My apologies - the wording in my post could have been improved - I accept that common descent can be a reasonable explanation for certain genetic observations. But an explanation for an observation doesn’t necessarily equates to an “understanding”. That may sometimes prove be true, but the history of science is littered with claims of “understanding” that turned out to be “misunderstanding”.
A YEC would certainly have a great deal of trouble explaining the predictable patterns of organisms found in ancient strata that geologists make use of. Evolution offers the best scientific explanation for those patterns, although I think it’s debatable whether that particular explanation is necessary in order to render said patterns useful to geologists looking for oil or gas.
Does a geologist need to know why such patterns exist, or does he simply have to be aware of the patterns themselves?
1 Like
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
63
You have now. I’m sure there’ll be a proper term, but that’s mine. Empiricism - science - is irrelevant, except as the uniformitarian basis of extrapolation to eternity. It’s axiomatic to all rational thinkers. Those who think that far. No magic occurred in the Jurassic in the transition from reptiles to birds or in the Carboniferous transition from gymnosperms to angiosperms, which is far more mysterious.
Later. OK, for ‘rational truth’ try truth as per correspondence and coherence theories aka common sense. Magic doesn’t come in to any truth category.
I think I was unclear and conflated age of the earth with evolution. His link regarding worms and strata was convincing in terms of the extreme age of the earth. A young earth would not fit these observations. I don’t recall the specifics of his predictions though. Thanks…
Yeah, it does. When observations are exactly what your explanation predicts they will be then you have an understanding of what causes those observations. That’s how science works.
I work in the field of molecular biology, so I will defer to the late Glenn Morton who worked in the field of gas and oil discovery:
Genetic evidence for evolution? How about pointing to some.
The cancer clonal evolutionary… errr hypothesis has not been proven at all. Sure, we can see a mutation when a mutagen is applied to a cell culture. We may also see transformed cells in many cases but they never develop into cancer cells.
Just a quick google will show no large studies that show an association with increased cancer risk, with the possible exception of a contaminated polio vaccine in the 1950’s that a virus contamination may have had some effect. In that case, it was not the vaccine but a viral contaminate that caused the problem, and that is no longer a problem.
In contrast, some vaccines actually are associated with a lower risk of childhood leukemia, and of course the HPV vaccine which prevents some carcinogenic strains of the virus prevents cervical cancer and oral pharyngeal cancer, Hepatitis B vaccine helps prevent liver cancer due to hepatitis B.
I am curious as to your question, as it seems based on suspect information. Care to share your source, as it would be interesting to see?
Actually, I think it will be one of those things that we won’t know until it’s far too late to remedy. With all of history, especially the past 100 years, we still tend to believe that those in charge have our health and well-being in mind. What if many of them believe in climate change and overpopulation? Lower the population to 500 million or lose everything and everyone?
Not necessarily. What if, in the course of time, your explanation turns out to be wrong? In that case, what you claimed to be an “understanding” was actually a “misunderstanding”.
What about contrary observations? I don’t understand what they’re talking about in the following article, but I thought you might find this extract interesting:
"Other classes of retroelement also show fairly specific target-site preferences. For example, Levy et al. (2009) report that Alu retroelements routinely preferentially insert into certain classes of already-present transposable elements, and do so with a specific orientation and at specific locations within the mobile element sequence. Moreover, a study published in Science by Li et al. (2009) found that, in the waterflea genome, introns routinely insert into the same loci, leading the internationally-acclaimed evolutionary biologist Michael Lynch to note, “ Remarkably, we have found many cases of parallel intron gains at essentially the same sites in independent genotypes. This strongly argues against the common assumption that when two species share introns at the same site, it is always due to inheritance from a common ancestor.
” [Do Shared ERVs Support Common Ancestry? | Evolution News]
(Do Shared ERVs Support Common Ancestry? | Evolution News)
The YEC belief system can’t be reconciled with scientific evidence. Instead of conceding that the Bible doesn’t provide a literal description of deep-time history, YECs deny said scientific evidence.
Then again you can take the approach that Australian geologist, Dr. Andrew Snelling, appears to, and have a foot in both camps. Professionally, he attests to the earth being billions of years ago; but religiously, he’s a YEC who writes for Answers in Genesis. Go figure! Snelling (tufts.edu)
Would you mind telling me what you do in that field, exactly? Just curious …
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
72
As a rational fact is a fact derived, extrapolated from empiricism, like the eternity of nature from uniformitarianism, then an irrational fact, although syntactic, isn’t semantic until one takes cognitively biased culture in to account. Most people have facts, truths which are no such thing.
I would say none.
From my own experience with cancer episodes AND given the scientific evidence with cancer stem cells, I do not believe that cancer arises out of any damaged DNA or rogue bits of DNA from viruses or miscopied genes. I am certain that cancer is a nocebo effect.