GENETICS- CREATIONISTS need not be INTIMIDATED.

by hooberus 40 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

  • hooberus
    hooberus

    GENETICS- CREATIONISTS need not be INTIMIDATED.

    Internet Evolutionists almost universally and repetitiously proclaim that modern neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory is supported by “overwhelming evidence” and that there is “no evidence” for Biblical creation (or even mere intelligent design) for that matter. They will dogmatically claim that evolution receives universal support from “all the real scientists” and “all the facts” from genetics, biology, geology, paleontology, and every other “ology” that one can think of.

    I think that the situation actually somewhat different. Now, I’m not claiming that the following genetics specific resources “prove the Bible” or even that they “disprove evolution”. But they do show that the evolutionary dogmatist claims like the above are well . . . dogmatist claims, - and that creationists need not necessarily be intimidated by them.

    “Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Human Genome” (second edition), available from http://www.creationresearch.org

    “Dr. Sanford’s popular book explores the limitations of evolution’s primary axiom. This axiom is the evolutionary change (i.e., common descent) is accomplished by a combination of natural selection and random mutations. Using modern genetics research, the former Cornell University scientist provides several challenges to this axiom. Organisms, including humans, are declining in health, not evolving to more advanced stages of evolution. This newest edition contains the addition of a glossary, index, and author’s notes.”

    This is the best recent book for “extincting” neo-Darwinian theory by showing that the deleterious mutation rates are vastly higher than evolution can allow for. Evolutionists admit that the deleterious mutation rate needs to be less (much less in reality) then 1 deleterious mutation on average per individual per generation - otherwise genetic degradation and extinction is inevitable. Contains shocking appendix documenting this from recent top evolutionary journals. Written by a very prominent geneticist. Highly damaging.

    This is also the best book available for an easily understandable explanation of other issues as to the absurdity of neo-Darwinism as our "creator". Very enlightning.

    A DVD is also available. See also: http://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j21_1/j21_1_43-47.pdf -

    The book “The Biotic Message”. http://saintpaulscience.com/contents.htm

    Though not a biblical creationist book this is still a very informative and (though technical) resource providing information on how evolutionists developed their genetic models and the SEVERE remaining problems. For example gives the history on why evolutionists came up with the (now falsified) claim that 99% of DNA is “junk”. (This was not based on observation, but instead on what would be needed to “save” evolution in light of the high observed rates of mutation). Other evolutionists (possibly unaware) later parroted this “ 99% junk” DNA claim as “evidence” against a designer, when in reality it was a figure calculated to bring the effective deleterious mutation rate down by a factor of a hundred to push it to less then one per individual per generation to “save” evolution.

    The book also shows that regardless of the deleterious mutation rates, that the substitution rate of beneficial mutations into a population with long generation times i.e. humans, is so vastly slow that only a negligible amount of beneficial evolution (only a few hundred nucleotides) could occur even over the evolutionists own time frame . This was discovered a long time ago by a very prominent evolutionist and was never solved. "In my opinion the [Haldane's Dilemma] problem was never solved, by Wallace or anyone else."George C. Williams, a highly respected evolutionary geneticist, 1992,
    in his book, Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges, p 143-144

    http://saintpaulscience.com/Haldane.htm

    The book also offers an excellent treatment of problems with a naturalistic origin of life and the genetic code. Responses are given to evolutionists attempts to defeat probability calculations. (Also available from the Creation Research Society)

    Article:

    Astonishing DNA complexity demolishes neo-Darwinism

    http://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j21_3/j21_3_111-117.pdf

    Article:

    Mitochondrial eve and the biblical Eve are looking good: criticism of young age premature

    http://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j19_1/j19_1_57-59.pdf

    Some responses to Evolutionists claims on things like junk DNA, Endogenous Retroviruses, Chromosome fusion, etc.

    http://www.detectingdesign.com/pseudogenes.html

    A WARNING: Many internet evolutionists will frequently try to suppress the reading of any materials against their generally secular, evoltionary naturalist, worldview. They will often dismissively “review” books without even reading them, or search and link you to other “reviews” by other evolutionists who have never really read them. They will often immediately parrot any counter article on the internet without doing virtually any research, and dogmatically claim that the anti-evolutionary claims have thusly been “refuted”. They will also ad hominen the writers. They will appeal to the fact that any referenced evolutionary geneticists still “believe” in evolution, and claim that therefore it is wrong to cite them (even for specific technical points). Even if the anti-evolutionary article has been written and reviewed by qualified scientists (and even though it may document many of its technical point from even evolutionary technical literature), they will still proclaim that the explicit anti-evolutionary article is invalid since it has not been both peer-reviewed and published by editing evolutionist bodies in their evolutionary science journals.

