debate, I would think a reasonable inference is that many of the most important features of biology did not emerge via large collections of small typical events but rather via some Black Swan process in the past, not by any mechanisms we see in the present. It is not an argument from incredulity so much as a proof by contradiction.
If one accepts the reasonableness of Black Swan events as the cause of the major features of biology, it becomes possible to accept that these were miracles, and if Miracles there must be a Miracle Maker (aka God). But questions of God are outside science. However, I think the inference to Black Swan events for biology may well be science.
In sum, I think atheism is a reasonable position. I also think the viewpoint that biological emergence via Black Swan events is also a highly reasonable hypothesis even though we don’t see such Black Swans in every day life. The absence of such Black Swans is not necessarily evidence against Black Swans, especially if the Black Swan will bring coherence to the trajectory of biological evolution in the present day. That is to say, it seems to me things are evolving toward simplicity and death in the present day, ergo some other mechanism than what we see with our very own eyes was the cause of OOL and bridging of major gaps in the taxonomic groupings.
Of course such a Black Swan interpretation of biology may have theological implications, but formally speaking, I think inferring Black Swan hypotheses for biology is fair game in the realm of science to the extent it brings coherence to real-time observations in the present day.
Where do you get that from what I said?
None of the gospels was written down by a person who had been there “when it happened”.
Those were the second or third or fourth generation.
I assume that there was an actual person Yeshua ben Yosef. I don’t have any reason to disbelieve that he existed physically. But ol’ Joe Smith was an actual person, too, and so were the inner circle of his followers who for whatever reason chose to start the cult by spreading the unbelievable tales of the golden plates, the angel, the scrying stone and the hat …
I don’t see any difference between Joe’s men and whichever of Yeshua’s followers (sincere but deluded? con-men? we’ll never know) chose to start spreading the unbelievable tales of angels’ annunciation, reviving Lazarus, walking on water …
But the tales they told were surely worth a meal by the fireside, a cup of wine, and a cot to sleep on as they roamed from village to village.
True background is beyond 56,000 years now that we have Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS). The main reason they keep citing that figure as “background” is so many fossils have that trace amount — which means pretty much the background levels confirm most of the fossil record is young! That is the radio carbon barrier.
They declare anything beyond 56,000 years as not reliably dated by C14 because it conflicts with Old Fossil Record ideas, not because we can’t actually reliably detect small trace amounts.
56,000 years implies 9.77 C14 half life cycles (half life 5730),
56,000 / 5730 ~= 9.77
So after 9.77 cycles
(1/2)^9.77 ~= 1/ 900
So we have 1/900th the amount in such a fossil. That is detectable because AMS can measure 1 part in 100,000 of PMC (percent modern carbon), so AMS has over 100 times the sensitivity to measure 56,000 dates. The use of the word “Background” is ideological labeling that disguises the truth, not actual instrument sensitivity.
And I also pointed out, as small as that amount is (on the order of 1 part in 1000), laboratory contamination can’t be easily ascribed if we’re dealing with hard fossils like marble.
“Background” is another abuse of language. What it really means is “gee so many fossils have at least a 56,000 year or younger date, C14 must be unreliable since we KNOW the fossil is hundreds of millions of years old.”
As Allan Miller astutely realized, the C14 concentration in the atmosphere could not have been as high as the equilibrium level today, so the C14 in fossils before Noah’s flood was lower in C14 than would have been the case if the creature were alive in today’s environment. Hence the C14 traces indicate lower amounts of C14 than would be expected if the fossils died only 4,500 years ago in Noahs flood, and hence they get assigned a 56,000 year date.
NOTES:
And just to set one other data point, since the NCSE hasn’t purged this in their archive, a lot of C14 measurements prior to AMS did have problems with cosmic background radiation since the measurement was done by Gieger Counter of Beta Decay rather than AMS techniques that can pull out isotopes.
Now the word “background” has been equivocated.
I wrote this in the reddit.com/r/creation underground forum:
This is quite the claim. Start an OP!
Sal is our resident standup comedian (even if he wasn’t actually standing up when he wrote that).
Sal, there never was — physically, never could have been — a Noachian flood.
