You have it backwards. Those who argue for common descent use DNA as part of their evidence.
Even when like 90% of the code doesn’t do anything?
Junk DNA is defined as DNA under no functional constraint. We can calculate a corrected K[sub]a[/sub]/K[sub]s[/sub] ratio: this is related to the rate at which DNA in a particular place in a genome is changing without any evolutionary selection – basically how fast individual nucleotides are mutated if there is no particular benefit or risk to changing them. I’ll gloss over the details (unless there is particular interest), but let us just say that nearby DNA which is changing as fast as one would predict by the K[sub]a[/sub]/K[sub]s[/sub] is under no evolutionary selection. By definition, therefore, that DNA is “junk.”
The majority of mammalian genomes are like this – pieces under no functional constraint. These are large runs of simple repeats, noncoding filler, genes which we no longer use, and old pieces of nonfunctional retroviruses left over from old infections. What they once were is of little importance because they no longer do anything. What they now are is junk.
This is not to say that there aren’t functional surprises hidden in megabases of nonfunctional DNA. Sometimes these surprises can be very difficult to find, sequence, and assemble because of the nature of whole genome shotgun sequencing, the method of choice for all genome projects. But I see a lot of this “junk DNA isn’t really junk” argument. I will state with some authority that for the most part, junk DNA really is junk.
This relates to the OP in a tangential fashion. There are no other reasons except evolution which predict these kinds of things. The K[sub]a[/sub]/K[sub]s[/sub] ratio is a direct predictor of molecular evolution. Adding other pieces in the puzzle, in this case something which would create humans without evolution but the fossil record and everything else with evolution is unnecessary with scientific inquiry. The science explains it all, and using Occam’s Razor, we shave off the extraneous.
This can be philisophically unsettling, but it has been the basis of science for 500 years or so. Good science produces the slimmest, most efficient theory which explains all of the data. We can add aether to explain the constant speed of light, but Einstein showed that you didn’t need it, and it went buhbye. Evolution does the same for a creator’s role in human origins. It doesn’t prove anything, it just makes those parts dispensable.
And we now suspect that junk DNA can be involved in the regulation of certain kinds of mutation and gene swapping. If nothing else, we know it affects the chance that genes will be affected during sexual mixing.
You can’t refute their arguments because, contrary to their assertions, their arguments are not scientific theories–they’re a religious view.
Certainly you can refute their arguments on philosophical grounds.
Nope, Urban Ranger. What it would require is for them to change their religious views. And that requires conversion, not refutation.
I am interested in deconverting somebody. Do you have any good stretagies or prior experience?
And the value of re-using those components is because it’s more efficient. However, “efficiency” would be a meaningless contruct to an omnipotent being, since any creation would be effortless. Therefore, there is no reason to expect that such a being would (or should) re-use anything; He would be under no constraint to do so.
To which you can reply, “If it isn’t evidence, then what is it?”
Urban Ranger: The thing is the Creationists–of whatever stripe–are just tossing out lies left and right. First is they pretend their view of creation is science. Next, they pretend the scientific view itself is nothing but a religious view. Finally, they toss up irrelevancy after irrelevancy in the “discussion.” Good luck in getting them to admit that they’re arguing religion against Science.
Gee, why do humans have an appendix? That seems like a pretty obvious and non-technical approach. Since we are “made in his image,” does God also have a useless, exploding internal organ?
I will laugh until I’m blue if someone explains that away with a bible verse.
If they use the very flawed argument “If humans evolved from monkeys, why don’t we see monkeys evolving into humans today?”, just answer: “Pete Sampras”.
WHY ARE SO MANY OF YOU SO UPSET THAT MAYBE GOD EXISTS?
I DONT KNOW HOW YOU CAN BE SO SURE.IVE REALLY TRIED TO BELIEVE THE SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATIONS FOR HOW THE CREATION TOOK PLACE,AND AS FAR AS I CAN SEE,IT BOILS DOWN TO THE BOTTOM LINE THAT IT ALL HAPPENED BY CHANCE,OR A SET OF NUMBERS IN A THEORY OF WORDS, WHOSE MAIN PURPOSE SEEMS TO ME ,TO BE MORE ABOUT TRYING TO KEEP GOD/CREATOR OUT OF THE PICTURE,THAN ACTUALLY EXPLAINING HOW AND WHY THE WORLD CAME ABOUT. ITS LIKE COMMENTING ON A GREAT PAINTING,AND DELIBERATELY DENYING THAT THE ARTIST HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH IT. IF THE UNIVERSE EXISTS “BY CHANCE”, WHY CAN`T GOD EXIST “BY CHANCE”?
YOU NEED TO ASK YOURSELVES THIS–IF WE BELIEVE THAT GOD DOES NOT EXIST,WHY DO WE CARE SO MUCH ABOUT PROVING IT? ONLY BY FIRST DENYING THE EXISTENCE OF GOD ,CAN WE TRY TO BECOME (FALSELY) GOD OURSELVES.THIS IS BEHIND THE ENDEAVOURS OF EVOLUTIONISTS AND BIG BANG SPECULATORS…ENVY OF THE POSITION OF GOD.
Speak up some, will you, kid. I don’t think you yelled loud enough.
