DNA the New Fronter

[_LittleNipper]

Scientific Proof Of God
QUESTION: Is there any scientific proof of God?

ANSWER:

Before we can discuss the existence of scientific proof of God, we need to identify what we mean by proof. Also, to know what type of evidence supporting the existence of God would be considered by science, we also need to know which definition of science applies.

The definition of science has changed within the last century from an overall search for truth to a more limited scope of natural explanations of natural processes. Using the current narrow scope definition, there is not any scientific proof of God. The truth or untruth of this statement is not based upon evidence or lack of evidence, but by definition alone. Even though there is extensive, solid evidence for God’ s existence, none of that evidence would be admissible in the science court of law using the current definition.

Consequently, to know what evidence really supports the existence of God, we need to base our statements on the old classic definition of science to eliminate the disqualification of the evidence. The kind of evidence we need to consider is the same type that would be admissible in a court of law.

The level of proof is different in a criminal court than a civil court. In a civil court the prosecution only needs to prove that the preponderance of evidence tips the scales in their direction. Alternatively, in a criminal court a higher level of proof is required. The prosecutor needs to provide evidence that proves the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

What types of evidence are admissible in courtrooms? These include direct evidence such as fingerprints, DNA, or eyewitness accounts. Also, circumstantial evidence is normally admissible unless it is abnormally weak. Although circumstantial evidence is indirect, it can be powerful evidence to prove guilt or innocence.


Scientific Proof of God – The Evidence
What evidence exists that could prove the existence or non-existence of God? Does God exist?
• First, the non-existence of God cannot be proven. One cannot prove a universal negative. Alternatively, the existence of God is provable.


• The concept, design, and intricate details of our world necessitate an intelligent designer.


• Both direct and indirect evidence for God’s existence are well known and well documented. Nothing in history is better known or better documented than the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We even use the year of His birth as the basis for our calendar. He perfectly matched the over 100 unique Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament regarding His birth, life, death, and resurrection. The laws of probability cannot give us a reasonable explanation for either the Messianic predictions or the resurrection, let alone both by the same person.

Jesus’ miracles were witnessed by many and were documented redundantly for additional corroboration. He was seen by at least 500 people after His resurrection. He was seen ascending into heaven. His transfiguration was seen by Peter, James, and John. His wisdom in dealing with many circumstances was astounding. He never promoted Himself or His miracles. C. S. Lewis stated that He couldn’t have just been a good teacher. He was either a liar, lunatic, or Lord. He didn’t even come close to meeting the profile of a liar or lunatic, so He had to be God.


• Jesus Christ also supported the truth of the Old Testament and quoted it many times. Consequently, with Jesus Christ, we have an eyewitness to the truth of the Old Testament. This gives credibility to the creation account and God’s interaction with man. The entire Old Testament account is about how God is trying to have a relationship with man while man is separating himself from God by sin. It tells how God is long-suffering and merciful and ultimately how God sent His Son to die for our sins so God could ultimately have a relationship with us.

God’s interaction with man in the Old Testament was often and powerful. Some of the main interactions included Adam, Cain, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, the Israelites, the prophets, and the kings. In addition to Jesus’ testimony to the truth of the Old Testament, ancient manuscripts, archaeology, and internal consistency also testify to its truth. Consequently, much direct evidence including eyewitness accounts and indirect evidence corroborate the existence of God and the truth of the Bible

[_LittleNipper]

Can DNA Prove the Existence of an Intelligent Designer?
signature in the cell: dna and the evidence for intelligent design

In the growing movement known as intelligent design, Stephen Meyer is an emerging figurehead. A young, Cambridge-educated philosopher of science, Meyer is director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute — intelligent design’s primary intellectual and scientific headquarters. He’s also author of Signature in the Cell, a provocative new book that offers the first comprehensive DNA-based argument for intelligent design.