  • bohm
    bohm

    hooberus: I cannot speak of all the resources you posted since i have not read many of them. HOWEVER:...

    Dr. Sanford base many on his claims on a particular simulation he wrote. WHENEVER you write a simulation, you want to VALIDATE it to make sure you didnt make a mistake. To my knowledge Dr. Sanford never validate his model. Speaking as someone who has read countless papers on various simulations this is a giant red flag. Its like saying a particular type of drug works without testing it. Sanford appears to do it for good reasons - his simulation is not compatible with the real world, and make some unphysical assumptions about evolution so that it HAVE to give poor results. Furthermore, when i examined the simulation, it contained a rather grave bug in the code that controlled how surviving species was selected.

    The worst problem about Dr. Sanfords results remain that his simulation repeatly predict that things such as Mice and Flies (with a far shorter life-span than humans) would all be dead by now - Dr. Sanford is a young earth creationist, by the way.

    Secondly, WHENEVER you attack the mechanism you want to keep in mind that evolution is a well known optimization strategy that is used in computer science and engineering every day. It works. Its that simple. It cant be argued, you can only argue if it can produce as complicated things as life. To make matters worse, non-trivial adaptions has been seen in several laberatory experiments.

  • MissingLink
    MissingLink

    Why don't you site any watchtower articles? They're just as good.

  • BurnTheShips
    BurnTheShips

    Hooberus, I don't have the time to go and read all of those resources right now. I'd appreciate it however, if you could explain the arguments. And yes, the whole junk DNA thing is not only itself junk, but highly popularized junk that has been misused by certain prominent figures that I need not name. However, there have been scientists all along that have believed this to be wrong, and we now know it is wrong. "Junk" DNA is a repository of unused genetic material, which, through mutation, can become active and serve a purpose at some point in the evolutionary career of a phylogenetic branch of the tree of Life. It's a non-coding genetic warehouse. There's stuff there we needed at one point in our ancestral past, but don't anymore. But just in case we need it in the future, it's still there.

    And please, for the love of the Chief Evolutionist, don't bring up Haldane again like you always do. His arguments are based on assumptions that don't map to reality.

    BTS

  • bohm
    bohm

    BTS, Hooberus: I will agree to some extent. Junk DNA (i use it here to describe parts of DNA which does not seem to code to any proteines or serve any function) is predicted by evolution to be highly nonrandom and (primarely) that it *must* be there otherwise evolution is false (so if one could show parts of the human DNA did not serve a function, evolution would have gotten a prediction right, yah!). BTS: I have not thought about the 'genetic warehouse' view. Are you aware of any experiments one could perform to determine if the junk DNA indeed is a 'genetic warehouse', or if it is just various leftovers from retrovirus and other evolutionary processes.

    (Evolution allow 'junk' dna to act as a warehouse, but i understand you to imply that the junk dna didnt get there from evolution in the first place)

  • Mad Sweeney
    Mad Sweeney

    If one is rational enough to not take the Bible as literal and yet value it as perhaps the world's most important piece of literature, none of this evolution versus creation stuff really matters.

    I frankly don't allow evolution to have anything to do with whether I believe in God. They are two different topics who's paths only cross when you bring the dogmatic views of religionists into contrast with the equally dogmatic views of many scientists.

  • BurnTheShips
    BurnTheShips
    BTS: I have not thought about the 'genetic warehouse' view. Are you aware of any experiments one could perform to determine if the junk DNA indeed is a 'genetic warehouse', or if it is just various leftovers from retrovirus and other evolutionary processes.

    Bohm:

    Research Barbara McClintock and Lynn Margulis. I find that atheists frequently bandy about the "junk DNA" argument without understanding it, because they think it bolsters their case. Creationists fight it for the same reason. However, most, or all, of the "junk DNA" likely serves a biological function, and research is revealing it more and more.

    For example, some of the "junk" may serve a spacer function between coding regions. Junk DNA is a misnomer for DNA that is non coding. Our knowledge of the genome is still very incomplete. The more evidence accumulates, the more it has become apparent that much of this so called "junk" DNA serves a necessary biological purpose. For example, the size of the non coding portion of the genome varies wildly from species to another, and the actual size may perform some evolutionary function. There is a large evolutionary cost involved with maintaining a large genome full of "junk" as opposed to a small one. As you know adaptation favors efficiency, cave fish lose their eyes, birds on remote islands without predators lose their ability to fly, and so on. Some organisms have very short DNA sequences, with very little "junk", others have very long ones.

