No offense meant, Cooper, but I calls 'em as I sees 'em. When you said
, you seemed to me to be implying that Chaim had not thought about what he was saying, and that he was not thinking for himself. I would find that insulting, CMK may not have. Hell, he probably didn’t.
You’re right, I shouldn’t have implied you called him stupid, and for that I apologize. You did no such thing. But you called him willfully ignorant, which IMO is worse.
-andros-
and sorry, all, for the hijack
Batgirl, as regards your point on Bible translations, I can accept it. I have never read the Koran despite some interest, because it is said to be one work that does not translate well at all. One must read it in Arabic to understand it.
You might be interested to know that the old and new Jerusalem translations both have extensive footnotes identifying “style” material that does not translate. For example, the naming of Jacob’s sons late in Genesis is about 1/3 text and 2/3 footnote, giving the transliterated Hebrew for the son’s name and the pun made by the mother in English and transliterated Hebrew. Talmudic commentaries and such, as well as Christian scholars, are well represented in these.
That said, I think Tinker said well the point I was making…while nothing replaces the original, a good translation will carry the essence.
Apropos the OP, I ran into Stephen Jay Gould’s essay on Charles Henry Dana, who was both the top man in mid 19th Century American paleontology and a Creationist. Some of Dana’s statements on creationism and evolution are worth posting, and I’ll try to remember to bring it in and quote them. It’s in Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, if anyone happens to have a copy and look it up.
I heard on NPR that there was a very modern translation of Genesis which tries very hard to get at the original spirit and emphasis of the original. The author read the portion of Abraham (not)sacrificing Isaac, and it seemed very good IMHO.
Sorry, I do not remember any details about the translator.
This is a very interesting thread and has answered a question I have had for some time. I never could understand why fundamentalist Christians had such reverence, support and attachments to Jews and Isreal (sure, there are exceptions). My experience, in life as well as in the SDMB, has been with those atheistic and agnostic Jews who have shown a pathological bigotry towards Fundamentalist Christians. This thread show that fundamentalist/orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Christians are, or should be, natural allies. Good for you guys. You both are, no doubt, the repository for virtues and ethics for future generations. However, as scientists, forget about it.
Does that include:
1)Chapter 34 of Deuteronomy, which details Moses’ death? (34:5,6,7)
And how the children of Israel wept for thirty days? (34:8)
And how there was never again a prophet like Moses? (34:10)
I suppose it’s possible Moses wrote everything from Genesis on down to Deuteronomy 33, but I do not see how he could have written 34. It had to have been added later, perhaps as late as the sixth century BC, during the Babylonian Captivity.
>< DARWIN >
__L___L
jab1,
You may find this hard to believe, but you are not the first person to think of those questions. All of the major Torah commentators have addressed them. One of the commentators, I don’t remember who, said that God dictated the last six verses to Moses just prior to his death. When I go home tonight I’ll check my Bible and find out more detail.
IIRC, Orthodox Jews and conservative Christians following their lead understand that Deut. 34 was written by Joshua to “put a wrap” on Moses’ books. He also inserted the lines in the Torah about Moses being a very modest man.
I thought Orthodox Jews said God told Moses to write the “modest man” bit (can’t argue with the Big Guy, if he says you’re modest, you write it down). I suppose God could’ve told Moses to write about his death, too; kind of a bummer for him, but possible. Theistically speaking, of course. 
I have absolutely no doubt that others have asked that question before. I never claimed to be first.
It’s just that I have never heard an answer to that question that satisfied me. (God told Moses he was going to die and there would be no other like him. So Moses wrote it down and it was placed into the Ark of the Covenant and then he went into Moab and died. Is that it?)
*batgirl, there are a number of websites devoted to the study of the Torah. www.metacrawler.com gave me 62 results, though many of them are for the same sites, like www.torah.org and www.shamash.org Unfortunately for me, there are so many sites, I have trouble knowing which ones are worth my while.
Can anyone suggest a good Torah website?
>< DARWIN >
__L___L
You oughta know, Gaud!
jab1,
I like the Ohr Samayach site www.ohr.org. Aish HaTorah also has a good site, as does Project Genesis. I would provide the link, but I’m not sure how to do that.
