You must be kidding! That cosmological address coincides exactly and precisely with… 50 N Temple, Salt Lake City, UT 84150…! (And this is very very precise because it includes the infinite number of universes sorrounding us).
As always, great talking to you, Patrick.
You are absolutely correct. You really are the center of your observable universe! Have a great weekend.
Hi piopio -
You seem to be unaware that Tifft’s research, which is now 40 years old, has been thoroughly refuted by more recent, higher quality data. Since then, there has been an explosion of data published by the 2dF Survey (2002), the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2007), and many others. Analyses by Hawkins, Tang, Trimble, Bell, and Godlowski now show no evidence of any redshift quantization other than what would be expected by galaxy clustering (your first point). In other words, the anomalies disappeared.
As to the “Great Wall” phenomena, you should be aware of 2 things:
(1) Just because scientists cannot explain every piece of data in comprehensive detail does not imply that theories established by massive amounts of other data can just be rejected. There are always interesting puzzles to solve at the peripheries of scientific knowledge; that’s how scientific knowledge keeps advancing.
The fact that some journalist decided to capture some eyeballs with an enticing headline about “maybe the Big Bang isn’t true” doesn’t change the consensus of astronomers, whose opinions are the most important in this discussion.
(2) Even if the universe did not originate in a Big Bang, the evidence that the universe is billions of years old is still overwhelming. For example, astronomers can use “standard candles” (supernovae type 1a) to determine that light reaching the earth today was radiated billions of years ago. These standard candle data do not rely on redshift for distance measurement.
Maybe it’s just me, but this playing copy editor for other people’s posts is kind of annoying. Nit-picking someone’s phrasing or lack of what you deem to be the appropriate caveats is not really furthering an argument or contributing to a discussion. You’ve made your point already a couple times about how you think Patrick says stuff that’s too sweeping or generalized. It’s getting redundant. I want to be enlightened by your posts, Eddie, not bored by this mundane repetition! You’re letting me down! 
I don’t doubt that you see “many many problems with descent with modification” but the we baffles me, because I certainly don’t see “many many problems” and don’t know of anyone who has been able to show me any of them. But I’m always willing to learn. Could you simply summarize…let’s say: the top three “problems” as you see them? A single sentence for each (or as many sentences as wish) would probably be enough to identify them and/or allow me to Google them. I would be most grateful if you could help me out in that way.
Incidentally, I have done extensive reading at Creation.com and AIG and was very disappointed in the arguments they presented. So I am very interested on something more substantial.
If there are problems with the Theory of Evolution, I would love to learn about them! I spent a lot of time looking for problems and instead I found more and more reasons to be very impressed by the theory, even though I grew up in a young earth creationist church.
And recently I read a blog article about the importance of consilience in science and how it relates to evolution and the age of the earth. I’ve looked and looked and haven’t found any creation science source that even mentions the word, despite its centrality to science. I began to realize that was the huge deficit in creation science: no consilience holding it all together. Instead I found just collections of random arguments for “why evolution theory is evil.”
Frankly, I would love to have good reason to return to the viewpoint of my background and denomination on origins but I just keep finding logic and evidence problems in creation science.
I do sincerely thank you and others for any assistance and information you all can provide.
Welcome to the forum!
There is the Institute for Creation Research: http://www.icr.org
If it’s disappointing, you can always come back and hang out here with other problem children who disagree with their parents and denominations.
I get error message saying my post didn’t complete…but later I saw duplicates. Sorry for the confusion.
I totally agree! That has been exactly what I have observed in “creation science”: poor science wanting to protect its own faith based on flawed interpretations of the scriptures.
You attempted to correct piopio, when you actually verified what he said. He said 80% of matter was dark matter (as theorized), and you said that 5% is not dark compared to 27% which is dark matter, which is the same ratio… approx 80% dark matter. Then you added energy, but he was just talking about matter.
