Why isn't Intelligent design not allowed in public schools?

[UTEOTW]

"The 2 most simple words that make an evolutionist squirm........mature state."

Does not make me squirm in the least. (I am surprised that Helen seemed to be going along with you since she has elaborate ideas on how to explain how things got to be the way they are in a short time.)

In any case... If you want to tell us that "mature state" means that the normal state of a "mature" creation would be what you get after billions of years of evolution, then fine.

Does your idea of a "mature" universe involve one that looks like it was made in a manner consistent with the inflationary cold dark matter lambda theory? Our universe sure does look to have been made that way. Perhaps you think that a mature universe should appear to have been made that way.

Does your "mature" planet have life that appears to have been the product of evolution? The life on our planet sure does look that way. Should "mature" organisms have retroviral inserts and pseudogenes and paralogs and all sorts of genetic homologies that make them look to be related to other life through comon descent and to have been formed through evolutionary processes?

"The funny thing is I'll bet the Big Bang Theory remains as an alternative possibility within their textbooks."

Why not? That is how out universe appears to have been formed?

Or, alternatively, are you now backing away from your "mature" claim and instead saying that the universe does not in fact look "mature?"

"My question to a Christian who claims to believe in evolution. What would God's purpose be and how does that fit with man being created in God's image?"

I do not understand the first part of the question other than to say he created the laws of this universe to carry out His will. They behave in accordance with His will.

As to the second part, being in God's image is not a physical thing. It is spiritual.

 

[Helen]

"working from an accurate evolutionary framework"

give me a break, UTE. That means they are starting with a presupposition of evolution. They will therefore come to conclusions in line with the presupposition.

Let's look at some basic math which does not take evolution as a presupposition. It's just math.

By Fred Hoyle -- who was sort of good in math, as you may know.

In his book The Intelligent Universe, (Michael Joseph, London, 1983) pp 12-17, he deals a little with probability. On page 12 he makes mention of a blind man trying to solve a Rubik's cube -- he will use this as a basis for comparison a little later on, so I want to mention what it would be mathematically.

"The chance against each move producing perfect colour matching for all the cube's faces is about 50,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1.

"These odds are roughly the same as you could give to the idea of just one of our body's proteins having evolved randomly, by chance. However, we use about 200,000 types of protein in our cells.

"... Left ot themselves most chemical reactions of importance in biology would proceed so slowly that life would be impossible. The food we eat would be useless to us because its chemical components and energy could not be released fast enough to keep us alive. Enzymes speed these processes up enormously.

"In total there are perhaps 2,000 such enzymes, and their structures are basically the same across the whole of the living world -- an enzyme from a bacterium can be used in the cell of a man. The chance of finding each individual enzyme by stringing together amino acid beads at random is againlike the Rubik cube being solved by a blindfolded person. Although the chance of finding all the enzymes, 2,000 of them, by random processes is not nearly as small as the chance of finding the whole 200,000 proteins on which life depends, the chance is still exceedingly minute. Call it x to 1 against. If you started to write x out on longhand form, beginning with the digit one and adding zeros, you would have a few hours of work ahead -- 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000...and so on for about forty pages, some 40,000 zeros in all. It is about the same chance of throwing an uninterrupted sequence of 50,000 sixes with unbiased dice! This is a crucial stastic, because it seems that without these 2,000 enzymes being formed in exactly the correct way, complex living organisms simply could not operate.

"...the chemical reactions catalyzed by the 2.000 enzymes are fundamental to the basic chemistry of the carbon atom itself."

So there's a little math. From a mathematician. And it's not even about abiogenesis, really, but about the possibility of getting the whole thing together no matter how it started.

Let me add the simple math of the generation problem. A generation time is the time it takes from the first beginning of a life form until it can reproduce itself. E.coli is about 20 minutes. Apes are about ten years, etc. Evolution says the first multicelled organism took a billion years to develop from a single celled organism. That, at the rate of only ten generations a day, would be about 3,650,000,000,000 generations. That's over 3.5 TRILLION generations to get that far. If the generation time extends for more complex organisms to even a year -- even six months -- evolution has nowhere near enough time in 2.5 billion years (it took a billion for the earth to produce one cell, we are told, and then another billion to get from there to a multicellular organism).

How many generations from fish to amphibian...to reptile...to mammal .... to man?

