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StAnastasia
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And it misses the theological point to insist naively on its literal truth.
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grannymh
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What do you consider as the theological points (plural intended) to the “story” of Adam and Eve? Thank you.
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hecd2
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Nevertheless, it was painted. I’m with Hilary on that one.
Benjamin Wiker is no authority on science, but he’s right that *if *we were the offspring of two people then science could discover it - it would have left an unmistakeable signature on our genome. However that signature is not there and all the evidence points away from it - we are not descended from two sole parents.
Alec
evolutionpages.com/Mitochondrial%20Eve.htm
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StAnastasia
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I’ll answer that a bit more broadly, from Genesis and the Psalms:
(1) God calls forth order from chaos, actuality from potential (Gen. 1:2-3)
(2) God entrusts the creative process to creation itself (Gen. 1:11, 20, 24)
(3) There is an order and coherence to the creative process (Gen. 1:5, 8, 13)
(4) God recognizes the world as very good (Gen. 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31)
(5) Humans are integrally bound up with the created order (Gen. 1:26-29; 2:15, 19)
(6) Human free will entails that actions carry moral consequences (Gen. 2:17, 3:15-19)
(7) Humans recognize the imperfection of a creation entrusted with its own integrity (Gen. 3:1-24)
(8) God cares enough about the world even to cleanse it with a flood (Gen. 6:6-7)
(9) The heavens declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1)
To the Americans on this thread, Happy Fourth!
StAnastasia
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edwest2
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What StAnastasia left off the list is the fact that Adam and Eve were our first parents. If Science cannot comment on the supernatural then it cannot comment on that fact. Eve was created from Adam’s side. There is no symbolism there. None. Just as Jesus Christ raised the dead, there is no symbolism there. These are things God can do.
Peace,
Ed
Peace,
Ed
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hecd2
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It’s not a sophism at all. It is exactly what evolution is - descent with variation and selection.
That’s not so - very few if any speciations are the consequence of a single protein change. Speciations generally result from the accumulation of several or many changes over time. And it is certainly not the case that a bacterium will evolve into something that is not a bacterium by a single mutation. You are setting up wobbly strawmen and gaily knocking them down. However, the fact remains that bacterial strains have been shown to evolve advantageous traits by mutation and selection.
Well, there are many reasons why recent lava flows could give anomalous dates, but the most pertinent one here is the extreme incompetence of the people collecting the samples and analysing the data.
Well if the best authority that you have to offer are two Vedic cranks who believe that humans have been around for hundreds of millions of years (how does that fit in with your belief that the world is 6000 years old?), then your case must be weak indeed. Regardless of what those guys claim, professional geochronologists use multiple radioactive species and multiple techniques in many locations around the world to arrive at concordant dates for major events such as the K-T transition. These techiques include K-Ar, Ar-Ar and U-Pb (including U-Pb of zircons partly reset by the bolide).
No - it’s a measurement.
Radiometric dating has not been rejected except by those like you, who refuse to accept the science for ideological reasons. As for the astronomic fine-tuning of radiometric dates, I suggest that you begin by looking up Milankovitch cycles.
The K-T is not a layer, but a boundary between two layers (the Cretaceous and the Tertiary). Can you direct us to a paper in a respectable journal that reports mammoth fossils in the Cretaceous period?
Alec
evolutionpages.com
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hecd2
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Yes, this is a reprint of the paper in a book, but the original paper was published in the journal I cited.
It is about free will, because the article specifically discusses the phenomenological correlates of voluntary action.
Indeed that is what they are saying and what I am saying. We experience free will, but it is a phenomenon of the neurobiology - which is ultimately based on matter. This doesn’t devalue our experiences - but it grounds them in the physical world and eliminates the need for an immaterial cause.
Alec
evolutionpages.com
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hecd2
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I’m afraid you don’t get to determine the “rules of evidence” since your rejection of properly cited work as evidence disqualifies you from determining what is valid evidence and what is not.
You are simply wrong, it is clearly science and accepted as such by the vastly overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists and philosophers of science. Furthermore it is testable (it has been tested) and it is falsifiable - just find us a rabbit and T rex fossil in the same non-reworked stratum, or show us how organisms have arbitrary characteristics that cannot be categorised or nested. There is no scientific perspective on which you and your fringe group reject evolution - your motivation is ideological not scientific.
because genomics uncovers aspects of our genomes that have clearly evolved over millions of years.
This is wrong in many ways, but basically your logic is flawed. How does epigenetics make comparative genomics “specious”? Try to be specific. (By the way there are no epigenetic codons - do you know what a codon is and why, by definition, it doesn’t create an epigenome?)
No, it’s garbage.
