Posted on 09/30/2005 5:42:09 PM PDT by gobucks
<< 500 hundred years ago people still thought the earth was flat. >>
It is sort of an "urban legend" -- but still widely taught -- that people at that time did not know about the sphericity of the Earth. There is a good book by a former Librarian of Congress [Daniel Boorstin, I think] that explains the origins of this myth.
It is deeply ingrained in a lot of folks. I was surprised when so many of my college students were surprised when I explained this. They had all been taught the myth about the "myth."
The ancient Greeks understood the sphericity of the Earth. Aristotle gave the classic arguments: ships masts disappearing before the ships do as they sail away; the shape of the Earth's shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse; and the fact that as one travels north or south, new stars appear in the direction one travels, while stars behind him disappear under the horizon.
The Greeks also figured out that the Sun was larger than the Earth and much farther away than the moon -- and Eratosthenes calcuated the circumference of the Earth.
The sphericity of the Earth was not in question at the Council of Salamanca, at which Columbus made his case for a voyage westward. It was the distance to Asia that was the bone of contention -- and it turned out that Columbus's claim was false, while his opponents were correct.
If you read up on the proceedings at the council, you will see that the shape of the Earth was never at issue. What was unexpected to both sides was for Columbus to bump into something about half-way around. He was expecting to reach Asia any day when land was sighted -- and he insisted to his dying day that he HAD reached Asia. His crew was getting very restless at the time of land-sighting, because they would have soon run out of provisions -- just as the opponents of Columbus had warned -- and they had been led by Columbus to expect to reach Asia by that time.
Perhaps the everyday uneducated peasant of the time looked around himself and gave no thought to the possibility that the Earth was a sphere -- but among scholars, the question had long since been settled.
Submitted humbly and in good cheer. BTW -- I just registered today after reading faithfully for a couple of years. I have enjoyed the discussions immensely and have learned a lot.
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But isn't that the same as evolution. Now I am confused.
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Evolution takes time! This may be the beginning of speciation, but the constant intermingling and the lack of time produced only geographical races, not different species.
But, if you keep groups apart long enough that they change to a larger degree, or cannot interbreed because of geographic separation or some other cause, you could end up with different species in time.
Lets try an example. Your Miniature Chihuahua and my oversized Great Dane are both Canis familiaris, and of the same species. They can interbreed.
But, they can't interbreed on their own. Because of the size difference which we have created, they are on their way to being different species. If they were left on their own for a few hundred thousand years, and if they did not tend toward a more normal median size on their own (in response to their environment) perhaps they would become two different species.
This is the case with all critters. At one distant time, Africa and South America were contiguous. New and Old World Monkeys were all part of the same line, but the continents drifted apart and so did the monkeys. They gradually became quite different.
Try Stanley Garn's Human Races, third edition or better. Its pretty cheap.
I hope you are not a troll. I have spent some time on this, its late and I haven't shaved, so I do hope your questions are genuine.
"A lot of people working within the evolutionary paradigm are anything but stupid, and we need to be ready to candidly acknowledge that if we are going to have any chance at reaching them."
No argument, and I agree with the assessment regarding how Horvind is not doing it the way he should be...
A long time ago, however, it dawned on me that the YEC side of this whole conflict was one that both sides see for what it is. I could spend alot of time defending YECs or attacking them, and either way I'd have good reasons for both.
But in terms of political impact, I don't think they are the biggest factor in the end, and I don't think they have much pull in driving away 'fence sitters' to the wrong side. If that happens and they want to blame YECS for the reason they were 'pushed', they weren't really fence sitters to start out with.
But anyway, I have seen his stuff; if I had my way, Frank Turek would be the first choice for voicing how one should think and speak about the subject. I don't buy Horvind's stuff, and when folks ask me about him, I'm simply noncomittal.
On the other hand, it is true that some people STILL believe in SPONTANEOUS GENERATION (aka evolution)
"Welcome to FreeRepublic!"
<< On the other hand, it is true that some people STILL believe in SPONTANEOUS GENERATION (aka evolution) >>
As has been explained a hundred times already, evolution does not concern itself with origins of life -- just what happens after that. And Redi's experiments did not deal with first life, either.