And please keep in mind that

1. Most mutations are not expressed, meaning they do not show up in the body form.

2. Of those which are expressed, it is at least 1000 to 1 in favor of those which are degenerative or simply lethal.

3. More than one negative heritable mutation per generation in a population and you have a population on its way to sure extinction.

So please times the number of generations needed for these magical transformations by at least a thousand or two thousand in order to keep your population alive while you are waiting for the mutations to come together to form this new creature.

In the meantime, each expressed, "positive" mutation must give some kind of advantage to the organism or the mutation will probably be lost along the way.

So there's a little math.

Evolution is, mathematically, impossible.

 

[UTEOTW]

"Intelligent Design theory is a system for recognizing when certain events or objects (broadly considered) came to be as a result of intelligent causation. It uses an explanatory filter or sieve to rule out natural causes."

Great. Can you give us an example? Take us step by step how you distinguish intelligent design from unintelligent design and how you determine that something could not possibly have been the product of natural mechanisms.

"Evolutionists just don't like to have this process applied to abiogenesis."

Why not? There are several promising pathways.

 

[Paul of Eugene]

Originally posted by Eric Pement:

Intelligent Design theory is a system for recognizing when certain events or objects (broadly considered) came to be as a result of intelligent causation. It uses an explanatory filter or sieve to rule out natural causes.
[/quote]

In other words, it simply says there are some things for which no explanation exists. But it goes further. It declares that it can tell that there will no discovery of a future explanation and therefore there must have been an intelligent designer.

That is the non-scientific leap.

Did the victim have butter on his shoes and was the knife wound in the abdomen? Maybe he slipped and fell on the knife. Intelligent design takes into account natural "laws" or lawlike behavior (e.g., butter on shoes reduces the friction necessary to walk firmly) and also the laws of probability (it is statistically probable that a household accident can occur while walking with a knife).

The ID position would say that if the event can be accounted for by laws of physics or chance, or both, then there is no need to look for agent causation.

However, intelligent design also looks for small probability. Was the victim seated on a chair, with the knife stuck through his back? In that case, there is an extremely small probability that the death was the result of an accident while walking across the floor ... even with butter on one's shoes. ID also considers "specified complexity", or a state of affairs which is not only improbable but also which fits a particular need or situation. A recently-filed insurance policy might do the job, and if so, we would be justified in suspecting a murder instead of an accident.

Specified complexity would also obtain if the knife were not still in the chair and the victim, but were lying on the table with all fingerprints wiped clean. In this situation, ID would insist that the death resulted from "intelligent design."

ID allows that extremely rare things may occur, and does not stipulate that improbability always indicates agent causation. Improbable events can and do occur, and they should not be attributed to deliberate acts.

Intelligent Design, like forensics generally, doesn't always catch false negatives (a murder designed to look like an accident), but overall it seems to do a pretty good job of describing the logical or mathematical process of distinguishing deliberate actions from accidents or chance events.

Evolutionists just don't like to have this process applied to abiogenesis. And that, in my opinion, is the rub. [/QB]

In forensics, the detective works out a theory of "design" and tests it against the evidence. He speculates that intelligent agent "a" took action "x" and looks for corraboration. Finding the corraboration, a jury is invoked . . .

We can'd do that with ID in the life sciences! We have no action "x" which we can point to! Its as if you found a dead body and couldn't tell how the body even died.

Until ID can come up with action "x" which we can point to . . . and I mean the action that was taken to get the result, not the bald fact of the result . . . we have no science of ID. And saying the action was merely creating the result is not specifying any action at all, it is simply repeating that we really don't know the action that was taken.

Forensics also goes into motive. Let's suppose that the bacterial rotating flagullum was impossible to evolve naturally and God had to design it from scratch before it arrived.

Why would it be invented? Why not just use a flageullum that went back and forth only? Surely bacteria could still fullfill their role in our ecosystem without a fancy irreducibly complex flagellum.

And on the other hand, why do no birds have propellers, like our airplanes do? Surely waving the wings up and down is inherently less efficient.

It's not as if the designer had not ever ever thought of a rotating part.

A decent science of ID would give us some hints as to how to think about those questions.