So any claim you have which depends on C14 amounts before that imaginary flood isn’t worth the electrons it took for you to invent it.
hotshoe:
You do realize that, right, Sal? A global Flood, as described in the Bible, did not happen.
Since the Bible clearly got the Flood wrong, why twist the evidence to convince yourself that it got creation and the Tower of Babel right?
I was being sarcastic. I was pointing out there is no basis for saying “background” at 56,000 years given the C14 measurements are being done by Accelerator Mass Spectrometry.
Background is only meaningful if there is a physical mechanism creating a persistent 1 part in 900 Percent Modern Carbon (PMC) reading, and there is absolutely none, it is a myth of necessity to explain anomalies that are ubiquitous. The anomaly is ubiquitous because the fossil record is young.
I’ve sided with you guys against Gish and Sewell on the 2nd law. I’ve sided with you guys mostly on CSI.
But a global flood? I think it happened and it was a such a geophysical cataclysm the mountains and continents arose out of the flood waters in a matter of months.
Look at all those bent formations like:
http://www.biblearchaeology.org/image.axd?picture=2014%2F11%2FFoldedmountains.jpg
The flood is the cause of much of the fossil record. That’s why dinosaurs and flying creatures are mixed with marine fossils. That’s why marine fossils are trapped in tree sap amber. That’s why there are marine fossils mixed in there with flying creatures in the fossil record. Why do we not hear that in the mainstream? Cherry picked data and not wanting to highlight evidence of a flood cataclysm.
The fossil record is not consistent with slow piling up of creatures that died natural deaths but drowning and horrific suffocation as they were buried in piles of mud and water.
You were wrong about that.
stcordova,
Complete and utter unsubstantiated nonsense. Try addressing the talkorigins.org archive issues before making ridiculous claims like that.
Sal,
There isn’t a quota, Sal, and it isn’t tit for tat. If we’re right, you should agree with us, and if we’re wrong, you should disagree.
We’re right about the Flood.
I believe the Ark and events associated with it (the ark itself, it’s ability to hold the creatures, etc.) were a miracle, starting with God telling Noah about the flood before it happened.
Sal,
You can believe anything at all, no matter how ridiculous, if you tell yourself it was a miracle. The question is, are you justified in thinking that a) it happened, and b) that it was a miracle?
That’s fine, but it means you have abandoned science.
stcordova,
That appears to be a synonym for what I said: “Complete and utter unsubstantiated nonsense.”
I think it’s a bit disappointing to spend days and weeks discussing sciency stuff, only to be told screw science, goddidit.
Kind of puts the carbon dating argument in perspective.
Then what under god’s blue heaven was the POINT of it all? Why a global flood? Why destroy all the innocent animals and plants to teach humanity some lesson or other?
Okay, ordering Noah to build an ark to test his obedience and loyalty, that could be a goddy thing (although that begs the question of why an omniscient god would need to test anything whatsoever, when it already knows the answer …) but then why miracle up the flood? Noah passed the test, now painlessly miracle all the non-Noah humans out of existence. Poof, problem solved. Why was god such a painful asshole?
Anyone who voluntarily chooses to worship a god who would destroy a whole planet for the alleged sins of a handful of its people (which it had caused to have sinful natures to begin with! ) is a heartless traitor. No chance of one’s own future in heaven could possibly be worth kowtowing to such an immoral monster.
IF that god exists, and did what the tale says it did, we have a born duty to resist it with all means possible.
And it’s not as if there’s anything in YEC itself which requires one to believe the Noah tale. They’re separate claims.
Sal has been honest in this thread that he’s using the term “black swan” because it’s more palatable (for people in general) than the term “miracle” when referring to some unexplained turn-ups in biology. His main examples – OoL and origin of eukaryotes – are genuine questions which are currently open in science. So while none of us except Sal think “miracle” is going to turn out to be the real answer, at least it doesn’t contradict everything we know about physics, chemistry, biology, etc.
Noah’s ark, though, urghh. To imagine it happened is to deliberately throw away everything christian geologists have discovered in three hundred years of increasingly powerful science.
When that’s what you feel, why bother playing the game of looking for answers in science?