On May 14, Meyer gave a lecture at an event hosted by Biola's Christian apologetics program in Chase Gymnasium, where he made his case that the origin of the information needed to create the first cell must have came from an intelligent designer. Biola Magazine sat down with Meyer while he was at Biola and asked him to elaborate on evolution, the scientific merit of the theory of intelligent design and the uncanny similarities between DNA and computer programming.

When it comes to evolution, what type of evolution do you agree with and what type do you deny?

Well, evolution can have several different meanings. It can mean change over time, or it can mean that all organisms share a common ancestor such that the history of life looks like the great branching tree that Darwin used to depict the history of life. Or it can mean that a purely undirected process — namely natural selection acting on random mutations — has produced all the change that has occurred over time. I think small-scale microevolution is certainly a real process. I’m skeptical about the second meaning of evolution — the idea of universal common descent, that all organisms share a common ancestry. I think the fossil record rather shows that the major groups of organisms originated separately from one another. But that’s not what the theory of intelligent design (ID for short) is mainly challenging. We’re challenging the third meaning of evolution, and that’s where we kind of go to the mat. We do not think that a purely undirected mechanism has produced every appearance of design that we see in nature or in biology. So I’m skeptical of that third meaning, sometimes called macroevolution, where we’re really talking about the mechanism of natural selection and mutation. My book, Signature in the Cell, is actually about an even prior question, which is the origin of the first life, sometimes explained by a theory called chemical evolution. That’s the main target of my own research. I’m showing that that doesn’t work at all. For example, I don’t think there’s any evolutionary account for how you get from molecules to cells.

How old do you think the universe is?

I tend to think it’s old. About 4.6 billion years. I tend to think humans are pretty recent, however.

Do you affirm the Big Bang?

I think the Big Bang is a good theory, and I think it actually has theistic implications. It establishes, along with the field equations of general relativity, that there was a singular beginning to the universe, in which both time and space begin.

One of the big unanswered questions you see in the theory of evolution concerns the origin of the information needed to build the first living thing. How do the Darwinists answer that question?

Many people don’t realize it, but Darwin did not solve, or even attempt to solve, the question of the origin of the first life. He was trying to explain how you got new forms of life from simpler forms. In the 19th century, this was a question very few scientists addressed. The standard theory in the 20th century was proposed by a Russian scientist named Alexander Oparin who envisioned a complex series of chemical reactions that gradually increased the complexity of the chemistry involved, eventually producing life as we know it. That was the standard theory, but it started to unravel in 1953 with the discovery of the structure of DNA and its information-bearing properties, and with everything we were learning about proteins and what I call the “information processing centers” in the cell, the way the proteins were processing the information on the DNA. Oparin tried to adjust his theory to account for these new discoveries, but by the mid-60s it was pretty much a spent force. Ever since, people have been trying to come up with something to replace it, and there really has been nothing that has been satisfactory. That’s one of the things the book does. It surveys the various attempts and shows that in each case, the theories have a common problem: They can’t explain the origin of the information in DNA and RNA. There are other problems as well, but that’s the main problem.

What would be your main argument for the evidence of intelligent design in the cell?

Well, the main argument is fairly straightforward. We now know that what runs the show in biology is what we call digital information or digital code. This was first discovered by [James] Watson and [Francis] Crick. In 1957, Crick had an insight which he called “The Sequence Hypothesis,” and it was the idea that along the spine of the DNA molecule there were four chemicals that functioned just like alphabetic characters in a written language or digital characters in a machine code. The DNA molecule is literally encoding information into alphabetic or digital form. And that’s a hugely significant discovery, because what we know from experience is that information always comes from an intelligence, whether we’re talking about hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or a headline in a newspaper. If we trace information back to its source, we always come to a mind, not a material process. So the discovery that DNA codes information in a digital form points decisively back to a prior intelligence. That’s the main argument of the book.
signature in the cell: dna and the evidence for intelligent design
Your book talks a lot about information and you find parallels between a software program and our DNA. Do you think the ideas in your book about programming and programmers would even have been conceivable to readers trying to understand intelligent design a generation ago?

