Evolutionary Science-v- Creationism

[Griff]

oooppsss ya get the point though. Studying history we end up trusting somebody somewhere along the way, who to trust can be a problem. With enough sources we get a good idea whether or not someone existed but interpreting their life is difficult even with modern figures.

[elSicomoro]

Originally Posted by Griff

There is really no doubt that Jesus existed.

There are a lot of people that would disagree with you, bro...me included.

[Troubleshooter]

Originally Posted by sycamore

There are a lot of people that would disagree with you, bro...me included.

Yeah, I was leaving that one for someone else.

It's a question of a jesus or The Jesus(tm).

[elSicomoro]

Speaking of Jesus, the headline of this article made me laugh.

[wolf]

This showed up in my mailbox.

[OnyxCougar]

Originally Posted by Torrere

However --

Information GAIN certainly does occur. One example is gene duplication: occasionally, when DNA is passed from generation to generation, sequences of DNA are duplicated. Usually the duplicate information immediately follows the original information, but sometimes it moves to an entirely different location. Gene duplication is widely acccepted, and has been examined for over 30 years now.

Duplication is not adding new information. It's still the same info, just duplicated.

If I have cell A, B, C and D, and I duplicate C, I have A, B, C, C, and D. I don't have a gain of information. C was there to begin with. What I mean by gain of information is somehow getting an E from somewhere. That is what is required for the evolutionary theory to work (molecules to man).

[quote] According to this article published in 2001 in Science,

Whole quote of article referenced, my emphasis in bold
Department of Biology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA. mlynch@oregon.uoregon.edu

Gene duplication has generally been viewed as a necessary source of material for the origin of evolutionary novelties, but it is unclear how often gene duplicates arise and how frequently they evolve new functions. [/i] [So, basically, this theory really needs to work, but we aren't sure how or how often.] [i]Observations from the genomic databases for several eukaryotic species suggest that duplicate genes arise at a very high rate, on average 0.01 per gene per million years. Most duplicated genes experience a brief period of relaxed selection early in their history, with a moderate fraction of them evolving in an effectively neutral manner during this period. However, the vast majority of gene duplicates are silenced within a few million years, with the few survivors subsequently experiencing strong purifying selection. Although duplicate genes may only rarely evolve new functions, the stochastic silencing of such genes may play a significant role in the passive origin of new species.

There is so much wrong with that "story" that I'm surprised you bothered to link it. First, this is all guesswork based off of a computer simulation database. Second, they are guessing that the mutation/duplicate rates stay constant over time (or didn't account for the flux). Third, according to my (usually flawed) math, that's one duplicate gene every 100 million years. Most of those duplicated don't do any thing, and if they do, they don't do anything relating to new functions. This was a irrelevant story anyway, because gene duplication is not adding new information, which is required for molecules to man origins.

This page is a good starting point for looking into gene duplication and explains it reasonably well for the laity.

Well, I'm a laity, but I was still lost. Try here:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/crea...2/genetics.asp

In case you require extra special evidence, this paper, entitled "Multiple Duplications of Yeast Hexose Transport Genes in Response to Selection in a Glucose-Limited Environment" describes the preceding experiment (or a verification of it).

Not only was information gained [information was duplicated and hence there was more overall information], but the extra information was an improvement over the information existing at the beginning of the experiment.

But more overall information is not new information. I think the problem here is the way I described it (my fault). See above about ABC and D and the link I posted, that describes the 4 main genetic changes in regards to origins.

[OnyxCougar]

Originally Posted by sycamore

There are a lot of people that would disagree with you, bro...me included.

IIRC, Jesus as a person has been historically documented by at least three independant sources (other than the bible), one of which was the roman scribe to Pontious Pilate, Josephus.

Whether or not this person was or was not the Messiah [tm] is of course, speculative.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by OnyxCougar

Duplication is not adding new information. It's still the same info, just duplicated.

Until it mutates.

If I have cell A, B, C and D, and I duplicate C, I have A, B, C, C, and D. I don't have a gain of information. C was there to begin with. What I mean by gain of information is somehow getting an E from somewhere. That is what is required for the evolutionary theory to work (molecules to man).

The second C will mutate differently from the first C. So you start with ABCD, go to ABCCD, and then A'B'C'C"D'.

[OnyxCougar]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

Until it mutates.The second C will mutate differently from the first C. So you start with ABCD, go to ABCCD, and then A'B'C'C"D'.

Agreed. But that's not new information. That is mutation of the same information. Show me where we get an E and we'll talk about gain of information.

Having 3 legs is not the same as having 2 legs and wings.

[OnyxCougar]

This is from the link wolf posted:

Science is all about proof and testing. Scientific method entails coming up with a hypothesis to explain an event or process, then testing that hypothesis to see whether it works.

Agreed. But you can't test origins.

If it [the hypothesis] does [work], it becomes a theory -- a working explanation with the weight of evidence to support it.

Also agreed. But there is no evidence for origins. It isn't observable or testable. It's a bunch of guesses.

If you cannot disprove a theory, you may have discovered a fact. If the hypothesis can be disproved, it must be discarded and a new explanation postulated, and so on.

It's all about your starting presuppositions and the way the evidence is interpreted. There is alot of science out there, and a few ways to interpret the facts we can observe and duplicate.