The question about Noah’s flood is whether we have corroborating evidence of the miracle.
That “background” number of 56,000 years is actually a C14 level corresponding to 1 part in 900 percent modern carbon. That amount is a fact, it is not an inference. It is a laboratory measured fact. The AMS machinery can detect it as the amount is more than 100 times the AMS detection threshold. C14 has a half-life of 5730 years, so there is no reason there should be a background of 1 part in 900 spread across millions maybe billions of tons of fossils like the coal in the carboniferous era if the fossils are actually as old as claimed by the mainstream.
The 1 part in 900 indicates recency of death, and not only that, likely the deaths were close in time spread globally, not locally.
Also as Allan Miller astutely pointed out, the C14 atmospheric concentration would not have been at equilibrium prior to the flood if special creation was about 1500 years prior to the flood, and I suspect that’s why Hartnett felt comfortable calibrating the 1 part in 900 to indicate an age less that 7000 years ago.
We have also the mtDNA bottlenecks in humans, cattle and dogs at around 10,000 years ago according the Lowe and Sherer (not the less accurate mtDNA studies that indicated an Eve farther back). But let’s see if this can be extended to other creatures. Also we can see if the mtDNA signatures indicate an out-of-mesopotamia signature as it does for humans.
We have the dinosaurs and flying creatures fossilized with marine fossils. And these fossilization patterns span continents, therefore in light of the C14, amino acid racemization, protein, dna half-life issues, they died recently and with marine fossils. Therefore there was a global flood. Separate from the question of the miracle of the ark, that’s what the data suggest to me. Because that’s what the data suggest, I’m more willing to believe that Noah’s flood was a valid account because how did people survive such a cataclysm?
One thing that caught my attention is the Faint Young Sun Paradox.
Oh, I know, a google search will reveal some scientist claiming he’s solved the faint young sun pardox, but these “solutions” always require a fine tuned global warming scenario. “Not too much greenhouse gas lest the Earth incinerate life and not too little lest the Earth turn to a permanent ice ball.” But such solutions don’t give much in terms of a mechanism as to why global warming should be so delicately balanced to offset the increasing heat the sun delivers. If there were such a fine-tuned green house warming, it would be yet another feather in the cap of the privileged planet hypothesis. So faint young sun paradox is ID-friendly if solvable, and YEC friendly if not solvable.
At some point, believing the paleontological record is old becomes indistingiushable from believing in miracles.
Angular unconformities. Noah’s Flood 4500 years ago is falsified.
C14 calibration curve. Noah’s Flood 4500 years ago is falsified.
We’ve sequence the genomes of thousands of species. Only a few show a genetic bottleneck and none of those do at 4500 years ago, Noah’s Flood 4500 years ago is falsified.
Nowhere in the world do we find any extant land species fossilized with dinosaurs, or any extant bird species fossilized with pterosaurs, or any extant marine species fossilized with plesiosaurs. Noah’s Flood 4500 years ago is falsified.
Real people don’t need to survive fictional floods.
(snip the rest of Sal’s YEC PRATT list)
Noah’s Flood 4500 years ago is falsified Sal. It didn’t happen. Act like an adult and deal with reality.
And once again, here is Dawkins — “there is no sensible limit to what the human mind is capable of believing, against any amount of contrary evidence.”
As others have pointed out, the human ability to imagine and envision things is both a great strength and a serious liability. It can be used to make sense of the world around us, but can equally be used to deny the obvious. If the human mind is sabotaged at an early age, then (again quoting Dawkins) ” no evidence, no matter how overwhelming, no matter how all-embracing, no matter how devastatingly convincing, can ever make any difference.”
Reading Sal’s efforts at make-believe has the same sort of morbid fascination as watching the birth-defect freaks at the circus.
Cool story, Sal, still murder.
When you choose to voluntarily worship such a genocidal tyrant – in exchange for a hope that you will go to eternal heaven – you show yourself worse than any prostitute on the arm of any gangster in history.