    But there are other reasons as well, some of these non-coding regions may perform a regulatory function for the coding regions:

    http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S24/28/32C04/

    I think some of it serves as a reservoir of genes that may become active as evolutionarily needed. A mutation may activate some of the junk, and that junk, when expressed, may convey an advantage. Think of it as an "archive" of past adaptations that are no longer needed. A programmer for example, may save code that is no longer used in the current version of a program by commenting it out, but may make it active again in a future version.

    http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/1386/junk-dna-not-so-useless-after-all

    http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v447/n7146/pdf/nature05874.pdf

    Regarding a viral etiology for some of the non-coding DNA, yes, that is, in fact, the case. But I think that viruses have long served as vectors for DNA transfer across different species. We'd never have been here if it wasn't for the parasites.

    Just about all the popularizations of evolution I have ever read or heard of set up discrete boundaries regarding the evolutionary process, limiting the transfer of information to within a species through reproduction. That's a vertical gene transfer. But the natural world doesn't work that way. Genes can and do cross species boundaries. Humans themselves have done it. Take maize for example. There is no such thing as wild maize, although there are wild close relatives like teosinte. Humans mixed several different species together, and improved the hybrids through selection. Google the transposon theory. Interspecies gene transfer. The horizontal movement of genetic information from one species to the next. Those selfish genes! They just want to propagate! Species be damned! The idea earned a Nobel Prize.

    (Evolution allow 'junk' dna to act as a warehouse, but i understand you to imply that the junk dna didnt get there from evolution in the first place)

    I didn't mean to imply that. Special creation isn't necessary to explain the presence of non-coding, "junk DNA". It's a natural part of the molecular processes that control the transfer of genetic information from one generation to the next, and the transfer between species.

    //begin ramble

    Evolution isn't just competitive, by the way, it is highly cooperative. It isn't just survival of the fittest, it is the survival of the best team players. We're all symbiotes. Even our eukaryotic cells are the result of more primitive prokaryotes joining forces. Your cellular mitochondria has it's own DNA, an ancient holdover from when that organelle was once a discrete organism. You can even trace matrilinear ancestry with it (male sperm don't bring mitochondrial DNA into the picture at fertilization, only nuclear, it's all female ovum there). Back to cooperation: you can be very good at making goals, but if you can't receive a pass well, or give one out, or coordinate your strategy, your team will lose. At one point in time, a couple of primitive cells "thought it was a better idea" to mix n' match their DNA together when replicating. This increased the chances of new combinations, and new adaptations. Eventually, the cooperative technique became so specialized that we ended up with the two sexes. The biosphere is like a giant team of cooperative organisms. Take the human body as an example. It is a giant team of cooperative cells. The biosphere has regulatory processes like the human body does, and different species are like different tissue types. To further the example, individual organisms could be likened to individual cells. It's like a mega-organism, if you think about it. Evolution is beautiful, so beautiful. Some people take it as proof there is no God. Others see it's sublime, adaptive, self regulating beauty as evidence of an incredible Creator. We look in a mirror, and only see ourselves. Anyway, thanks for reading my ramble.

    //end ramble

    BTS

  • frankiespeakin
    frankiespeakin

    I think the junk DNA serves probably a couple of purposes but I may be wrong but would like to throw this thought out there anyway.

    When you look at the embryonic development from fertilization to birth we can see the gradual evolutionary history of humans from a one celled animal to when we had gills and to our present stage. Well maybe the so called "junk DNA" plays a vital role in this process as it contains the vital instructions by having it read and active during this stage following the exact same process step by step but in a much more sped up form than the original billion year process.

    There is one test that we can make to see if that is true but I don't think we have sophisticated enough machinery yet to do it: Take an animal and cut out all the "junk" DNA of both the male and female and use them use them to fertilize each other and see if an embryo develops.

  • frankiespeakin
    frankiespeakin

    Here's an interesting find about Junk DNA:

    Junk DNA may have handed us a gripping future

    http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14667-junk-dna-may-have-handed-us-a-gripping-future.html

  • frankiespeakin
    frankiespeakin

    Wow I''ve been doing searches and came to this on Junk DNA:

    http://allthings2all.blogspot.com/2004/10/junk-dna-appears-vital-for-life.html

    It has been known for some time that there is a process known as reprogramming that takes place in embryos - certain genes are turned off and others are turned on. A new genetic blueprint is formed for a unique individual. This new research has discovered that the junk DNA is involved in this process - it "triggers sequential reprogramming of the embryonic genome during the oocyte to embryo transition and in preimplantation embryos."
    Or in other words, the junk DNA turns on different sets of genes during different stages of embryonic development, from the unfertilized egg through to embryo formation before it is implanted in the womb. It does this by acting as a promoter - a piece of DNA which sits in front of a gene and acts as a signal for the gene to be activated. The junk DNA is in effect the crucial signal for a switch from off to on for different genes that regulate the growth from egg to embryo.

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