a swing and a rocket

I'm 24, 25 next week. On a completely side bar, totally off all these topics; I have to admit, if that's you in your avatar picture (which I think it is, but I don't know if you've actually said so), you've aged very well.</font>[/QUOTE]Thank you. That was me three years ago when Barry and I were married. I think I am still recognizable! I am so blonde that I have had to stay out of the sun a lot, and that, plus no gray hair genes, no drinking (occasional wine is all) and no smoking has left my hair and skin in pretty good shape. HOWEVER, I do seem to be losing parts faster than most! But that's from the neck down! So the picture is deceptive in its own way, I guess! At any rate, I have three kids older than you! And please understand that I have been studying this material for many, many years now. I'm aware of what you have learned and, which is what I don't think you kow, I am also aware of why it has been taught to you. Actually, the truth has little or nothing to do with it. After I retired from teaching, I was able to spend more time reading some of the journals I did not have time for when correcting papers and such. I became furious when I realized that a decent portion of what I had taught kids in biology and general science in high school was not only wrong, but had been known to be wrong for some time. This, by the way, is not just with secular texts. I have taught in both secular and Christian settings and texts from both sides have the same problems -- just in different areas. It makes it very frustrating to be a teacher when you want to not only prepare your students for their future, but acquaint them with the truth about what we humans know, as well. I can honestly tell you that there is a great deal that you have learned in the sciences especially which is simply not true. I would encourage you to start digging on your own. Read some things that most people don't. Read some original material and see if the conclusions others draw from it are really warranted. It gets really interesting...

Again, as far as micro becoming macro, they are two entirely different things, as I have tried to point out. One does not become another. It's the same sort of thing as saying that if a tree grows up far enough what is to prevent it from becoming a cloud? After all, the two are both mostly water! But the one thing is simply an entirely different thing than the other. This is part of what you were not taught, or what was avoided when you were a student. Variation already is a potential within the genome. Mutations are errors. Variations go back and forth -- that's the nature of the thing. Vary too much and the organism is dead! Mutations can kill, too, but they are different. They are mistakes. Variations are not mistakes.

About my use of the term 'variation' in the singular, I apologize for the misunderstanding. I was thinking of it generically when I used it that way and not in terms of just one variation. Variation itself, as a noun, can indicate a process of a number of different appearances and not just one of them. So I'm sorry if I confused you. I never assumed you were talking about one variation doing that much. I have understood that you meant a number of them. I will try to be more careful.

The fossil record, to continue on down the post, is simply evidence that things died. Everything else is interpretation, from either side. Please don't call it evidence for evolution. It is not. It is evidence that there were animals and plants, many of which we don't see today, which were alive at one time and died, often catastrophically if the disarticulated skeletons in some areas are any indication.

And again, and again, I have no trouble with speciation. That is not what is being argued here. The argument is common ancestry.

ITM, you REALLY squeaked around telling me what you think I define a species as -- especially when you first told me I didn't know! Here is a working definition: an isolated population which shows some kind of identifiable difference from related populations and which frequently refuses to interbreed with them.

OK?

To continue: beneficial mutations are beneficial only in very particular circumstances and by way of deletion in terms of animals. This is not what evolution needs.

About DNA etc., I strongly recommend catching up on the material in some of the recent material coming out. I am not missing any point. You are just, evidently, not aware of some of the points I am referring to.

Have a good day, and thank you again for the compliment.

 

"A significant fraction of the energy generated inside Earth comes from the decay of radioactive elements in its crust and mantle. The radioactive isotopes uranium-238 and thorium-232 are responsible for about 90 percent of this heat."
http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/1_24_98/fob3.htm

Recently, and I can't remember where I read it, there was an article (respected journal or journal-summary type) regarding the reasonable sureness the geologists feel right now about all the earth's radioactive elements being under the surface of the earth originally. The quote above should help at least give evidence that this is the current thinking.

In the Biblical model, the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and this would have brought up massive amounts of subcrustal material -- including the radioactive elements.

We know radioactive elements cause mutations. We know the VAST majority of expressed mutations are harmful to lethal. We can see in the Bible that the ages of men dropped in half immediately after the Flood. This would have been a lot more than atmospheric changes. This required a genetic change -- possibly the destruction of the ability to rebuild telomeres.

If you want me to use some kind of evolutionary time scale to give evidence of all this, that's not possible. I don't think the evolutionary time scale has even the slightest relationship to the truth of history! But when one looks at the evidence from geology and the Bible together, the concept of a number of deleterious mutations shortly after the Flood makes sense.

Now, as far as the criminal investigation nonsense is concerned, you really have it wrong. No one is denying fossils (fingerprints). No one is denying any of the evidence! We are denying what you say the evidence means. That is a far cry from denying the evidence itself.

In a criminal investigation, both fingerprints and DNA are evidence of individuality and can be used to narrow the range of individuals who were at the scene rather dramatically. But that has nothing to do with the claims of evolutionists that one sort of animal changed into another. In your criminal investigation scenario, that would be the equivalent of seeing TWO sets of fingerprints -- one near the back door and one near the front door -- and then claiming that one changed into the other!

Then you would claim that a 'transitional' should be found somewhere in the middle of the house. And, sure enough, there is a third set of fingerprints, different from both the front door set and the back door set, but somewhat similar to both as well.

