Developmental biology is pretty amazing, but there is a great deal that is understood in detail of the path from DNA to gene activation, tissue differentiation, and morphological development. How it works is not some total mystery.
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In that vein, the work being done in C. elegans is pretty amazing. This tiny roundworm is a long used model organism because we can track every cell through development. In recent years they have been able to track gene expression in all cells through development which should open up a whole treasure trove of information on development. How much crosses over to vertebrates is questionable, but the feat itself is impressive.
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No, you have proved more than once that you do not understand what I am saying or how I can criticise you or science.
Take mathematics.
The data is the numerals the concepts are Addition, Subtraction, division ad so on. The two: data and concept are interlinked and inseparable.
You have data and you use concepts, but you do not (seem) understand what those concepts are in terms of uderstanding.
You are full of flash illustrations like the map or picture of DNA comparrison. But you cannot see what the concepts involved are.
Is proof that you have no idea where chance comes into ToE.
Natural Selection is reactionary., It can only select from the chosice it is given.It has no control on thoose choices. Those chpices arrive by chance. The changes are chance. The whole thing is chance. Humanity is a cosmic fluke (according to ToE).
The connection between me and my parents is irrelevant. it is data, but it does not impinge on ToE as a whole, because there is no mutation or deviation, The iformation in My Genes can be found in my parents. So what?
ToE need deviations. it needs more than a dorect merging of fixed DNA. It needs the variance of chance. And you , cleearly cannot see this.
A chimp has a 2% variance from huumans. 2% of what 10,000? 100,00? (I know you can give me the right answer but it doesnât afffect my argument.)
You need to identify the concepts iinvolved in ToE. You need to understand the concept of irriducability. (It is not an invention) You need to understand the concept of Random change It is not just the data that matters it is what you do with it and also how it is made. What it is. It is more than sequences. It is more than plain succession. It involves such things and dominance and resseive. It involves things like latent or unidetified. It involves understand what the data represent.
And that is your assumptiion from ignorance.
It matters. Because without it you are not understanding the way crdatures are built and therefore cannot understand how they evolve.
It is so simple for you! Things just slowly change and âInventâ DNA sequences that just so happen to work and form new body parts or specifications.
Itâs so simple. You hae identifie sequences that match so they must be related
How many similar DNA sequences do you and I share?
So we must be related! Or share the same distant parent! That is your concept of heredity.
Stop telling me I know nothing. What I know youu clearly do not. And you do not value it because it does not fit with your âScientific methodâ
Oh dear, what a shame, never mind!
Richard
You said God reusing building blocks would produce a nested hierarchy. If you understood what a nested hierarchy is you wouldnât make that claim. Only someone uninformed about biology would claim that.
I understand all of the concepts involved. Which concepts do you think I donât understand?
I do know. It comes in during mutation, the creation of genetic variation.
And this is a problem how?
The concept you donât seem to understand is that the beneficial changes will be selected for and the deleterious changes will be selected against. This is how lineages adapt over time. It isnât by chance but by selection.
You can think of it like gravel being passed over a sieve. The rocks smaller than the wholes in the sieve pass through while the rocks larger than the holes in the sieve donât pass through. You end up with two piles of non-randomly distributed sizes. Chance alone canât do that. You need a filter. Natural selection acts as a filter, kicking out bad mutations and amplifying good ones. The mutations that are neither good nor bad fix at random. If there was no natural selection then both beneficial and deleterious mutations would fix at random as well, and this would result in a lack of adaptation, or at least rates of adaptation that are way, way slower than what we see.
Take the rock pocket mouse.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0431157100
The black phenotype is due to 1 to 4 mutations in a gene called mc1r. When we look at the geographic distribution of those mutations they are non-random. The mutations for the black phenotype are limited to small volcanic areas with black basalt. Why? Natural selection.
And Iâm the one who doesnât understand concepts? Really???
Here are a few excerpts from the chimp genome paper where they compared the chimp and human genomes.
If 35 million substitutions represents a 1.23% of the genome, then that would be 2.8 billion bases. That represents the number of bases they sequenced in the chimp genome for the 2005 paper. At that point in time, that represented about 95% of the total chimp genome. The actual size for both the human and chimp haploid genome is right around 3 billion. The diploid genome would be double that, so about 6 billion.
I have.
Take a part away and the system stops functioning. Not that hard to understand.
I understand these concepts just fine. I even understand the mechanisms that cause random mutations, something you claimed science doesnât know.
Dominance and recessive doesnât matter when you are comparing the sequence differences between species. Perhaps you donât understand these concepts?
Then show me why I need to know the function of a stretch of DNA in order to count the number of differences that separate them.
Thatâs what the evidence demonstrates.
False. You donât understand the concepts.
It isnât simple similarity. It is a nested hierarchy.
On top of that, I have shown you the differences between the human genome and the genomes of other primates. There is an excess of transition mutations. This is also evidence of common ancestry. It is both the differences and the nested hierarchy that demonstrate relatedness.
