Keith, if not to personal, how are things in the family and how did you deal with the issue of teaching YEC to the kids then changing course?
Keith
Great essay. Thanks for sharing this story. See you soon.
Sy
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Well, thereâs no reason it couldnât, as expected, have been genetic changes in many small stepsâa little more sticky each timeâa little better trap each time, etc. Bottom line: Even the Venus flytrap isnât a good IC feature to argue against evolution.
Scientists also have a good handle on how the camera-like eye evolved in a stepwise mannerâŚmultiple independent times. Even the invertebrate octopus has sophisticated camera-like eye that structurally resembles ours except that the rods arenât inverted like oursâadditional evidence that it arose independently.
And, if they can show how something as complex as an eye could have arisen through gradual adaptive steps, then that REALLY puts the burden of proof on whoever proposes that some other feature of life is IC. Some features, like the bacterial flagellum, really arenât fair-game, in my view, because there couldnât be anything in the fossil record to look at either way.
But, again, that was just what got me questioning my ID theory position. The word-limit on my story post didnât permit me to get into other evidence I saw after Collinâs book as I subsequently studied for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours to see if the evidence really was that definitive.
The molecular genetic evidence for evolution that I really found to be a slam-dunk was the inheritance trail of endogenous retroviral (ERV or HERV in humans) infections we share with primates that I mention in my âAbout the Gospel and Evolutionâ section of my blog. There is an easy-to-understand intro to that kind of evidence in Part 1 for those who donât have the molecular genetics background, but the ERV evidence is touched-on in Part 2 of the Story in Our Genes talk in 2009 by Dr. Graeme Finlay adapted with his permission from his Faraday Institute talk in 2009. See also his Human Genetics and the Image of God talk there. It would make no sense for God to insert hundreds of virus RNA/DNA sequences into specific locations in our genomes to make it look for-all-the-world just like an inheritance trail through common descent from a shared primate common ancestor.
Dr. Finlay also wrote the recent book, Human Evolution, where that evidence and a mountain of other similar molecular evidence is documented and shared from a Christian perspective. Graeme, though a busy scientist, author and family man, has been gracious enough to correspond on several occasions and he is very evangelical about his faith in the gospel and love for God.
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Not too personal at all, James, always glad to talk about my family. By the grace of God, Lisa and I have been married 30+ years and each of our 5 kids (now ages 15-26) believes in God and is growing in their faith, Iâd say. Almost all are part of a local evangelical church. Sadly, not many families that we know of in our church or in our large extended family of evangelicals can say that. I share some sobering stats in that regard in the âAboutâ section of my blog, how 45% of youth 18-22 years old leave Protestant churches never to return, if you do the math on a couple recent surveys.
I actually think telling our kids about my paradigm shift and how we were wrong when we taught them (homeschooled) to be anti-evolution and scientific concordists in their interpretation of Genesis, actually helped them to hold on to their faith. That and emphasizing all their lives the love of God revealed in the cross of Christ has made a difference with them so far, I think. There were about 300 families that homeschooled in our church at the time, so I donât think it was homeschooling, per se.
Our two oldest sons recently graduated from Grove City College (GCC). The biology major defended Francis Collinâs position there in a paper and he holds to an evolutionary creation view even while being very fervent in his faith. He sees it as a 2ndary issue and none of the kids has as hard a time as their mother and I in adjusting to the differencesâprobably because they didnât have as much invested in maintaining a typical creationist view for nearly so long.
One of the 5, who had already left the nest to be on his own, now married to an awesome Christian girl, assumed that I had become an atheist/agnostic. I get that on Twitter too sometimes, but nothing could be farther from the truth. I really had to sit down and talk to him to explain again in more detail what an evolutionary creation (EC) view looks like. Iâll never underestimate again just how pervasive and deeply ingrained is the FALSE dichotomy that it has to be either âCreation or evolutionâ. I just heard that false dichotomy from the pulpit a month or so agoâso not helpful!