That’s a great question. I think the digital revolution in computing has made it much easier to understand what’s happening in biology. We know from experience that not only software but the information processing system and design strategies that software engineers use to process and store and utilize information are not only being used in digital computing but they’re being used in the cell. It’s the same basic design logic, but it’s executed with an 8.0, 9.0, 10.0 efficiency. It’s an elegance that far surpasses our own. It’s a new day in biology. It’s a digital revolution. We have digital nanotechnology running the show inside cells. It’s exquisitely executed and suggests a preeminent mind.

What is “specified complexity” and how does it play into your argument?

It just refers to strings of characters that need to be arranged in a very precise way in order to perform a function. If they are arranged in a precise way such that they perform a function, they are not just complex but specified in its complexity. The arrangement is specified to perform a function.

I’ve heard the argument that the likelihood of specific genetic instructions to build a protein falling into place would be like a bunch of Scrabble letters falling on a table and spelling out a few lines of Hamlet. But couldn’t you just say that the chances of winning the lottery are also very slim, but someone usually does get lucky? What if the universe forming was just the proverbial “lottery winning”?

But there are some lotteries where the odds of winning are so small that no one will win. And that’s the situation of trying to build new proteins or genes from random arrangements of the subunits of those molecules. The amount of information required is so vast that the odds of it ever happening by chance are miniscule. I make the calculations in the book. There’s a point at which chance hypotheses are no longer credible, and we’ve long since gone past that point when we’re talking about the origin of the information necessary for life.

Some have criticized ID as being primarily a negative enterprise, denying things but not really offering scientifically convincing alternative. In a recent Christianity Today article, Karl Giberson said that ID advocates should “stop trying to prove that Darwin caused the Holocaust or that evolution is ruining Western civilization. … Instead, roll up your sleeves and get to work on the big idea. Develop it to the point where it starts spinning off into new insights into nature so that we know more because of your work.” How do you respond to this?

Well, we are doing this. What Giberson isn’t doing is reading our work. In the back of Signature in the Cell I lay out the research program of ID and an appendix that develops 10 key predictions that the theory makes. There’s a new journal called BIO-Complexity that is investigating the heuristic fruitfulness of intelligent design. It’s testing the theory, looking at papers that generate predictions based on the theory, publishing papers that are developing new lines of research based on the theory.

To the point that it’s mainly a negative enterprise — that is completely incorrect. ID is proposing an alternative explanation of life. It’s not just criticizing Darwin or criticizing chemical evolution; it’s proposing a contrary explanation and in light of that explanation, developing a number of important hypotheses that can be tested in a laboratory.

Do you ever tire of having to defend the scientific legitimacy of ID?

The thing that is most frustrating is that people seem to feel comfortable making comments about our work without even knowing what it is. The characterizations or criticisms of ID often bear no resemblance to what is actually being done, said, researched or written. There have been any number of reviews of my book that were clearly written by people who hadn’t even read it. ID is an idea that some people think they can attack without impunity, because it is so disreputable.

John Walton, an Old Testament professor at Wheaton College, said this about ID in his recent book on Genesis: “Science is not capable of exploring a designer or his purposes. It could theoretically investigate design but has chosen not to by the parameters it has set for itself. … Therefore, while alleged irreducible complexities and mathematical equations and probabilities can serve as a critique for the reigning paradigm, empirical science would not be able to embrace Intelligent Design because science has placed an intelligent designer outside of its parameters as subject to neither empirical verification nor falsification.” Do you agree with this?

