I don’t know. @Ashwin. If it really comes down to our ignorance (and I think much of what we know is affected by that), I think that even if we enter atheism, God, who is just, will take that into account. Otherwise, isn’t religion itself Darwinistic? Shall not the Judge of the earth do right? “As a Father pities his children, the Lord has pity on those who fear him; for He knows our frame. He remembers that we are dust.”
Thanks for your interaction. God bless.
Thanks for your civil interactions, Ashwin. Blessings on your endeavors.
-Merv
Thats a totally different debate… However i doubt any reasonable reading of the book of Romans would support your view. I don’t believe religion is Darwinistic…
Anyway, God bless.
God bless Merv.
Sorry, I meant that if God blamed us for ignorance it’d be unjust. Some religions are “survival of the fittest,” or only those who happen to become cognizant of special knowledge. I’m afraid that those forget that God is just. But if that’s a different discussion and you’d like to avoid that, that’s fine 
No problem. Keep up the good work.
God is Just… However, as anyone who has found himself on the wrong side of the Justice system knows, that can be a problem as much as a relief
I believe Gods plan for salvation involves reformation (i.e Gods purpose is not mainly to punish, but to reform). This involves kindness and mercy and patience…
It also involves personal choice.
As to God blaming us for ignorance… That assumes that the truth cannot be known.I don’t hold to that world view.
Even Scientists agree that athiesm is in contradiction to the basic instinct of human beings… Our instinct is to believe in God.
Yes, God is just. Thank God! (not lightly!) About the Rebellion Thesis, though, I just read Randal Rauser’s “Is the Atheist My Neighbor”–you might find it interesting. The Psalm and Romans allusions appear to refer to other things. the book is best, but below is a partial link.
Anyway–interesting stuff.
Will look into it when i have time…
The answer to the question though is an unambiguous yes… All human beings are our Neighbors 
Awesome!
Yes. If there were separate origins of life then we would expect things such as different genetic pathways and different mechanisms. For example, there is plenty of flexibility in codon usage and tRNAs. There is no physical law that says AUG should be matched to an anti-codon on a tRNA that has methionine attached to it. In fact, there is no reason that life has to have tRNA. The molecules used in genetic systems can be arbitrary in many places, so there is no expectation of shared genetic systems if there was separate origins of life or unrelated organisms.
Non-DNA based lifeforms would falsify the assumption, as would species that have very dissimilar genetic systems. The ubiquity of specific metabolic pathways is yet another possible test.
What bait and switch?
Einstein’s theory of relativity greatly refined and modified Newton’s theories on gravity, so did this falsify gravity?
Speciation is a result of population genetics which includes vertical inheritance. Common ancestry with vertical inheritance are the causes, and speciation is the effect. Horizontal genetic transfer can also cause speciation, but it is very rare in eukaryotes compared to prokaryotes. Also, speciation can be an arbitrary division between populations, especially when looking at populations separated by time and in the case of asexual prokaryotes.
Last I checked, the theory of evolution includes mutations which add new DNA to a genome which is then inherited, either by vertical or horizontal transfer. Also, a lot of de novo genes do share orthologous DNA in other species. The difference is that the same stretch of DNA is not transcribed in the other species. All genes are made of DNA, but not all DNA is genes. In fact, only about 5-10% of the human genome is made up of genes.
We would also expect orthologous de novo genes to fall into a nested hierarchy, which is what we observe.
At best, its an argument based on ignorance. We don’t know enough about living systems and genetics to say that. Its not like we have developed alternate systems and demonstrated the feasibility. How do you know that DNA/RNA is not somehow fundamental to life?
As to methionine… There is evidence of primitive Ribosomal proteins which start with Valine or leucine and don’t have the codon for methionine. All in all there are 15 known non canonical codes… of course, this did not disprove common ancestry.
And of course it totally ignores the design POV. (Say life originated on earth via directed Panspermia as Francis Crick suggested and the “aliens” seeded earth with several DNA based life forms through meteors over intervals of time. And so the beginning of life was agroup of developed cells.There is an interesting paper along this lines though it stops itself at panspermia and doesn’t mention aliens.)
Of course not. You would at most say that the organisms with Different systems have a common ancestor apart from us. or perhaps they developed these systems as a novelty. After all the “ubiquity of specific metabolic pathways” is another way of saying there are metabolic pathways which are not shared by all organisms… No one uses that as an argument against CA.It could even be speculated that there is a primitive form ancestral to both variants.
In one sense it did falsify Netwtons laws of gravity. It defined conditions in which the law is not applicable. This was possible because Newtons law of gravity was specific in its claims.
If it was a truism like “Things fall”, or “mass attracts”… no one could falsify it .This is the case with common ancestry. Its not a theory. Its a a speculation that has been assumed.
In the end of the day, Gravity itself is an abstract concept which we don’t know enough to define comprehensively. But that concept is not considered a theory. A theory needs to be specific.
Are you suggesting that evolution is like gravity??
Common ancestry with vertical inheritance cannot cause speciation. Did you mean something else???
