Reconciling RTB and BioLogos Biblical Creation Models

My point is, your arguments are not supporting the claim you’re making. I haven’t seen you offer anything that provides evidence that natural evolutionary processes are inadequate to explain the changes we see within the available time.[quote=“Mark_Moore, post:80, topic:37468”]
And again, with the ape stuff I am only trying to show why that data is not necessarily evidence for the position that we descended from a common ancestor with chimps closer than gorillas.
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I get that. What I’m telling you is that the data is evidence that we descended from a common ancestor with chimps that was more recent than our common ancestor with gorillas.

ORRRRR, in creating man that more genetic code was used from a creature that was closer to the chimp ancestor than the gorilla ancestor in most places, but some code was used from a creature closer to a gorilla ancestor in a few places, and unless you simply refuse to consider one of those possibilities because you don’t wanna then there is no way to know which is which!

But there is all kinds of other evidence that you have to consider. Does supposed incomplete lineage sorting only occur in places where three branches diverge very close to one another? If not, than that’s powerful evidence against that as an explanation, but it would be completely consistent with a common design explanation. Since we do see it only where we would expect to see it under common design, then it is evidence for that explanation, We can also look at the segment lengths that are shared with gorilla. Are they of the length that we would expect, based on how large shared segments are in great ape populations? Again, yes, we see what we should see if common descent is correct.

@Mark_Moore

You are inventing imaginary barriers to variation.

If you taught basic evolution, did you teach that early hominids became advanced hominds by sitting around the camp fire for 10 million years, until the change was acquired?

Or did you teach that first there were vast forests in Africa. And the earliest primates exploited the tree-top ecosystem to avoid predators. They developed eye-hand coordination so they could brachiate throughout the canopy.

And then the forests becamne thinner and thinner, with pockets of forestation at significant distances, right? This meant the primate troops that could spend more time on 2 feet could watch for dangers on the savannah… by lions and leopards… and their hands were now available to carry things…

And then there was another change… maybe the one hypothesized by a river … where primates spent long periods of time in the water, safely away from predators, developing more human-like hair growth patterns. Etc.

If the Earth had not changed three times … the primates wouldn’t have been primates as we understand them.

The ecosystem “steers” the genetics of populations. So the ability to create very unusual life forms comes from the creative mind of God to make global environments that produce the populations he plans for.

As for your fixation on “barriers to change” … are you saying that chromosomes are intelligent? They know when the population is just getting too different? Proto-Whale nostrils used o be like the nose/nostrils of any number of land mammals.

But over the period of millions of years, successive generations benefited by the nostrils advancing up the long mammalian muzzle… providing incremental benefits to each new generation that received increasingly re-located nostrils.

Eventually, the nostrils are at the top of the head. If some sweet old lady proto-whale took a look at her descendants breathing out of the top of their heads, she would probably scream like a little balleen whale! That is one messed up baby! Its breathing out of the top of its skull!

Do you think there is anyting about evolution that would have stopped that progression… as long as there was a benefit being derived? In a way, you can say there are limits… why don’t whales have nostrils down by their tail fin? Why did the nostrils stop moving? Because for the ecosystem the whales were in, the nostrils had arrived at their best compromise location.

It will have to be some other mammalian group that comes to breath out of the rear of their anatomy. But even this is not out of the question… there are turtles who do breath out of their rear anatomy!

Regarding the number of genes that have appeared or disappeared in the human lineage… That kind of fluctuation in gene number stemming from duplications within gene families is consistent with what we see within humans. A survey of structural variation in humans (here) found ~2900 genes that were missing or duplicated in a sample of humans, just compared to other humans.

Now that I can believe. Because it is saying something different. It is saying that some humans had 2 glibglob genes and others had 1. And that happens a bunch because the number of genes varies. But I am saying that there were hundreds of genes which are not found in a single chimp anywhere which are found in every human everywhere. Much different thing. And vice-versa. The fact that humans vary so much yet this is still so makes it even more implausible that we had a common ancestor as recently at six million years ago.

Either variation is unlimited- butterflies to blue whales, or there are only so many changes an animal genome can undergo before too many genes that have to work together don’t anymore. It is not a question of the chromosomes being intelligent, it is a question of the combinations being limited in what they can do in a given amount of time- even if the time is 543 million years.

But that was the first comment I made speculating on the nature of the barrier, so I was not inventing the barrier so much as observing that there must be one, given that we don’t see the rates of DIRECTIONAL change we should if evolution was really solely responsible for the change and was operating at historical rates. We should have seen creatures different enough to be classified as new families by now, especially with domestication.

@Mark_Moore,

This is a common error. Why would domestication change a goat into a whale? How would we feed or house the animals that were beginning to turn into a whale? Or beginning to turn into a lion? Or whatever?

When you are a human raising animals, you don’t try to find ways to make groups of animals reproductively incompatible … you are constantly taking the ones that demonstrate the highest levels of fertility, along with some important traits… and those are the ones that you cross-breed. By definition, you are maintaining the population at the highest level of reproductive compatibility.