I think it’s strange that a biblical scholar would weigh in on the definition of science. His definition of science doesn’t work. Science often infers things that can’t be seen based on things that can be seen. Darwinism does that. In physics, we talk about quarks and all sorts of elementary particles. We don’t see those. They’re inferred by things we can see. I don’t think his concept of science comports with the experience of scientists. Direct verification is not a standard that separates science from any other discipline. It’s also a odd thing for a biblical scholar to say, because the biblical witness is that from the things that are made, St. Paul says, the attributes of God are clearly manifest, and one of his attributes is intelligence. So why should it be surprising that if we look at things carefully and reason about their origins, that we would come to the conclusion that a designing intelligence had indeed played a role in their origin?

It seems like the idea or inference of anything supernatural scares scientists away. Do you agree?

Well, all we are inferring is intelligence. Whether it is supernatural or natural is a matter for further deliberation. I don’t even like the term “supernatural.” I think the better philosophical distinction is between transcendent and immanent. Are we talking about an intelligence within the cosmos or an intelligence that is in some way beyond it? And that’s a theological distinction. I think it is possible to reason about that, and whether you call it a philosophical deliberation or not, it doesn’t really matter. All the theory of intelligent design is doing is establishing that intelligence was responsible for certain features of life. We recognize intelligence all the time, and we have scientific methods for it. If you’re an archaeologist and you’re looking at the Rosetta Stone, are you duty-bound to continue looking for naturalistic explanations even though you know full well that wind and erosion and everything else you can imagine is not capable of making those inscriptions? No, you’re not. You really ought to conclude the obvious, which is that a scribe was involved. There was an intelligence behind it.

But then, doesn’t the inquiry become one of history rather than science?

It’s historical science. That’s what my Ph.D. dissertation was about and it’s part of what I defend in the book. That’s what Darwin was doing. He was doing a historical science — attempting to infer the causes of an event in the remote past. There’s a scientific method by which you can do that which addresses questions of past causation. Sciences such as archeology, geology, paleontology, cosmology are concerned with those kinds of questions. Intelligent design is using the same sort of scientific methods that these sciences are using.

People are hung up on how to classify intelligent design. But how you classify a theory is not all that important. Whether it’s science, religion, philosophy, history — why can’t it be all four? I think Darwinian biology is certainly science, certainly history, and certainly has larger metaphysical and philosophical implications. Nature and the world do not present us with tidy categorical distinctions.

portrait of Stephen C. Meyer

Why do you think scientists are so adamant that the admission of a metaphysical, teleological explanation of the universe would undermine the practice of science? If such a thing could be shown to be provable, or even just probable, shouldn’t it excite the scientific mind? I think of a scientist as being in awe of the wonder of the world.

It’s a very astute question. The origin of modern science was spawned by scientists who had precisely this sort of awe. They were in the main Christians who believed that science was possible because nature was intelligible. It could be understood and comprehended by rational minds such as ourselves because it had been designed by a rational mind in the first place — that God had put into nature order and design and discernable pattern. That’s what made it possible to do the hard work of looking at things and then eventually discerning that there was a pattern. Kepler said that scientists have the high calling of “thinking God’s thoughts after him.” Design was part of the foundational assumption of modern science. Scientists assumed that nature was designed, and that’s why they could do science. Now roll the clock forward 300 years and you have scientists saying that if we allow a design hypothesis in any realm of science, even if we’re talking about something like the origin of the first life, that we are undermining the very foundation of science. In fact, we’re getting back to the very foundation of science and to that awe and wonder that was the inspiration for the whole enterprise.

There are many evangelical Christian scientists who disagree with you — even people familiar with genetics and DNA, such as Francis Collins. On what points do you agree with someone like Collins, and at what points do you disagree?