But since you believe in ID, would the evidence that you follow to accept ID lead you to believe in a single designer, or multiple designers? There are many trends in natural design that seem to be at odds with each other. Cheetahs getting faster and faster at catching antelopes, Antelopes getting faster and faster at eluding Cheetahs . . . is an ID theory that includes multiple designers better able to account for such competition?

Hey, ID is wonderful, I believe in ID. Its just not science. I believe it was mostly done in the background as God derived the scientific laws of the universe itself and put them together in a way that made them work to bring life about. I also believe in the occasional miracle as needed for special situations, such as liberating Israel from Egypt.

 

[UTEOTW]

""working from an accurate evolutionary framework"

give me a break, UTE. That means they are starting with a presupposition of evolution. They will therefore come to conclusions in line with the presupposition.

Let's look at some basic math which does not take evolution as a presupposition. It's just math."

It's just math.

But you illustrate for us all just why it is that you need to make the right assumptions.

You assumption is that you are going for a specific sequence, that none other will do and that you have to randomly assemble all of the parts at once.

It might be interesting math, but it has nothing to do with how biologists would propose that such a thing happened.

A major problem for such math is that studies have shown that there are huge numbers of possible configurations that would do a given job. Not just the one sequence in question.

Another major problem is the assumption that it all must come toegether just perfect the first time. In reality, there can be a selectiv process going on. In real life, versions that works less well may be originally selected. Or it may come about through modification of a sequence that did something else entirely before.

No, the math is fun. But you must do the math is a way that reflects reality.

 

[AntennaFarmer]

Originally posted by Paul of Eugene:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by AntennaFarmer:
"Your examples don't look like the pelvic bones of a land creature to me."

A.F.

A.F., here's a link to a site with sample pelvic/leg bones from several whale species. Some of them are curvier than others. In addition, there are some comments about them you will be interested in, I post an excerpt here (check the web site for further documentation)


http://www.edwardtbabinski.us/mpm/mpm_whale_limb.html
</font>[/QUOTE]Those are great pictures. Isn't it amazing how even the bones of THE LORD's creatures are so beautiful. You have me in a notion to visit a museum!

Please give me a little more help Bro. Paul, I can't find the pictures of the fossil whales with the attached pelvic bones.

But even if some whales had functional legs, what would that prove? Maybe THE LORD created some whales with legs and some without. If they were able to interbreed what would happen? It seems to me that given a great deal of genetic diversity in the original population provides for all of the observed evidence.


A.F.

 

[AntennaFarmer]

On detached whale "pelvic bones."

Originally posted by UTEOTW:


They aren't attached anymore because they do not need to be anymore. They are no longer supporting weight.

Are you Darwinian or Lamarckian?

If we follow Darwin your statement doesn't make any sense. The bones wouldn't become detached because they "don't need to be" attached. The bones would become detached because of a mutation which had nothing to do with "need". Maybe you had better go back and study the basics.

A.F.

 

[Helen]

Originally posted by UTEOTW:
""working from an accurate evolutionary framework"

give me a break, UTE. That means they are starting with a presupposition of evolution. They will therefore come to conclusions in line with the presupposition.

Let's look at some basic math which does not take evolution as a presupposition. It's just math."

It's just math.

But you illustrate for us all just why it is that you need to make the right assumptions.

You assumption is that you are going for a specific sequence, that none other will do and that you have to randomly assemble all of the parts at once.

It might be interesting math, but it has nothing to do with how biologists would propose that such a thing happened.

A major problem for such math is that studies have shown that there are huge numbers of possible configurations that would do a given job. Not just the one sequence in question.

Another major problem is the assumption that it all must come toegether just perfect the first time. In reality, there can be a selectiv process going on. In real life, versions that works less well may be originally selected. Or it may come about through modification of a sequence that did something else entirely before.

No, the math is fun. But you must do the math is a way that reflects reality.

I don't care in what order those enzymes formed. Just show me some form of life which doesn't need them, OK? Unless you can do that, we have to assumed that they formed, IN WHATEVER ORDER, in time to supply the first living things with the wherewithal to survive.

Your handwaving about reality does not work either. Go ahead and show where you don't need that many generations to get from fish to man. Go ahead and show us the data which say that more than one negative heritable mutation in a generation in a population does NOT lead to extinction (error catastrophe). Go ahead and show us how one mutation has EVER been shown to -- without man's intervention and only by observation -- add on to another to produce a new form or function. I would be especially interested if you could point to anything above a microscopic level where this had happened!