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Thanks for sharing. I think many who change perspectives have a difficult time with how and when to share those views with friends and family. I have a feeling hitting the "like " button on Facebook for Biologos posts give a pretty good idea to folks however these days. Interestingly, no one really talks about the subject at our pretty conservative Baptist church, sort of is comparable to the "donât ask, donât tell " policy.
With my kids, they watched Nova programs at home and we discussed different views, but they had a very YEC oriented youth pastor, so it was interesting to be supportive of him yet not affirm those views. I too am blessed with great children who have followed Christ.
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Thanks Mr Furman for your courage and integrity. Thanks to Biologos as well. It gives me hope that the wrecking-ball of young-earth-creationism is being weakened by your efforts. I have no doubt that it is the Holy Spirit who is leading you on this path. Please continue with boldness.
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[quote=âArgon, post:12, topic:5229â]
âIrreducibleâ, pace Behe, simply means that for a particular point in time and in a particular biological context, a component of a system cannot be removed without loss of a particular function. And yes, there are certainly irreducible systems in biology.[/quote]
This is well said and an important point.
Iâd say that he hasnât really bothered to sell it. Itâs just a hypothesis, and heâs done nothing to test it himself. That he hides the hypothesis under this definition suggests to me that he is not being forthcoming.
Thus, Beheâs hypothesis has been falsified.
This is all very accurate.
Itâs worth noting that Behe has done nothing AFAIK to correct this misconception.
[quote]If one can reduce the emergence of an irreducible system to a series of logically envisioned, evolutionary steps, weâre showing that âICnessâ is not a valid predictor of evolvabilty.
[/quote]Correctâeven if those steps are entirely imaginary.
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Well put, Kyle. I had a professor that would say he was putting some âew-ahâ figures on the boardâthose are number so big that when you hear them you exclaim, âewâ and âahhhâ! Well, I used to make a big deal about how many different possible proteins 100 amino acids long you could get with the 20 amino acids found in nature. The answer is calculated as 20 x 20 x 20⌠all the way to 100, i.e., 20 to the 100th power which equals 1.27 x 10 to the 130th power. How big is that number? Well, according to a leading biochemist named Creighton in 1993,
âJust one molecule of each of these proteins, if they were packed together in the most efficient manner, would fill the [known] universe 10 to the 27 times!â, Iâm not sure how he gets that but there it is in print in Proteins: structures and molecular properties By Thomas E. Creighton, W. H. Freeman and Company, NY, 1993, p. 106
I know what your are thinking, âewâ and âahhhâ!
Of course, the universe was much smaller in 1993âŚ
So I looked for specific proteins of about that length that were highly conserved in nature, i.e., had the highest % sequence homology being the most distantly related species, like between humans and yeast (still a eukaryotic cell), like the H4 protein of histones, and argue that the chances of that protein coming about by chance are so astronomically low as to prove the need for intelligent design, i.e., God.
Well, thereâs a couple things wrong with that argument. Sure, if that was the only protein that could fit the bill, then yes, I think that would be a pretty good argument. BTW, no one knows why (according to the link above) that the H4 histone protein is virtually invariant across species. Its one of the proteins that allows DNA to coil and so is found only in eukaryotic cells, per se, which have a lot of DNA. And it, thus, plays a pretty critical role in allowing more DNA in those cells than simple circular plasmids and other arrangements of DNA in bacteria cells.
One of the things wrong with that argument, however, is that there may be an ocean (not literally, but enormous number) of totally unrelated protein primary structures (linear amino acid sequences) that could have the same shape (assuming shape alone was the critical thing), even though once that sequence is encoded in the DNA it remains invariant. For example, imagine you have a big hollow plastic key, like a kidâs toy key. Protein specificity is often described as a lock and key type mechanism. Now image a thin string a couple feet long would fill that key if pushed through a hole in the hollow key. How many different way do you think you could push that string into the key and never have it fold the same way twice? It would probably be and endless number of times. Or lets just say youâd be saying âewâ and âahhhâ before we ever reached the same way twice. Yet, for every one of those endless times, the string folded in the exact same critical key shape.