There are a number of points on which I agree with Collins. He says that he’s against intelligent design, but he actually makes arguments for intelligent design in The Language of God. He says intelligent design is the best explanation for the fine-tuning of the laws of physics and chemistry. He also argues that the moral sense of humans cannot be explained by undirected processes. Collins denounces ID as a “God of the gaps” argument or an argument from ignorance, but yet he’s making arguments for intelligent design based on physics. I think he sees theistic implications from the Big Bang, and I agree with that. Where we differ is that he wants to hold out for a materialistic explanation of the origin of life, and I think he thinks that Darwinian evolution is sufficient to account for new forms of life. One of the things I’ve been asking Collins to clarify, as a theistic evolutionist, is what he means by evolution. Which of those three meanings of evolution does he affirm? Change over time, common ancestry? I know he affirms those. But what about the third meaning? The idea that the evolutionary process is purely blind and unguided. I had a chance to ask him personally: Is the evolutionary process directed or undirected? He paused, and responded, “It could be directed.” If he says it is directed, he’s got a problem because he’s breaking with the dominant materialist view of the scientific establishment. If he says it’s undirected, then he’s going to lose his influence with the evangelical Christian church, which he’s desperately trying to influence. If he says that evolution is essentially undirected, that’s not consistent with the biblical view he espouses. Instead, it’s a form a deism in which nature is doing all the work and God is either absent or just watching from the mezzanine.

What is the most compelling argument that you’ve come across from your opponents? What do you think is the hardest thing to overcome from your position?

I think one of the strongest challenges to intelligent design has always been the observation of things in nature that are not going well or don’t look like they were intelligently designed. In the book I have a section on pathogens and virulents. There have been these horrific diseases in the history of life — like the plague. People ask me, “Do you really want to say the plague was intelligently designed by God?” And as Christian and a design theorist, of course I don’t want to say that. So there are then three options to respond to this, sometimes called the problem of natural evil. One option is that there really is no evil, natural or otherwise; it’s just that you’ve got random mutations producing things that we like and things that we don’t like. That was essentially the Darwinian view. He was going to let God off the hook by saying essentially that God had nothing to do with it. He didn’t want to make God responsible for evil, so he made God responsible for nothing at all. The other view is that it looks like you’ve got design, but it looks like you’ve got a good designer and a bad designer at the same time. A third view — which I think is more in line with a Christian view of design — is that the world is simply evidence of a good design gone bad.

What does ID have to do or prove to get more of the mainstream scientific community on board with it?

I think it needs to continue doing what it’s been doing, making the case and focusing on the evidence, and then challenging the rules of science that prevents scientists from considering ID as an explanation. I think this is the main impediment.

What do you hope for the future of the ID movement?

We’re trying to grow it. We want to see more scientists come in to it. And I think it is incumbent upon us to develop a robust research program of questions that flow from an ID perspective. If ID is correct, life ought to look different than if it were the result of random processes of mutation and selection. One of the key predictions that illustrates how it ought to look different is the prediction about junk DNA. We’ve been saying since the early ’90s that the non-protein-coding regions of the genome — which the Darwinists said to be junk — are not going to be shown to be junk. If ID is true, it makes no sense for a designing intelligence to design an information system in which 97 percent of it is doing nothing. We’ve predicted that yes, you ought to see some mutational decay and some errors over time, but the signal should not be dwarfed by the noise. What we’ve been seeing in the last 10 years is that that prediction has been substantially, overwhelmingly confirmed. That’s an example of how the ID perspective is anticipating discoveries in science, suggesting testable predictions, and I think that’s the future of ID.

[_Maksutov]

Poor Simplicio. You will get carpal tunnel cutting and pasting from creationist websites, intelligently designed or not. You should go read the Dover case.

Most religious people accept science, and many accept evolution. This is an unnecessary conflict.

[_spotlight]

LittleNipper - Do you back up anything you cut and paste with any evidence? You need to do so otherwise it can be dismissed without evidence. - Christopher Hitchens

Your first cut and paste is from here:
http://www.allaboutcreation.org/dna-evi ... on-faq.htm

Did you bother to read it yourself? I'm betting you did not. Do you ever employ your own mind in the process of thinking?
Seriously sad LittleNipper.

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.