Conversely, there have been genetic shifts in animals we have domesticated. For example, when wolves were studied compared to dogs, they found out something rather interesting at the molecular or physiological level:

The brains of domesticated dogs release oxytocin into the dogs blood stream when the dog sees its “owner/manager”.

The brains of wolves do not release oxytocin when a wolf sees its “owner/manager”. (In fact, it is probably thinking about Lunch !!!)

It is easy to imagine that there is a biological basis for domestication… with horses being another good example. A truly wild horse will practically kill itself to get a human off its back. For centuries, with new generations of horses being produced constantly … whenever someone encountered a mean horse (or a horse that was meaner than the usual horse meanness) - - they put it down, without question. Bad horse. Now it is a good horse.

After thousands of years of domestication, most of the horses “in the wild” are not truly wild horses… but the descendants of generations of domesticated horses that are currently in a feral state.

Now, as far as your idea that there must be natural limit to how many genes can aggregate in a life form before no more genes can be gained… so what’s to stop a new generation from losing 10 “paralyzed chromosomes” and reviving its flexibility?

But even before we start fretting about that, you will see at this website that there is virtually no relationship between number of genes, size of genome, or chromosome count - - whether it is plant, animal or something else!

[[ This one is Genome Size ]]

[[ This one has “Number of Genes” Compared ]]

https://gf.neocities.org/gs/genes.html

Mark, I’ve never had to teach science to anyone… but in ten minutes I found answers to the questions that you’ve been chasing down for who knows how long…

I think your bias has put blinders on the scientific side of your mind…

OK I see you problem.

You are assuming evolution works in series. It doesn’t. It works in parallel. To run the numbers correctly you would have to figure out in one year how many new species would result in a new genus which would result in a new family. Of course you don’t believe this can happen but it is what you would have to assume to run the numbers as you have.

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This response makes me think you glanced at the article but did not read it. I assure you it is highly relevant to your claim that distinct families appear without plausibly evolving.

It is true that selection pressure can be quite strong on domesticated species. It can also on occasion be very strong in nature, too. But the mutation rate is no higher for domestic species than wild ones, so yes there is limited variation. And before you try, upping the mutation rate won’t help you because then you still need generations of letting natural selection filter all those mutations to find a few good ones, and if you’re imposing severe artificial selection for random traits at the same time, you’re interfering and making it all take even longer. Evolution takes a lot of time and trial, and you just can’t get around that in a thousand years or so.

What makes you think we don’t? You think scientists don’t argue if a given division should be at a genus level vs. a family level, or a family vs. subfamily? What does that mean if not that a new family is on the verge of becoming?

Your “butterfly to blue whale” example is quite odd, because both of these organisms are the result of a lot of evolution going in different directions. Why do you assume that the butterfly is more primitive than the whale? Just because it’s smaller? A butterfly has a highly developed exoskeleton while a whale has a somewhat less evolved ossified internal skeleton. It would be much more likely for a predecessor which lacked any kind of skeleton to develop into different lines of descent with different structural solutions.

That’s not to say that, given enough time and suitable environmental pressures, butterflies couldn’t evolve into giant air-breathing sea creatures. But they wouldn’t be blue whales, and why should they be? Whales are mammals and butterflies are insects, and that won’t change any more than whales will stop being vertebrates or chihuahuas will stop being dogs. They could evolve in the far future into something totally unrecognizable to us today—but they’ll still be part of Canidae!

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Domestic Animal Breeding and Speciation

I strongly suspect that we will never see those arguments.

And sure enough, I was right. All you have is an argument from incredulity. You don’t have any math or scientific arguments showing that there are too many genes being produced in each lineage. Reality is not forced to conform to what you believe or don’t believe is possible. That’s the first rule of science.

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How is it not arbitrary? What is stopping us from joining the families Hominidae (great apes) and Hylobatidae (gibbons) into the same family? What is stopping us from putting orangutans and gorillas in one family and chimps and humans in another family?

Actually, Linnaean taxonomy has been largely replaced by cladistics because Linaean taxonomy doesn’t accurately reflect how biology works.

Where is the evidence for this time and distance problem?

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OK Lynn I have to hand it to you on one thing. You busted me on the Ken Ham article. I had to go back and read it carefully. And it gives me shivers to think I am lining up with that outfit on anything, but if YOU will go back and look closely at that article you may find a weakness at the point where they try to give the impression that all of Carnivora came from a single ancestor. It said…

“Together with a series of other known carnivores from various regions and strata, they can be used to trace the origin of the entire carnivoran clade”

So while their picture showed one small tree-dwelling animal as the ancestor of all carnivora the text admits that they use a variety of other animals as the “ancestors” of these groups. IOW they are not claiming that they all descended from a branching of a single ancestor species. This undermines their whole point that Ham’s basal types for cats and dogs are themselves branched off from a single common ancestor. Indeed if you take a closer look at the organisms that Ham’s group claims are the base of the cat and dog family they do have substantial differences from each other which are the same as those which distinguish cainids from felines today.