And please, please don't try to inundate me with your interminable lists of references. I much prefer a clear, cogent piece of writing where you yourself actually explain something fairly concisely. I do not read or attempt to read your long posts. Thank you.

 

[mioque]

WILLIAMSPORT - A federal prosecutor said testimony in the Dover Area School District's intelligent design case is under review to determine if perjury charges should be pursued.

U.S. Middle District Attorney Thomas A. Marino said yesterday that decision will take time because there is "a lot of reading to do" to determine if the statements rise to the level of a crime.

"I want to question a couple of people who were present," he said. They will not include Judge John E. Jones III, who presided over the case, he said.
 Advertisement
 

Marino's comments came a day after Jones struck down the school district's policy of telling ninth-grade biology students Darwin's theory of evolution is not fact and intelligent design is an alternative explanation of the origin of life.

In his opinion, Jones accused some of those who testified during the six-week trial in Harrisburg of lying, singling out former board members Alan Bonsell and William Buckingham, the leading proponents of the policy.

Both men testified during the trial, which ended last month, and both gave sworn statements in depositions on Jan. 3. During the trial, Jones and lawyers for parents opposed to the policy confronted the men about the discrepancies and evasiveness in their answers to questions about their motivations and efforts to raise money for a pro-intelligent design textbook, "Of Pandas and People."

During the trial, after questioning by Jones and lawyers, Bonsell and Buckingham acknowledged that Buckingham raised money for the books in his church, then wrote a check for $850 to Bonsell's father, who bought the texts and donated them to the school district. Neither man disclosed the transaction in their deposition.

"The inescapable truth is that both Bonsell and Buckingham lied at their Jan. 3, 2005, depositions about their knowledge of the source of the donation for Pandas. ... ," Jones said in his ruling. "This mendacity was a clear and deliberate attempt to hide the source of the donations by [Bonsell and Buckingham] to further ensure that Dover students received a creationist alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution."

"Pandas" is a pro-intelligent design book written by creationists.

Jones also questioned the "credibility" of statements by other school officials and former board members.

In an interview, Buckingham called Jones a liar and denied making false statements. Bonsell has said he "tried to be as truthful" as he could.

Witold Walczak, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented parents opposed to the policy, said any decision to bring perjury charges would be made by the prosecutor's office.

http://www.pennlive.com/news/patriotnews/index.ssf?/base/news/1135248153247780.xml&coll=1

 

[UTEOTW]

Originally posted by AntennaFarmer:
On detached whale "pelvic bones."

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by UTEOTW:


They aren't attached anymore because they do not need to be anymore. They are no longer supporting weight.

Are you Darwinian or Lamarckian?

If we follow Darwin your statement doesn't make any sense. The bones wouldn't become detached because they "don't need to be" attached. The bones would become detached because of a mutation which had nothing to do with "need". Maybe you had better go back and study the basics.

A.F. </font>[/QUOTE]Allow me to rephrase.

The legs are no longer functional in their original role. They are no longer needed to support weight. Therefore there is no longer any selective pressure to maintain the attachment to the spine. So if there was a mutation which caused this attachment to no longer develope, it would not be selected against.

Now, could you please answer my question of just what you think those things are if not the remains of legs and a pelvis. Remember that we are talking about what the guy doing the dissection noticed some number of pages ago now. Where you would expect to find legs if they were there, there were bones that he identified as uppoer and lower leg bones with what he identified as a knee joint between them. The upper leg bone had a head which was in what he identified as a pelvis. Each of these joints had characteristics like cups, cartilage, liagaments and muscles. And they had little to no mobility.

 

[UTEOTW]

"I don't care in what order those enzymes formed. Just show me some form of life which doesn't need them, OK? Unless you can do that, we have to assumed that they formed, IN WHATEVER ORDER, in time to supply the first living things with the wherewithal to survive."

You are still doing apples and oranges. No one supposes that any life around today, after 3 - 4 billion years of evolution, will be anyhting like what first emerged. There are various pathways being investigated as possible most of which involve an initial molecule which could catalyze the production of itself. From there you have various ideas of how to life in a cell. Many ideas even involve first "life" that uses RNA for both carrying genetic information and for the role filled by proteins in modern life. There are even some organisms that still use RNA strands as enzymes in some roles. There have been experiments, such as those by Sumper and by Spiegelman, which show such molecules forming. One used an existing RNA chain which transformed itself into a self catalyzing string. The other, much closer to you question, used only the raw bases and formed new RNA strands from chance with the same results.