This is totally false. Computer simulations of evolutionary processess work just fine and falsify this assertion.

Let me try to explain why.

Imagine you have 12 dice and a Yahtzee cup. I'd like you to roll all 6s. The odds that this will happen are 1 in 2,176,782,336. (6 to the power of 12)
Working 8 hours a day rolling the dice once per second you'll get there on average in about 207 years.

Now do the same thing but retain any 6s that are rolled and roll the remaining dice again. In this manner you will get there on average in less than 30 seconds. That's quite an improvement. That's what natural selection does. It retains the improvements.

Just so you don't balk at what I just posted let's go through it. There are no Lionel trains involved so you may find this challenging. But stay with me, it isn't that hard and I'll simplify it to keep things really easy.

You start with 12 dice and roll them. On average you should get 2 that come up 6.
Now you have 10 dice remaining. Roll them and you should get another 6, (rounding down) on average.
Now you have 9 dice. Roll again and on average you have another 6.
Again with the remaining 8 dice, and again with the remaining 7, and again with remaining 6 dice.
Now you have 5 dice. If you roll them twice you should expect to get another 6.
Again with the remaining 4 dice, and again with the remaining 3 dice.
Now you have 2 remaining dice. Roll them 3 times to get your next 6.
You now have 1 die. On average you'll have to roll it 6 times to get your last 6 to come up.

So total (with errors rounded in your favor) you need to roll the dice on average 21 times to get all of your 6s. Natural selection does this for evolution. It retains any benefits from the otherwise random process which would not make it anywhere on its own without retaining the improvements.

[_DrW]

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.

In 1986-87, I lived in Saudi Arabia and managed the stand-up of the analytical laboratory at the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals Research Institute.

I knew better than to self-identify as an atheist to anyone in country. Moreover, we were warned by Saudi staff that, while our team would be afforded a certain amount of leeway within the University setting (academic freedom and all that), this courtesy would not extend off campus.

No matter what our religious affiliation (or lack of same) or national origin, we were told to declare ourselves Christian (unless we were Muslim). This was the strict rule for on all official papers, and when asked. Christians are considered "People of the Book" in Islam, and we were to go into no more detail about religion than that.

We were told that we would be subject to the religious police when off campus and that we should show special deference to a certain employee - an aged male scribe (secretary - who still used a manual Royal typewriter), because he happened to be a (lesser) member of the Wahhabi tribe or family. We soon learned that this individual was treated with as much respect among the local rank and file as was the Director himself.

The Americans on the team had no problems because we all worked as government contractors, had security clearances, the senior guys were mostly ex-military, and the embassy kept tabs on us. The Brits did fine as well. Muslims from other countries were no problem, because the Saudis took some responsibility for them.

We did have a few issues with certain of the younger northern European academics, who were a bit more free spirited than was good for their well being, or for that of the team. In the end, we were very well treated and well rewarded for finishing on time and on budget.

[_spotlight]

LittleNipper cut and paste,

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. Etc

Science is not established based upon what anyone "believes" to be possible. If it was, Quantum Mechanics would never have gotten past Einstein. Despite his belief that God did not play dice with the universe, it turned out to be the case.

We just saw that evolution can increase information in my last post by retaining improvements. Improvements are an increase in information. We have an experimental example of it in the modern evolution of Nylonase.

Evolution cannot provide new complex information:
Such a law would have to be established by experiment. Such a law has not been established by experiment. So such a law is not a scientific law.

A note about probabilities here. You do not get to take what evolution creates and then calculate after the fact the odds of that creation, whatever you happen to be discussing. Here's an example of what I mean.

