DNA the New Fronter

[_ludwigm]

This is one of those instances where Europeans and the UK look at the US and shake their heads.

+

... call me antiamerican ...

[_spotlight]

Crickets, as it turns out, possess 11 times more genetic material than fruit flies. When the Harvard geneticists measured changes in the cricket’s genetic material, they were pleased to find that it lost junk DNA 40 times slower than the speedy flies.

"The result indicates that losing junk DNA at different rates is probably an important reason for the startling variation in genetic material that we observe among species such as onions and humans," Petrov says.

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2000/02.10/onion.html

[_ludwigm]

Does Fronter means frontier?

[_spotlight]

Junk DNA (non-coding DNA) has some fun possibilities. Like reverse engineering dinosaurs from chickens. I hear they are having some interesting success at doing that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/paleontologist-jack-horner-is-hard-at-work-trying-to-turn-a-chicken-into-a-dinosaur/2014/11/10/cb35e46e-4e59-11e4-babe-e91da079cb8a_story.html

Thanks. Cool article. I hope we don't get those tiny dinosaurs depicted in the Jurassic Park series that eat you like a school of piranha. But if we do I hope creationists are tastier.

[_spotlight]

If Little Nipper, Franktalk and NightLion were all on the same page along with the rest of the religious world and if the science community got results that wildly diverged between researchers maybe they'd have an argument worth considering.

Unfortunately the convergence of evidence is on the side of evolution.
http://www.freethoughtdebater.org/2011/ ... -evidence/

[_Quasimodo]

Junk DNA (non-coding DNA) has some fun possibilities. Like reverse engineering dinosaurs from chickens. I hear they are having some interesting success at doing that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/paleontologist-jack-horner-is-hard-at-work-trying-to-turn-a-chicken-into-a-dinosaur/2014/11/10/cb35e46e-4e59-11e4-babe-e91da079cb8a_story.html

Thanks. Cool article. I hope we don't get those tiny dinosaurs depicted in the Jurassic Park series that eat you like a school of piranha. But if we do I hope creationists are tastier.

That would be the ultimate irony. Creationists eaten by the same creatures that disprove creationism. Almost poetic.

[_DrW]

Junk DNA (non-coding DNA) has some fun possibilities. Like reverse engineering dinosaurs from chickens. I hear they are having some interesting success at doing that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/paleontologist-jack-horner-is-hard-at-work-trying-to-turn-a-chicken-into-a-dinosaur/2014/11/10/cb35e46e-4e59-11e4-babe-e91da079cb8a_story.html

Thanks. Cool article. I hope we don't get those tiny dinosaurs depicted in the Jurassic Park series that eat you like a school of piranha. But if we do I hope creationists are tastier.

Spotlight,

Thank you for the time and effort you have put in to your excellent DNA-related posts on this thread. We are indeed fortunate to have domain experts on MDB who are willing to take the time to provide explanations based on evidence, as opposed to nonsense based on unfounded belief.

[_Maksutov]

Thanks. Cool article. I hope we don't get those tiny dinosaurs depicted in the Jurassic Park series that eat you like a school of piranha. But if we do I hope creationists are tastier.

Spotlight,

Thank you for the time and effort you have put in to your excellent DNA-related posts on this thread. We are indeed fortunate to have domain experts on MDB who are willing to take the time to provide explanations based on evidence, as opposed to nonsense based on unfounded belief.

I second DrW. You perform a public service, Spotlight.

I take this stuff a bit seriously. Even in the 21st century we continue to contend with fundamentalists who do not only promote ignorance, but violence and oppression. Recently an atheist blogger was murdered in Bangladesh. And then we have this from a few days ago:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyat ... s-country/

Saudi Arabia is a favored ally of our government. We share military and other security operations. When I was attended Army courses at Fort Lee several of my classmates were uniformed members of the SANG, the Saudi Arabian National Guard. We have coordinated with them against real terrorists like ISIS and Al Qaeda...yet they have this position as well.

[_LittleNipper]

DNA Evidence for Evolution
QUESTION: What is the DNA evidence for evolution?

ANSWER:

DNA molecules are complex molecules which contain the assembly instructions for every living creature. Certain aspects of DNA have been interpreted as evidence for Darwinian evolution. DNA evidence for evolution includes mutations, genetic similarities among species, so-called “Junk DNA” and “Pseudogenes.” Here we will look at these evidences and briefly make note of some of the criticism levied against them by opponents of Darwin’s theory.

