Then what about pseudogenes? It’s not enough to talk vaguely about the “Divine” “tweaking” things. Why couldn’t the Divine have simply created the human genome de novo?
**
Easy enough- pseudogenes, introns, and quadruply-degenerate positions undergo the fastest mutation rates, as inferred from phylogenetic trees. Protein coding regions have the slowest mutation rates. Doubly-degenerate and upstream and downstream coding regions have an intermediate mutation rate.
So if I win the lottery, I have to prove that it was impossible for anyone else to win?
Show me even one instance where we have witnessed on behalf of atheism, or even one instance where we have mocked anything but wilful ignorance. If you can’t, then I suggest an apology is in order.
Monkeys
For the monkey analogy to be accurate, it must be stated that once a monkey has correctly typed a part of shakespear, that word or phrase is not discarded but used by every othr monkey. Lottery
For the lottery example to be accurate, it must be stated that every time a winning number (but not all numbers) is found, that number stays a winning number.
Evolution, as was already stated, relies upon the fact that correct choices are kept in the fray.
the odds of wiping out life as opposed to creating it
Pretty good, I’d say, if we look at the other planets in our solar system. Methane, CO2, H2SO4, etc etc. I think, in fact, that it would be more suprising to find an earth-like environment with NO life on it. That would surely raise some eyebrows. Mine, anyway. As it stands, it seems we can put forth a very reliable figure for the odds of life. 1 in 9 {{snicker…not at all}}
Anyway, who is to say both evolutionists AND creationists are wrong? Hell, the univers could have popped into existence one second ago, complete with a “past” depending on how we choose to interpret our false memories.
I like to agree earlier that evolution is not really random. It follows a path that is the best because if it wasn’t the best the organism would die and that path would stop.
The factors that affect evolution is where the random part comes in.
Well, that depends on what you mean by “creationism”. You could say that God created each species separately, but in such a way that they appear, by all the evidence (comparative anatomy, protein homology, etc.) to be the result of evolution, and that God furthermore created supporting evidence (the geological record, fossils of extinct forms, and so on), and that God did all this in 4004 B.C., even though everything looks billions of years old. That’s not logically impossible, but it is scientifically useless. What evidence could ever overturn such a “theory”? The most perfectly formed sequence of fossils–tens of thousands of generations where each organism laid down and died on top of its parents, with gradual transitions exquisitely preserved–could be “explained” by saying “God made them that way”. Why God would do this I don’t know. And of course there are an infinite number of such “theories”–God made everything in 4004 B.C., or 40,004 B.C., or 4,000,000,000,004 B.C., or 1904 A.D.–with in each case the resulting created universe bearing evidence of an “apparent age” much older or much younger than its real age.
If Nicoli is a “scientific” creationist, though, this isn’t what he’s claiming. He’s claiming that in fact there is or should be evidence to support divine creation. If Nicoli is a young-earth, six-day creationist–and I don’t really know which version of creationism he subscribes to–he’s making a number of explicit or implicit claims which can be tested; for example, that there was a world-wide deluge a few millennia ago–for which there should be lots of evidence, which isn’t there–or that the Universe and this planet are in fact only a few thousand years old, when we have massive evidence that both are billions of years old.
Are you saying the only alternatives are persecution or throwing up our hands and saying “all opinions are equal”? No one is saying Nicoli shouldn’t have freedom of speech. But everyone else has the right to freedom of speech too. This board is dedicated to fighting ignorance; if we think someone is spreading untruths, we have a duty to set the record straight. (capacitor: We don’t proselytize for atheism–we proselytize for Cecilianity! “For Cecil so loved the world that he gave his one and only Editor, that whoever pays at least remote attention to him shall not be ignorant but have eternal knowledge” – Jon 3:16)
Bearing in mind that scientists never claim to be absolutely sure of anything, there is much which no one has seen with their own eyes which we can be sure about beyond any reasonable doubt. Nobody’s ever seen an atom with their own eyes, but we have very good reasons for believing in the “atomic theory of matter”.
Like I said above, I think if you look at all the evidence, you really do have to come to the conclusion that either we evolved from non-human ape-like animals and are close cousins of chimpanzees, or someone created us to look exactly as if we had evolved from ape-like animals and are close cousins of chimpanzees. Again, I fail to see why God (or the Goddess, or the gods) would have done such a thing.
Jeez, if you just would have read the next sentence. . .
Anyway, it isn’t the only possible way. Off the top of my head three other theories:
X created everything as it is now (Current day-Y) ago. God, IPU, space aliens, whatever.
Lamarkian neck stretching and trait inheritance.
Human beings did develop directly from a single generation of mutated fish/apes/bacteria. (Close to evolution, but wrong enough to qualify as a seperate theory.)
The thing is, evolution has all the same positive evidence that those theories have (i.e. Here we are), and the support of additonal evidence which leads most thinking people to conclude that evolution is the way it works.
However, beware of arguing "I can’t imagine. . . " even based on evidence. Just because you’re right doesn’t make it any less an argument of personal disbelief.
Good God almighty in heaven, do you have any idea how big a leap that is?!
Changing a Java applet into an ActiveX control requires rewriting the thing in another freakin’ programming language. It’s less like tweaking chimp DNA to make humans, than it is like tweaking chimp DNA to make sequoia trees.
On the contrary, humans and chimps are quite similar on a genetic level, and the bulk of the differences between them concern the timing of different stages of development, rather than any sort of fundamental difference in the basic materials they are made of.
Capacitor, what, exactly, is your argument at this point? The genetic evidence shows that humans and apes share a common ancestor. If you posit that God used the DNA of that ancestor to make humans and apes, then you have to explain a number of things:
Why isn’t that explanation tantamount to Last Thursdayism?
Why did God keep all those pseudogenes and transposons around?
Why didn’t God create homo sapiens ex nihilo, as it were, rather than cribbing his old notes?
Worse than that. Chimps and sequoias use the same language - all life does (barring a very few very minor exceptions). There’s no equivalent in biology for going to a new language. I can’t even think of an analogy.