Okay, I appreciate the clarification. Let’s say we find a gene like aaRS that seems to have extreme levels of intra-species conservation compared to inter-species conservation. Why do you make the leap to this being evidence of a recent origin of life? What about alternative explanations (such as gene conversion or strong purifying selection, among others) and how do you explain all the many other sequences that are less conserved? Counting this as evidence in the favor of a recent origin for life seems like the least parsimonious possible leap of logic I can think of in the face of this data.
Very many thanks for your constructive criticism. Those are definitely points I should consider carefully and those are angles that haven’t occurred to me until you mentioned them.
Thank you again for reading and responding.
That’s because you are trying to leap in the wrong direction. The proper approach is to presume, without any possibility of doubt or error, that life has a recent origin. Now, the leap is simply to FORCE cherry-picked and appropriately distorted factoids to fit this requirement.
Convictions not based on evidence, cannot be dislodged by evidence. You can tell which creationists are most intelligent by the complex duplicity of the contortions they must go through to preserve their delusions.
You notice how Sal hasn’t addressed a single bit of the evidence offered against his silly Noah’s Flood claim?
What conclusions should be drawn from such avoidance?
Actually, he sort of did address it. It’s miracles all the way down.
For the record, I did take a look at aaRS (it seems to be called alaRS in bacteria). I pulled an e. coli sequence off genbank, took the open reading frame and blasted it against the nr database. The gene is indeed very conserved within e. coli but it’s not invariant. There were as many as 40 non-identical positions in the e. coli sequences I looked at. Note that in some cases the number of differences within e. coli were higher than the number of differences between e. coli and some Shigella sequences. I downloaded just a few sequences (mostly e. coli with a Shigella and an e. albertii sequence thrown into the mix) , aligned them and found % identities ranging from 99.9% to 98.4% within e. coli and 98.7% to 96% between species. Again, very conserved but not invariant either within or between species.
Science can be defined as an opportunity to scour the AIG archives for packaged responses.
stcordova,
As I also astutely realise, there should be some consilience with the C14 in limestone above and below any given coal layer. Which there isn’t. And there should be some consilience with other dating methods. Which there isn’t. And coals worldwide should give more concordant recent dates than anomalous ones if C14 is an accurate dating method for them. Which they don’t. And the assumed change towards equilibrium from early days should be preserved in tree rings, directly dateable by counting. Which it isn’t.
Actually that is one the most astute criticisms you’ve offered.
I have no good counter at this time for lack of consilience in short time frames (20,000 – 50,000 years) except to say, relative to billion year geological time scales, there is consillience between:
1. C14 dates
2. Faint Young Sun Paradox limiting dates
3. Amino acid racemization limting dates
4. DNA half life limiting dates
5. Erosion time limiting dates
The only thing old Earth paleontology has going for it is the long term radioisotope dates of the rocks that can be dated that way, but just because a strata is built with billion year old rocks doesn’t mean the strata are billions of years old any more than making a skyscraper with billion year old rocks makes the sky scraper a billion years old. At issue is the time of death, not the age of the sediments or rocks that the fossil is buried in.
Even if YEC is false, it doesn’t preclude the YLC model from being correct. The faint young sun paradox is a significant help to the YLC model because a frozen planet won’t allow life to evolve and is clearly not consistent with the claim of an old fossil record.
It’s amazing that scientists just cavalierly brush away the faint young sun paradox, and the only solutions offered so far are dependent on fine-tuned global warming that decreases in intensity as the sun increases in intensity.
Also as far as layers “above” and “below” perhaps sideways is a more honest rendering of the fossil “layer”. See this diagram here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_Great_Britain
Now some geologist will say, well the layers were all put down horizontally then they got bent upwards. Ok so there was 500 million years of fossils being laid down on top of each other like layers on a cake, and then unlike the previous 500 million years the cake gets bent recently for no good reason so that we can see the once vertical layers laid out horizontally as we see in that diagram. Doesn’t that strike you as a bit incongruous? 🙂
And we also have the great unconformities:
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/science/treiman/greatdesert/workshop/greatunconf/index.html
Dave,
Thank you very much for doing this.
A question that I will have to take up with specialists is regarding the 80% differences between E. Coli species. Are the differences likely due to the possibility there was an E. Coli ancestor that had all the the genes reprsented in the E. Coli family and the strains we have now are just subsets of that E. Coli ancestor.
