Posted on 09/25/2014 6:50:38 AM PDT by fishtank
Genome Scrambling and Encryption Befuddles Evolution
by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D. *
One-cell creatures called ciliates are expanding our knowledge of genome dynamics and complexity. Now a newly sequenced ciliate genome reveals unimaginable levels of programmed rearrangement combined with an ingenious system of encryption.1
Contrary to the evolutionary prediction of simple-to-complex in the alleged tree of life, one-cell ciliates are exhibiting astonishing genetic complexity.2 The ciliate Oxytricha trifallax has two different genomes contained in separate nuclei. The micronucleus is dense and compact and used for reproduction while the macronucleus is dramatically rearranged, amplified, and used for the creature's standard daily living.
(Excerpt) Read more at icr.org ...
I understand ymmv, but if it directly contradicts the Word of God those who are truly wise will examine all the evidence much more critically.
“I have considered the task that God has appointed for the sons of men to be busied about. He has made everything appropriate to its time, and has put the timeless into their hearts, without man’s ever discovering, from beginning to end, the work which God has done.” (Eccles 3:10-11).
Put "Jeffrey Tomkins PhD" and ICR at the top of that list.
Join them, if you like...
Thanks for the ping, dear brother in Christ!
JimSEA, I gather from the context above that by “we,” you mean scientists who, deploying scientific presuppositions and methods exclusively, will eventually be able to figure out everything going on in the universe, given sufficient time, by means of such methods. I have reason to suspect that this expectation will prove unlikely to be the case.
At the same time, I am not a person who believes that when science fails to explain something this is somehow “proof” of the existence of God. That is total nonsense: God is not subject to “proof.”
What worries me about the practice of biological science in particular nowadays is that it seems so constrained by Cartesian and Newtonian principles that it is hampering its ability to understand living systems in nature at the very outset. This practice entails a whole bunch of unexamined presuppositions, such as:
• The expectation that everything in the natural world is reducible to “matter in its motions” governed by causal relations obtaining between material states and the forces impinging on them — or as it has been stated, “everything supervenes on the physical.” [Newton’s legacy.] Also involved is the presupposition that biological systems are physical “mechanisms.” [Descartes’ legacy.]
Yet as the great mathematician and theoretical biophysicist Robert Rosen has pointed out,
The universe described by these laws is an extremely impoverished, nongeneric one, and one in which life cannot exist. In short, far from being a special case of [the physical] laws, and reducible to them, biology provides the most spectacular examples of their inadequacy…. To this day, today, the formidable powers of theoretical physics find nothing to say about the biosphere, nor does any physicist contemplating the mysteries of life speak of them qua physicist. This, I would argue, is because biology remains today, as it has always been, a repository of conceptual enigmas for contemporary physics, and not technical problems to be dealt with through mere ingenuity or the application of familiar algorithms. Somehow, the life gets irretrievably lost whenever this is attempted.A mechanism is something that can be productively studied by disassembling it down to its parts. Then the expectation is, if you understand the parts, just sum them all up, and you can completely recapture the whole of which they are the parts. This happens to be impossible in biological systems. When one disassembles a biological system, one instantly loses information about that system — preeminently its organizational information. One also happens to lose its life….
This parts-to-whole expectation reflects what is known as “context independence,” which is one central feature of scientific objectivity. Yet it appears that the “parts” of living systems are not context independent. For they are both “parts” and “participants” in the Whole — the Whole being the very context that is being rigorously ignored, for the sake of “scientific objectivity”….
I have an analogy that suggests somewhat the loss of information that is involved in the sort of paradigmatic reductionism that I am trying to describe here: the “reduction” of an analog to a digital signal. Ask: “What is lost in this transformation?”
I am not a “water carrier” for either Jeffrey Tomkins Ph.D. or ICR. I’m pretty skeptical in general these days. But I did like the article. If anybody has a specific objection to Tomkins’ methods and/or conclusions, I would very much like to hear the details.
Thanks so much for writing, JimSEA!