You are a very well read person. Surely you know all of this. And you have heard the arguments against what you first posted many times. But still you try and show math that depends on assuming something that no one actually says happened.

"Your handwaving about reality does not work either. Go ahead and show where you don't need that many generations to get from fish to man."

Again, you are asking questions which are not in line with waht any one actually claims. Last time you brought this up I told you that the mistake here is that there is far more genetic diversity between bacteria than between the most distantly related eukaryotes. While they are single celled, they developed most of the genetic diversity that we see. The additional diversity in the eukaryotes is tiny compared to that which came before. That is why you do not need so many generations.

You did not address this, you just went off on some tangent about memes because I used Dawkins. So I went back and found a much better resource that explained it in detail. You just ignored that. Now that the thread is closed, you bring it back up without ever addressing the original response.

"Go ahead and show us the data which say that more than one negative heritable mutation in a generation in a population does NOT lead to extinction (error catastrophe). "

Selection.

This is basically rehashing Haldane's dilemma. Population geneticists have dismissed this as a problem for a while now. Thee were some aspects which he did not consider which caused the "problem."

"Go ahead and show us how one mutation has EVER been shown to -- without man's intervention and only by observation -- add on to another to produce a new form or function. "

Why?

Last time you asked this question I gave you a few. You answer was that it was intersting and that you would look into it further. Whether you did or not I have no way of knowing because you never responded to it again.

" I would be especially interested if you could point to anything above a microscopic level where this had happened! "

Moving the goalposts?

Maybe you do remember the previous examples that were given.

Again, you are not starting to deviate away from what people claim you should be able to see. Complex changes in body plans are not exactly something that is expected to happen in a short period of time.

But again, I am sure you are aware of the many studies involving research into things like hox genes and other genes involved in the regulation of development and how they have been shown to be able to cause such changes. Now in a lab, these changes are things like legs where an antennea should be, but when you combine this work with comparing the gene expressions in various organisms as they develop and comparing the homology of the genes regulating development, you can start to see a way that such things may happen.

 

[Helen]

UTE, regardless of what different 'ideas' float around (ain't imagination great?), the fact is that even bacteria fossils are recognized as bacteria! In other words, what we actually SEE is the same sort of life 'then' as now -- so your argument that life today would be nothing like life when it 'emerged' is simply not holding up to actual data.

A strand of self-replicating RNA is NOT what we are talking about. We are talking about cellular respiration, which requires those enzymes. But your appeal to RNA is interesting because we hear so often that origins is not what evolution is about. So forget origins. Let's presume the first cell. God did it.

Complete with all those enzymes and proteins, right?

Of course many of those enzymes also require a non-protein co-enzyme. They must have been suppled in the beginning, too.

And since enzyme activity is strongly influenced by pH and temperature, those were regulated, too.

Many enzymes are inserted into cell membranes, for example, the plasma membrane, the membranes of mitochondria and chloroplasts, the endoplasmic reticulum and the nuclear envelope. Not only that, they are locked into spatial relationships that enable them to interact efficiently.

So you had better not be talking to me about self-replicating or self-catalyzing strings of RNA, which have nothing to do with the incredible complexity of the living cell.

So let's take ALL of Hoyle's arguments and say, "But we are talking about evolution, not about abiogenesis!". That first cell was THERE, or first population of cells, created by God. That is, after all, what you believe, right? Theistic evolution? God starts it and front-loads it to work by means of evolution?

Then we are back to generations. And the argument is a solid one. You do not have enough time. Not because different variations cannot appear in different organisms of the same population. They can, and do. But because all the necessary variations must end up working together in more than one individual (for sexual reproduction to carry it forward) and therefore we come back to the necessity of looking at linear generations and not all the variations that can be found horizontally, in a co-existing population.

And, contrary to what you stated, it is EXACTLY the claim of evolution that the build-up of an innumerable number of positive mutations caused a fish to turn into a man! Genetic load itself forbids that amount of mutations to take place. The simultaneous accumulation of heritable negative mutations which are KNOWN to occur in a population would wipe out that population totally in a much shorter time than evolution requires for the changes.