But -- well -- I'm sure you've heard this plenty. I'm not an apologist, just an interested observer.
M
"Welcome to FreeRepublic!"
Thanks -- and thanks for the picture. Made me guffaw!
"I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration... Communist indoctrination... Communist subversion... and the international Communist conspiracy... to sap and impurify all of our vital bodily fluids!"
M
Substitute "evolution" where "Creationism" is found. Same question.
You're not going to be able to reach them because they're not stupid.
That's just a very simple example...but there are more.
Greater than 98% Chimp/human DNA similarity? Not any more.
A common evolutionary argument gets reevaluated—by evolutionists themselves.
by David DeWitt
A new report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the common value of >98% similarity of DNA between chimp and humans is incorrect.2 Roy Britten, author of the study, puts the figure at about 95% when insertions and deletions are included. Importantly, there is much more to these studies than people realize.
The >98.5% similarity has been misleading because it depends on what is being compared. There are a number of significant differences that are difficult to quantify. A review by Gagneux and Varki4 described a list of genetic differences between humans and the great apes. The differences include ‘cytogenetic differences, differences in the type and number of repetitive genomic DNA and transposable elements, abundance and distribution of endogenous retroviruses, the presence and extent of allelic polymorphisms, specific gene inactivation events, gene sequence differences, gene duplications, single nucleotide polymorphisms, gene expression differences, and messenger RNA splicing variations.’4
Specific examples of these differences include:
1. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes while chimpanzees have 24. Evolutionary scientists believe that one of the human chromosomes has been formed through the fusion of two small chromosomes in the chimp instead of an intrinsic difference resulting from a separate creation.
2. At the end of each chromosome is a string of repeating DNA sequences called a telomere. Chimpanzees and other apes have about 23 kilobases (a kilobase is 1,000 base pairs of DNA) of repeats. Humans are unique among primates with much shorter telomeres only 10 kilobases long.7
3. While 18 pairs of chromosomes are ‘virtually identical’, chromosomes 4, 9 and 12 show evidence of being ‘remodeled.’5 In other words, the genes and markers on these chromosomes are not in the same order in the human and chimpanzee. Instead of ‘being remodeled’ as the evolutionists suggest, these could, logically, also be intrinsic differences because of a separate creation.
4. The Y chromosome in particular is of a different size and has many markers that do not line up between the human and chimpanzee.1
5. Scientists have prepared a human-chimpanzee comparative clone map of chromosome 21 in particular. They observed ‘large, non-random regions of difference between the two genomes.’ They found a number of regions that ‘might correspond to insertions that are specific to the human lineage.’3
6. The size of the chimpanzee genome is 10% greater than the size of the human genome.9
These types of differences are not generally included in calculations of percent DNA similarity.
In one of the most extensive studies comparing human and chimp DNA,3 the researchers compared >19.8 million bases. While this sounds like a lot, it still represents slightly less than 1% of the genome. They calculated a mean identity of 98.77% or 1.23% differences. However, this, like other studies only considered substitutions and did not take insertions or deletions into account as the new study by Britten did. A nucleotide substitution is a mutation where one base (A, G, C, or T) is replaced with another. An insertion or deletion (indel) is found where there are nucleotides missing when two sequences are compared.
Insertion/deletion
Comparison between a base substitution and an insertion/deletion. Two DNA sequences can be compared. If there is a difference in the nucleotides (an A instead of a G) this is a substitution. In contrast, if there is a nucleotide base which is missing it is considered an insertion/deletion. It is assumed that a nucleotide has been inserted into one of the sequences or one has been deleted from the other. It is often too difficult to determine whether the difference is a result of an insertion or a deletion and thus it is called an ‘indel’. Indels can be of virtually any length.
The Britten2 study looked at 779 kilobase pairs to carefully examine differences between chimpanzees and humans. He found that 1.4% of the bases had been substituted, which was in agreement with previous studies (98.6% similarity). However, he found a much larger number of indels. Most of these were only 1 to 4 nucleotides in length, although there were a few that were > 1000 base pairs long. Surprisingly, the indels added an additional 3.4 % of base pairs that were different.