By “we” I simpily mean humans. Dr. Jeffrey Tomkins Ph.D. has the ICR habit of misstating evolutionary theory.
Supposition: Proving God!... what a concept..
Either God exists -OR- he/she/it does not....
If the universe is not proof of God or something we choose to call god..
Then something else originated “it”..
Decoding what that something “IS” a matter of perception..
There’s a plethora of designer gods on this planet..
From an invisible friend to a Roman Emperor.. to the savage “id”.. (self)..
What a drama it is to observe people resorting to primitive perceptions and
others very sophisticated perceptions trying to fathom this/these issue(s)..
Could be thats what we’re here FOR!... is to make those “choices”..
Making us all guilty of low expectations or higher expectations..
Water seeks it’s own level, as “they” say..
AND it’s changes day to day from youth to old age..
It’s not who you are that counts, it’s who you are becoming.. I think..
Theme song: https://www.dropbox.com/s/lb16ez0s9ja68gd/TakemeThere.avi?dl=0
Its amusing to see someone, heart beating in his chest, surrounded by life in all its many variations, animated by mind and will and emotions, ask for proof that God exists.
Either you see it or you don’t, I suppose. Either you see transcendent values, transcendent principles, meaning and purpose, or you don’t.
I would never try to prove God’s existence. No one is ever convinced by argument. One day you shift your focus and there he is in all his self-evident glory. Once you see him you can’t un-see him. Until that day, no intellectual construct is ever going to convince you.
How did he misstate evolutionary theory in this article?
Please provide an example.
The general observation of simple to complex on the tree of life does not mean that one cell organisms are simple internally. The basic building blocks of a cell, proteins are very complex and serve a multitude of functions. A single cell is, however less complex than multicellular organisms.
These two statements seem true enough — as far as they go (which isn't very far).
Looking more deeply into the matter, however, we are confronted with Francis Crick's Central Dogma of biology, which states (in the words of Hubert Yockey) that "information can be transferred from DNA to DNA, DNA to mRNA, and mRNA to protein. Three transfers that the Central Dogma states never occur are protein to protein, protein to DNA, protein to mRNA."
...no code exists to send information from protein sequences to mRNA or DNA.... Therefore, it is impossible that the origin of life was "proteins first" from the Urschleim [i.e., some sort of undifferentiated yet material chemical "soup"]. Nevertheless, "proteins first" is widely taught in university classrooms and perhaps at the Grand Academy of Lagado as well....So it seems to me that Darwinian Tree of Life has a lot of 'splaining to do, in the matter of how "simple" systems "evolved" into more complex ones, when the differentiator between them is the ability to process/communicate information — which is, of course, wholly immaterial.The restrictions of the Central Dogma ... are mathematical. Scientists cannot get around them by clever chemistry. Likewise, Nature's proscription against the building of perpetual motion machines is also mathematical. The Second Law of Thermodynamics places a severe limit on the ability of a clever engineer to build machines that derive work from heat. Regardless of the choice of materials or design it is impossible to build a perpetual motion machine. These restrictions apply however socially, politically, and environmentally desirable it may be to make perpetual motion machines.
Plus the idea of "function" is something that makes many Darwinians (and other scientists as well) nervous. For any function denotes a purpose or goal — in Aristotelian language, a "final cause" — which is the very thing that Darwinism denies in Nature. Darwinian Nature always moves ("evolves") from the "bottom-up" — from comparatively simple systems to more complex ones — according to random chance, as reinforced by natural selection.
Thus it is dogmatic in Darwinism to regard Nature as having no purposes at all. But this supposition tells us nothing about how information actually flows in the natural world. DNA is more "informative" than proteins, We need to remember, as Yockey points out, that "life is guided by information, and inorganic processes are not."
Darwinist evolutionary theory — which sees life as something emergent from inorganic, i.e., non-living processes — by and large seems wholly oblivious to such considerations.
Actually, Darwinism has no theory of life qua life. It can tell you nothing about what life "is" or "where it came from"; it is merely a description of what already-existent life "looks like."
To those of reductionist persuasion!