We dont know the extent of HGTs among eukaryotes, because scientists assumed tehre werent many…They have just started popping out of the closet.
I dont know how you are defining genes. if you refer to the portions that are transcribed, most of the human genome is transcribed.(around 80-90%).
Its probably true of most animals.
Nested heirarchies that say the same story when we assume CA? I dont think this happens. Can you share evidence?
Actually, we do know enough. We already know that you can change around the anti-codons on tRNAs and still have them work. We also know that different amino acids would work as well, other than the standard 20 amino acids.
That would be common ancestry since all life would have evolved from that first organism that seeded life.
Then why ask for potential falsifications if you are just going to ignore them?
That’s not what I asked. When Einstein’s theory of relativity falsified Newton’s laws of gravity, did this disprove the existence of gravity?
This is essentially what you are arguing for evolution. You are claiming that changing the theory of evolution means that evolution didn’t happen.
Please explain why vertical inheritance, random mutations, and natural selection can not produce genetic divergence between populations that don’t interbreed.
We do know the extent. There are several papers written on the subject. For example, this is a figure from a peer reviewed paper:
The number at the base of the tree is the number of genes that were acquired by HGT somewhere between the base of that tree and the base of the phylum. For primates, there were 101 genes acquired between the base of the primate tree and the base of the vertebrate tree. Within the primate tree, there have been just 2 genes acquired by HGT in the human lineage, going back to the base of the primate tree. So for humans, just 2 genes acquired through HGT since the common ancestor shared with all other primates. That’s 2 genes out of ~20,000 genes total. The other 19,998 genes were inherited vertically.
All genes will be transcribed, but not all transcripts are genes. Genes also need function which is defined as affecting the fitness of the organism. Not all transcripts affect the fitness of the organism which means they lack function. There is junk RNA because the mechanisms that transcribe RNA do not have the required specificity to only transcribe functional genes. Those mechanisms will also transcribe junk DNA at low levels. One of the strongest pieces of evidence for a functional gene is sequence conservation, both between species and within a species.
Genes are also defined by their physical context, being a contiguous stretch of DNA with a defined start and end.
ERV’s are a good example. Orthologous and non-orthologous ERVs form the expected nested hierarchy. Also, the algorithms that produce trees from data don’t force the tree into a pre-defined phylogeny. Algorithms find the trees with the highest phylogenetic signal, and if that signal is consistently low across all trees or if the tree departs wildly from the expected tree then that is a serious challenge to the theory of evolution. Neither is seen. What we find throughout genetics is that there is a strong phylogenetic signal, and the trees calculated from genetic data correlate very strongly with the trees based on morphology.
you are equating genetic divergence and speciation. Thats a generalization that need not hold. Other than in computer simulations, this processs has never led to speciation.
Some genes create far more impact than others. This is especially true of regulatory genes and genes that have a role in embryo development.
Do you realise what you are saying? Did you understand the science correctly? There are phenotypic differences between a human and the proposed common ancestor such as Brain size, Bipedal motion, cognitive ability etc.
If you are claiming the genes are more or less that same. Then the only conclusion is that “genes” have nothing to do with phenotypes… i.e genes have nothing to do with what makes a human a human and not the last CA (an Ape)
This kind of foolishness is what makes evolutionary science look like a pseudoscience.
That’s another ridiculous definition. Fitness changes with the context in which the organism exists(competition,environment etc). So a gene that contributes to fitness in one environment will be useless in another.In the end, “fitness” is reduced to a measure of genes that are conserved across species. And being conserved indicates function… this is loony nonsense.
Thankfully real scientists are interested in what a Gene does and how it contributes to the organism.And this helps them find out causes for diseases.
As opposed to being lazy and assuming most of the genome is “junk”.
Different genes point to different trees. That’s a fact… phylogenetic signal is just a filtering method used to arrive at a tree. CA is assumed… and there is a lot of circular reasoning involved if you plan to use it as proof for CA.End of the day, its a method to do systematics which will work irrespective of actual biological history.
That’s what speciation is, genetic divergence. You also didn’t explain why vertical inheritance, random mutaitons, and natural selection can not produce speciation between populations that don’t interbreed.
You are changing the subject. You claimed that we can’t know how many genes were acquired through HGT. I showed you a paper where they determined how many genes were acquired through HGT. Even if their methods were not sensitive enough to catch every single possible instance of HGT, it is still sensitive enough to find the vast majority. The evidence supports the rarity of HGT in animal lineages, contrary to your claims.
Again, you are changing the subject. You were talking about HGT, not sequence divergence.
And yes, it is the DNA sequence differences between orthologous and homologous genes that explains the phenotypic differences between species. The 40 million or so mutations
out of 3 billion bases that separate chimps and humans is what explains the physical differences between the species.
Real scientists use sequence conservation to find genes. Only 10% or so of the human genome shows evidence of sequence conservation which is why real scientists conclude that 90% of the human genome is junk.
What you ignore is that those different trees are very similar to one another which is what we would expect from biology and evolution. There are no massive departures from the expected phylogeny, such as a gene putting jellyfish and mice on the same branch while putting rats on a different branch.
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