The references contain the evidence - they are not “diversions”. here we go again:
Dinosaur fossils such as hadrosaur and T rex lie below the K-T boundary - there is no instance of an articulated non-avian dinosaur fossil lying above the iridium anomaly and the change in biota that marks the K-T boundary (and that includes any dinosaur fossils that Hugh Miller has access to). Dinosaurs, along with many other clades of animals (including microscopic animals) and plants also went extinct, but other clades such as mammals and birds survived across the boundary. See, for example, MacLeod et al, The Cretaceous-Tertiary biotic transition, Journal of the Geological Society 154 (2): 265–292 and Fastovsky and Sheehan, The Extinction of the Dinosaurs in North America,* GSA Today* 15, 4 - 10 and so on.
The date of the K-T boundary has been consistently found to be about 65 - 66 million years BP using a range of radiometric and astronomic dating methods applied in multitudes of locations all over the world. See for example:
Kuiper et al, Synchronizing Rock Clocks of Earth History, *Science *320, 500- 504 (2008), where the K-T boundary is found to be 65.95 million years BP using 40Ar-39Ar dating fine-calibrated by the Milankovitch 405k year astronomical cycle.
So dinosaurs became extinct at or before the K-T boundary and so are at least 65 million years old. Thus it is absurd, and a waste of time to attempt to date them with a technique that has a maximum scale of 100,000 years. You will only get spurious results.
And you did get spurious results.
Is that why it’s broken in exactly the same way in all haplorrhine primates including man? Or is it because it was originally broken in the common ancestor of haplorrhine primates including man? I, like almost all scientists, am going for the latter.
Alec
evolutionpages.com
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hecd2
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Yeah, right. At the mid-oceanic ridge? Across entire strata (the effect of lightning strikes on the magnetism of cooling molten rock is extremely localised)? Your hypothesis simply doesn’t stand up.
Alec
evolutionpages.com
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hecd2
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But *you *don’t get to define what is science and what is not. The past is testable through the effects it leaves on the present (that’s how we do crime detection, forensic chemistry and pathology, history, archaeology, palaeontology, comparative genomics, systematics and phylogenetics, galactic and stellar science, geology, cosmology, and so on). Now I can see that many of these branches of science confound your mythology, and for that reason you want to discredit them and pretend that they are not science. But the evidence is there and they are science - you are fooling no-one.
Alec
evolutionpages.com
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edwest2
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You may, at some point, come to realize that there is an immaterial cause.
We are not haphazard mistakes and neurobiology is simply another way of saying that our wandering genes just kept upgrading our mental software for no apparent reason.
Peace,
Ed
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grannymh
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It appears to me that in order to continue an open discussion on the phenomenological correlates of voluntary action in relation to the concept of free will, we both have to be on the same page regarding the meaning of free will. In my humble opinion, using “experience” is a very good way to get at the meaning of free will.
When you say “We experience free will, but…” would you please describe the “experience”, which you are referring to, from its beginning to its conclusion? Thank you.
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hecd2
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Ed, I might come to realise that, but I doubt it, because there is simply no evidence for it - in fact, all the evidence points the other way.
Alec
evolutionpages.com
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hecd2
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Sure - for me, when I say we experience free will, I am talking about the experience of choosing to do or not do something. In order to have that experience, first of all I have to have a sense of selfdom that delineates me from the rest of the universe so that the personal pronoun “I” has meaning. That sense of selfdom also has to be correlated with my physical body so that in choosing to do something, I recognise that the appendage in front of my eyes with five bendy sticks is my hand and part of my selfdom, so that when I raise it, or use it to grasp something, or sign the cheque, or cut the bread, or pop the pill, or clasp it in prayer or whatever, that I can recognise that it is part of me that is doing something that I have chosen to do.
So the experience of free will is that “I” experience the process that I choose to do something that I could do or not do, and that I carry out that choice. This is the experience that I think has a purely physical neurobiological foundation, and that to explain the underlying mechanism for the exercise and experience of free will does not require an immaterial cause and that it is the product of matter and physical laws.
Alec
evolutionpages.com
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StAnastasia
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Ed, I’m not clear on why you conjoin “haphazard” and “mistake.” I am a product of chance in that one of my father’s trillions of sperm fertilized one of my mother’s hundreds of eggs. That in no way suggests that I am a mistake or unwanted. You seem to be setting up a straw person argument here.
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hecd2
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This is with regard to the paper that Ed referenced as follows:
and then said:
To which I said:
.
So here goes: Ed has misunderstood the paper and his claims are wrong in many respects. Telomeric sequences protect the end of chromosomes. In vertebrates (including humans) the sequence is TTAGGG repeated hundreds or thousands of times. Interstitial telomeric sequences (usually much shorter than the sequences at telomeres appear not at the end but somewhere within chromosomes. One reason for their presence mid-chromosome is the fusion of ancestral chromosomes - as is clearly the case with the fusion of the two ancestral chromosomes that make up human chromosome 2 (evolutionpages.com/chromosome_2.htm) where there is a pre-telomeric, telomeric, telomeric and pre-telomeric sequence mid-chromosome just where we would expect if two ancestral chromosomes had fused telomere to telomere and we can see that by comparing the human chromosme 2 with the analogous chromosomes in chimps where the chromosomes are not fused.
