I see. Phishing for ways to support an ad hominem attack. Yeah, I can see how it would be important to you.
That would be odd if that’s what @Daniel_Fisher wrote. It’s not what he wrote.
@EricMH Awesome… another software engineer! Me too. But I’m not sure where you were going with the two engineers thing. I tend to agree with @jpm that it looks like life had one primary path. To me the history of life looks like the release history of some programs I have worked on: small revs a lot of the time, medium ones sometimes, and occasionally a big set of changes. And then sometimes we take a bunch of code from one project and go down a whole new path with it, and it still shows some of the history of the other project, but now there are two diverging projects.
In a sense Dawkins makes an interesting argument here that is somewhat effective in that it attacks a serious weakness in the theology of his opponents.
I hope you are familiar with the ancient puzzle of the Priority of the One or the Many? It assumes that Reality has to start with theOne or Unity or the the Many or Diversity. He already knows where he stands, with the Many, with Democritus and the atoms.
On the other hand philosophers and theologians generally stand with the One, One God or Reason. The Many thinkers, which includes complexity, say that Unity can arise out of the Many, while the the One thinkers say that Many arose from the collapse of Unity. The New Atheism of Dawkins says that Unity/Oneness does not exist, so rationalism which gives rise to the unity of thought is gone also.
The problem with both sides is that the One and the Many is a false dichotomy. Both the One and the Many are basic. We do not have one without the other. Both Ideas and facts, philosophy and science, unity and diversity are real and true
The advantage that Dawkins has in this question is that many traditional theologians say that God is Simple, not just One, but Simple, which is not true if you believe that God is Trinity, One and Three, not just One. Therefore we believe that God is One and Many, Unity and diversity. God is more than complex enough to create the world, yet one enough to communicate with God’s People.
Science and philosophy are under the misapprehension that evolution goes from the simple to the complex. This is the only reason that evolution could take place by real chance. That is false. No reality is simple. All is complex. Even atoms the basic building blocks of the universe are complex. They contain three types of matter protons, e34ledcftrons, and neutrons; three electric charges, positive, negative, and neutral, three separate aspects, nucleus, and electron cloud; and three types of energy, kinetic, strong force, and the electro-weak force.
God is not Onw because God is Simple. God is One because God/Goodness is the unity of of the universe and Reality beyond the universe. Dawkins used the complexity argument to show that the Absolute God did not create the universe. What instead this proved is that the Christian Trinitarian God created the universe and life, and all that is.
Yes, I agree with that too. Common scars is harder to explain away.
My point is just that commonality is not by itself evidence for evolution.
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[quote=“Marty, post:221, topic:43175, full:true”]
I’m a Christian. The Big Bang was not the beginning of creation. Just of this insignificant universe.
Ad hominem on whom?
There is some evidence that ERV are functional (see Bannert and Kurth, 2004, PNAS Vol 101 suppl 2 pp 14572 to 14579) rather than evolutionary remnants (although they could be both). Others do seem broken, which is consistent with a fallen creation.
I’m pretty sure that’s an example of an ad hominem.
Yes, that would be very much an error.
As an example of one of the misconceptions:
Imagine a string of text, 100 characters long. Now duplicate that text exactly, so the duplicate is 200 characters long.
How similar is the 100-character string to the 200-character string?
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Yeahhhh. Second order. Not aimed at anyone here. Too strong nonetheless.
That’s what Daniel said. That’s why I said what I said. Which, unlike the second order ad hominem, I stand by. Nature is the eternal first cause all the way down, is its own first cause from eternity. Unless God exists. Then He is. Nature is the default, rational, dialectical synthesis; the primum primum mobile. Proposing a more complex, supernatural, intentional first cause ground is unwarranted. Not all philosophies are equal. Unwarranted but for our desire for the claim of the earliest historical Church to be true.
If lower order physics is unable to explain higher order phenomena, such as life and mind, then there is great warrant for supernatural causation.