While previous studies have focused on base substitutions, they have missed perhaps the greatest contribution to the genetic differences between chimps and humans. Missing nucleotides from one or the other appear to account for more than twice the number of substituted nucleotides. Although the number of substitutions is about ten times higher than the number of indels, the number of nucleotides involved in indels is greater. These indels were reported to be equally represented in the chimp and human sequences. Therefore, the insertions or deletions were not occurring only in the chimp or only in the human and could also be interpreted as intrinsic differences.
Will evolution be called into question now that the similarity of chimpanzee and human DNA has been reduced from >98.5% to ~95%? Probably not. Regardless of whether the similarity was reduced even below 90%, evolutionists would still believe that humans and apes shared a common ancestor. Moreover, using percentages hides an important fact. If 5% of the DNA is different, this amounts to 150,000,000 DNA base pairs that are different between them!
A number of studies have demonstrated a remarkable similarity in the nuclear DNA and mtDNA among modern humans. In fact, the DNA sequences for all people are so similar that scientists generally conclude that there is a ‘recent single origin for modern humans, with general replacement of archaic populations.’8 To be fair, the estimates for a date of a ‘most recent common ancestor’ (MRCA) by evolutionists has this ‘recent single origin’ about 100,000-200,000 years ago, which is not recent by creationist standards. These estimates have been based on comparisons with chimpanzees and the assumption of a chimp/human common ancestor approximately 5 million years ago. In contrast, studies that have used pedigrees or generational mtDNA comparisons6, 10, 11 have yielded a much more recent MRCA—even 6,500 years!10
Research on observable generational mutation events leads to a more recent common ancestor for humans than phylogenetic estimates that assume a relationship with chimpanzees. Mutational hotspots are believed to account for this difference.6 However, in both cases, they are relying on uniformitarian principles—that rates measured in the present can be used to extrapolate the timing of events in the distant past.
The above examples demonstrate that the conclusions of scientific investigations can be different depending on how the study is done. Humans and chimps can have 95% or >98.5% similar DNA depending on which nucleotides are counted and which are excluded. Modern humans can have a single recent ancestor <10,000 or 100,000-200,000 years ago depending on whether a relationship with chimpanzees is assumed and which types of mutations are considered.
References
1. Archidiacono, N., Storlazzi, C.T., Spalluto, C., Ricco, A.S., Marzella, R., Rocchi, M. 1998. ‘Evolution of chromosome Y in primates.’ Chromosoma 107:241-246.
2. Britten, R.J. 2002. ‘Divergence between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA sequences is 5% counting indels.’ Proceedings National Academy Science 99:13633-13635.
3. Fujiyama, A., Watanabe, H., Toyoda, A., Taylor, T.D., Itoh, T., Tsai, S.F., Park, H.S., Yaspo, M.L., Lehrach, H., Chen, Z., Fu, G., Saitou, N., Osoegawa, K., de Jong, P.J., Suto, Y., Hattori, M., and Sakaki, Y. 2002. ‘Construction and analysis of a Human-Chimpanzee Comparative Clone Map.’ Science 295:131-134.
4. Gagneux, P. and Varki, A. 2001. ‘Genetic differences between humans and great apes.’ Mol Phylogenet Evol 18:2-13.
5. Gibbons, A. 1998. ‘Which of our genes make us human?’ Science 281:1432-1434.
6. Heyer, E., Zietkeiwicz, E., Rochowski, A., Yotova, V., Puymirat, J., and Labuda D. 2001. ‘Phylogenetic and familial estimates of mitochondrial substitution rates: study of control region mutation in deep-rooting pedigrees.’ Am J Hum Genet 69:1113-1126.
7. Kakuo, S., Asaoka, K. and Ide, T. 1999. ‘Human is a unique species among primates in terms of telomere length.’ Biochem Biophys Res Commun 263:308-314.