Again, from 140 years ago a person who understands these concepts better than you do:
I do not value your claims because they are either unsupported by evidence or contrary to known facts.
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Maybe not, but it does affect your impact.
Understand then criticize.
Unnecessary and ineffective.
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What evidence? Evidence of what? Even your James K. A. Smith explains the reality that any view of the crucifixion is an interpretation.
Regarding contemporary claims of miracles, or of anything else, a claim must be tested and verified before it can be considered âevidence.â It could also be a lie, an interpretation, a misunderstanding, the result of outright ignorance, a delusion, a fabrication developed as literature, for deception or some other purpose.
Until the claim is investigated and verified it is just a claim.
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I donât expect to bridge the gulf between you and @T_aquaticus, but since this thread contains spillover from the thread about attitudes toward science, I will make one point.
Your definition of ârandomâ seems to be an intuitive or metaphysical one. You are thinking of random as âmeaninglessâ. The scientific definition of random is something like ânot correlated with an external influenceâ. Science isnât the right tool for talking about the meaning or purpose of events. For example, I flipped a coin to get these bits: 1011101010. I would say that these are random bits, according to the scientific definition. I wouldnât believe that anyone could have predicted them based on what I did today, or the state of the stock market. They may have a divine purpose, but science is not used to discern that.
I would like to point out that the âscientific methodâ has great value. Surely, we have better medicine in the present day than people did in medieval times, when doctors operated on a more intuitive level. Of course, the scientific method is not the only thing to live our lives by. No one is saying that.
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Yhe problem here is that if random does not mean chance or chaotic then there is an order, even if unidentifiable, and that indicates an intelligence (AKA God)
ToE goes out of its way to negae an intelligent influence, which is why many treat it as aniti-god or even a proof aganst Him as the creator. So as soon as science admits that there is an order it is opening itself up to theism.
Of course there is order in the universe. There are constants and âlawsâ that seem to goverrn many aspects of the universe. It is this order that stimulates the belief in God. It is only ToE that is (seems to be) fighting against such a notion. The mechanism are all self intiating and self sustaning without need for an outside intelligence or influence. However, what we find is that theistic scientists insert God as the âcontrolâ and instigator of order.
For instance: Could there be deliberate weaknesses in DNA chains that encouraes mutation? Could there be parameters that limit the extent or direction of mutations? There is no doubt that evolution has a direction, simplistcally from simple to complex but there is always this underlyng notion that it is adapting as if it can understand what is needed at any one time and deviate to accomplish it.
As far as I was taught, Evolution cannot learn, it cannot build, it cannot anticipate, it cannot dignose or solve. Yet, if you hear it being extolled it seems to do all these things and more. The right muttation occurs at the right time and place allowing Natural Selection to selelct the right answer. It is all so convenient and orderly.
Most of the thrust in these âdiscussionsâ is on Nested hierachies and DNA mapping. They do not address the simple notion that to get from single cell to human is both progressive and building, and anticipatory. To hark back to one of my pets, that is feathers. Even if they have other functions and could have evolved from those, Birds could not be birds without them. Feathers have a unique structure that is 100% perfect for flight, and regardless of there being alternatives (bats, Pteradactyle, and so on) the domination of animals larger than insects is by feathered flight. If fetheras are a âhappy accidentâ you have an even greater fluke than humanity⌠If they are not an accident then there is an intelligence involved. I have yet to hear of an intelligence for creation that is not theistic. The alternative is to anthropmorhisise Evolution as a self contained intelligence.(Such an intelligence is strictly denied by Gensis 1)
Richard.
Your objections to evolution seem entirely philosophical to me. I accept that.
It seems like you were taught evolution by someone who loaded it with philosophical implications, which is sad. There are plenty of those I guess. I hope this forum has at least opened you to the idea that there are people that take ToE as a scientific theory, apart from the supposed theological implications you were taught.
Aside: biologists can correct me, but the organization of life is a tree (or tree-like), not some ladder leading up to humans. I think, from a scientific perspective, simple bacteria have been the most successful organisms, in terms of longevity and diversity. Bacteria were around billions of years before us humans, and will likely outlast us. Of course, from a theological perspective, we humans are bearers of Godâs image.
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Thank you.
It is not that i never did science, in fact went up to colegic in Biologym but i ahve a tendency towards philosophy as opposed to impiracle scientifi methosology.
The problem is one of tunnel vision.I admit that i look at the concepts over the data, but the reverse is true of the scientists here. It is almost as if they cannot see the concpetualisations that they use. The scientifi method is a philosophy. This not to diminish or belittle it, but to claim impicalism is to misunderstand what philosophy is.
I have never placed scripture over scientific data, but I do claim that the resulting philosophy that emerges from science (Specifically ToE) is in conflict with the philosophy of Scripture as opposed to the details. (7 day, YEC etc)
Richard
All you can say is âthere are conceptsâ, but never describe them in any meaningful way. Until you do so, there is going to be an ongoing problem with communication.