The fact that mutations can corrupt DNA is important for the Darwinian paradigm because in order for an organism to eventually evolve into an entirely different organism, changes must be made to the creature’s genome over time. But Darwinian evolution needs more than just change. It needs an increase in genetic information. Critics point out that genetic mutation does not appear to provide a mechanism for that increase. In fact, there appear to be genetic limitations to the potential for biological change. As biophysicist Dr. Lee Spetner explains, “. . .Reptiles and birds are very different. Reptiles have no genetic information for wings or feathers. To change a reptile into a bird would require the addition of. . .complex information. . . . I really do not believe that the neo-Darwinian model can account for large scale evolution. What they really can’t account for is the build up of information. . . .And not only is it improbable on the mathematical level, that is theoretically, but experimentally one has not found a single mutation that one can point at that actually adds information. In fact, every beneficial mutation that I have seen reduces the information, it loses information”1

Genetic similarities between species are also interpreted as DNA evidence for evolution. The fact that human and chimp DNA are more than 96% the same is taken to mean that humans are genetically related to chimps and therefore descended from a common ancestor. Opponents of Darwin’s theory point out that there is a certain degree of genetic similarity to all living systems and that the more similar two species are, the more similar their DNA should appear. “The DNA of a cow and a whale, two mammals, should be more alike than the DNA of a cow and a bacterium. If it were not so, then the whole idea of DNA being the information carrier in living things would have to be questioned. Likewise, humans and apes have a lot of morphological similarities, so we would expect there would be similarities in their DNA. Of all the animals, chimps are most like humans, so we would expect that their DNA would be most like human DNA.”2

The final category of DNA evidence for evolution which we will look at concerns Junk DNA and Pseudogenes. Junk DNA are segments of DNA whose function remains a mystery. We do not know what they do. Darwinists believe that Junk DNA are similar to vestigial organs in that they are useless vestiges from our evolutionary past. Opponents of the theory point out that just because we do not know what something does, that does not mean that it does not serve an important function. Consider vestigial organs. Back in the 19th Century there were dozens of organs which were designated “vestigial” because scientists could not figure out what they did. These, like Junk DNA, were interpreted as evidence for Darwin’s theory. Of a list of 86 put together by Robert Wiedersheim, one of Darwin’s disciples, only a handful remain ambiguous at the present time. Scientists have discovered important functions for all of the rest.

Similarly, we do not know much about Pseudogenes. Scientists believe that they are genes which have lost their function through mutation. As John Woodmorappe explains, “Arguments for shared evolutionary ancestry have been advanced based on the similarities in perceived disablements found in orthologous pseudogenes (counterpart pseudogenes in other primates).” Woodmorappe goes on to say however, “. . .A close examination shows that this presumed evidence is equivocal. Dissimilarities between the pseudogenes of presumably related organisms are at least as prominent as the similarities, and similarities in orthologous pseudogenes can arise independently of shared evolutionary ancestry.”3

The debate over DNA evidence for evolution rages on. Too much remains unknown at this current stage. Hopefully, as time goes on and we learn more about DNA we will be in a better position to know whether or not DNA truly supports Darwin’s theory of evolution.

This article is also available in Spanish.


Evidence for Evolution - Learn More!


WHAT DO YOU THINK? - We have all sinned and deserve God's judgment. God, the Father, sent His only Son to satisfy that judgment for those who believe in Him. Jesus, the creator and eternal Son of God, who lived a sinless life, loves us so much that He died for our sins, taking the punishment that we deserve, was buried, and rose from the dead according to the Bible. If you truly believe and trust this in your heart, receiving Jesus alone as your Savior, declaring, "Jesus is Lord," you will be saved from judgment and spend eternity with God in heaven.

[_LittleNipper]

DNA is proof of creation. Evolutionists are in illogical denial of this obvious fact.






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If you have not read Stories Versus Truth, you may want to read that before reading this.



DNA is Evidence for Creation

The scientific observations regarding DNA have not helped the case of the evolutionists except to create a new area where they can get away with telling half truths because the public is not aware of the details of DNA research. Sometimes, evolutionists even claim that DNA evidence supports evolution, but it does not. Similarities between the DNA of two animals do not prove a common designer any more or less than those similarities would be able to prove evolution, though both arguments are presented.