Unfortunately your argument contains a number of fallacies. You make a false dichotomy between the twelve homologous proteins and 16,000+ nonhomologous ones; you never consider the possibility of 12 nonhomologous proteins or 16,000+ homologous ones. That omission masks the fact that most of your argument is an argument from non sequitur. You state above that the benefit arises from using homologous proteins, but that simply isn’t true. The benefit arises from the way that the proteins combine with each other, and the fact that they are homologous has nothing to do with it. Once you strip away your discussion of combinatorial control, we are left with only your statement that the 16,000+ proteins would have to bind to the same regulatory protein. This is just a restatement of your earlier claim that God uses the same protein (or slight variants of it) to perform the same task. Since that is (at least in part) what you’re trying to prove, and since you haven’t addressed my examples which prove that claim to be wrong, then your statement constitutes the fallacy of begging the question.
Plus, you haven’t even attempted to answer any of my actual questions: why do we see the observed patterns of homology across species? Why do homologous proteins sometimes perform different tasks, and nonhomologous proteins sometimes perform the same task?
-Ben
CMKeller,
you state that the number of witnesses at Sinai numbered in the millions, and so you believe the Bible. But what about the millions of witnesses to events described in the Book of Mormon?
-Ben
The problem with that explanation is that the Bible says that no one knows the location of Moses’ tomb “to this day.” To what day?
-Ben
Don’t you see the problem here? “We bred two related dogs once and they did fine- ergo, you can successfully inbreed two organisms generation after generation to populate the entire earth with no problem.” Think of the massive genetic drift involved. Suppose you have two pigs on Noah’s ark. They interbreed, and half of the genetic material of each is passed on to the offspring. If any genes aren’t represented in the next generation, they are lost forever, and the gene pool is depleted because no new genes can come in. The next generation of pigs interbreeds, and more genes are lost, and so on, until genetic drift makes all the pigs homozygous in all their traits- although clearly they would have died off long before.
Remember too that one problem in cheetah conservation is that cheetahs have passed through a bottleneck of low population which depleted their gene pool, so that now they are so genetically similar that they actually accept skin grafts from each other without immunosuppressants.
The fact is that you need, if memory serves, about 30-40 organisms to have a chance of starting a successful “colony.” (I’m getting this from Ridley’s Evolution, which is a college-level evolutionary biology textbook.) Even with more individuals than that, you can still have problems. One of the Dutch colonists who founded South Africa had a genetic disease (I believe it was Hodgkin’s lymphoma,) with the end result that his disease is now enormously common in that country.
-Ben
[sepulchrous voice]To any day. God sees all time, so scripture does likewise. His choice for that wording passeth our understanding.[/sepulchrous voice]
Actually, I have no idea. Maybe ‘cause scripture’s going to be around for a long time, so God decided it made more sense to tailor it for the several thousand years after Moses’ death, rather than the brief period when they did know where his grave was. We’d be better off asking Chaim Keller. But I have the God-is-too-far-above-us-to-truly-comprehend-anything-He-does argument used against me often enough, it was fun to try it out on my own.
Polycarp:
Thanks for the info re: modern English Bible translations. I must admit, I’d thought that the new versions were pretty much syntactic updates of the KJV. Glad to hear I’m wrong.
Just out of curiosity, do the new versions you’re referring to prevent such translation errors as (let’s use just one of Satan’s examples) the “mixed cloth” quote, which led him to believe that cotton-polyester blends are forbidden by the Bible? Do they note that the mixed cloth referred to is specifically a wool-linen mixture?
Cooper:
Well, clearly, an omnipotent being wouldn’t be short on time.
As for why, though, I can’t honestly say I have a concrete answer. What we (i.e., those of us who maintain religious beliefs in the first place) know about G-d is only what he has allowed us to know through his own words (again, what we believe are his words), and his motivation for creating things in five days prior to beginning the history of humanity (rather than doing it in fifteen billion years or in a single instant) is unknown to us. There are numerous lessons that the Rabbis have derived from the text of the creation story; perhaps it was done that way in order to specifically impart those lessons in the manner he felt most effective. What it boils down to is that while I can probably speculate, and maybe even come up with an answer that’s better than merely half-assed, I can’t find any religious authority of note that addresses the question, so what you’d be left with is my private speculation, take it for what you will.