So, there is nothing to say that the proteins that exist today had to have linear sequences like they now doâan ocean or maybe a galaxy of other primary sequences could form the same shape. Of course it isnât just shape that matters but the position of + and - charges, hydophobic regions, hydrophilic regions, steric hinderances, etc., possess by the different amino acids and their properties. But, the analogy still applies.
Note that there are multiple carbonic anhydrase protein enzymes that have almost no sequence similarity because they evolved independently.
There is also the fact that the key evolves along with whatever âlockâ it fits into, in our analogy. So, there is nothing to say that the key has to fit a particular âlockâ that exists today.
So, you are exactly right, Kyle.
I didnât see the weakness in these former ID theory-related arguments of mine until I saw and was convinced by the new molecular evidence for evolution.
hi again keith.
first- i gave you an interesting way to check if this kind of change is realy simple. do you think that by adding one part at time we can change a door into an automatic one? its very important question to this discussion.
now you gave the eye evolution exmaple. here is something interesting:- the first eye that appear in the fossil record contain about 16000 lenses, when even human eye have only one. a simple eye spot (the starting point in the evolution of the eye) contain about 200 proteins. those evidence alone make a counter argument against the eye evolution. seond_ its the same problem. because to change a simple eyespot into a more complex eye will need a jumps of several parts at once. its like changing a heat sensor into a video camera. you will need at least about3-4 parts to this transition.
here is several problems with this ervs argument:
1)its a fact that retrovirus need a host and cant survive without it. all experiments so far support this conclusion. so its possible that those retrovirus evolved from the genome and not the other direction.
2)we know that virus can steal genes (for example the rous sarcoma virus)
3)we know that a lot of them functional. what is the chance that a virus infacted someone and it not just help him but also get fix in the entire population about 100,000 times for the about 100,000 ervs in the genome?. and if they functional- therefore its good evidence that those ervs are the product of design.
4) we found ervs that contradict the animals phylogeny (its also falsified the talkorigin claim- for example the herv-k erv found in chmp and gorila but not human).
so the main 2 claims: eye evolution and ervs arent evidence for evolution according to the scientific methods and experiments. and those evidence suppose to be the best evidence for evolution.
dcscccc Will get back to you here on this. Thanks!
Yes, that is what I am thinking.
Also I seem to be comi8ng to Genesis through NT eyes, (See John 1:1-4) while most people seem to be obsessed with only Genesis ! & 2. As a Christian this seems to be a mistake, but it persists.
I see the issues as not Genesis versus Science, but how Genesis, John 1, and Science go together, which is much easier than Gen vs Science, except for one thing. John 1:1 says that the universe was created through the Logos, Jesus Christ. Darwin said that evolution is formed by Natural Selection.
The Logos is characterized by Love, Peace, and Justice. According to Darwin Natural Selection is the War of Nature against Nature, which cannot be good and is no way like the Logos. In this way Evolution in the form of Survival of the Fittest is anti-Christian. (Please note the moral and political aspects of these two views.)
For a long time Evolution held sway in the biological scientific world, but suddenly around 1970 ecology came on the scene with its message of our need to change our view of nature. Ecology says that flora and fauna and humans are interdependent and we need to work with nature and with each other to prevent pollution and man made ecological change from destroying the ecology. The message of ecology is the opposite of evolution.
It should be noted also that before the Human Age, ecological change was directed by God. Today humans, as promised by God are more min control. This does not mean that we can do what we want to doe, but that we are responsible for what happens under our watch.
This is not a guilt thing, but it is a calling and responsibility thing. God is not mocked. We will reap what we sow.
In any case reading the articles on your website lead me4 to buy to book Human Solution by Simon Conway Morris, which I had not been aware of. It goes very well with my thinking about evolution and ecology. Also I purchased Michael Ruseâs book, The Gaia Hypothesis, which discusses the facts behind the conflict between Darwinian Evolution and ecology.