Evolutionism is merely a story. An expensive tax-supported story, but a story none the less. It is simply a story designed to compete with the historical record that we observe in the Bible. Increasingly, it is an story (actually, an entire matrix of inter-woven stories) fabricated to try to explain away what can be easily observed (though not very effectively any more). (Read the latest science on the subject: Without Excuse by Werner Gitt, a description of the scientific Laws of Universal Information. See also: Information Theory Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. Here is another interesting article.) More is constantly being learned about information and about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Evolutionists tend to hide in the weeds of the unknown with an argument from ignorance: "If you can't prove, by empirical science, that evolution is impossible, then it happened." By empirical science alone, we can only prove probabilities. The probabilities show the Big-Bang-Billions-of-Years-No-Flood-Molecules-to-Man story to be a bazaar hypothesis, a story that is so improbable that it should not be considered. However, empirical science is not a tool that can prove anything to be true or false absolutely. For absolute proof, we have revelation. (See Basic and Concise Guide to Practical, Useful Logic and Reasoning). God says that He created everything. He is the One Who enforces the laws of nature. He is the One Who will judge all of us in the end. We know that because we know Him presonally through the indwelling Presence of Jesus Christ and the moment-by-moment instruction of the Holy Spirit.

As evolutionist become aware of the complexity of the cell, they are forced to explain how all this complexity came into existence by random chance. So they try to give magical abilities to Natural Selection and mutation, neither of which has any ability to add information to anything. For molecules-to-man evolution to have taken place, libraries of information would have had to have been added to cells--but they can't even think of a story that could possibly explain this let alone prove that it has happened.

There is constant work being done, on the part of Evolutionists, to provide some method by which complexity and order could have possibly developed by naturalistic means--as if telling an uncheckable lie makes the lie true. But they can't even come up with an uncheckable lie. They try in vain to make up a story that would show a way that information could be added to these cells by random Chance. So far they have come up with wild tales like the following: "Whence life complexity? Give evolutionists all the carbon-based molecules they want - will they get life to form and evolve? Will the amino acids form proteins (see online book) that can evolve into complex life? Michael Lynch and Ariel Fernandez, scientists at the University of Chicago, reported PhysOrg began with proteins, and then speculated that "Errors in protein structure sparked evolution of biological complexity." That's right: complex life is the result of mistakes. This idea was published in Nature.1 "... "This new idea is actually un-Darwinian. In a nutshell, PhysOrg said, "random introduction of errors into proteins, rather than traditional natural selection, may have boosted the evolution of biological complexity." How can that be? Is there any complex system that gets better with the introduction of random errors?"... "Help your local pre-creationist friend at the university become a full-fledged one. Give him or her the following books:
•Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused and Illusory World of the Atheist by Moshe Averick. Chapter 3 gives a good summary of the hopelessness of evolutionary theories on the origin of life, with ample quotes from leading evolutionists and origin-of-life researchers themselves.
•Signature in the Cell by Stephen C. Meyer.
•Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome by Dr. John C. Sanford. Fascinating and convincing evidence (from a geneticist) on why mutations will never, ever lead to increased fitness--in fact, the human genome is disintegrating due to mutations.
•The Nature of Nature by numerous authors on both sides of the design question.
•The Programming of Life by Don Johnson." (Source: CREV - read more)

So what do they teach in the Universities and High Schools and Grade Schools? They have nothing that makes sense or that could stand up to scrutiny. These poor students learn lies and misrepresentations. There is ample information available for the students to discount the lies, but most students don't want to think that hard. And many of them get into sins that make them actually hope God isn't there. They are hiding out in the woods like Adam and Eve did after they sinned. Then, here is a convenient lie, and the path of least resistance is to believe it. So they let their life be a life based on lies and fabrications.

Evolution is Just Story Telling







I was talking to an evolutionist who wanted to debate me. There was no point in arguing with the man. His mind was made up. I just kept asking him why he believed what he believed. When he would tell me, I would ask him why he believed that to be true. He would give me an answer and I asked him why he thought that was true. After about a half hour of this, he got a kind of glassy-eyed look and his answer was, "I guess I'm making the whole thing up." Do you think that he dropped Evolutionism? Not a chance.

The particulars of this conversation, though, have nothing to do with the dilemma and whether or not it is truly a dilemma. In fact, the event that is recorded here doesn't prove the dilemma. It is only an example to make it easier to understand how unreliable human thinking is. You can verify this dilemma yourself. Just keep asking yourself how you know what you think you know and you will come either to an axiom that you believe simply because you believe it or a supernatural revelation. There are two other ways that can go: infinite regression or circular reasoning. This is true if you are an evolutionist, a creationist, or a theologian.