Just some thoughts for your consideration, JimSEA.
Thank you so much for writing.
I was merely commenting on the complexity of an individual cell. I didn’t say a word about information transfer. As for your other trips afield to Darwin bash, I can only suggest you study a bit of biology. I’m not about to go on another game of creationist wack-a-mole.
I am not a "creationist." And I am not interested in playing games of "wack-a-mole."
What I am interested in is demonstrating how Darwinist theory places shackles on the free development of biological science.
Here's an analogy. Ptolemy's geocentric model of the universe was actually enormously productive in explaining celestial phenomena that were observable at the time. But new observations came along that this model couldn't answer for. Thus, science had to change, and it did.
Darwinists seem to be the modern-day Ptolemys of biology. The basic difference is that the Ptolemaic model was found wanting, and science was free to discover the reasons why and develop better explanations.
In contrast, Darwinism is a doctrinal enterprise, in the sense that, even if it is shown that it does not answer for new observations — principally from the mathematics and information science fields — it is still the "received doctrine" that can in no way be challenged. That is, in terms of my analogy here, it cannot/will not proceed from the geocentric to the heliocentric model. It brooks no challenge whatsoever, even when increasingly it is obvious that it does not explain the most fundamental questions about biological origins and living processes.
FWIW.
Thanks for writing JimSEA.
This crew has neither a grip on faith nor science.
They pretend to have faith and also pretend to understand the science they discuss.
God does not require scientific affirmation. He can be found within science as easily as He can be found through the Bible.
I so agree. Even if one could do that — which one can't, in principle — conviction does not come from the operations of logic — that is to say, the operations of "dialectical argument."
Though that is not to say that reason has no role in human investigations into the Reality of which we are parts and participants. After all, Reality was fully "here" before we humans arrived (as species or individual); and I daresay it will still be here, after we humans pass out of it (whether as species or at the individual level).
A very open question: "What is reason?"
My trial answer would be something like this: Much-vaunted "Reason" ends up being an amalgamation of human experience (direct and historical), observation, and logic. Plus we can toss in "common sense" as the salt that can only enhance this stew, by causing its several ingredients to optimally cohere....
You are absolutely right about this: "Once you see him you can’t un-see him. Until that day, no intellectual construct is ever going to convince you."
Oh so very true — to you and me anyway.
But America is seemingly catastrophically culturally divided at this time. It is along this profound cultural divide that the United States of America — its values, principles, traditions, institutions, culture, and Constitution — is currently disintegrating before our very eyes, thanks to the tender ministrations of a chief executive who detests America in principle, with every fiber of his being.
I'll put a sock in it for now.
Thanks so much for writing, dear brother!
You missed “something”, something went over yer head..
OR you have an agenda..
So you got all that from my post did you?..
How many of those would you estimate there are, as opposed to scientists who don't believe the scientific method can solve every riddle of the Universe, but do believe it will work on the tiny little bit of it they're working on right now?
A very open question: “What is reason?”
What reason is, is what is reasonable.. it seems..
Pregnant with the question..... Reasonable to whom?..
Perception of what is reasonable, can be unreasonable..
Seeing “the trees”, “from the forest” depends on the size of the forest, weed patch, garden, or Swamp you live in..
One’s vantage point can miss some Trees, Weeds, or Swamp Cabbage others can see..
It may not be possible to see the whole forest.. patch.. or swamp..
If so, thats WHY? one might need a God.. Gods, or Demigogue..
It is possible for there to be a Real God, but some make up their own instead.. or deny that reality..
It seems “faith” is very reasonable.. when you only see a portion of “what is”..
AND are barely cognizant of what “Ain’t”..
To know what “Ain’t” you first need to know all of what “Is”..
OR act like you do... which is unreasonable.. i.e. 2nd reality..
Solomon might have been most reasonable..
When he said seeking after knowledge was “Vanity.. striving after wind”...
I could have liked that guy...
a Prayer: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8dyzjzl4k16shpl/YourLove.avi?dl=0
Thank you so much for sharing your insights!
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