And keep in mind those changes do not erase the genetic load! It seems to me that evolutionists are presuming the genetics of any given population have an almost infinite capacity to handle an increasing load of heritable negative mutations. And we KNOW that is not true!

Take ten billion years. The known facts, as opposed to evolutionary imaginations, contradict evolutionary scenarios mathematically, genetically, and biologically. The bird just doesn't fly. It doesn't even waddle!

 

[RayMarshall19]

Hey, UTEOYW:

Tell us one specific fact you know for sure about evolution and tell us what your evidence for this fact is.

 

[UTEOTW]

Originally posted by RayMarshall19:
Hey, UTEOYW:

Tell us one specific fact you know for sure about evolution and tell us what your evidence for this fact is.

OK.

One way that we know about common descent is through shared genetic homologies. One specfic fact would be that a few percent of our DNA is made up of inserts from retroviruses. Of all the retrovirus inserts in humans and the other apes, a few percent of the genome, I only know of one human insert that is not shared by the other apes. And since biologists consider a single shared insert to be conclusive evidence of shared ancestry, this is fairly powerful evidence. We know they are shared by comparing genetic sequences.

Here is how I explained this in a different post.

Originally posted by UTEOTW:
The next subject to look at is retroviral DNA insertions.

"Constructing primate phylogenies from ancient retrovirus sequences," Welkin E. Johnson and John M. Coffin, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 96, Issue 18, 10254-10260, August 31, 1999.

Here, about a dozen different retroviral DNA inserts are used to construct the evolutionary tree of human and the other apes and primates. See the following chart to see how closely the different inserts match.
http://www.pnas.org/content/vol96/issue18/images/large/pq1892815002.jpeg

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />The genomes of modern humans are riddled with thousands of endogenous retroviruses (HERVs), the proviral remnants of ancient viral infections of the primate lineage. Most HERVs are nonfunctional, selectively neutral loci. This fact, coupled with their sheer abundance in primate genomes, makes HERVs ideal for exploitation as phylogenetic markers.
...
Endogenous retrovirus loci provide no less than three sources of phylogenetic signal, which can be used in complementary fashion to obtain much more information than simple distance estimates of homologous sequences. First, the distribution of provirus-containing loci among taxa dates the insertion. Given the size of vertebrate genomes (&gt;1 × 109 bp) and the random nature of retroviral integration (22, 23), multiple integrations (and subsequent fixation) of ERV loci at precisely the same location are highly unlikely (24). Therefore, an ERV locus shared by two or more species is descended from a single integration event and is proof that the species share a common ancestor into whose germ line the original integration took place (14). Furthermore, integrated proviruses are extremely stable: there is no mechanism for removing proviruses precisely from the genome, without leaving behind a solo LTR or deleting chromosomal DNA. The distribution of an ERV among related species also reflects the age of the provirus: older loci are found among widely divergent species, whereas younger proviruses are limited to more closely related species. In theory, the species distribution of a set of known integration sites can be used to construct phylogenetic trees in a manner similar to restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis.

Emphasis added.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/96/18/10254

There are many such papers out there using LTRs to trace evolution. Here is another.

Liao, D., Pavelitz, T., & Weiner, A.M. (1998). Characterization of a novel class of interspersed LTR elements in primate genomes: structure, genomic distribution, and evolution. JMolEvol, 46, 649-660.

Phylogenetic analysis of the LTR13 family confirms that it is diverse, but the orthologous U2-LTRs form a coherent group in which chimpanzee is closest to the humans; orangutan is a clear outgroup of human, chimpanzee, and gorilla; and baboon is a distant relative of human, chimpanzee, gorilla, and orangutan.

And another...
"Evolutionary implications of primate endogenous retroviruses," Shih A, Coutavas EE, Rush MG, Virology. 1991 Jun;182(2):495-502.

In the second study, a comparison of endogenous proviral DNAs and their adjacent sequences has been used to analyze the evolutionary history of three previously reported human endogenous retroviruses, HERV-E(4.14), HERV-R(3), and HERV-Ia. It is shown that these retroviruses have also been resident in the primate line since before the ape-Old World monkey divergence.