8. Knight, A., Batzer, M.A., Stoneking, M., Tiwari, H.K., Scheer, W.D., Herrera, R.J., and Deninger, P.L. 1996. ‘DNA sequences of Alu elements indicate a recent replacement of the human autosomal genetic complement.’ Proc. Natl Acad Sci USA 93:4360-4364.
9. Marks, J. 2000. ‘98% alike? (What our similarity to apes tells us about our understanding of genetics.)’ Chronicle of Higher Education May 12, 2000, B7.
10. Parsons T.J., Muniec, D.S., Sullivan, K., Woodyatt, N., Alliston-Greiner, R., Wilson, M.R., Berry, D.L., Holland, K.A., Weedn, V.W., Gill, P., and M.M. Holland. 1997. A high observed substitution rate in the human mitochondrial DNA control region. Nat. Genet. 15:363-368.
11. Sigurgardottir, S., Helgason, A., Gulcher, J.R., Stefansson, K., and Donnelly P. 2000. ‘The mutation rate in the human mtDNA control region.’ Am J Hum Genet 66:1599-1609.
Available online at:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v17/i1/DNA.asp
You seem to have some fairly distinct ideas about how evangelism works - let me ask you, can you support your position from scripture? It always seems to me that there are groups (of which you would appear to fall into) who think that one can mollycoddle and cajole a nonbeliever into becoming a Christian. What did Jesus say about this? Did He try to first convince them that he was respectful of them, cater to their 'self-esteem building' perhaps, first let them know that they were loved ....and so on? Remember, Jesus was the greatest preacher of hell that every existed. Count the references - He mentioned hell far mores times than He mentions heaven.
Did Jesus take a laisez-faire attitude when He saw the money changer in the temple? Does the word 'respectful' come to mind when He picked up a rope scourge and drove them all out of the temple overturning the tables of money? John 2:13 And the Jews' passover was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting: 15 And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers' money, and overthrew the tables;
The message of Jesus was actually quite blunt - repent or you will go to hell (or to use slightly softer language) Luke 13:3 I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.
And how about the passages in Matthew when Jesus got into rip roaring disputes with the Pharisees? Would you say that Jesus was being particularly 'respectful' when he called them a 'generation of vipers'? In case there is any doubt, he called them this on three separate occasions! Matthew 3:7 But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Matthew 12:34 O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. Matthew 23:33 Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?And in Matthew 12:39, didn't he call his questioners an 'evil and adulterous generation'? Matthew 12:38 Then certain of the scribes and of the Pharisees answered, saying, Master, we would see a sign from thee. 39 But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas:
By the way, I have seen Hovind in person several times. It is certainly true that he provokes some serious and rowdy discussion to put it mildly.... but I can truthfully say that I have never heard him say anything to an individual that would be regarded as being disrespectful. There are other grounds on which I have some difficulties with the message of Mr Hovind but this certainly isn't one of them.
Buddy Davis is nearing the completion of his work on the 40-foot Tyrannosaurus Rex model he is creating for the museum! When you walk into his workshop and come face to face with this beast it inspires frightening memories of movie scenes with people running from the ferocious, apparently starved, giant. However, we know from the Bible that God created all animals, including dinosaurs, to be vegetarians. It was only after sin and the resulting curse were introduced that animals began to eat each other. Before that there would have been no reason to fear a 40’ long, 12’ tall T-Rex!
And here is yet another example :
Dinosaur “kinds” loaded onto Noah’s Ark: “It’s easy to explain how we fit on the Ark. It was the size of an ocean liner and the average size of dinosaurs were the size of sheep. Even the few ‘big guys’ were most likely young adults (of average dinosaur size) when they boarded the Ark.”
Buddy Davis is a sculptor, not a scientist. BTW - what specifically are you objecting to in the two clips you cite?
<< Maybe Darwin shouldn't have named his book "Origins of Life". >>
He didn't. He named it: *On the Origin of Species.* The book does not deal with the origin of life -- and neither do the Theories of Evolution and Common Descent.
Cheers --
M
Oh Really I lost the argument before I was born, before I even though through what I believe, really? I didn't know that, I guess I better just shut up and believe a theory that I don't believe is correct, right?
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