Oldest Grave Flowers Unearthed in Israel

[rossum]

You don’t even know the definition of “evolution” let alone know when you are “being told rubbish.”

It is your sources which need to learn the definition of evolution:

The Definition:
Biological evolution, simply put, is descent with modification. This definition encompasses small-scale evolution (changes in gene frequency in a population from one generation to the next) and large-scale evolution (the descent of different species from a common ancestor over many generations). Evolution helps us to understand the history of life.

Source: Evolution 101.

rossum

 

[HansTrappist]

It is your sources which need to learn the definition of evolution:

The Definition:
Biological evolution, simply put, is descent with modification. This definition encompasses small-scale evolution (changes in gene frequency in a population from one generation to the next) and large-scale evolution (the descent of different species from a common ancestor over many generations). Evolution helps us to understand the history of life.

Source: Evolution 101.

rossum

Darwinian Evolution is actually a witch’s brew of three ingredients: random mutation, natural selection, and common descent.

Common descent by itself is actually quite trivial. It only tries to account for similarities between creatures. It simply says that certain shared features were present from the beginning - the ancestor had them. Common descent doesn’t tell us how the features or the ancestor got their in the first place.

Natural selection is also a quite trivial concept. It simply asserts that the most fit organisms in a species will produce more surviving offspring than the less fit. Uh, duh.

Random mutation is the bread and butter of Darwinian “evolution”. Until random mutation appears, natural selection is powerless. But random variation, selection and inheritance will only work if their is a smooth evolutionary pathway. If there is not a smooth, gradually rising, easily found evolutionary pathway leading to a biological system within a reasonable time, Darwinian (aka Random, Chance) processes won’t work. Time is not the chief factor in evolution - population sizes are. In calculating how quickly a beneficial random mutation might appear for natural selection to act upon, evolutionary biologists multiply the mutation rate by the population size. Since the mutation rate is pretty similar for many kinds of organisms, the waiting time for the appearance of beneficial random mutations depends mostly on the numbers of organisms: the bigger the population size or the faster the reproduction cycle, the more quickly a particular beneficial random mutation will show up. The numbers of malaria cells and HIV in just the past 50 years are greater than the number of mammals that have lived on earth in the past several hundred million years. So, the evolutionary behavior of malaria and HIV in even such a short time as a half century gives us a clear indication of what can happen with larger organisms over enormous time spans. What is observed? Evolution? No. Devolution is all we see. Sorry to bust your bubble, rossum, but you did not get here by Darwinian (random) evolution. You got here thanks to the Intelligent Designer. Yay!!!

By the way, rossum, Darwinian evolution is not even a novel concept. It goes back to Epicurus, who believed that Science should be therapeutic rather than about truth-seeking. Epicurus used Science to achieve “ataraxia” (freedom from disturbance) from all those, you know, nasty thoughts of an Afterlife and Judgement.

 

[Mount_Carmel]

Are you an expert on genetics?

My sister-in-law is - she has a PhD in population Genetics AND a PhD in Theology - she has taught both at graduate and post-graduate levels.

She has had a number of books and articles on Human Genetics published, and was a contributor and co-editor of a cerebral tome called, ‘God, Humanity and the Cosmos’.

She is co-founder, with Professor Geoffrey Cantor, of the Centre for Science and Religion at Leeds University.

She is better academically qualified than Dawkins, and appears in the opposite theological camp to him.

 

[The_Serpent]

I don’t know when Adam lived, but there is an ancient tradition that says where he was buried. It’s the same place where Christ, the new Adam, was crucified. “And they brought him to the place called Gol′gotha (which means the place of a skull).” (Matt. 15:22) “The place of the skull” is referring to the skull of Adam. Everything mentioned in the gospels has a deep significance.

I suddenly recall the amateur Christian (Non Catholic) Archaeologist Ron Wyatt, claimed he found the Ark of the Covenant; under the place where the Lord was crucified. Perhaps if he did find something, it was Adam’s tomb? His site for this is not the Catholic site however.

 

[The_Serpent]

Again, I ask you: what information is “inaccurate”?