There are many more that can be found with a little searching. </font>[/QUOTE]http://www.baptistboard.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php/topic/66/19.html#000002

And here is a specific YE problem that this implies.

There is another complication that arises when looking at these examples. Let me use the retroviral DNA insertions as an example.

As shown above, humans and the other apes and primates share insertions that demonstrate their common ancestry. (The quote is "Therefore, an ERV locus shared by two or more species is descended from a single integration event and is proof that the species share a common ancestor into whose germ line the original integration took place.") In a young earth hypothesis, this is a major problem. You would have to assume that the humans and all the "kinds" (whatever that may be) of primates and apes were infected by the same combination of virii, that they all inserted the exact same sequence in the same place, and that all these insertions were fixed into the various species.

Furthermore, since these insertions are common between essentially all humans, in a young earth they all must have taken place in the (about) ten generations between the creation and the last common ancestor (Noah) and none have taken place since. Unlikely.

http://www.baptistboard.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php/topic/66/19.html#000005

 

[Helen]

The homology argument is based upon
1. The assumption of evolution in the first place
2. Conclusions which are based upon partial kowledge of the data available.

Can you present anything, UTE, which does not rely on the previous assumption of evolution for its conclusions?

In the meantime, I'm waiting for an answer regarding my post.

 

[UTEOTW]

[snip a bunch of stuff based on personal incredulity about how complex it is with no reason as to why it cannot have evolved]

What's left?

"the fact is that even bacteria fossils are recognized as bacteria! In other words, what we actually SEE is the same sort of life 'then' as now -- so your argument that life today would be nothing like life when it 'emerged' is simply not holding up to actual data."

You have a genome sequence for that oldest fossil bacteria? Wow!

But if not, then all you really seem to know is its shape. Somewhere around 3.4 billion years ago we have fossils that are likely to be similar to cyanobacteria. You have no idea what genetic pathways hade developed to that point. You know nothing about how much diversity there was at that point in time. Could have been quite a bit even by then since carbon isotope analysis seems to indicate that life was around another half billion years before that.

So, let's see, you've got small, fossilized single celled organisms. Theory goes that the first cells would have been prokaryotes like you have found fossils of.

I fail to see what problems you plan to advance from that.

"Then we are back to generations. And the argument is a solid one. You do not have enough time. Not because different variations cannot appear in different organisms of the same population. They can, and do. But because all the necessary variations must end up working together in more than one individual (for sexual reproduction to carry it forward) and therefore we come back to the necessity of looking at linear generations and not all the variations that can be found horizontally, in a co-existing population."

I think to address this adequately, we need to go back to your other post where you said,

"Let me add the simple math of the generation problem. A generation time is the time it takes from the first beginning of a life form until it can reproduce itself. E.coli is about 20 minutes. Apes are about ten years, etc. Evolution says the first multicelled organism took a billion years to develop from a single celled organism. That, at the rate of only ten generations a day, would be about 3,650,000,000,000 generations. That's over 3.5 TRILLION generations to get that far. If the generation time extends for more complex organisms to even a year -- even six months -- evolution has nowhere near enough time in 2.5 billion years (it took a billion for the earth to produce one cell, we are told, and then another billion to get from there to a multicellular organism).

How many generations from fish to amphibian...to reptile...to mammal .... to man? "

More personal incredulity there, but let's look at the gist of your argument. It is that it took a really long time to get to the first multicellular organisms with organisms that reproduce really quickly so how can there possibly have been enough time for these more slowly reproducing organisms to give us snakes and redwoods and humans.

Now I am sure that you have seen phylogenetic trees before. Here is one showing all of life. The key thing here is to remember that the longer the line the greater the genetic distance. So look at this.

http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~pkoch/lectures/L5-Domains.GIF

from http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~pkoch/lectures/lecture5.html

Now you will see that the genetic distance between various mambers of the prokaryotes stretches all the way across the chart. In contrast, look at how short the line is for ALL animals or for ALL plants. Or even the combined length of those two lines. Now consider that those lines still include many single celled organisms.

And there were about 3 billion years of diversification up to the time of that first multicellular organism and less than a billion years since. And this is where your question fails. You treat that first three billion years as a time of struggle and little diversification. A struggle against the supposed problems you alledge. And then after all that struggle, how can the great diversity of mammals and birds and trees have happened in so much less time.