Hi @dcscccc - I hope you are enjoying Godâs love today.
Actually, I cannot think of a more irrelevant question. The plans for manufacturing doors are not passed on to future generations through genetic mechanisms.
You have made the fundamental error of confounding quantity with quality. The lens in a human eye is much, much more complex than the 16,000 lenses in that first eye.
I will illustrate with some simple programming pseudo-code.
/* Sample 1: Find the lowest non-negative integer and print it 16,000 times */
unsigned int i = integer.random()
while (i > 0) { iâ; }
for (j = 0; j < 16,000; j++) {print i;}
/* Sample 2: Now letâs find the largest prime number less than 10^16,000 and print it just once */
i = FindThatPrimeWithAMillionLinesOfCode()
print i;
What youâre saying about eye lenses is like saying the second programming task is simpler than the first because the print instruction (the final line) is slightly shorter. The statement about print instructions is true, but the conclusion of greater simplicity for sample 2 does not follow; itt ignores the million lines of code it takes to find that prime number, as compared to the one line of code that it takes to get from a random positive integer to zero.
Sigh. How many times have various commentators here tried to explain incomplete lineage sorting to you, @dcscccc? The most notable example was Dennis Venemaâs comment to you in March, which describes how observed patterns in genomic analysis conform with the patterns predicted by evolutionary population genetics.
I also explained incomplete lineage sorting to you with an example of trait similarities with cousins vs. with brothers.
Do you remember these explanations of ILS, d? Do you understand why ILS perfectly explains the ERV data in primates?
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i will wait dr keith.
Roger, Iâm glad I was in tune with what you were thinking and appreciate your reply. Iâm only qualified as an armchair theologianâwhy I rely on qualified theologians holding to an evolutionary creation view, especially those that also have a science background. But, Iâll go out on a limb a bit and give my 2-cents with what I find satisfying on this topic. However, Iâm probably wading into the deep end of the philosophical/theological pool here. So, take it with a grain of salt if this is not satisfying to you from a scriptural and common sense perspective.
As a matter of faith, because I have other reason beyond science to believe in God, Iâd hold that all of nature was Created by God (Jesus as in John 1:1-4), including the evolutionary process as Godâs apparently chosen creative tool.
I think it is a matter of perspective and we have to be really careful not to read philosophical or theological meaning into biological realities or necessities like people did with social Darwinism. That was a mistakeâprobably an excuse for political agenda.
For instance, physical death, when limited to our planet, is necessary for life in a real physical world If two rabbits continued to breed like rabbits and never died and resources were not limiting, how long would it take before every square foot of land on Earth was filled with a rabbit? I did the math based on an average 39 offspring per year per pair and it would be less than 12 years. Iâm sure it wouldnât be much longer that they would be piled a mile high. And thatâs just one species out of many millions. You get the picture. But, we canât read into that need for physical death in order to have evolving life on a planet to mean that committing murder or physical death is OK whenever it suites us. That oneâs obvious.
But, itâs the same with evolution. Itâs hard to imagine a physical world where creatures have no ability to adapt to changing ecological environments, as you discussed. That would be an excessively cruel world. So, from one perspective, given the necessity of physical death, one could argue that having the fittest animals survive and reproduce best in their current environment so that the more adaptive traits are passed-on to subsequent generation is a kindness. Life on Earth doesnât work without it, at least it wouldnât work without direct Divine intervention all over the place.
I think the real question is, âWhy would God choose to create through an automatic process rather than direct Divine intervention?â Someone asked that question at the recent [March 2016 debate between evangelical theologian Denis O. Lamoureux (pioneer of evolutionary creation); world renowned physicist and atheist, Lawrence Krauss, and ID theory proponent; Stephen Meyer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMuy58DaqOk). I like Lamoureuxâs response which was to the effect that direct de novo creation of man or other organisms would have been proven by their sudden appearance in the fossil record which would prove the existence of God. If God were proved, then where would faith be? It would be sight, not faith. Weâd have to obey/worship as if at the point of a gun. There would be no seeking and finding or faith that pleases God.
