Evolutionary Science-v- Creationism

[OnyxCougar]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

OC, I understand your position on molecules-to-man.

What I'm asking about is just speciation from apes to man, forgetting all the earlier steps for a moment.

In your mind, could a group of apes speciate to the degree that they became indistinguishable from humans?



Edit to add: I'm in no hurry, so feel free to take a break for awhile before getting back to me. I won't be back online to read it until 6AM tomorrow anyway.

"speciation from apes to man" assumes man "evolved" from apes, that apes are our ancestors. It has a starting assumption I don't agree with. It's inseparable from the molecules to man idea, because it's just the last few steps on that tree.

To answer your question more directly, no, in my little mind, speciation from apes to man can't occur because there are things men can do that apes can't (sometimes called "higher functions") and that is information GAIN, while speciation is information LOSS.

[OnyxCougar]

I won't lie, I didn't even read TW's second set of posts. It's not that important to me.

[Troubleshooter]

Originally Posted by OnyxCougar

I won't lie, I didn't even read TW's second set of posts. It's not that important to me.

It's worth the effort to copy and paste all of that stuff from other places but you won't read something that he actually took the time to compose and type?

[OnyxCougar]

Originally Posted by Troubleshooter

It's worth the effort to copy and paste all of that stuff from other places but you won't read something that he actually took the time to compose and type?

No, and here's why:

Most of the things TW posts are long and I've had a tendency to disagree with.

And as to wolf's comment about basically, it would cause me to question my beliefs or be scared or whatever, no, it never occurred to me that anything TW had to say would be that impactful to me personally. Especially since I did answer the first incredibly long post, and I had to take it point by point, which TW seems to very much dislike. I fear if I would try to take those two very long posts point for point, he'd bust an artery.

Oh yeah, and because EVERY FREAKING TOPIC HE POSTS ON TURNS INTO GWB BASHING....

Not that I like GWB or agree with his policies or am "defending" him. I just don't think GWB has anything to do with this topic.

[Troubleshooter]

Originally Posted by OnyxCougar

No, and here's why:

Geez, give a guy chronological whiplash why don't you?

[wolf]

Originally Posted by OnyxCougar

I won't lie, I didn't even read TW's second set of posts. It's not that important to me.

I suspect that you fear that it will cause you to question.

TW makes a lot of good, interesting, coherent points (that is my non-christian Christmas gift to you, tw ... nice series of posts).

[Torrere]

Originally Posted by OnyxCougar

There has NEVER been any record of information GAIN in any life form scientists have studied. Mutation and Speciation happen, but these involve LOSS or CORRUPTION of EXISTING material.

However --

Information GAIN certainly does occur. One example is gene duplication: occasionally, when DNA is passed from generation to generation, sequences of DNA are duplicated. Usually the duplicate information immediately follows the original information, but sometimes it moves to an entirely different location. Gene duplication is widely acccepted, and has been examined for over 30 years now. According to this article published in 2001 in Science,

Observations from the genomic databases for several eukaryotic species suggest that duplicate genes arise at a very high rate, on average 0.01 per gene per million years.

This page is a good starting point for looking into gene duplication and explains it reasonably well for the laity.

One of the interesting experiments concerned depriving cells which normally required glucose of glucose and providing them instead with another sugar, xylose.

Cells from the chemostat were analysed and found to have gained multiple copies of genes responsible for an early stage in glucose metabolism. These additional genes occured as tandem repeats, a section of DNA repeated a number of times over in sequence.

In this situation multiple copies were advantageous because the gene responsible for glucose break down was not 100% specific for glucose. The enzyme had a weak side specificity for xylose. By amplifying the gene, that is having multiple copies, enough of the enzyme was produced to metabolise xylose.

In case you require extra special evidence, this paper, entitled "Multiple Duplications of Yeast Hexose Transport Genes in Response to Selection in a Glucose-Limited Environment" describes the preceding experiment (or a verification of it).

We analyzed a population of baker’s yeast that underwent 450 generations of glucose-limited growth. Relative to the strain used as the inoculum, the predominant cell type at the end of this experiment sustains growth at significantly lower steady-state glucose concentrations and
demonstrates markedly enhanced cell yield per mole glucose, significantly enhanced high-affinity glucose transport, and greater relative fitness in pairwise competition.

Not only was information gained [information was duplicated and hence there was more overall information], but the extra information was an improvement over the information existing at the beginning of the experiment.

[Troubleshooter]

If we have all of these works from Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Xenophon, etc., guys who predate Jesus by hundreds of years, why are there no writings directly attributable to his own hand?

[Griff]

Don't we know Aristotle through Plato or am I misundermembering Philo 101.

[OnyxCougar]

Originally Posted by Torrere

However --

Information GAIN certainly does occur. One example is gene duplication: occasionally, when DNA is passed from generation to generation, sequences of DNA are duplicated. Usually the duplicate information immediately follows the original information, but sometimes it moves to an entirely different location. Gene duplication is widely acccepted, and has been examined for over 30 years now.

Duplication is not adding new information. It's still the same info, just duplicated.

If I have cell A, B, C and D, and I duplicate C, I have A, B, C, C, and D. I don't have a gain of information. C was there to begin with. What I mean by gain of information is somehow getting an E from somewhere. That is what is required for the evolutionary theory to work (molecules to man).