The answer is that that first three billion years was no so much a struggle as you imagine. As we see in our tree, there is great diversity in the organisms that dominated most of that time. To get from the first multicellular organism, likely something like a sponge, to my dog, for example, was a comparitively short walk comparitively.

Look, even, at the preceeding step before multicellular organisms. The eukaryotes are really just a symbiotic grouping of prokaryotes. Organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts are really just prokatyotes living inside the eukaryote cell. The same can be said for the origin of other structures. Bacteria are the great chemists of the planet.

...to be continued...

[ December 31, 2005, 02:58 PM: Message edited by: UTEOTW ]

 

[UTEOTW]

...continued...

"And, contrary to what you stated, it is EXACTLY the claim of evolution that the build-up of an innumerable number of positive mutations caused a fish to turn into a man! Genetic load itself forbids that amount of mutations to take place. The simultaneous accumulation of heritable negative mutations which are KNOWN to occur in a population would wipe out that population totally in a much shorter time than evolution requires for the changes. "

Even Haldane himself said way back in 1957 that "I am quite aware that my conclusions will probably need drastic revision."

And revised they have been. I am sure you are aware of many of the revisions. Some of them have been correcting for some bad assumptions on the part of Haldane. I am also sure that you are familar with the work of Eigen and his hypercycles. Much of this is well beyond my understanding, but from what I can gather, part of it involves dividing the sequences into sub-units that are each small enough to not be subject to the problems of error catastrophe. Thre has been much published on this. One popular book is Mark Ridley's The Cooperative Gene: How Mendel's Demon Explains the Evolution of Complex Beings.

The short of it is that it appears that population geneticists are well aware of the potential. Are there many other than Remine who still thinks of it as a problem? It is far beyond my level of understanding so imust go with the experts.

 

[UTEOTW]

"In the meantime, I'm waiting for an answer regarding my post."

You got it. I had to clean house. My brother is coming over soon. But the other answer only took a short post. It could be done while the milk for my creme brulee was heating.

"The homology argument is based upon
1. The assumption of evolution in the first place
2. Conclusions which are based upon partial kowledge of the data available.

Can you present anything, UTE, which does not rely on the previous assumption of evolution for its conclusions?"

Ah ha. The old assertion of a circular argument. Let's see how well that really works for you.

We make an observation of a genetic homology. Merely an observation. In this case it is in regard to retroviral inserts.

We observe that the genomes of eukaryotes are made up of huge numbers of such inserts. A few percent of the overall genome.

We observe that when we watch, that the inserts are random.

We observe that essentially all humans hsare the same inserts.

We observe that all apes and primates share nearly the same set of inserts, both in sequence and in location, as each other and as humans.

We observe that there are a couple of differences however. Particular species missing inserts that some others have or having an extra insert not shared by all.

We observe that these inserts accumulate mutations and many do not appear to be under selective pressures.

When we start comparing the pattern of the missing and extra inserts a pattern emerges.

When we start comparing the mutations in the shared sequences among the species we get a pattern.

The two patterns match.

Now, just why would this be?

Well, as it turns out, if you hypothesize that these species shared a common ancestor and split off different lineages through the ages, you have a good explanation for what you see.

But how do you check?

Well, as it turns out, you can also use other unrelated aspects to check your patterns. Maybe transposon insertions or pseudogenes or maybe even fossils in some cases.

You keep getting the same pattern. Maybe you are on to something.

But, it is often said the YE looks at the same data and comes up with a different conclusion. What is the YE explanation for the pattern of ERV inserts?

Or is this expected in a "mature" creation?

In any case, not quite so circular.

 

[Paul of Eugene]

Originally posted by Helen:
The homology argument is based upon
1. The assumption of evolution in the first place
2. Conclusions which are based upon partial kowledge of the data available.

Can you present anything, UTE, which does not rely on the previous assumption of evolution for its conclusions?

In the meantime, I'm waiting for an answer regarding my post.

I know somebody who projects fantastically large changes in the speed of light into the past history of the universe based on very small changes in the speed of light they alledge have been observed in the past few hundred years.

Strangely, that same somebody claims it is inappropriate to make conclusions based on partial knowledge.

Go figure.

 

[Helen]

LOL, your information is exremely inaccurate. And red herrings smell nasty even on the screen, Paul.