Take a deck of cards and deal them out. That particular order of dealt cards has the odds of 1 in 8.0658x10^67.(52 factorial or 52!) That is a single deal of one deck. You can create any degree of impossible odds by dealing out as many decks as you like one after the other and multiplying this figure for each deal of the deck. You could argue the way creationists do that this is impossible! The odds are so low! But obviously some deal of the decks was going to come out of this activity. That is how it is with evolution. There may be some convergences due to the laws of chemistry and the particular niches available in the environment but I hope you get the idea. You cannot simply take an existing thing like a modern bacterium and calculate the odds of it forming and say "see, it is too improbable." The same argument can be used to "prove" that a particular dealing of ten or a hundred decks of cards in a row is impossible. Evolution has no particular end goal in sight.

[_spotlight]

LittleNipper's cut & paste:

Genetic similarities between species...

I already addressed this in multiple previous posts. Apparently you did not read them or you did not read this cut and paste of yours before posting it, or both. If you had you might have left this paragraph out since there is nothing here backed up by any experimental evidence that falsifies my previous posts on this matter.

It fails especially in convergent evolution, where different morphologies have similar exterior similarities and adapt to similar niches but have very different DNA.

Next paragraph on junk DNA

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.

I proved that it does not by the experiment where some junk DNA was removed from mice without any effect upon the mice. Also noting that similar species can vary in the size of their genomes by a factor of 10 lays this nonsense to rest. There is no way to explain this without the idea of junk DNA. That an amoeba has a genome 100 times as large as ours is convincing enough evidence for rational individuals. This just illustrates the degree to which creationists are willing to be irrational in order to support their presuppositions of the existence of a god and the particular religion represented by their belief in the Bible.

Vestigial does not mean without a use. It means the use has been altered. Goosebumps are to expand body hair which we no longer have in order to keep warm. They now are used by Mormons to identify when someone says something by the power of the Holy Ghost.

Similarly, we do not know much about Pseudogenes.

We know enough to give them the name they have. We can see the one for egg yolk creation in our genome right where it should be for a chicken. Enough parts of it remain without mutation that it is clearly recognizable. This is simply denial of reality on the part of creationists due to your presuppositions that constitute your worldview.

similarities in orthologous pseudogenes can arise independently of shared evolutionary ancestry.

Not without violating the odds which have been calculated against this. They are astronomical. Again creationists are simply denying reality.

The debate over DNA evidence for evolution rages on.

There is no debate. The fact that flat earthers have a website where they debate a spherical earth does not mean that there is a debate that rages on about that reality either.

[_Gunnar]

There is no debate. The fact that flat earthers have a website where they debate a spherical earth does not mean that there is a debate that rages on about that reality either.

Good point. I used to frequent the flat earth website, and even the arguments they use to defend a flat earth, as irrational as they are, make more sense than many of the arguments have heard in defense of young earth creationism.

[_Gunnar]

DrW,

Thanks for that reminder. You are obviously right about that. It probably is a waste of time to engage him. I hope, though, that at least some, if not most, can see how he further damages the credibility of his views with every post he makes.

Thanks also for all I have learned from your posts! You have long been one of my very favorite contributors to this forum!

Nipper does have some value. Refuting his illogical contortions (cleaning his clock) does give those lurkers out there (that may be on the fence) some reliable data to help them understand the issues.

Nipper gets to play Dr. Watson on this board. A literary device that allows others to explain where he went wrong.

Thanks, Quasi! There is something to that too. Let's hope that in the minds of rational, unbiased people following these discussions it is only becoming ever more obvious just how illogical and worthless his contortions are.

[_Gunnar]

I couldn't help but notice that Stephen Meyer, who was the interviewee in Little Nipper's long cut and paste agrees with mainstream science about the age of the earth and about the "big bang theory."

How old do you think the universe is?

I tend to think it’s old. About 4.6 billion years. I tend to think humans are pretty recent, however.

Do you affirm the Big Bang?

I think the Big Bang is a good theory, and I think it actually has theistic implications. It establishes, along with the field equations of general relativity, that there was a singular beginning to the universe, in which both time and space begin.

Is LittleNipper coming around to accepting that too! Maybe we are making some progress here!