But you’re ignoring a piece of observable evidence as well…the testimony of the millions of Israelites who claim to have witnessed a miraculous divine revelation at Sinai. Left with these two apparently contradictory sets of information, there are three ways to deal with them. 1) Deny the religious one, as you do, and come up with a secular explanation of how the story of a huge national revelation was fabricated. 2) Deny the scientific one, as the Kansas Board of Education does, and have faith that in the end, the contradictory science will be proven wrong. 3) Create a level of detachment between the two that makes both sets of information true, even if the full logic of why it is that way is not readily apparent. This is the option I choose.
andros:
Well, I’ve got a “most patient poster” rep to maintain, y’know? 
Thanks for the defense. But quite frankly, I’m so used to seeing non-religionists assume that religious people are brainwashed that it hardly registers as an insult anymore, although of course, it implicitly is.
jab1:
There are two schools of thought on this in the Talmud. One group of Rabbis says it was written by Moses with divine prophecy, and one group says that the last eight verses were written by Joshua.
Polycarp:
As far as I know, there are no Orthodox Jewish authorities who think that that verse wasn’t written by Moses himself under divine dictation. As for the other verses, see above.
Ben:
I’m afraid I’ll have to ask more detail on that. My understanding is that the Book of Mormon was given privately by the angel Moroni (sp?) to Joseph Smith. What people witnessed a divine Mormon revelation? Do modern Mormons (or LDS Christians, as I think they prefer to be called) claim to be the descendants of those witnesses, or only to have read of those witnessed events in the Book of Mormon?
Two possible explanations: either this was a prophetic reference to his tomb never being located (i.e., to the day of the text being read, whenever it’s read), or it was intended to inform the next generation (i.e., the Joshua generation) that already the location of his tomb is unknown (i.e., to the day that the verse is written).
Chaim Mattis Keller
I think Ben said:
To which Cmkeller responded:
I think a better example would be the miracle at Fatima. The Virgin Mary supposedly appeared to three children six times and spoke to them, and at the last appearance announced that highly visible miracle would take place. The following is quoted from http://www.fatima.org/history.hmtl :
Here we have an example less than 100 years ago, witnessed by 70,000 people (some of whom are still living). Everyone who is not Catholic basically has to dismiss this ‘miracle’. I have to dismiss this miracle, as well as what happened at Mt. Sinai. Its simply not meaningful to me. I’m interested in what you think of it, however. There is lots more information on the web site.
Deut. 22:11 (NIV)
Ben,
You wrote “the benefit arises from the way that the proteins combine with each other and the fact that they are homologous has nothing to do with it.” The fact that they are homologous has everything to do with it. The homology arises from sharing the same IkB binding site, so that they can all be regulated by the same protein, as opposed to 16,000 + different proteins. They also have homologous DNA binding sites which bind to consensus sequences in each NFkB regulated gene. If there were 16,00+ proteins you would need 16,000+ target DNA sequences. By the way, let me re-iterate that 16,000+ is the theoretical number of proteins.
Before I get to your three questions, it would be helpful if you could give me a more precise definition of “homologous proteins” and “non-homologous proteins.” Many proteins share regions of homology but have non-homologous regions also. For example, many peptides act via G-protein coupled receptors. G-protein coupled receptors consist of an extracellular peptide binding domain, seven transmembrane loops, and an intracellular domain that interacts with G-proteins. The seven transmembrane loops and intracellular domains are highly homologous regions, whereas the extracellular peptide binding domains are not because they bind different pepetides. So would you classify these as homologous proteins or non-homologous proteins? What about collagenase, a matrix metalloproteinase which is regulated by a low-density-lipoprotein scavenger receptor? The zinc binding domain is homolgous with zinc binding domains of other proteins, but the rest of the protein may not be; the region which binds to the scavenger receptor is homolgous with scavenger receptor binding domains in other proteins regualted by low-density-lipoprotein scavenger receptors, but the rest of the protein may not be; and the collagen binding domain is homologous to collagen binding domains in other collagen binding proteins, but the rest of the protein may not be.
In answer to your three questions (for now, subject to revision as more information is supplied):
2: Homologous proteins with different tasks: It would help to have a specific example to work with.