This suggests a bottleneck and/or purifying selection. I’m inclined to say bottleneck because if there were intense purifying selection, then how can there be interspecies variation at all — unless we invoke some sort of idea of species- dependent purifying selection on the aaRS family of genes. But even if there are species-depedent selections, this would be a barrier to one species evolving to another.
One way to test the bottleneck hypothesis is if the conserved regions are changing in real time. I’ve been told informally there may be real time changes in codon bias (real time as in since World War 1 or whenever we were able to refrigerate strains of times past). Unfortunately, that was a passing remark when I heard it. Nothing I have hard data in hand for. So that remark I take with a table spoon of salt till I see confirmation.
When I can clear my schedule or recruit one of my friends, we’ll try to look at this more systematically.
Thanks again for taking a look. Your comment was worth the price of admission for me being in this discussion. Thank you again.
stcordova,
I’m glad it was at least a little helpful. Just so we’re clear, the two non e. coli species I included in the alignment were not particularly representative of my blast results. I just got lazy because it was late and I was tired so I didn’t include more. I could have added other species that would have increased the amount of inter-species divergence seen for that gene.
I don’t really know what’s going on with the variability in gene repertoire seen in e. coli but my (non-expert) guess is that it could be related to the insane diversity that the “species” has. I’m not a microbiologist, but I’ve read that if e. coli were not so important as a model organism it would probably reclassified as multiple species.
With regard to the lack of aaRS/alaRS intraspecies diversity, there are probably a lot of potential factors at play. Without looking into it further (which I really don’t have time to do), I wouldn’t hazard a guess as to which factor(s) might be responsible.
I note that no one is arguing for the reasonableness of atheism. 🙂
There is zero consilience between those items. Sal found a new word and doesn’t know what it means.
OMG someone is actually using the Joe G argument “the Earth is young just made of old materials” :D. Sal, if the materials of the Earth are 4.5 billion years old that pretty much screws your “whole universe created 6000 years ago” claim, eh?
That sounds like a five year old trying do describe his first view of a geology exhibit at a science museum. 🙂
Yes, we do. How does Da Flud explain the physical mechanisms by which they formed?
Hey Sal, how does Da Flud explain this formation?
No you didn’t as others have repeatedly pointed out. All you did was pull some statements you think support your position out of larger texts that distinctly do not support your position.
For example, the whole silliness about our ancestors being stronger, faster, or even smarter than us is meaningless from a genetic health standpoint. Why? Because strength, speed, and intelligence is only considered “beneficial” or “detrimental” in relation to how well they suit a given species in its environment, not in any kind of absolute measure sense. So it absolutely makes sense that these characteristics would fluctuate; they are ridiculously costly to maintain!
Sal, we have provided the absolutely solid rebuttal to your silliness: the human population is increasing exponentially and has been for hundreds of years. That right there solidly proves our genome is not only “just fine”, but better than fine.
Silliness…all you’re doing is ignoring the facts Sal…
That right there is proof you promote a twisted conception of what constitutes health and wellness.
The exponential growth is due to the relaxation of selection pressures due to the increase in technology (particularly agricultural), not mutation plus natural selection. So exponential grown is due to lack of selection against bad traits, not presence of it.
Thus the negative S-coeffients get small because of technology changes, not because of genome changes, but changes outside of the genome.
We look at the same facts, but you look at them differently. The exponential increase of dumber and weaker you view as genetic improvement. I don’t look at it that way, I view it as a genetic tragedy rooted in the fact mutations are generally damaging to such a fragile Rube Goldberg genome as ours and that selection can’t do much to arrest it as hinted at by the population genetics considerations laid out starting with Muller.
(Face palm). Sal, our increasing use of technology is part of our current environment.
How hard you must work to ignore the obvious.
This is worth repeating, Sal. How long do you think you would last in the environment that Homo neanderthalensis lived in during the last Ice Age? How well would a group of Neanderthals cope in today’s New York?
There’s a New Zealand movie called The Navigator that speaks to that. Sort of. Some others have tried, but that one stands out.
