Posted on 09/16/2007 3:45:54 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
“The gene is dead... long live the gene,” announced subtitles to an article in Science News this week.1 Geneticists have come to a striking conclusion over the last few years: genes are not the most important things in DNA, if they even exist as a concept.
The “central dogma” of genetics, since Watson and Crick determined the structure of DNA, is that genetic information flows one-way – from the gene to the protein. In the textbooks, a gene was supposed to be a finite stretch of DNA that, when read by the translation process, produced a messenger RNA, which recruited transfer RNAs to assemble the amino acids for one protein.
As Patrick Barry described in his article “Genome 2.0,”1 the situation in real cells is much messier. “Mountains of new data are challenging old views,” his subtitle announced, including the “modern orthodoxy” that only genes are important:
"Researchers slowly realized, however, that genes occupy only about 1.5 percent of the genome. The other 98.5 percent, dubbed “junk DNA,“ was regarded as useless scraps left over from billions of years of random genetic mutations. As geneticists’ knowledge progressed, this basic picture remained largely unquestioned...." "Closer examination of the full human genome is now causing scientists to return to some questions they thought they had settled. For one, they’re revisiting the very notion of what a gene is."...
http://creationsafaris.com/crev200709.htm#20070912a
(Excerpt) Read more at creationsafaris.com ...
I think that's the phrase you are grasping for and not finding ~ "Honest Abe" and "Young George Washington" are certainly as much creations of literary license as they are their mothers' loins yet we do not doubt they existed.
Actually, anyone who is a scientist knows that you are not able to connect the dots. You really come across as a joke to people who actually do this stuff for a living. There was a time when I felt sorry for you, but now you are just another creationist pretender that deserves derision.
You biggest failure is your lack of ability to recognize the difference between new insights that shed more light on how evolution operates versus something that would disprove evolution. The nature of this article is no different than any other area of science where things change. A new chemical reaction may be discovered or the synthesis of new compound, either entirely new or a biological compound never before prepared in the lab. Or a material with radically new peoperties may be prepared. None of this invalidates chemistry. Does the discovery of a new element invalidate the theory behind the Periodic Table? Did Einstein invalidate Newton? No. But some psychological misfiring makes you, and other creationists, think that research that advances biology somehow invalidates evolution and supports the silly notion of a 6K year old Earth and custom made life. Thank God real scientists aren't as mind numbingly incompetent as creationists.
Really? So why do we need faster and more powerful computers to run newer generations of Windows? Why do newer versions run slower on the same machine compared to older versions? I'm under the impression the Microsoft simply relies on improved computer performance to hide their software's glaring innefficiencies.
These guys put code in there to enable certain portions of the body of code to be run AFTER other portions have been run so that the answer (usually a string of pictels) shows up in the proper sequence at the right time.
My old Ashton Tate Framework software quit working at all about 6 years ago ~ a company bought it up, reworked the timing sections, and put it back out on the market for many boucoup bucks.
Windows was made smaller about 8 years ago when Microsoft rewrote Basic. This was based on a statistical analysis of relative rates of occurrence of various sorts of statements. Without changing clocks on chips MS managed to more than double the amount of processing that could be done in the same time.
Making Windows "smaller" by reducing the code elements definitely increased their ability to stuff more programs into Windows.
They also don't load everything at the same time ~ pieces sit out there on disk waiting for later use. The earliest Windows didn't have that feature ~ they stuffed the whole thing into your CPU ~ by deleting "color" you could run it without additional memory though.
==You...nitpick science from beginning to end while making laughable mistakes, embrace young earth creationism with all of its disproved ideas, and then claim to be making scientific discoveries.
1) Name DLR’s “laughable” mistakes
2) Specify the disproved ideas of YEC
3) What specific scientific discoveries by Creationists do you contest?
PS Resist the temptation to quote bomb. Just make a list and we’ll go from there—GGG
Sorry Davey, but you've got things turned around. The reason we don't take creation 'science' seriously is not because we automatically dismiss their work but on the contrary, we dismiss their work because we have taken serious looks at it. Had we found anything more than incredible leaps of logic in their just so stories, and the abuse of known physical laws we wouldn't be so quick to dismiss their later works. If you can come up with some creation science that does not presuppose a supernatural cause and modify the known laws to accommodate that presupposition then we can talk. As it stands right now, all of the Creation 'science' out there suggests that the laws of physics we are familiar with must have been different in the past, with no evidence as support. In fact, had those laws been different in the past, they would have left evidence obvious to us now. We don't see that evidence.
For all of your dislike of 'naturalism' as a philosophy, which I assume you believe pervades all of scientific investigation, naturalism as a methodology was developed by Christians as a way to pull information from the natural world about how God accomplished what he accomplished. Those same techniques are used not only by secular scientists but by your mistakenly trusted Creation scientists, albeit quite superficially. Part of methodology is the assumption that God would not 'play' with experiments or change the laws of nature capriciously. The main difference between Creation scientists and secular scientists, who both rely on physical evidence, both directly observed (seldom) and inferred from the directly observed (most frequently), is that the secular scientist requires an hypothesis to fit the observations whereas the creation scientist requires the observation to fit the hypothesis. Creation scientists spend their time fitting the world into their world view. This bias is admitted freely on many Creationist web sites, as Cman has tried to get you to understand. The modification of data, failure to perform falsifying tests, inability to make predictions, and the extensive modification of physical laws, all to fit a preconceived notion, is not science. If a secular scientist were to do the same thing, his work would be analzed, considered and rejected for failure to follow the methodology necessary to remove as much of the normal human bias from his work. The critiques would be harsh, blunt and straight forward, because that is how scientists are, but they would be accurate. If he continued to push his work, without modifying his hypothesis to follow evidence, he would be ridiculed and eventually laughed at by his peers, and rightly so. If you were to run across a person, hit on the head by an apple, claiming that the sky is falling, you would use a similar process. Eventually you would either try to get the person help for his mental problem or you would avoid him in future.