Well, a matter of perspective… generalizations. I am glad you agree that evolutionary science also wants to protect its own faith, and resents problems being pointed out as well. Personally, I have seen this in the classroom years ago in a secular university, when problems with evolution were pointed out, the response was not cool and calculated but very emotional. Very emotional. However, sometimes this observation can be made on both sides.
Top three problems?
Whether there are three top ones, or it is a combination of the many… difficult to say.
But for me:
Rapid geologic processes seem to dominate over slow and gradual processes in terms of evidence for formation of fossils, and sedimentary layering.
Sea growing fossils, or water growing fossils are found on virtually all dry land on the globe, especially the higher points.
By random mutations and natural selection alone, there does not appear to be enough time to have all the various species, genera and families that exist in a hierarchical fashion based on present observed mutation rates.
The huge great difficulty of attaining the type of genetic information required to develop organs and organisms without the intermediate or transitional types which we would expect, and which we do not discover in the fossil record in the numbers that we would expect them.
The descriptions of various human ancestors in the fossil record, including the fact that we have neanderthal dna in present day humans, indicates to me that these ancestors were human, not pre-human or non-human.
The discovery of dinosaur tissue, and even of dinosaur dna, which is supposedly 250 million years old, or at least 60 million years old is a problem, since it doesn’t last that long by any normal scientific measuring process.
The problem of helium dispersion from zircon crystals seems to counter other radiometric dating methods.
Okay, sorry, that’s more than three, but seven for a biblical completion rate. Okay, it’s also not a complete listing either, but you get the metaphorical message, right?
Dr. John Sanford, a geneticist, wrote the following:
All of the problems with evolutionary theory, as outlined in Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome, have now been rigorously proven using numerical simulation. We did this using “Mendel’s Accountant”, a state-of-the-art computer analytical tool for genetic systems. Five scientists—John Baumgardner, Wes Brewer, Paul Gibson, Walter ReMine, and I—developed this tool. We reported these new findings in two secular publications, and they will soon be discussed in a second book, Genetic Entropy and Mendel’s Accountant.’
and he wrote this: “‘Mutations are word-processing errors in the cell’s instruction manual. Mutations systematically destroy genetic information—even as word processing errors destroy written information. While there are some rare beneficial mutations (even as there are rare beneficial misspellings), bad mutations outnumber them—perhaps by a million to one. So even allowing for beneficial mutations, the net effect of mutation is overwhelmingly deleterious. The more the mutations, the less the information. This is fundamental to the mutation process.’”
> But selection only eliminates a very small fraction of the bad mutations. The overwhelming majority of bad mutations accumulate relentlessly, being much too subtle—of too small an effect—to significantly affect their persistence. On the flip side, almost all beneficials (to the extent they occur) are immune to the selective process—because they invariably cause only tiny increases in biological functionality.
So most beneficials drift out of the population and are lost—even in the presence of intense selection. This raises the question—since most information-bearing nucleotides [DNA ‘letters’] make an infinitesimally small contribution to the genome—how did they get there, and how do they stay there through “deep time”?
Yes, Sanford did write that, and yes, he’s a geneticist, but he’s not a population geneticist. His statements here are simply incorrect. There is no reason at all to think that there are a large number of very slightly deleterious mutations accumulating in genomes. He took a mathematical model of slightly deleterious mutations – a model based on no empirical data, and that makes no sense in terms of evolutionary biology – and drew conclusions from it. That makes his conclusions meaningless.
> Mutagens have been used for years in plant breeding, creating billions of
mutation events: mostly small, sterile, sick, deformed and aberrant plants (p.
25). One improvement, low phytate corn, was caused by mutations which
damaged the metabolism of phytic acid, making hungry cows happy, but hardly
explaining the origin of this biochemical process (p. 25). ‘However, from all
this effort, almost no meaningful crop improvement resulted.
