Posted on 11/25/2008 10:22:41 AM PST by GodGunsGuts
A team of Princeton University scientists has discovered that chains of proteins found in most living organisms act like adaptive machines, possessing the ability to control their own evolution.
The scientists do not know how the cellular machinery guiding this process may have originated, but they emphatically said it does not buttress the case for intelligent design, a controversial notion that posits the existence of a creator responsible for complexity in nature...
(Excerpt) Read more at princeton.edu ...
There's a whole 'nuther doctoral degree or two in just patching up this problem ~ FOR EACH AND EVERY SPECIES where they've used any mitochondrial rates of change.
Do you mean to say physics can investigate prior to the beginning of the universe by using scientific methodology?
Asserting that there is an entity that does not require a first cause is logically indistinguishable from asserting that first cause in not required.
I do not, and have never asserted that the beginning of the universe did not require cause. You seem to be asseting this, and yes, repeatedly you have asserted such without so much as a centilla of evidence and at the expense of logic.
An honest person might conclude that we just don't know.
Thank you for that honest statement. At least you have moved from atheism to agnosticism. That is some movement. But an honest person would examine the circumstances at that instant prior to singularity, that being nothingness, and ask what was there to cause it? No space-occupying mass, energy, no time...Whay and why would the universe spring denovo into existence from that mileau?
Well, it is nice speaking to you.
The genes the Ghengis Khan had were not exactly the same as everyone else. There may have been any number of other people with any specific gene Ghengis had, but only Ghengis had that particular combination. So, any genes he had were reproductively favored in the next generation. They had a greater chance of reproducing. Those genes got ahead in the competition with other genes.
Due to whatever factors induce speciation (distance apparantly being one of them), visits between boyfriends and girlfriends of these creatures (all living in a state of grace), could be few and far between, but just as fertile as ever upon appropriate consumation ~ male on top, lady on the bottom eh?!
So, they go on like this for one of God's near eternities, swapping genes, but still growing apart. Group A could have more visits with Group C than with Group B or Group D. Etc.
Finally, one day God (or whoever) decides "I'm creating four new species), and it's done, but some are more closely related to others ~ yet deletions and insertions may be identical, or different in major ways (affecting body shape, color, etc.)
It all makes sense.
This stuff isn't as linear as it might at first appear ~ the changes affect groups over long periods of time in many generations.
The beginning of our universe is not necessarily the beginning of existence, so I would say that in principle, it is possible. Whether the attempt goes anywhere I can't say.
The more we know the bigger the questions. I find that interesting.
Using scientific principles in studying the origin of life, one can only conclude that it was intelligently designed. To deny that fact is to be irrational.
Boy got around fur shur.
Or maybe he had a "repair" mechanism like the one identified in this news piece we are discussing and it patched everything up.
Obviously the only sane belief is that some unspecified agency having unspecified capabilities and limitations and unspecified motives, operating at unspecified times and places, doing unspecified things, accounts for life and its variety.
The conclusion is inescapable.
Your notions about natural selection are incomplete. You obviously believe it is some mystical abstract force that people can only conjecture. A view that is completely wrong.
Back at you.
The point wasn't to prove 1 + 1 = 2. I know people have done that. The point was that it shouldn't be necessary in this discussion to prove it, any more than it is necessary to prove that you don't know what you can't know.
When scientists stop short of that conclusion by papering it over with "meaningless phrases" or by "refusing to speculate", it seems that they are simply refusing to accept the facts and the most reasonable conclusion that come from them. This is a matter of will, not of mind. The evidence is objective; it's the disbelieving scientists who are not.
When you get down to where the rubber meets the road, there are only 2 possibilities; (1)either the universe has always existed, or (2)it had a beginning and a cause. All of astrophysics, physics, assert that the universe had a beginning, so it must have been caused by something else...something outside of itself. The fact that that conclusion leads to a theistic faith, is not based upon faith, but upon solid scientific analysis and evidence.
From science we know that 'that entitiy' is self-existent, timeless, nonspatial, and immaterial (no it is outside of time, space, matter), unimaginably powerful to create an entire universe out of nothing, supremely intelligent to design the universe with such incredible precision, and personal ( as I say, a decision was made to convert a state of nothingness to a time-space-material universe (an impersonal force has no ability to make such a choice). These characteristics of First Cause are exactly the characteristics theists ascribe to God. But as I have provided in posts on this thread, those characteristics have been derived via science and logic. Those conclusions are drawn from critical thinking.
I will leave you with this one last question; "If there is no God, then why is there anything at all, rather than nothing? Why is there something rather than nothing?
No, you've missed the point. If the rate was established independent of assumptions about the mechanism, knowing the mechanism doesn't change the rate. It doesn't matter whether anyone observed these fixes before.
No. Once again for the sake of argument, the objective evidence could only say there was a "cause". You are trying to take "cause" and make it "god". That's not objective.
By the way, your two possibilities are limited. A begning and uncaused is also a possibility.
At the quantum level such seeming absurdities do happen.
Again, you refuse for the 5th time to answer my simple question. Please answer the question.
It might even be a "statistical construct".
To convince me you aren't really thinking of an invisible magic being I think you owe me some quite serious formulas combined with theorems that can be analyzed in terms of "proofs" ~ you know, like regular old mathematics.
I have answered this question in post 102 of this thread...please read it.
You, like js, elect to avoid the question rather than answer honestly. Evasion of the question is not the 'tool of choice' for the scientist. Logic says.........
you fill in the blank.
Going the other way ~ if the errors eliciting the fixes occur at a high rate, e.g. 100 per second under Condition A, and 1 per hour under Condition B, with Condition A and Condition B consisting of exogenous situations that cannot be controlled, you have a real mess on your hands.
As the number of conditions increases, your inability to estimate the rate of change simply steps off the planet.
Time for grants and graduate students hungry for fame and fortune I tell you.
You asked a “simple” question? Refresh my memory. The only questions I’ve seen asked are those that have baffled the best human minds for all of recorded history.
Color me surprised if I haven’t answered.
My point in these debates is not that science has all the answers, but that science is the only human enterprise that has learned to ask deep questions at a level that leads to useful productive research. The results are cumulative rather than instantaneous.
It's a good question. The ultimate question. But why say, "If there is no god" in front of it? This is the problem. You are automatically injecting "god" into this as if it were the default answer. Either you have a different answer, or god did it. That's not correct. Knowing that god did it requires just as much evidence as knowing any other possible answer.
Just postulating that god did it doesn't answer anything anyway. It just adds the extra step. If god did it, where did god come from?
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