And on a personal note, I don't buy the intelligent design theory any more than the evolutionary theory. And ID theory is NOT the same as creationist. Usually, when you say "creationist" you mean a person who believes in 6 literal days of creation. ID theorists generally believe that God did it in millions of years.

edit:

If you CAN prove it, then you destroy it -- it becomes fact. There's no longer any merit or moral benefit to belief in it, any more than there's a moral benefit to belief in gravity, or spiritual merit to the belief that airplanes can fly.

So since you can't prove origins, then even the evolutionary theory is faith.
Religion.
Interesting.

[OnyxCougar]

Found these, I thought some may find it interesting.

The stars of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, rotate about the galactic center with different speeds, the inner ones rotating faster than the outer ones. The observed rotation speeds are so fast that if our galaxy were more than a few hundred million years old, it would be a featureless disc of stars instead of its present spiral shape.(1)

Yet our galaxy is supposed to be at least 10 billion years old. Evolutionists call this ‘the winding-up dilemma’, which they have known about for fifty years. They have devised many theories to try to explain it, each one failing after a brief period of popularity. The same ‘winding-up’ dilemma also applies to other galaxies.

For the last few decades the favored attempt to resolve the dilemma has been a complex theory called ‘density waves’.1 The theory has conceptual problems, has to be arbitrarily and very finely tuned, and lately has been called into serious question by the Hubble Space Telescope’s discovery of very detailed spiral structure in the central hub of the ‘Whirlpool’ galaxy, M51.(2)

(1) Scheffler, H. and H. Elsasser, Physics of the Galaxy and Interstellar Matter, Springer-Verlag (1987) Berlin, pp. 352–353, 401–413.

(2) D. Zaritsky et al., Nature, July 22, 1993. Sky & Telescope, December 1993, p. 10.

[OnyxCougar]

more

According to evolutionary theory, comets are supposed to be the same age as the solar system, about 5 billion years. Yet each time a comet orbits close to the sun, it loses so much of its material that it could not survive much longer than about 100,000 years. Many comets have typical ages of 10,000 years. (3)

Evolutionists explain this discrepancy by assuming that (a) comets come from an unobserved spherical ‘Oort cloud’ well beyond the orbit of Pluto, (b) improbable gravitational interactions with infrequently passing stars often knock comets into the solar system, and (c) other improbable interactions with planets slow down the incoming comets often enough to account for the hundreds of comets observed. (4) So far, none of these assumptions has been substantiated either by observations or realistic calculations.

Lately, there has been much talk of the ‘Kuiper Belt’, a disc of supposed comet sources lying in the plane of the solar system just outside the orbit of Pluto. Even if some bodies of ice exist in that location, they would not really solve the evolutionists’ problem, since according to evolutionary theory the Kuiper Belt would quickly become exhausted if there were no Oort cloud to supply it. [For more information, see the detailed technical article Comets and the Age of the Solar System.]

(3) Steidl, P.F., ‘Planets, comets, and asteroids’, Design and Origins in Astronomy, pp. 73–106, G. Mulfinger, ed., Creation Research Society Books (1983) 5093 Williamsport Dr., Norcross, GA 30092.

(4) Whipple, F.L., "Background of modern comet theory," Nature 263 (2 Sept 1976) 15.

[Undertoad]

If you CAN prove it, then you destroy it -- it becomes fact. There's no longer any merit or moral benefit to belief in it, any more than there's a moral benefit to belief in gravity, or spiritual merit to the belief that airplanes can fly.

This statement offends me deeply. Determining and believing in facts and structuring your life around them, helping others to determine facts and believe in facts and structure their life around them, is the MOST MORAL BEHAVIOUR that one can engage in.

[OnyxCougar]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

This statement offends me deeply. Determining and believing in facts and structuring your life around them, helping others to determine facts and believe in facts and structure their life around them, is the MOST MORAL BEHAVIOUR that one can engage in.

Welcome to the world of scientific thought.

[OnyxCougar]

more

Each year, water and winds erode about 25 billion tons of dirt and rock from the continents and deposit it in the ocean. (5) This material accumulates as loose sediment (i.e., mud) on the hard basaltic (lava-formed) rock of the ocean floor. The average depth of all the mud in the whole ocean, including the continental shelves, is less than 400 meters. (6)

The main way known to remove the mud from the ocean floor is by plate tectonic subduction. That is, sea floor slides slowly (a few cm/year) beneath the continents, taking some sediment with it. According to secular scientific literature, that process presently removes only 1 billion tons per year. (6) As far as anyone knows, the other 24 billion tons per year simply accumulate. At that rate, erosion would deposit the present amount of sediment in less than 12 million years.

Yet according to evolutionary theory, erosion and plate subduction have been going on as long as the oceans have existed, an alleged 3 billion years. If that were so, the rates above imply that the oceans would be massively choked with mud dozens of kilometers deep. An alternative (creationist) explanation is that erosion from the waters of the Genesis flood running off the continents deposited the present amount of mud within a short time about 5000 years ago.

(5) Gordeyev, V.V. et al., ‘The average chemical composition of suspensions in the world’s rivers and the supply of sediments to the ocean by streams’, Dockl. Akad. Nauk. SSSR 238 (1980) 150.

(6) Hay, W.W., et al., ‘Mass/age distribution and composition of sediments on the ocean floor and the global rate of subduction’, Journal of Geophysical Research, 93, No B12 (10 December 1988) 14,933–14,940.