Test it out. It's how logic works. There must be one of these: a root premise, infinite regression, or circular reasoning. The root premise can either be a presupposition (something you made up) or revelation. If what you write is valid, we will certainly add it to this page. An axiom that you believe simply because you believe it or because someone else told you to believe it--this is a lie--something that you or someone else just made up.

Someone did ask, "What about empirical observation?"

There is not one root premise. There are many. They reside in worldviews, also known as paradigms. A worldview is the real basis/foundation for thought, unless revelation is. Worldviews even affect empirical observation. Worldviews are founded on presuppositions. Presuppositions, as the term is used here, are assumptions that we no longer recognize as assumptions. They appear to us as reality, though they are mere arbitrary assumptions. So, worldviews are not reality but a representation of a fake reality within our minds. The assumptions become part of a worldview, a paradigm, a false reality. Call it the world in our minds if you will. (read about revelational apologetics versus presuppositional apologetics)

Everyone has a false reality. No one is exempt. This worldview tends to have all kinds of conflicts in it--things that are mutually exclusive. Most Bible-believing Christians, for instance, have some measure of a naturalistic worldview mixed with a belief in the Almighty God Who answers prayer, leads us in our daily lives, and enforces all the laws of nature. This conflict results in unbelief and can be the cause of unanswered prayer. A lot of our stress proceeds from these kinds of conflicts. Atheists actually do know that God exists, since it's plain in the creation, but they develop complex rationalizations to try to keep their worldview atheistic. No one has a totally consistent worldview. However, we live our lives based on our worldviews/pseudo-realities . . . or else we live our lives based on the leading and revelation that comes from the throne of God.

The problem with false realities is that they seem more real to us than real realities. They filter our thoughts in many ways. A lot of good science has been done on this. They have found that scientists filter out facts that don't conform to what they thought they would see. When we run into something that violates our own personal fake realities, we filter that information out by whatever means we can. So, the senses are not really as predictable as we think that they are.

Scientific method is supposed to get around this by being very open-minded and bringing in many observers to observe the same thing. The problem is that a worldview that is universally held in a group becomes even more binding because of the action of confirmation bias. In scientific method, no opinion is to be left out. However, society doesn't work that way. When Galileo thought that the Earth went around the Sun, the scientists got angry and got the state (The Holy Roman Empire at the time) to shut him up. A similar thing is going on now with evolutionism. The evolutionists hold the political power and are doing everything in their power (which is considerable) to disallow any other message. You cannot get published in most scientific journals if you mention God or creation.

Now, three people observe the same fossil in the same rock layer. One person has a worldview built on a foundation of millions of years, naturalism, big bang, evolution, materialism, and uniformitarianism and automatically sees the fossil as further evidence of all these foundational premises. Confirmation bias. This is further confirmed by colleagues with the same worldview. A second person has a worldview built on a foundation of biblical creation, about 6,000 years, a great, catastrophic, worldwide flood, and a God Who created everything and Who is currently enforcing every law of nature at every level throughout the Universe and automatically sees the fossil as further evidence of these foundational premises. For this second person, this foundation was once living revelation, but it is no longer an interaction between the person and the Holy Spirit--these have become the presuppositions, the foundation, of the worldview. A third person has the same worldview as the second person but has come to realize the weakness of the human mind and has made a habit of staying in the Presence of God even when working. As this person looks at the fossil, the Holy Spirit brings the great flood to mind and the creation to mind and the creator to mind, and whatever else the Holy Spirit is teaching that day. For this person, Jesus Christ, the Person, is the Foundation.

Jesus said that He is the Truth. He said that whoever is on the side of Truth listens to Him. Truth is reality. Revelation is always a revelation of reality as it really is. Revelation is progressive. God pulls back the veil of our worldviews so that we can see reality more clearly. Ultimately, the Holy Spirit will destroy the veil.

So, even empirical observation is affected by the starting place of our thinking. However, the problems in logic come up throughout the thought process. When any idea is presented that is incompatible with our own fake reality, we are surprised. We may judge the other person as being crazy, not realizing that we are looking at life through a very limiting filter of our own fake reality. This is why there are divisions within the church, denominations. It has been said that we ought to hold our theology loosely enough that God is able to correct us when He wants to bring us to a higher level in Him.

What we observe is prior to any logic. But how do we know the meaning of what we observe. Without revelation, you can't even know for certain that you or the world around you actually exists. However, God reveals that you and the world around you actually exists and that He created it for His pleasure. We can make no deductions about anything that we observe without either revelation or some combination of made-up stories, arbitrary assumptions, irrational thoughts, or outright lies. But these thoughts are generally buried in presuppositions within our worldviews, and we are not conscious of them most of the time.

