I’ll say, Azazel. The score thus far:
GOM says that life is high technology which could not have evolved, and demands an intelligent designer.
Ben rebuts GOM’s argument with a molecular genetics FAQ explaining in detail how life evolved without ID.
GOM says that life is high technology which could not have evolved, and demands an intelligent designer.
Ben points out that he already knows that, because, after all, he has a PhD in the subject. Won’t GOM please reply to the FAQ which Ben wrote about molecular genetics, which he learned about when he got his PhD?
GOM declares that it’s hard to believe that Ben has a PhD, since if he did, then it would be obvious that life is high technology which could not have evolved, and demands an intelligent designer.
Watch this, Azazel. It always gets him into a tizzy:
Hey GOM- is there any evidence for abiogenesis? Yes or no?
While we’re at it, let’s recap the questions that GOM has been weaselling out of:
1.) Explain how ID meets the criterion of Popperian falsifiability.
2.) Have you, or have you not read the FAQs (molecular genetics and abiogenesis) as you said you would?
3.) How do you defend your belief in special creation as opposed to common descent?
4.) Why do the calculated phylogenetic trees (ie “family trees”) of orthologous proteins agree with the pattern of relationships between species which evolutionists claim to have reconstructed from the fossil record? Why do unrelated proteins serve similar functions in cases where evolutionists claim that those functions evolved independently in the fossil record? (For example, odorant binding proteins in vertebrates and insects, and lens crystallins in vertebrates and molluscs.)
5.) Why does the arrangement of genes and pseudogenes in the hemoglobin clusters correlate with their calculated phylogenetic trees?
6.) Why are similar functions sometimes served by completely different proteins? Why are completely different functions sometimes served by similar proteins?
7.) Why do retrogenes lack introns, and have a poly-A tail? Why are they sometimes cut short? Why are they flanked by repeat sequences which are characteristic of transposons and other inserted sequences?
8.) Why do pseudogenes exist? How do you explain their observed features?
9.) Why do transposons exist? Why do some transposons carry pseudogenes for transposases?
10.) Why do introns exist? How do you explain their observed features?
11.) Why are exons predominantly of class 1-1? Why is exon class conserved when particular exons appear over and over again in different proteins?
12.) Why do pseudoexons exist?
13.) Why do we see the observed mutation rates (creationists might prefer to think of them as “observed number of differences”) for different classes of genetic information? Why do pseudogenes differ between species roughly as much as introns and fourfold degenerate sites do, while protein coding genes differ much less?
14.) Why do amino acids on the outside of proteins show higher mutation rates (or observed differences, if you prefer) than amino acids in the hydrophobic core or active sites of proteins?
And while we’re at it, let me ask this:
GOM, you love to present gene regulatory networks as proof of design. Do you feel that this applies to viruses, too- that the gene regulatory networks of, say, retroviruses are a “technology” that had to be designed?