The rest of you post there are claims, and I think the evidence has pointed away from those claims for a very long time. The idea is that two groups of things branch out from a common ancestor which is somewhere inbetween them. I remember when I first realized that this wasn’t working out in the field past the sub-family level. It was 1992 from this study… https://www.researchgate.net/publication/21743223_DNA_Sequences_from_a_Fossil_Termite_in_Oligo-Miocene_Amber_and_Their_Phylogenetic_Implications

Basically they found a termite in amber, at least 25 million years old. The theory was that termites and roaches branched off from a common ancestor, therefore the DNA from this critter (which morphologically looked like it could be a cross between a roach and a termite) should look closer to roach DNA than that of modern termites. It did not work out like that and they had to declare it a “sister group” of living termites rather than something more recent of the branch leading to the purported “common ancestor”.

Over the years I remembered a few more such studies that got ahold of ancient DNA and tried the same thing with other species. They invariably found the same thing. When you are talking about family or above what they thought might be ancestral group between two types was instead a sister group to one of the types with no trace of being a recent offshoot from a purported common ancestor.

So yes, I know the story. I understand the story. The story sounds reasonable. The evidence does not support the story, at least not anymore than it supports an Intelligent Designer stepping in to “help” evolution from time to time.

This is what you said before:

“They bombarded fruit flies with radiation for thousands of generations and got the same batches of mutations over and over.”

I am not seeing anything in your references that backs this up.

How is that claimed backed up by the science?[quote=“Mark_Moore, post:49, topic:37468”]
Yet it was supposed to have happened 700 times from chimps to humans and even more amazing, a LOSS of the same kind of numbers in EVERY chimp on the planet?
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Humans didn’t descend from chimps, and we share a common ancestor that lived more than 5 million years ago, not 12,000 years ago. On top of that, no one is saying that all of the gene differences are advantageous.

Again, an argument from incredulity is a logical fallacy.

You will see, and not see, what you wish. I have already put one of the numbers-based arguments on this thread and another poster has tagged someone to look at those numbers.

Second part demonstrably false but I am not going to make you see what you don’t wish to see. It only produces anger, not illumination. For the first part, that is not “all” I have but incredulity is the rational response when presented with a claim that a phenomenon produced a result in history at a rate which seems far above what it is doing now. You yourself are incredulous about the existence of God even though you could not possibly have seriously investigated every place in the cosmos, and beyond the cosmos, or even 1% of the claims of people who have had experiences that they claim are with God/Angels. But that is your right. The fact that you are incredulous does not necessarily mean that you are wrong, nor does it mean I am wrong about what I am incredulous about.

Do your codes fall into a phylogeny? I bet they don’t.

The genomes of species do fall into a phylogeny, otherwise called a nested hierarchy. Intelligent design can’t explain this, but evolution can.[quote=“Mark_Moore, post:53, topic:37468”]
More evidence mitigating against your hypothesis is that a big slice of our DNA is closer to Gorillas than Chimps!
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That is exactly what we would expect from evolution. It is called incomplete lineage sorting.[quote=“Mark_Moore, post:53, topic:37468”]
Some researchers say that we are more closely related to Orangs based on physical traits and challenge the DNA evidence you are citing…

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And those researchers are wrong. The DNA evidence clearly puts chimps closer to humans.[quote=“Mark_Moore, post:53, topic:37468”]
And some Orang genes are closer than chimp genes anyway.
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Again, exactly what we would expect from evolution.

@Mark_Moore,

And so… this is why @T_aquaticus wrote this:

“Actually, Linnaean taxonomy has been largely replaced by cladistics because Linaean taxonomy doesn’t accurately reflect how biology works.”

There has yet to be a flood scenario that explains how Australia became full of all sorts of marsupial mammalian forms (small or large, omnivore or carnivore, and more and more), while the rest of the world only has a few marsupials amongst the milllions of placental mammals.

If a flood wiped out all life on Australia, then Australia had to be close enough to land for the marsupials released from the Ark to make it on shore of Australia. And they had to do it before any placental mammals (especially predators) could also get onto the “Australia ship” before it set sail for the middle of the ocean!

Are you going to suggest that God held back the placental animals… so the marsupials could have a head start? And then he nudged Australia into the middle of the ocean one night ? The next day, the placental mammals are all at the beach wondering where did Australia go?

However, if you hold to an Old Earth scenario, how and why there are only marsupials on Australia becomes a simple matter, and genetic testing of Australia vs. South American marsupials demonstrate and prove the connections!

Then “evolution” is in this case unfalsifiable and unprovable by this method. Because it is exactly what I would expect from Divine Creation too. So the genes being most like chimps proves your case and the genes NOT being most like chimps ALSO proves your case.

Here is an example where it looks a LOT more like code-splicing than bats and dolphins having the exact same genes used for echolocation…even the scientists doing the study were amazed, which you will no doubt dismiss as “incredulity” because apparently only your own incredulity on the existence of God has any merit… http://arkansaswatch.blogspot.com/2013/09/evolution-again-dolphins-and-bats-have.html