Creation science is that deluded person, relying on imagined changes to physical laws with no corroborating evidence, in order to fit the world into their tiny restricted belief system. They ignore and pervert the system their philosophical ancestors developed long ago. Those early Christians decided that methodological naturalism was the way to go because they trusted their God. You and your sources do the exact opposite, you assume God has and does change things in order to make the Biblical Genesis story accurate.
Because of the number of times secular scientists have seriously investigated the claims of Creation scientists and found those claims to be ridiculously unfounded and based on everything from bad data collection, to bad analysis to horribly distorted conclusions, the term YEC scientist is now taken to mean someone with no interest in following the evidence but in distorting it. That is why we ignore your links to Creation 'scientists'.
2) Specify the disproved ideas of YEC
3) What specific scientific discoveries by Creationists do you contest?
I don't pay much attention to Dave, so someone else will have to field #1.
As for #2, a "young earth."
And as for #3, I can't contest any "scientific discoveries by Creationists" because I'm not aware that there are any. Perhaps you could help out by naming a few.
And the "scientific discoveries by Creationists" are?
Davey, the evidence is not there. The conjectures you and others have put forward as evidence for a young Earth simply do not make sense given the current state of knowledge and known physical 'laws'. Much of your evidence is based on changing physical laws or on ignoring data contrary to your preconceptions. And no, it is not about the 'interpretation' of the evidence based on philosophical bias for secular scientists, it is about trying to form a logical conclusion based on numerous data points taken from a variety of disciplines. All of the data points, the analysis and the conclusions must be valid within all known contexts. Your Creation science does not do that, they take a piece of science they do not like and either modify the data, the analysis or change the context to such a degree that the evidence does not fit in with any other science. That is why people like Brown and Sutterfield scramble to get their notions back in line with other sciences by proposing outlandish and unbelievable 'just so' fixes. Their 'just so' stories are much bigger and more outrageous than anything science could propose.
"I gave you a big fat list of dating revisions and other arguments against the infallibility of your dating methods (which you never much got around to refuting) and I just gave you another one now.
Who says that our dating methods are infallible? You are creating a straw man so that you can come up with one error and say "see the whole house of cards falls because of one error". That is nonsense. I could just as easily say the same about a straw man of the Bible. Both would be equally dishonest.
Scientists know very well that a single test can have errors, that is why more than one method of dating is used and dates are cross referenced. A lot of research goes into determining the limits of specific dating methods to find the most common errors and the most appropriate corrections for those errors. It seems to me you believe scientists use only those methods which give them the oldest ages rather than those which give the best accuracy. You also seem to believe scientists don't care about errors and don't take precautions to avoid them. This is a highly inaccurate characterization of science and scientists. Perhaps if you would take the time to investigate how those methods are used before you read Creationist literature damning the methods you too might find the Creationist sources are mistaken.
"You yourself admitted that if you got a young (geologic) date, you'd toss it out.
You keep repeating this obvious mischaracterization. Do you not understand how the process works or are you being dishonest?
If you have a number of dates, say several dozen, that give you a normal distribution, should you take the mean, the median, or the mode as representative of the correct date? Or should you take a date several std.dev. away? More importantly, in a Chi Square distribution, should you accept one of the outliers or accept those with the best fit?
If a date not in with the 'pack', whether too high or too low, skews the data when doing an analysis should you leave it in and run with the skewed conclusion or remove it to get a better idea of what the vast majority of dates is trying to tell you? Should a date that is too high be treated differently than one too low?
If you are suggesting that we take the low date simply because it agrees with your preconceptions and ignore all the other dates, you are fudging the data. Is that honest?
"Now you're trying to peg someone else for allegedly not accepting the first result because of previously-formed assumptions. I've got five words for you, and three of them are pot, kettle and black.
First result?
Are you under the impression that a single date is taken at a time?
Are you under the impression that what has happened in the past has no meaning in the now?
That is quite the leap. Are you saying that the belief we all have a common ancestor in some way contributed to the belief that genes were the only thing we should consider? How would that work?
Quite the stretch Davie. The new date is that of the uplift, not the age of the underlying rocks. Go lift the end of your couch and tell me how much younger it becomes. I'll bet your Mom has a bill telling you how old the couch is but I doubt she could give you a date for the last time it moved.
Compare apples with apples, Davie, not oranges.
It's what we can't see that makes us see
No worries. Atlaw’s non-answers will not prompt me to fill in the blanks for him. I await Coyote’s specific answers. But nothing forcoming so far.
Is this the discovery that’s going to drive the last nail into the Theory of Evolution’s coffin yet again?
No actually it doesn't. Your interpretation of it has been affected by your Creationist coloured glasses.
No evolutionary idea hinges on whether or not more than the gene is totally responsible for the phenotype. As long as there is a mechanism for passing on morphology, with a few errors, from one generation to the next, evolution will continue quite well. Scientists came to the belief that the gene was solely responsible for organismal morphology, not because they believed in evolution but because all they saw at the time was the affect genes had on morphology. If the belief in evolution stifled the investigation of how the genotype affects the phenotype and how some of the morphology of an organism is outside of direct control of the genome (the external environment has an effect), we would not now be studying Evo-Devo.
You can't make the claim that evolution stifles investigation when it was 'evolutionists' who decided to investigate further.
"qualified or credentialed" is a necessary but not sufficient criteria to be classed as a scientist.
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