[quote] According to this article published in 2001 in Science,

Whole quote of article referenced, my emphasis in bold
Department of Biology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA. mlynch@oregon.uoregon.edu

Gene duplication has generally been viewed as a necessary source of material for the origin of evolutionary novelties, but it is unclear how often gene duplicates arise and how frequently they evolve new functions. [/i] [So, basically, this theory really needs to work, but we aren't sure how or how often.] [i]Observations from the genomic databases for several eukaryotic species suggest that duplicate genes arise at a very high rate, on average 0.01 per gene per million years. Most duplicated genes experience a brief period of relaxed selection early in their history, with a moderate fraction of them evolving in an effectively neutral manner during this period. However, the vast majority of gene duplicates are silenced within a few million years, with the few survivors subsequently experiencing strong purifying selection. Although duplicate genes may only rarely evolve new functions, the stochastic silencing of such genes may play a significant role in the passive origin of new species.

There is so much wrong with that "story" that I'm surprised you bothered to link it. First, this is all guesswork based off of a computer simulation database. Second, they are guessing that the mutation/duplicate rates stay constant over time (or didn't account for the flux). Third, according to my (usually flawed) math, that's one duplicate gene every 100 million years. Most of those duplicated don't do any thing, and if they do, they don't do anything relating to new functions. This was a irrelevant story anyway, because gene duplication is not adding new information, which is required for molecules to man origins.

This page is a good starting point for looking into gene duplication and explains it reasonably well for the laity.

Well, I'm a laity, but I was still lost. Try here:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/crea...2/genetics.asp

In case you require extra special evidence, this paper, entitled "Multiple Duplications of Yeast Hexose Transport Genes in Response to Selection in a Glucose-Limited Environment" describes the preceding experiment (or a verification of it).

Not only was information gained [information was duplicated and hence there was more overall information], but the extra information was an improvement over the information existing at the beginning of the experiment.

But more overall information is not new information. I think the problem here is the way I described it (my fault). See above about ABC and D and the link I posted, that describes the 4 main genetic changes in regards to origins.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by OnyxCougar

Duplication is not adding new information. It's still the same info, just duplicated.

Until it mutates.

If I have cell A, B, C and D, and I duplicate C, I have A, B, C, C, and D. I don't have a gain of information. C was there to begin with. What I mean by gain of information is somehow getting an E from somewhere. That is what is required for the evolutionary theory to work (molecules to man).

The second C will mutate differently from the first C. So you start with ABCD, go to ABCCD, and then A'B'C'C"D'.

[elSicomoro]

Speaking of Jesus, the headline of this article made me laugh.

[wolf]

This showed up in my mailbox.

[OnyxCougar]

This is from the link wolf posted:

Science is all about proof and testing. Scientific method entails coming up with a hypothesis to explain an event or process, then testing that hypothesis to see whether it works.

Agreed. But you can't test origins.

If it [the hypothesis] does [work], it becomes a theory -- a working explanation with the weight of evidence to support it.

Also agreed. But there is no evidence for origins. It isn't observable or testable. It's a bunch of guesses.

If you cannot disprove a theory, you may have discovered a fact. If the hypothesis can be disproved, it must be discarded and a new explanation postulated, and so on.

It's all about your starting presuppositions and the way the evidence is interpreted. There is alot of science out there, and a few ways to interpret the facts we can observe and duplicate.

And on a personal note, I don't buy the intelligent design theory any more than the evolutionary theory. And ID theory is NOT the same as creationist. Usually, when you say "creationist" you mean a person who believes in 6 literal days of creation. ID theorists generally believe that God did it in millions of years.

edit:

If you CAN prove it, then you destroy it -- it becomes fact. There's no longer any merit or moral benefit to belief in it, any more than there's a moral benefit to belief in gravity, or spiritual merit to the belief that airplanes can fly.

So since you can't prove origins, then even the evolutionary theory is faith.
Religion.
Interesting.

[OnyxCougar]

Found these, I thought some may find it interesting.

The stars of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, rotate about the galactic center with different speeds, the inner ones rotating faster than the outer ones. The observed rotation speeds are so fast that if our galaxy were more than a few hundred million years old, it would be a featureless disc of stars instead of its present spiral shape.(1)

Yet our galaxy is supposed to be at least 10 billion years old. Evolutionists call this ‘the winding-up dilemma’, which they have known about for fifty years. They have devised many theories to try to explain it, each one failing after a brief period of popularity. The same ‘winding-up’ dilemma also applies to other galaxies.

For the last few decades the favored attempt to resolve the dilemma has been a complex theory called ‘density waves’.1 The theory has conceptual problems, has to be arbitrarily and very finely tuned, and lately has been called into serious question by the Hubble Space Telescope’s discovery of very detailed spiral structure in the central hub of the ‘Whirlpool’ galaxy, M51.(2)

(1) Scheffler, H. and H. Elsasser, Physics of the Galaxy and Interstellar Matter, Springer-Verlag (1987) Berlin, pp. 352–353, 401–413.

(2) D. Zaritsky et al., Nature, July 22, 1993. Sky & Telescope, December 1993, p. 10.