As it is, natural causation is a secondary explanation mediated through our primary conscious intentional experience of reality. Idealism is a much more parsimonous explanation of our primary experience than physicalism. Thus, physicalism must always play second fiddle to supernaturalism.
Oddly enough, this is exactly the argument used against ID theorists to claim it is trivial to generate gobs of complex specified information through natural causes by copying! Looks like the same example can be used in contrary manner to disprove ID and prove evolution! Fun stuff.
Duplication and divergence after duplication is well attested in evolution, not least through the two whole genome duplication events on the vertebrate lineage. To say that this is not an increase in information requires odd definitions of information. I’ve written about this extensively here in the past.
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Taking these one at a time:
- I’m not sure where you get 3.2%, since the paper just says about 3%. Maybe in the supplemental info, which I haven’t looked at lately. In any case, you should be taking half of that number, since that’s the amount of unique sequence in each genome.
- Fine.
- The 7% is not a thing – it represents the more or less arbitrary length given to the genome assembly, including large blocks whose size is poorly known. It is not in any way a measurement of the length of the two genomes. So remove that.
- I have no idea what this means, or what the reference is to. It really doesn’t make any sense, since genes are already included in the numbers already listed.
To sum up, a reasonable estimate is that each genome is about 5% different (1.5% + 2.7% + 1.2%) from the other. But about half of that difference is in segmental duplications, which are large repeated chunks in one genome or the other, which means that almost identical sequence is present in the other genome, just in more or fewer copies.
And the answer is… . . the numbers are in the right ballpark, and (more importantly), the differences look exactly like a lot of accumulated mutations from originally identical genomes, i.e. they look like the differences between two human genomes but multiplied by a factor ten or twelve.
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@DennisVenema if I understand correctly, you are an ID opponent. Yet you appear here to use the word “information” much like Stephen Meyer would. If you don’t mind, could you clarify the difference between your definition of “information” in the genome, and Stephen Meyer’s definition? Or if you have already done so somewhere else, please provide a link. Thanks.
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It is also an interesting definition of information when one string contains double the information of the other string, yet they are also the same. One of those paradoxes of information theory, I guess 
“Information” in biology is a useful metaphor for chemical interactions that do things. It’s not abstract information in the sense of a cipher. Randy Isaac has some good stuff on explaining this.
By whatever definition of information one cares to use in biology, there are natural processes that can increase it.
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ID proponents typically say that a straight duplication is not an increase in information. But, back in the day Behe used to argue that diverged, side-by-side paralogs, with 5 different amino acids and slightly different regulatory DNA required the action of a designer to accomplish.
The evidence for 2x whole genome duplication and divergence of the remaining paralogs in vertebrates is excellent. These paralogs are different now and do different essential things. This is not merely quadrupling of existing material.
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This is an important point. For purposes of making an argument, people can count the deltas as more or less. But regardless, where the sequences align, the magnitude of the delta approximates the mutation rate since species divergence.
As I understand it, these changes in general have little to no known impact on function. Yet we all recognize that chimps and humans are worlds apart in our capabilities, and AFAICT the commonly referenced genetic changes in this category do not seem to explain this.
In addition there was still as of 2018 (according to Richard Buggs) 5% unsequenced and 4% unaligned, which means to me that claims we have seen of less than 2% differences need much better and fairer disclaimers. That kind of statistical claim in the financial world would probably result in significant fines.
In summary, I would agree that mutation and natural selection have been on-going as evidenced by the the changes found in well-aligned areas. But I’m doubtful these changes adequately explain the differences between humans and chimps, and meaningful numbers to characterize the actual genomic deltas need to include unsequenced and unaligned.
The only value that qualifies is the single nulceotide substitution differences at 1.24%. That’s a valid value for that measurement.
Honestly, only Christian antievolutionists seem to care about an overall value (and making it as low as possible). Getting a precise overall value depends on how you view duplications and deletions, and so on. As I said before:
Until that question is answered, we can’t have a meaningful conversation about a final value.
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