Iâm so glad you bought Simon Conway Morrisâs book, Lifeâs Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. Not everyone in the EC community is a fan, but I think his evidence and arguments are sound. Even the possibility that high intelligence and an advanced civilization are INEVITABLE in an evolutionary process, e.g., though initial conditions and constant of the universe that physicists determine to be exquisitely finely-tuned, or initial conditions that led to a universe that had such finely-tuned conditions, is enough for me to see that our existence could still be purposeful and God not âredundantâ in an evolutionary paradigm.
Isnât it amazing that Richard Dawkinâs agrees with Simon Conway Morris as I quote him in that âWhat if Evolution Meant High Intelligence and an Advanced Civilization were Inevitableâ blog post? How ironic is it that an atheist, Richard Dawkins, helps make it possible for me to be an intellectually fulfilled Christian?
Iâm glad I didnât stop looking for other perspectives when things didnât compute. I was driven on to keep looking by the strong belief that nothing makes sense in life, apart from the gospelâthat evolution and the gospel must be in harmony.
dcscccc, letâs go with what Chris said so well and Iâll just add a few comments on your ERV questions. Again, for 1-3 see Part 2 of A Story in Our Genes which addresses these very well. Youâd need a lot more than âwhat ifâ to falsify that evidence. And viruses were around long before humans and other mammals, which fully addresses 1) above.
But, Iâm getting the feeling that you are not FULLY engaging with this evidence, other than to argue against it. You assert in (4) that the talkoforigins erv argument was falsified by a specific HERV-K found in chimp, gorilla [and bonobos] but not human. Oh really? Firstly, while it would have been expected in humans too (see chart in slide 9 of Part 2), it was just one anomaly (an anomaly with a good explanation) out of a great many consistent ERV/HERV infections that tell a very clear and convincing story. I was actually aware of this anomaly years ago and did look into it further at that time because it did require explanation.
Secondly, the scientists in that 2001 study, âA HERV-K provirus in chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas, but not humanâ, said the anomaly was likely due to allelism, i.e. allelic variation, which is a perfectly good explanation, especially for such closely related species that diverged over a relatively short period of time. They added, âThese observations provide very strong evidence that, for some fraction of the genome, chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas are more closely related to each other than they are to humans.â
Thirdly, the potential falsification that the talkoforigns article refers to is that it is âincredibly unlikely for dogs to also carry the three HERV-K insertions that are unique to humansâ. That would indeed be highly unlikely (though not impossible). Thus, if a HERV infection in a particular location didnât occur until humans and, therefore wasnât in intermediate species, you certainly would expect the same one to be in dogs at the same location. Can you show something like that? I donât think so.
So, why is allelic variation such a good explanation for that anomaly? They explain it well in the 2001 study.
For an explanation that a wider audience might be able to understand better, some, but not all, genes have multiple alleles. Letâs use eye color as an example. Iâm not saying the particular HERV-K was in a gene for eye colorâthis is just for illustration. Suppose your mother had blue eye and you had brown eyes because you didnât inherent her allele for blue eye. Thus, if there was a HERV-K insertion in the gene for blue eyes then you wouldnât have it even though your mother would because you donât have the allele for blue eyes even though you are both humans in the same family. Allelic variation was a very likely explanation for that particular anomaly in an otherwise overwhelmingly consistent set of dataâa mountain of evidence. BTW, I almost accepted a job offer to do research characterizing allelic variations in almonds.