So Steve, to say that there is no reason, is simply false. These mutations have been counted, and averages per generation are known. They are either beneficial, or useless, or harmful. If useless, then they are essentially harmful, due to their energy requirements. If slightly beneficial, then they cannot be selected for, and will be lost, thus providing no benefit even if theoretically they had a beneficial effect.
Your generalizations are meaningless. Evolutionary biology cannot validly contradict basic genetics by claiming a different paradigm such as “population genetics”. Population genetics is not somehow independant from the principles and observations of basic genetics.
First, could you please tell where you’re quoting from if you quote? Thanks.
Second, your quotation has nothing at all to do with my comment. I was talking about the very slightly deleterious mutations that Sanford claims are causing genomes to degenerate. By definition, if you can see a negative effect from the mutation, it’s not very slightly deleterious. These effects are supposed to be very, very small. Those are the ones that he claims occur frequently, and for which there is no evidence.
Third, pretty much everything else you write is incorrect. Useless mutations are not essentially harmful, since the new version of the DNA costs (on average) exactly as much energy to produce as the old version. Slightly beneficial mutations (more beneficial than 1/(population size), very roughly speaking) can be selected for. Sure, they’re usually lost, but do indeed occur often enough to be selected. We know that because we know of lots and lots of cases of beneficial mutations being driven to high frequency by natural selection.
Evolutionary biologists are not idiots. If evolution were really so transparently impossible, do you really think scientists who study these things their entire lives would simply not notice?
Sorry, about not detailed citing…
An interesting article by Dr. R.W. Carter (Noah and Genetics) includes the following statement:
We already saw that Y chromosomes have little variation among them. We now add the fact that this little bit of variation is almost always geographically specific. That is, after the nations were separated according to Y chromosome, mutations occurred in the various lines. Since the lines were sent to specific geographical areas, the mutations are geographically specific. The current distribution of Y chromosome lines is a tremendous confirmation of the biblical model.
> Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) adds another confirmation. We have already learned that there are three main lineages of mtDNA. We now add the fact that these three lineages are more or less randomly distributed across the world. Also, the various mutations within each of the three main families of mtDNA are geographically specific as well.11 In other words, as the three mixed mitochondrial lines were carried along with the Y chromosome dispersal, each line in each area began to pick up new mutations, just like we would predict.
Never said they were. Making mistakes does not make you an idiot.
You are right that perhaps the energy costs may be the same as the old version, but only if the mutation is truly useless, and not just apparently useless. I don’t know what kind off definition you are using, but if you see a slightly negative effect, which however will not be selected for because the effect is too small, it is still slightly deleterious. If you cannot see an effect at all under any circumstances, then it would be for one of two reasons: either there is no effect, or you have not yet been able to see the effect. We do not always see everything. The fact there is no evidence, does not mean they are neutral. Near neutral, perhaps.
You state you know of lots and lots of cases of beneficial mutations being driven to high frequencey. Dr. Sanford and Dr. Carter disagree.
matter, energy ah,same thing E=mc^2 
That seems like an odd conclusion from the data. The three deepest branches of the human Y chromosome are all confined (or nearly confined – there’s been some leakage) to sub-Saharan Africa. All of the rest of the world is populated by descendants of one of the sub-branches of those three. That sounds a great deal like an evolutionary tree, and doesn’t sound at all like the Genesis account of Noah’s sons. You might also note that, based on the estimated rate of mutations in the Y chromosome, mutations have been accumulating in it for 270,000 years.
Missing glaring flaws in something you’ve devoted your entire adult life to studying does indeed make you an idiot, at least in my book. I’d certainly think myself an idiot if I discovered I’d been doing that.
Right. And if it’s very slightly beneficial, you won’t see that either. So when Sanford assumes that there are lots of very slightly deleterious mutations and very few very slightly beneficial mutations, he is making stuff up, based on no evidence at all. The conclusions he draws from his own imaginary model have no basis in reality – just in his assumption.
The difference is that I actually have expertise in this specific area. They don’t. I also have the evidence for the beneficial mutations.
A relationship between two different things.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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