"An anemonemone. Amnemonemomne....."
Posted on 07/06/2007 11:20:54 AM PDT by GodGunsGuts
The study also found that these similarities were absent from fruit fly and nematode genomes, contradicting the widely held belief that organisms become more complex through evolution. The findings suggest that the ancestral animal genome was quite complex, and fly and worm genomes lost some of that intricacy as they evolved.
It’s surprising to find such a “high level of genomic complexity in a supposedly primitive animal such as the sea anemone,” Koonin told The Scientist. It implies that the ancestral animal “was already extremely highly complex, at least in terms of its genomic organization and regulatory and signal transduction circuits, if not necessarily morphologically.”
(Excerpt) Read more at the-scientist.com ...
>> But you have no problem with “breakthroughs” that claim to support Darwinian evolution? <<
Where did I say that? It’s a presumption which is entirely wrong. For example:
I’m a former biology instructor. When scientists caused amino acids to form under early-Earth conditions, journalists reported this as demonstrating that life could be spontaneously created. I used the incident to teach my class the complexity of proteins and amino acids, and to critically reject media hype. We completely debunked as ludicrous and corrupt the assinine media assertions.
But you don’t know that. You crammed an interesting science story into your world view, and when I questioned it, you created a straw man out of what you knew about me, so you could cram your perception of me into a little box.
But if that’s your normal way of experiencing the world, there’s sadly nothing unique about it. It’s the way things are done, and the result is the very soullessness which you probably think you are fighting against. There’s no wonder, revelation, or anticipation in the modern world, just demands for pre-digested data.
A long time ago, an evolutionist (Haeckel) created schematics showing the parallel development of vertebrates. What came to be presented as realistic drawings were, to an extent, merely schematics. Creationists jumped on that fact as proof of a evolutionist conspiracy to mislead schoolchildren.
The irony is what you are crowing about as vindication for “Creation science” is the genetic confirmation of what Haeckel tried to illustrate.
The truth is far more mysterious and wondrous than the gross charicature of biological science which nihilist journalists report and which creationists bludgeon as a straw man. And it’s far more wondrous than one chapter of Genesis can express, once stripped of its life, meaning and context. And I’ll be damned if I think I can tell you or can understand myself exactly where the truth lies. But if you want to find any true joy in the revelation of God’s handiwork, or contribute anything positive to science, don’t continue to put everything that challenges your presuppositions into safe, little boxes.
Yeah. You really do. What you're saying, wrt the article, is that it looks like animals are "frontloaded" wrt their subsequent evolution.
If you don't accept that animals are generally related by common descent, then you can only be saying, at most, that God separately created all these thousands and thousands of different animals "kinds," reusing and distributing and slightly modifying their DNA code in such a way that it merely looks like animals as a group evolved with frontloading, even though they aren't related at all.
This (that God created animals with genomes that look like they evolved, with "frontloading") is every bit as problematic and arbitrary from your creationist perspective as saying that God created animals with genomes that look they evolved without frontloading.
The article was written by evolutionists. Their interpretation is their own. I am only interested in the data, which is much more in keeping with the notion that the created kinds were frontloaded.
Again, the data only (even potentially) has this significance if you treat animals as a single "created kind". Since you're treating them as thousands and thousands of separately created kinds, this data is entirely artifactual, i.e. irrelevant (at best; anomalous or contradictory at worst), wrt to your creationist position.
“I said practical goals. Not spiritual. Unfortunately, GGG has not responded.”
Yup, I understand what you asked; the answer I gave is practical.
Who can question why God designed something or not? The term “Spiritual” and “Practical” are our own definitions...If, say, ID were true, don’t you think our level of understanding would dwarf that of the Designer of the Universe?
I can’t (and won’t) speak for GGG, but after reading his posts, he more than likely agrees with me.
Wish you were a current biology instructor. It sounds like you were a good one.
What? I don't think I follow you. If we were to condlude that something is designed by God...that would give us knowledge of the organism greater than that which created it? I am going to assume you mis-spoke.
Let's assume that ID is true. Let's say we find proof that our DNA was designed. How does that help us in practical terms, such as medicine?
"An anemonemone. Amnemonemomne....."
==”reusing and distributing and slightly modifying their DNA code in such a way that it merely looks like animals as a group evolved with frontloading, even though they aren’t related at all”
That’s one way of looking at it. But when I look at the same evidence I see animals that look like they are related by a common designer, in much the same way as paintings have certain commonalities that point to a common painter. And to that extent, many IDers and Creationists are saying much the same thing, although they would differ on the parameters of said frontloading.
If a mischaracterized your position, I apologize.
No I'm not. I'm just inconveniently catching on to the fact that you don't have a point. The problem is you keep saying you accept this "data" as evidence of "frontloading". That's contradictory when you likewise insist that the UNloading of that "frontloading" never actually occurred.