In case you didn’t read it, I will highlight the scientific assertions that I linked to earlier (cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/humanity.html). You tell me which ones are inaccurate and why:

There have been a number of evidences recently that the human race is very young. For example,** a recent issue of* Science*** (Collins, F., M. Guyer, and A. Chakravarti, “Variations on a Theme: Human DNA Sequence Variation,” Science 278:1580-1581, 28 November 1997, page 1581) said that the age of the human race is roughly 1,000 to 10,000 generations:

… 1000 to 10,000 generations old, which is roughly the age of the human population, …

We review some of this evidence for the youth of the human race, including recent findings concerning mitochondrial DNA mutation rates which give even a much younger age than 1,000 generations.

Age estimates are obtained by observing differences between the DNA of different individuals, and are calculated using estimates of mutation rates. Mitochondrial DNA is often used for this; it is separate from the bulk of the human DNA, which is found in the cell nucleus. Mitochondrial DNA has about 16,000 base pairs and mutates, apparently, much faster than the nuclear DNA. Human mitochondrial DNA has been completely mapped, and all the coding regions are known, and the proteins or RNA for which they code. Some of the mitochondrial DNA does not code for anything, and is known as a control region. This region appears to mutate faster than any other region, because the variation among humans is greatest here.

Recently, mitochondrial DNA mutation rates were measured directly (Parsons, Thomas J., et al., A high observed substitution rate in the human mitochondrial DNA control region, Nature Genetics vol. 15, April 1997, pp. 363-367). The mutation rate in a segment of the control region of mitochondrial DNA was directly measured by comparing mitochondrial DNA from siblings and from parents and their offspring. Mitochondrial DNA was found to mutate about 20 times faster than previously thought, at a rate of one mutation (substitution) every 33 generations, approximately. In this section of the control region, which has about 610 base pairs, humans typically differ from one another by about 18 mutations. By simple mathematics, it follows that the human race is about 300 generations old. If one assumes a typical generation is about 20 years, this gives an age of about 6000 years.

This calculation is done in the following way. Let us consider two randomly chosen human beings, assuming all human beings initially have identical mitochondrial DNA. After 33 generations, two such random humans will probably differ by two mutations, since there will be two separate lines of inheritance and probably one mutation along each line. After 66 generations, two randomly chosen humans will differ by about four mutations. After 100 generations, they will differ by about six mutations. After 300 generations, they will differ by about 18 mutations, which is about the observed value.

We see that the mathematics is extremely simple. However, this timetable would revolutionize the history of humanity from a scientific standpoint, so biologists attempt to explain away the data. They do this in the following way: They assume that in this control region, most of the mutations are harmful. This means that individuals having more mutations are more likely to die, so that among surviving individuals, the number of mutations increases more slowly.

However, this explanation is implausible for the following reasons. First, we know that the control region does not code for any protein or RNA, so it is unlikely that mutations there would be harmful. Second, the fact that there is a lot of variation between individuals in this region suggests that mutations there do not have a harmful effect. Finally, one study noted that humans evolve (that is, accumulate mutations) 1.8 times faster in the control region than in silent sites in the mitochondrial DNA. (See ``Recent African origin of modern humans revealed by complete sequences of hominoid mitochondrial DNAs’’ by S. Horai, K. Hayasaka, R. Kondo, K. Tsugane, and N. Takahata, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 1995 Jan 17;92(2):532-536.) Silent sites do not affect the amino acid coded for, and so they generally do not have much of an effect. The fact that the control region evolves 1.8 times faster (that is, mutations accumulate 1.8 times faster) indicates that the control region has even less of an influence than the silent sites, also making it unlikely that mutations in the control region are harmful. A similar result was found for ducks, in which the control region evolves 4.4 times faster than the mitochondrial DNA in general. See Michael D. Sorenson and Robert C. Fleischer, Multiple independent transpositions of mitochondrial DNA control region sequences to the nucleus, PNAS 1996 93: pp. 15239-15243. This is additional evidence that the control region is not constrained much, and that mutations there are not very harmful.

Despite the sensational impact of this calculation on the chronology of the human race, we see that the most reasonable interpretation of the data is to assume that the human race is in fact about 6000 years old…

This is really interesting, however why are they going with a 20 year generation gap? What is their definition of a generation?