Examples of irreducible complexity?

In another sense, Myer states the problem with ID and teaching science: ID and the Creation Institute want to inject non-materialistic cause ( supernatural) into science subjects/

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It’s interesting and significant for how simple it is for a person to act as a non-materialistic cause

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Almost all recognized ID proponents accept an ancient Earth and do not share your philosophy of science, which is not so much open as predetermined. In that sense at least, those spokespeople are less wrong than YEC.

Most commentators, including evangelicals such as Mounce, would not agree. Revelation specifically addressed seven churches of the time. Rome is the immediate reference of Babylon. The subject of persecution was a sporadic reality for the early church. Other apocalyptic style works such as the Book of Enoch and 2 Esdras were in contemporary circulation. The Book of Revelation held great significance to the culture of the nascent church.

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Apocalyptic literature was quite common in this time period so no, it was written for the culture of the time.

Enough so that it was reluctantly added to the canon.

And if it only makes sense 2000 years later, why was it written? What good did the intended audience get from the book?

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The study that you cited was Shahsavarian 2017 doi: 10.1111/febs.14012. In this study they carefully constructed a library with sequences of antibodies from which has previously been shown to express higher levels of catalytic antibodies. As they say; catalytic antibodies are capable of catalyzing a wide range of enzymatic reactions. In this library, they found five antibody fragments having hydrolytic activity on a cephalosporin β-lactam ring.
This largely contrasts your statement that it was a random peptide library. Since they have specifically searched in a library, rich of broadly catalytic antibodies, a probability of 1 out of 10^9 is really not high. The difference between 10^9 and 10^50 nicely shows that change of function is extremely more likely than creation of function.

I think you’ve misunderstood. The library they constructed consists of fragments of antibodies. The antibodies come from mice, where they are generated (as usual) by random mutation and recombination of existing sequence. So they are random peptides. They got the antibodies from mice of two strains, one (and only one) of which is prone to autoimmune disease, which has previously been shown to generate catalytic antibodies more often than healthy mice. This is probably because mice normally have some mechanism for suppressing antibodies likely to attack the host, which has the side effect of suppressing catalytic antibodies; that mechanism is presumably defective in the autoimmune-prone strains. In other words, healthy mice normally suppress the random production of catalytic antibodies.

The reason for the enhancement in autoimmune-prone mice is speculative, and you could dismiss it. That won’t help you much, however, since healthy mice still produce catalytic antibodies (see https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.92.6.2145, for example) – this would only buy you two orders of magnitude, not 40. In fact, if you read the body of the paper I cited, you’ll find that two of the five catalytic peptides actually came from the healthy mouse strain, so you have to give back those two orders of magnitude.

If catalytic peptides only occurred once in 10^50 times, then no probably no human would ever have produced a catalytic antibody. The reality is that they’ve been observed to occur multiple times in wha must have been a tiny number of humans screened for a small number of catalytic activities.

Axe’s number simply does not reflect reality.

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@Vanengelen, here’s a paper you might look at, reconstructing the acquisition of a radically new function by an existing protein: Evolution of an ancient protein function involved in organized multicellularity in animals | eLife

It most certainly was, in fact the big reason it got into the canon was that Christians back then read it and saw what it was talking about happening around them.

Good grief you are good at lying! I think you’re mostly lying to yourself and probably know it down on some level, because you’ve read people’s statements and still make false claims.
Interpreting ancient literature has to be done by reading it in its historical context. Science has nothing to do with that, and when you act as though it does when a statement is made on the basis of a piece of ancient literature’s content then you are not just lying but being extremelt disrespectful.

He says that because like YECs he’s clueless about how to actually read ancient literature – he has the very same arrogance to think that without doing actual study he can understand the scriptures.

Except in this instance it’s because both sides are operating in arrogant ignorance.

Except it doesn’t – that’s a scare tactic that’s based on fallacious reasoning. What undermines the authority of scripture is maintaining that its authority rests on being 100% scientifically and historically accurate, i.e. not treating it with the respect due to the Holy Spirit and the writers He chose along with the intended audiences.

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Amen!

More specifically, the Incarnation is the core. We don’t believe/trust Jesus because of Genesis, we trust Genesis because we trust/believe in Jesus.