That "data" you're pointing to only shows (putative) "frontloading" with respect to ALL animals, i.e. wrt the subsequent diversification of a single ancestral animal into the thousands and thousands of types which you consider separately created kinds.
Now, you can assert that God used relatively slight variations of, mostly, the same genes, and when He created additional genes put them into the same existing "gene families" (which is kind of an odd thing to do, but anyway...) you can say that. But you have no basis to call if "frontloading".
PS I should have said “disallow RM+NS altogether.”
BTW, you are the one confusing the two types. You’re saying evidence of the former is evidence of the latter. I’m the one distinguishing them.
It can, it has, and the whole notion of "frontloading" has been repeatedly falsified. Deal with it.
Not only is all the genetic evidence firmly against any kind of "frontloading" hypothesis, but the very notion is clearly unworkable even in concept.
First, there quite simply isn't space in any workable genome for all the "frontloading" that would have been required to "frontload" all the genetic information present in modern plants/animals. Period. It would have required a genome larger than any cell that would have attempted to contain it. It's like trying to assert that somewhere there's a book which was "frontloaded" with all the text of all the books that have subsequently been written, and all the millions of subsequent books were merely produced when modern authors just plagiarized from it... That would have been one freakishly unwieldy book, wouldn't it?
Second, almost all the "frontloaded" genetic information would have been soon destroyed through copy errors and other kinds of degrading mutations. The only thing that keeps functional genetic information intact over many millions of years is purifying selection, and that requires that those portions of the genome actually be *functional*. There's no way to "frontload" the earliest cells with, for example, the genetic information which encodes the vertebrate immune system, because this immune system requires a complex of diversified cell types in a multicellular animal to function. It quite simply could *not* be functional in a unicellular organism *as* the fully functional vertebrate immune system, and that's what would be required for purifying selection to keep that genetic complex intact in a way that would allow it to retain the necessary encoding *for* a vertebrate immune system. Had it been "frontloaded" there's no way in hell that it would have remained fully intact and undegraded during the hundreds of millions of years before the first vertebrate came about.
Finally, the origins of many, many genes and gene complexes have been traced, and what do you know, they arose through evolutionary change across many millions of years, and were *not* present (thus not "frontloaded") in ancestral species. There's no trace of them in lineages which diverged before those genes arose, as would be expected if everything had been "frontloaded" from the beginning.
Deal with it.
That’s one way of looking at it.
That's the way that a comprehensive, honest examination of the evidence compells one to look at it.
But when I look at the same evidence I see animals that look like they are related by a common designer, in much the same way as paintings have certain commonalities that point to a common painter.
That's because you actually have very little knowledge of the evidence, nor the relevant processes, nor the vast amount of research that has been done on the subject.
There are huge differences, both qualitatively and quantitatively, between the kinds of similarities/differences that are produced across lineages by "common design", and those produced evolutionarily through common descent. The vast amount of evidence and research accumulated to date -- and you truly have *no* idea how vast it is, I've spent a lifetime coming up to speed on even a portion of it -- points squarely at the latter and not at the former.
No one who has any familiarity with 1) the products of common design, and 2) the products of evolutionary common descent (via for example evolutionary algorithms and genetic programming), and 3) the evidence from biology (including DNA and the fossil record, among many other lines of evidence) has any problem recognizing the biological evidence as starkly consistent with evolutionary origins and not at all with the kinds of similarities and the kinds of differences produced by "common design".
This is why 99+% of biologists accept the validity of evolutionary biology.
And to that extent, many IDers and Creationists are saying much the same thing, although they would differ on the parameters of said frontloading.
The IDers and Creationists are as usual engaging in wishful thinking based on either unfamiliarity with the evidence, or a willful distortion of it. I have yet to see a single one of their pro-ID claims stand up to serious scrutiny or comparison to the available evidence and research results. Even their attempts at ivory-tower arguments, like Behe's, have glaringly obvious fatal flaws and inherent fallacies.
Bzzt. Wrong answer. Evolution predicts that creatures will evolve so that their offspring will survive. It has nothing to do with higher beings. That is a term that non-scientists use to describe evolution. The fact that the so-called higher beings evolved is because they were able to exploit their environment better. If losing traits makes it more likely for a creature to survive and reproduce then that is how it will evolve.
By the way, don't you also have a fight to maintain geocentricism? After all, it is in the Bible that the Earth cannot be moved. The heathen scientists are claiming that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Isn't that heresy?
So, the phylum cnideria are a sign of intelligent design?.... What is special? The radial nature of cnideria? The coiled barbed cells? Or the lack of a central nervous system?
Does coral count? How about sponges? But then they are phylum porifera.
I don’t deny intelligent design, infact I embrace it. However, I disagree with anti evolutionist garbage.
I want to go back to the Aristotelian table of the elements: earth, air, fire, water. Chemistry students everywhere will rejoice.
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