Were these three people related? Not necessarily. Were they in the house at the same time? Not necessarily. Did they live in the house at different times? Not necessarily.


Fossils are just like those fingerprints. We know that they were once live animals. We know the fingerprints belonged to live humans. That places them there at some time and, in the case of fossils, dead now. That's it, folks! Other information must be gathered from other areas, and it is very important to know when presuppositions are governing which conclusions are acceptable.

The presupposition of evolution governs what interpretations are 'allowable' regarding the fossil record. But that does not mean either the presupposition or the interpretation are correct.

 

UTEOTW, it takes very little in the way of mutations to throw things off severely. We have, at the ends of our chromosomes, something called telomeres. When a cell divides, it 'uses up' a section of this, and when there is no more to use up, the cell can no longer divide and it dies. This, for animals, is an entire body thing. However we are aware of certain types of cells -- such as cancer cells -- which have the ability to replace their telomeres (by manufacturing telomerase), and thus are able to divide 'forever.' All a mutation had to do was knock out our ability to produce telomerase and that would drastically reduce our life spans.

there are other ways it could be done, but I want you to see how little it really takes.

Here's a little more information:
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/T/Telomeres.html

That is one of the more excellent pages of explanation for the layman I have found on the subject, actually. Plenty of diagrams, too!

The point is not actually so much the amount of radioactivity on the surface, but the severe bottleneck the Flood was for all species of land and air animals and humans.

Something just occurred to me, and I have NO way of knowing how to check it out... we know that there were much larger animals and insects in the past. I assume they grew from the same size eggs and such that we see them produce now.

Growing to those sizes took time. We don't see dinosaurs now. They died out. An asteroid hit? Possibly. But what if they could not reproduce until they reached a certain size? And what it they could no long live that long? Just a random thought -- most of which are fit for throwing out. But one I would be interested in knowing if it could be dealt with through any data we have right now!

At any rate, it doesn't take much to throw the organism out of whack. It doesn't need a large amount of radiation. These were people who had not been exposed to radiation before in the history of the human race. We don't know what parts of the chromosomes were most fragile where that was concerned, but if the section allowing production of telomerase was one, then we have an easy answer to the age problem.

As it is, the only way I have heard of for long-agers to explain Genesis 5 and 11 is to say they 'represent' tribes or whatever -- they cannot affort to take them at face value at all.

And yet, if Moses wrote them (I personally believe he only edited and collated the accounts), wouldn't he have known better than to assign such improbable ages to men, or in statements made the way they are, if such had not happened?

But there is NO way for an evolutionist to explain those chapters in his naturalistic explanations -- so he has to allegorize them. On the other hand, should be Bible actually be telling the truth, then a very possible reason for that drop in ages twice would be connected to the corresponding breaks in the earth's crust and extrusions, or outgassing, both times -- for this would produce massive amounts of radioactive materials which would affect life on the surface.

 

I would refer you gentlemen to the following:

Evidence that exposure of the telomere 3' overhang sequence induces
senescence
Guang-Zhi Li, Mark S. Eller, Reza Firoozabadi, and Barbara A. Gilchrest
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 100, Issue 2, 527-531, January 21, 2003

Normal human cells cease proliferation after a finite number of population
doublings, a phenomenon termed replicative senescence. This process,
first convincingly described by Hayflick and Moorhead [Hayflick, L. &
Moorhead, P. S. (1961) Exp. Cell Res. 25, 595-621] for cultured human
fibroblasts 40 years ago, is suggested to be a fundamental defense
against cancer. Several events have been demonstrated to induce the
senescent phenotype including telomere shortening, DNA damage,
oxidative stress, and oncogenic stimulation. The molecular mechanisms
underlying senescence are poorly understood. Here we report that a 1- week exposure to oligonucleotide homologous to the telomere 3'- overhang sequence TTAGGG (T-oligo) similarly specifically induces a
senescent phenotype in cultured human fibroblasts, mimicking serial
passage or ectopic expression of a dominant negative form of the
telomeric repeat binding factor, TRF2DN. We propose that exposure of
the 3' overhang due to telomere loop disruption may occur with critical
telomere shortening or extensive acute DNA damage and that the
exposed TTAGGG tandem repeat sequence then triggers DNA-damage
responses. We further demonstrate that these responses can be induced
by treatment with oligonucleotides homologous to the overhang in the
absence of telomere disruption, a phenomenon of potential therapeutic
importance.

==========

Mark, I guess you have forgotten that Barry already answered this:

In brief, biological processes remain essentially unaffected by variations in lightspeed, c. If the old collision theory of reactions was true, all

reactions would proceed to the point of completion in a fraction of a second, even with the current speed of light. However, it can be shown that most reactions are controlled by a rate- determining step involving an activated complex. Reaction with the activated complex is dependent upon both the number of particles or ions approaching it, and the time these particles spend in the vicinity of the activated complex. As the physics of that step are worked through, it can be shown that even though there may be more ions come within reaction distance of the activated complex, proportional to c, the time that they spend in its vicinity is proportional to 1/c, so that the final result is that reaction times are unchanged with higher c values.

Consequently, brain processes, muscular contractions, rates of growth, time between generations, etc. all would occur at the same rate with higher c as they do today.

http://www.setterfield.org/other.htm#biological