"When evolution is seen as a storytelling game rather than a serious attempt at scientific explanation, it suddenly makes sense."

Here is one other component of this dilemma. Supernatural revelation can come from one of three sources: Divine, demonic, or human. Because of the fall into sin that puts all human beings into bondage to Satan, human supernatural revelation actually comes from demonic forces originally, so those two could actually be one and the same. You may prefer to call them earth spirits or gods or some such, but they are demonic forces, principalities, powers--basically, they are beings created by God who have stumbled and fallen away from Him.

Later, this same person challenged me, "You have to convince me that God exists." I just looked away to Jesus, and then I answered, "I can't do that." He said, "Why not? You have to try to convince me." I said, "How would I be able to change your mind when God has been speaking to you all along and you have ignored Him?" You see, Evolutionism is metaphysical. It does not respond to scientific evidence. It does not respond to logic. For instance, information and organization are never added to anything by random chance. That is a scientific fact. The story of Evolution is a story about magic. Evolution has a troubling information problem. The paradigms of Naturalism and Materialism are magical paradigms where things happen without any cause. The paradigm known as Uniformitarianism (denial of The Catastrophic Worldwide Flood) is a paradigm in denial of the evidence.

How does order come from chaos? How can something come from nothing? How can randomness create intelligence? If the universe always existed as some hypothesis, then why isn't it in heat death. If the universe popped into existence from nothing, then what is the mechanism by which it popped. If plants and animals evolved, there would need to be thousands of transitional forms between known kinds of animals and plants; where are they? You can line up plants and animals according to similarity and claim that proves evolution; I can do the same with things I find in my garage; does that mean they evolved too? If the first complex (they are all amazingly complex) reproducing life popped into existence, by what mechanism did it pop? If it came into existence slowly, what are the steps? No one who looks at evolution with an open mind can accept it as a viable hypothesis.

"What makes the question complex is that in place of the countless thousands of transitional forms expected (as Darwin logically indicated should be found were molecules-to-man evolution to have ever happened, and anticipated would be found in future), there exists at any point in time a handful of candidates, i.e. fossils put forward as transitional forms by evolutionary proponents. [Note: By 'transitional forms' is meant here fossils showing intermediate stages between major evolutionary transitions, i.e. from one kind of creature to a wholly different kind. For example, stages in the supposed transition of a walking reptile to a flying bird, nothing which creationists could regard as variation/speciation within a kind. Some evolutionists argue that we have countless thousands of transitional fossils, but they empty the term 'transitional fossil' of any content really meaningful for the creation-evolution debate. They define a fossil as 'transitional' in the same sense that a car is 'transitional' between a unicycle and a truck. That is not in view here.] Creationists by definition would argue that there are none, so to evolutionists this is seen as 'proof'. From a creation perspective, though, consider the following:" Go to http://creation.com/missing-links-parade for the rest of this article.

Interestingly, the similarities in the genetic code are often contradictory to the evolutionistic interpretations of the fossil record. Some evolutionists deal with this by presenting arguments for one part of their hypothesis that conflicts with the arguments for another part of their hypothesis. They try to do this in a way that avoids detection of the inconsistencies. When these inconsistencies are pointed out, the evolutionists use deception to try to rationalize the problem away. You can read the latest from the scientific journals and see what I mean right here: http://www.creationsafaris.com/crev200812.htm ~ Current News: http://crev.information

While Evolutionists look only at the data that seems to be consistent with Evolutionism, looking at all the data shows that it is consistent with Genesis 1 rather than Evolutionism. http://creationrevolution.com/2011/02/m ... ontinuity/

The Atheists, and those who believe Atheistic dogmas, claim that all they need to do is to prove that science could explain everything we needed to know without reference to God. If science is equivalent to story-telling this might have been true, except that we now know that scientific-sounding-story-telling cannot explain everything without violating several basic laws of science.

The reality is that the Atheists, and those who believe Atheistic dogmas, actually need to do a lot more than to prove that science could explain everything we needed to know without reference to God. They need to show proof that their stories have actually taken place, which they have not been able to do. They must show proof that God does not exist, which they have not been able to do. They have to show proof, using something besides circular reasoning, arguments from ignorance, universal negatives, and other irrational arguments, that followers of Christ are not actually hearing His Voice and being filled with His Spirit and having Him do His works through them.