Now to demonstrate to you what facts are and what false conclusions are:
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The fact is that there are many of us who don’t buy into creationism that are not upset that God exists. On the contrary, a number of us happen to be believers. Therefore, your initial appraisal is a false conclusion.
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Your last paragraph contains both a false premise and a false conclusion. None of us needs to do what you’re touting. And it’s an error that those of us who don’t buy into that particular religious tenet of yours are envying the position of deity.
Urban Ranger: I think you now have a grand example of my earlier assertions.
Dude, it’s been years since people thought that the appendix was a useless vestigial organ. My copy of The American Medical Association Encyclopedia of Medicine states that the appendix contains a large amount of lymphoid tissue, and that it helps provide bodily defense against local infections.
Isn’t that also the case with the tonsils?
The kid’s got a point. I’d like to be god.
Granted, but efficiency is only one such advantage. Another advantage is standardization. Using common components makes it easier for people (say, molecular biologists) to take designs lessons learned from one organism and apply them to another. It’s hardly inconceivable that a designer would choose a scheme that would grant humans this degree of flexibility.
Additionally, if it is possible to re-use components, then why should a cosmic designer choose to do otherwise? If one wishes to use the commonality of DNA as an argument for evolution, then one must show that this somehow argues against deliberate design. It doesn’t. Even if we ignore the value of reusability and efficiency, there’s no reason why a cosmic designer wouldn’t use such common components.
Heck, if there were a preponderance of alternatives to using DNA, I imagine that many atheists would use such design extravagance as an argument against God’s existence!
Please buy an 80-column text card for your Apple ][+, so that you’ll have access to lowercase letters. They were a brilliant innovation for their time, fourteen centuries ago, and have never gone out of style.
Sorry. That the end of my sarcasm. (For now.)
To answer your first question, I don’t think anybody here is upset at the prospect that God, in principle, could exist. Read the posters’ words, both here and in some similar recent threads, and you’ll see that athiests and agnostics simply find no compelling reason to believe in God. Emotion and personal preference don’t enter into it.
There is no purpose in scientific explanations, to either exclude God or include him, to either comfort people or disturb them. There is no agenda. We have simply found over the centuries that the universe does seem to obey rules, that many of those rules are mathematical — perhaps all of them, ultimately — and that the “God Hypothesis” simply fails to explain anything.
Scientific explanations are not invented, and they’re not published to please or displease anyone. They are discovered — gradually, painfully, and after lots and lots of hard sober observation and reasoning. What people hope or fear to be true is irrelevant.
I don’t agree. It’s perhaps more like coming across a snowflake, or a rainbow, or even a galaxy, and admiring the beauty and complexity that even simple particles can make, if you bunch enough of them together. Great paintings — which are known to be made by human artists — have their own kind of beauty, probably influence by our knowledge that there’s a person behind the art.
In any case, beauty is a reaction that occurs inside the human mind. However important this and other emotions are to us personally, it has historically been a poor guide to understanding how things work and where they come from.
He could. So could many things, including unicorns and El Dorado. But I see no reason to believe in things merely because they could exist, that their non-existence is not logically impossible. Chance doesn’t have much to do with it.
Personally I don’t care that much, nor do I believe that the non-existence of God can be proven anyway. Nor do I accept your implicit “the lady doth protest to much” claim that if someone argues strongly for a position, it indicates that they secretly have little real confidence in it.
And anyway, this thread had little to do with proofs about God until you dropped by. Why do you care so much?
We can never be anything like God, or gods, regardless of whether there’s a solid proof for God’s non-existence. I really don’t see how your conclusion would follow from the premise.
We are fragile animals in a cold, vast, chaotic, and lethal universe, who lucked into sapience by a series of flukes. Clever as we are, no matter what we do, no matter what we become, there will always be things that can kill us, maim us, humiliate us, destroy our possessions, shred our plans, and ruin our mornings. I see not a hint of self-deification in our future.
Uh, no. What’s behind it is a simple and genuine desire to understand, as best as we can, how the universe actually works, given the physical evidence available to us. If there is no God, or afterlife, or 72 virgins in waiting, well that’s just Tough Toenails to those who wanted it.
In other words, don’t shoot the messenger.
There is some evidence the appendix does have have minor digestive and immune functions, but as SciAm points out, it does about the same thing as Peyer’s patch and many other lymph-associated tissues in the intestines. People clearly can live without it. In Western countries approximately 7%of the pop. will develop appendicitis in their lives, which is 80% fatal if untreated. Thanks, God!
The fact that the appendix has some utility does NOT mean it is not vestigal. It is part of the cecum, a blind pouch in the intestines which has no business being in humans, since we don’t have symbiotic cellulose-digesting microbes. Why would the Almighty give humans jerry-rigged rabbit guts? God refused repeated requests for comment on this story.
I’ve never tried to argue against creationism because it goes in one ear and out the other. It’s like trying to convince a 3-year-old that there is no Santa. People believe in the literal word of their religious books because their parents introduced them to it as such. If part of this is in dispute then all of it is in dispute.
I’ve had people tell me that the entire world was covered in a great flood and mountain top sea shells are the proof. I then have to explain that some mountains, like the Himalayans, are tectonic (they grow upwards from continental shelf’s hitting each other). In one ear, out the other. Never mind that the complexity of the universe is probably the greatest example of a higher power.