For example, the concept I have been trying to get across is that all DNA mutates regardless of its function. The ToE makes very specific predictions of what we should see both in terms of mutations throughout the genome and in comparisons of functional and non-functional DNA. For example, the ToE predicts we should see much higher conservation of sequence between exons than in introns when we compare genes shared by diverse species. This is due to negative selection against deleterious mutations in functional DNA and neutral selection in the bulk of intron sequence. This occurs because the sequence doesnât matter that much in the vast majority of intron sequence since it is clipped out of RNA during messenger RNA maturation.
Guess what? Those predictions are borne out again and again in the data.
This is a view of the gene ACE2 at UCSC human genome browser. If you look at the strings of lines and boxes at the top, the boxes are the exons and the lines with < marks are the introns that get clipped out. Look further down and you see a track that says â100 vert Consâ. That is the track for the comparison of 100 different vertebrate species, and we see sequence conservation spike every time there is an exon, as predicted. Not only that, but introns become less and less similar with evolutionary distance, as shown by a lot of shared intron sequence with the rhesus monkey, less so with dogs, mice, and elephants and a lack of any alignable sequence when comparing the human genome to chickens, frogs, and fish. This is EXACTLY what we should see if the ToE is true.
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Tell me. How did you (science) arrive at this concept?
What criteria did you use?
What data?
How did you assess this data?
How many samples did you use? (in proportion to the number of DNA strands available?)
DId you (or whoever came up with this concept) use your brain at any time?
Did you employ the scienctific method?
I just did.
Richard
Itâs an observation, not a concept. We can map mutations by comparing the genomes of ancestors and descendants. We also understand the mechanisms that cause mutations which allows for any base to be mutated. The easiest way to test this is in bacteria because of their short generation time. If you are specifically looking for a mutation at a specific base you will always find it after a set number of cell divisions as long as it isnât a lethal mutation.
As an additional example, you can find mutations all over the place when comparing different human genomes, such as over at Ensembl. We can look at that if you wish.
The problem is that you are describing an observation, not a concept.
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Does observation involve the brain?
Does identifying something involve conceptuialising?
What is a concept in you view? (I think we need that base line)
Richard
A concept is usually a proposed generalization or a model. For example, plate tectonics is a concept and it has many proposed mechanisms, such as movement of the mantle and cold slab pull. The observations would be mapping of the movement of the mantle and plates, measurements of plate density, and so forth. The observations can then be used to test the concepts.
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That is a scientific concept.
There would be a more generalised meaning along the lines of
A concept is an abstract idea that serves as a foundation for more concrete principles, thoughts, and beliefs.[1] Concepts play an important role in all aspects of cognition (Wiki)
So that the scientific methid is a concept in itself, that is the foundation for scientific conceots.
You cannot function without cognition. It is part of your make up. it is what you are. Your logic is based on empiraalism⌠That will bth guide and limit how you interpret data, and form furthe concepts.
You keep giving examples of how you interpret data, as if I must do the same.
Why?
This is what we have batted about for the last few years. You accpet ToE as fact and will therefore view everything from that viewpoint. This is not an insut. it is humanity.
It is not about truth or lies. It is about cognition and dats processing. We are âwiredâ differently. We will never see it the same way. it doesnât mean I do not understand you, or even why you think it. it just means that I do not have to agree with you.
Richard
People often make decisions based on the claims of a person they trust. So I donât think itâs possible to draw a hard line between testimomy and verification. Itâs also not difficult to see that some forms of verification are based on methodological naturalism, and that would be quite ironic as it concerns the miraculous.
You can do whatever you want. You can look outside and interpret what you see as evidence of a Flat Earth if thatâs what you want to do. However, if you want to convince others that your interpretation is correct then you are going to need some reason and evidence to back your interpretation.
What I am showing you is what I would expect to see if the ToE is correct. I have given you many examples, and you really havenât dealt with those examples. If you are going to convince scientists that they have it wrong then you are going to have to come up with an explanation that better explains the observations. Instead, what I see you doing the most is complaining that we use observations.
To reiterate, you can use any interpretation that you want. I will also point out why that interpretation fails to explain the data if I so choose. If you are frustrated by me not accepting your interpretation, then you need to explain how the data relates to your interpretation and how the interpretation flows from the data. Thatâs science, as long as we are talking about the physical, objective world. When it comes to faith based beliefs and the subjective human experience then science isnât a good fit.
Hereâs an example. You claimed that if God reused DNA or physical features in species it would look like common ancestry. Why? Can you explain why this would necessarily produce a nested hierarchy?
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At least for me, verification doesnât require trust. If you verify something you look for yourself. It is ânullius in verbaâ, take nobodyâs word for it.
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If itâs your 4yo saying the milk tastes sour, you might just throw it out if for some odd reason you couldnât verify the milk had spoiled.
The best arguments I heard for Jesusâ resurrection couldnât really convince me it had happened, but when I was able to relate that claim to the work God was doing in my life, I became persuaded Jesus is the Christ.
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