Other, much shorter, interstitial telomeric sequences appear at or near locations where there have been inversions of sequences and near recombination hotspots. Inversions are relatively uncommon mutations where an entire block of code is excised and inverted in one lineage but not in another. One hypothesis is that these ITSs are signs of genome repair after such sequence inversion. This paper shows that an ITS is present near one end of all inversions between chimp and human and macaque and human studied, but that the sequence does not coincide exactly with the breakpoint end, so is unlikely to have arisen as a consequence of repair. On the contrary, these sequences pre-date the inversion and seem to promote it - so rather than a consequence they seem to be a cause or a partial cause for it. But note that an ITS was associated with every single breakpoint site studied.
Alec
evolutionpages.com/chromosome_2.htm
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hecd2
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Your claims have already been dealt with in detail by Orogeny who is a geologist, but just to reinforce his points - none of the professional geologists that you reference would support Guy Berthault’s grandiose and absurd claims to have overturned all of geology. Berthault is basicaly a crank who did (or paid to have done) one or two sensible experiments in the 1980s on segregating sediments in flows, but whose interpretations of those experiments (that all sedimentary deposition is rapid, that younger strata can underlie older ones, that the kilometres of thickness ofGrand Canyon sedimentary rock is a consequence of a single catastrophic event and that he, Guy Berthault, has single-handedly overturned the entire discipline of sedimentary geology) are ridiculous. In the last few years he has published two or three breathtakingly bad papers in obscure Russian and Chinese journals.hecd2:
If you and the above try and undermine mechanics of sediment formation as observed by the research of Guy Berthault (BG) than you must also try and undermine the research of the following scientists who agree with GB’s observations regarding the rapid deposition of sediments; some of this research preceded GB’s and others followed: For starters you must belittle the observations of the German, J. Walthur’s coring in the Bay of Naples in his 1894 publication whom GB referenced in his main paper of 1993 on flume studies.
Alec
evolutionpages.com/berthault_critique.htm
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hecd2
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Of course you must continue asking, and proposing ideas and of course you must hold to what is important to you. However, I should have thought we would make better and more reliable progress if we discuss specifics around areas that you think might be relevant so that you can then build on firm foundations - that means exploring the details of things. So, I was asking how the discovery of a third kingdom is a good foundation for separating chimps and humans? The existence of this third domain doesn’t support that separation although it explains a great deal about the make-up and evolutionary history of the eukaryotic cell. It confirms Margulis’s hypothesis that mitochondria start out as endosymbiotes and the presence of genetic heritage from both archaea and eubacteria in the nuclei of eukaryotic cells.
Alec
evolutionpages.com
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edwest2
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Your analogy has to do with the recent past. I know you know that. The word combination you refer to comes from Pope Benedict:
bringyou.to/apologetics/p81.htm
Pope Benedict XVI
Monod nonetheless finds the possibility for evolution in the fact that in the very propagation of the project there can be mistakes in the act of transmission. Because nature is conservative, these mistakes, once having come into existence, are carried on. Such mistakes can add up, and from the adding up of mistakes something new can arise. Now an astonishing conclusion follows: It was in this way that the whole world of living creatures, and human beings themselves, came into existence. We are the product of “haphazard mistakes.”
What response shall we make to this view? It is the affair of the natural sciences to explain how the tree of life in particular continues to grow and how new branches shoot out from it. This is not a matter for faith. But we must have the audacity to say that the great projects of the living creation are not the products of chance and error. Nor are they the products of a selective process to which divine predicates can be attributed in illogical, unscientific, and even mythic fashion. The great projects of the living creation point to a creating Reason and show us a creating Intelligence, and they do so more luminously and radiantly today than ever before. Thus we can say today with a new certitude and joyousness that the human being is indeed a divine project, which only the creating Intelligence was strong and great and audacious enough to conceive of. Human beings are not a mistake but something willed; they are the fruit of love. They can disclose in themselves, in the bold project that they are, the language of the creating Intelligence that speaks to them and that moves them to say: Yes, Father, you have willed me.
Peace,
Ed
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StAnastasia
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Of course – that’s why it is an analogy! Let me spell it out:
My being born was contingent on the chance fertilization one egg by one sperm. That’s does not alter my belief that God willed me.
The evolution of the human species was contingent upon the chance fertilization of many eggs by many sperm over countless eons, and the chance survival of parents and their transmission of characteristics to their offspring. That’s does not alter my belief that God willed the human species.
StAnastasia
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