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Yes. Release factors bind to the three base stop codons, catalyze reactions on the terminal tRNA, and cause the ribosome to release the elongated peptide sequence. A google search for “stop codon release factor” will find a ton of information about the physical and chemical causes. For example:

I already explained that in the post that you pulled the quote from. The tRNA with the anti-codon AGU has sequence in its D loop that causes seryl-tRNA synthetase to bind to it, and the bound synthetase drives the catalytic reaction that attaches a serine to the tRNA. The anti-codon AGU then binds to the codon UCA on mRNA through complementary base pairing, which is hydrogen bonding. The ribosome then attaches the serine to the elongating peptide. The same process applies to cysteine.

You also mention a “logical scheme”? What is that? What is the scheme and what makes it logical?

It isn’t because of evolutionary theory. It’s because of the mountains and mountains of evidence demonstrating that life evolved, including humans. If the evidence were consistent with the recent and separate creation of biblical kinds then that is what they would be concluding, but that isn’t what the evidence shows. The Bible isn’t the only thing that exists in the universe. There’s this big, big universe filled with facts. We exist in this universe. We exist in this reality.

A Seventh Day Adventist that gets his theology from Richard Dawkins? That’s a new one.

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I think @Vanengelen means, why do the release factors bind to that codon rather than some other codon – i.e. how did the system arise. Which of course we don’t know, since we have essentially zero evidence about how it started (even if there are some hints from chemistry, I believe). What I don’t get is why this is considered an interesting fact. Yes, the genetic code could have different assignments and still work. So?

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Has anyone given any thought between the mind and irreducible complexity?

My conclusion so far remains that we don’t know enough about the mind to even make a conjecture on the matter. My personal view is that the brain is the interface with our spiritual selves and thus the mind is greater than just the brain, which would make it irreducibly complex, I suppose, though not in the ID sense.

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I’m glad you spotted how it’s not irreducibly complex in the ID sense.

We don’t know enough about the mind, or you don’t know enough about your self to know that you can act and make choices?

It’s really that simple. Or as I like to say, and even got an AI program to backtrack on it’s smug agnosticism, all it takes is a single instance of a single person determining an action for determinism to be false.

For me, it is like asking why the craters on the Moon are in the exact pattern we see instead of some other pattern. Of course, that’s just how history played out, and I strongly suspect that this is exactly the same answer for codon usage.

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Super-conscious life is still comparable to the craters on the moon spelling out one of Shakespeare’s plays. I understand how it’s not totally impossible for the noise to do that, and it’s why I never took a real interest in the design arguments.

Asking what caused the craters is more in line with my approach to looking at the world.

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More precisely, antievolutionary DNA and creation science want to inject miraculous methods into science subjects regardless of whether the evidence supports it. The idea that God is ultimately causing events that happen by scientific patterns is often neglected or contradicted by their claims (though they generally agree that God does cause those if they actually think about it). Science can’t test that premise, but that cuts both ways. The claim that “methodological naturalism” [which is a terrible name for assuming that God’s normal physical laws are in effect] logically leads to philosophical naturalism is an extremely popular error among atheists and antievolutionists alike.

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Relatively similar codons do tend to code for similar amino acids. That makes a lot of sense evolutionarily. It would be favored by evolution to have mistakes less likely to cause problems. Conversely, in the initial evolution of the system, the similarities between groups of tRNAs suggests evolution from a simpler system with fewer distinguished amino acids. Specialization from a more generalized system will produce a pattern of similarities.

However, I don’t think there is any known reason why a particular set of similar codons might not code for a different set of amino acids instead. As far as we can tell, it is an arbitrary option out of the range of possible codons.

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What I find curious about their positions is that they don’t seem to believe in miraculous interventions in the real world. I’ve never seen one suggest that God is intervening in laboratories or in processes that are observably going on around us. It’s always at some vague place at some vague time in the fairly distant past. For example, they may ignore or dismiss as unimportant some evolutionary change that we’ve observed or that must have happened in the last 100 years, but they never argue that such events were the result of divine intervention. My own suspicion is that they don’t believe in the past as a concrete reality.

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