See also this PNAS publication from April, 2016 that shows HERV-K diversity in humans due to allelic variation, âseveral at low allele frequenciesâ!
maybe. but what about retrovirus that contain only about3-4 genes? some group of scientists claiming that the ervs can be the product of âescape modelâ:
http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-origins-of-viruses-14398218
âWhere viruses came from is not a simple question to answer. One can argue quite convincingly that certain viruses, such as the retroviruses, arose through a progressive process. Mobile genetic elements gained the ability to travel between cells, becoming infectious agents. One can also argue that large DNA viruses arose through a regressive process whereby once-independent entities lost key genes over time and adopted a parasitic replication strategy. Finally, the idea that viruses gave rise to life as we know it presents very intriguing possibilities.â
and this:
and again, we know that some ervs âinfactedâ by the host genome. combine it with the fact that a tipical erv have only about 3-4 genes, and we have a good evidence that ervs evolved from human.
just one anomaly? if its possible to explain 1 anomaly its also possible to explain 2 and 3 and 10. so the talkorigin claim that âit would be incredibly unlikely for dogs to also carry the three HERV-K insertions that are unique to humansâ is meaningless.
are we sure? first, its not just one case when it doesnt fit with the primate phylogeny:
âsecond, the PTERV1 phylogenetic tree is inconsistent with the generally accepted species tree for primates, suggesting a horizontal transmission as opposed to a vertical transmission from a common ape ancestor. An alternative explanation may be that the primate phylogeny is grossly incorrect, as has been proposed by a minority of anthropologists.â
but there is more problems. we even dont know what is the real primates phylogeny:
"By contrast, humans share at least 28 unique physical characteristics with orangutans but only 2 with chimps and 7 with gorillas, the authors say. "-
so from morphological prespective the orangutan is actually the closest primate to human. how its fit with the ervs phylogeny now?
hi chris. i will focus in one argument before i will go on.
no. i ask if an intelligent designer can add just one part each time to change a door into an automatic one. do you think its possible step wise? if so, how?
Hi dcs,
You will enjoy this piece on the evolution of carwash doors that have the ability to automatically reset.
Have a great day,
Chris
Dcscccc, my friend, I was hoping youâd fully engage with the evidence. But, I can see now that the only thing that youâve established is that you seem to be here only to try and throw doubt upon established science and obfuscate. For the sake of the gospel, please consider your adverse impact to the credibility of our witness for the gospel in doing so.
You donât acknowledge anything that is clear and convincing from what was said before but just try, in vein, to throw a wrench into the works. You give me no indication that you are fully engaging with the source material other than to argue against it. You appear to be putting great hope in weak, sometimes incredibly weak, arguments.
The issue at hand isnât about where viruses came from. Thatâs a red-herring in our discussion. Yes, where viruses came from is still a matter of investigation, much like abiogenesis (formation of life) where scientists still donât have much of a clue. That doesnât mean we insert God there in our knowledge gap. But its really irrelevant to the convincing data we discussed except to grasp at straws for other unfounded explanations and you try to use it to essentially argue that God directly created every living thing at once, which flies in the face of everything we know from science.
Your suggestion that the ERV/HERV viruses came from human gene sequences directly designed by God, i.e., that the sequences were originally designed by God there, and spread to all other organisms in the past, is ridiculous in the extreme. It denies the fossil record and all kinds of evidence on so many levels that is beyond the scope of anything we can cover here.
The PTERV1 publication is simply further research using other tools to validate and fine-tune the clarity of the picture and you quote it out of context in typical creationist fashion and without understanding how it actually builds upon and actually affirms the story.
Your dogmatic assertion that the talkoforigins claim is âmeaninglessâ because an anomaly in closely related species with a perfectly good allelic variation explanation somehow means anything can be explained away, including their potential falsification about dogs/humans, clearly shows that you are only here to obfuscate, in my opinion.
Iâm not throwing stonesâI used to do this too. Thatâs how I know and Iâm just trying to get you to see it for the gospelâs sake.
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I am very glad too. Have you heard about the excellent new book by Ben McFarland, The World from Dust?
I think that we are getting very close to demonstrating that God did use evolution to create humanity without question, although of course not all will believe. It is the faithful that deserve the help and support.
I would not say that âadvanced civilizationâ is inevitable, possibly probable, and certainly possible. Humans are certainly able to mess things up like we are now. Certainly we could not have done it without the revelation of Jesus Christ.