Alan,
There is not even agreement on Neanderthal capability, so maybe this is not a question anyone can answer.
http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/anthropology/science-neanderthals-smart-early-humans-01896.html
So what do you suggest be used as the appropriate yardstick of genetic success or deterioration? You have decided that reproductive success isn’t one, because it refutes you. You have decided that intelligence (as reflected in our science and technology) isn’t one, because that also refutes you.
So you seem to be left with some notion of how people were stronger or faster in the good old days. But look at any history of athletic records, or trends in height, or scientific advances, and you find that people have been getting bigger, stronger, faster, and smarter throughout recorded history.
I understand you THINK you are looking at the facts differently, but you state as a “fact” that people are getting dumber and weaker. Since all of the evidence indicates otherwise, you seem to be fabricating “facts” according to your a priori convictions, rather than any actual measurements.
births <= deaths
Wasn't that Sal's definition of genetic deterioration?
When that doesn't work, the goalpost transforms.
stcordova,
I was thinking, how would they apply for a job or a credit card, rent an apartment. How would they cope in modern society?
In addition to the Faint Young Sun paradox which no one here seems to even want to deal with and which raises serious questions about the old-fossil interpretation, I have this troubling fact.
The frozen woolly mammouths had tropical vegetation in their stomachs. How is it that they can have tropical vegetation and be frozen to death? The most reasonable answer is that they lived in a tropical environment and then were suddenly buried in snow that was far below freezing in a cataclysm that was permanent in effect (like the freezing in Siberia). The enzymes in their stomach would have dismantled the vegetation in their stomach if they weren’t frozen to death so quickly, and that means very very cold temperatures.
We also find tropical vegetation in the arctic. This suggests to me a horrible cataclysm, not slow gradual environmental change. I think it is associated with a great flood.
Back to this diagram:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_Great_Britain
Look at the lower right where we have Cretaceous (supposedly 145 to 66 million years ago) sideways sandwiched in between protozoic (2500 to 520 million years ago) and the neo protozoic (1000 to 541 million years ago).
There are things bothersome about this.
One, they are sideways!
Two. Sections of the Cretaceous are shoved in between to older strata. Going from the bottom right corner and going upward slight toward the upper left corner we have:
Cretaceous (olive)
Neoprotozoic (dark green)
Cretaceous (olive)
Protozoic (beige)
Cretacious (olive)
Middle/Upper Jurassic (light blue, 141 to 4 million years ago)
Doesn’t that strike someone as a little bizarre? Sure someone can invoke intrusions or whatever, in fact that’s how the YECs interpret it, but it sure doesn’t look to me like these are credible long age accumulations vs. some sort of rapid sorting, layering, then bending and twisting.
In 2001 when I explored the ID movement, I was fairly convinced the Earth and Life were old. My mind changed in light of these facts that cannot be reconciled with and old fossil interpretation. The Earth could be old, but that has no bearing on whether a fossil is young. I think I’ve provided several lines of evidence I think the fossils are young. Whether the Earth and Universe are old is a separate question, but I just don’t buy the fossils are young. Too much opposing facts like those I laid out and which no one here is doing much to refute.
I don’t know about others here but I have a job taking YEC claims at all seriously. Most of these issues have been done to death elsewhere and assuming you get re-presented with refuting evidence, I’m sceptical you’ll evaluate it impartially.
Pardon me if I don’t believe a word of this. There is not one single factoid in your laundry list that is not fully understood without resorting to fantasy. Your failure to reconcile what has long since been thoroughly reconciled is nothing more than a willful refusal to do so.
Once again, we see that there is no sensible limit to what the human mind is capable of believing. If the evidence refutes you, you can either ignore it or you can carefully and deliberately misinterpret bits and pieces of it, while ignoring the wealth of solid explanation available to anyone not allergic to understanding.
Can you be more specific? Is there a paper you can point me to? I don’t see any primary references to this on a quick google search.
You are aware that Antarctica was not always located over the South Pole?
Yes, because of course the first thing one associates with suddenly being buried in snow and freezing temperatures is a GREAT FLOOD.
What the ever blooming shit, do you even listen to yourself?