Posted on 08/13/2003 9:02:05 PM PDT by nwrep
TalkOrigins list of links to creationist websites.
If you try to post to it, you get a message that says "Congratulations, you guys filled it up! :)"
Bad hardware is temporary. Bad software is damn-near forever!
I just want to know, what percentage of AiG do we need to rebut, before was can conclude to a high degree of statistical certaintly that's it's all junk. Ok, better than 90% junk.
Which is utterly maddening, yes. What is operating there is religious horror. Someone might follow a link, read an evolution article, and lose her soul to Satan.
Some things must not be seen or touched, much less understood in detail. Witch Doctors make lousy scientists!
Do you need to eat a whole omelet before you can conclude it's got a bad egg?
Well, no, and in science we operate very much on the one-bite rule. If you publish a serious mistake, people remember it (or so they tell me :-)). If you get caught in outright fraud, you better find some scapegoat postdoc to blame it on, fast, or you'll have problems getting anything published. So if these 'Creation Science' sites were judged by scientific standards, one major fraud, or two or three boners, and we could write them off.
Some of these guys should know better. As I said, Baumgradner's on the one hand arguing for YEC, and on the other writing papers for Science claiming the earth's mantle has a memory of 150 million years. By what tortured ethics can he justify that to himself? And he should know that that Humphreys dating paper is sailing awfully close to the wind, ethically speaking. You can't acquire a data set, throw away the part of it that disagrees with your hypothesis and agrees with published work, and then write a paper on the rest, even though the guy who collected the data acknowledged that part of it is unusual and may be due to artifactual alteration of the crystal.
This is Latin for "don't let the bastards grind you down". Would you tend to agree that by calling us "bastards" Mr. LLLICHY is behaving in a gratuitously name-calling and unChristian manner?
Mechanisms exist within cells that correct various mutations. This can be demonstrated by a stretch of DNA associated with Vitamin C and used as an argument for the common descent of humans and other primates. The peculiar thing about this DNA stretch is that there are regions within it that have absolutely no mutations amongst animals that have been separated by over 50 million years(or 100 million both way years). That range of time is nearly 10 percent of the time since "complex" animals first appeared on the earth. This indicates that whatever causes the fidelity of those regions is a reliable process. The point being there is a reliable process that limits change.
Note that this is an enormous red herring. Sure, cells have mechanisms to "limit change". But so bloody what? Enough change still occurs anyway to drive evolution, since no repair-and-maintenance process is ever 100% accurate.
Mr. LLLICHY's word choices are misleading, especially "peculiar" and "absolutely".
There's nothing at all "peculiar" about the actual amount of changes in the primate/human vitamin-C synthesis psuedogene (more technically, the L-gulono-gamma-lactone oxidase gene, or GLO). The amount of mutations it has accumulated are quite consistent with evolutionary theory, both in the number of mutations and in its implications for common descent.
And to say that there have been "absolutely" no changes in "regions" of it gives the impression that on the whole the pseudogene has remained mostly and suprisingly pristine. On the contrary, at least 20% of its basepairs have mutated (including point mutations, insertions, and deletions), resulting in 30% of its coded amino acids to vary, which is a *very* significant accumulation of mutation. And I say "at least" because the 20%/30% is only a tally of the regions which could be directly compared -- Exon VIII is either entirely gone from the human genome due to a deletion event, or has changed so significantly that it can not be recognized any more compared to the non-primate Exon VIII, and Exon XI was too short to positively identify (it is either gone as well or the tentatively identified human XI is 32% changed in basepairs but was not included in the above tally).
...But that's hardly the impression a casual reader of the above post would come away with, is it? How misleading would an autopsy report be of a victim of a machine-gun killing who had bullet holes ripped through 20% of his body if the coronor had written nothing more than, "The peculiar thing about this body is that there are portions of it that have absolutely no damage" without acknowledging the actual extent of the damage, and concluded "The point being there is a reliable process that limits bullet damage"? Would the coronor be declared incompetent, dishonest, or both?
A few more observations:
[...]over 50 million years(or 100 million both way years).
The implication seems to be that there should be 50 million years worth of mutations on both lineages after the split. The problem is that "both ways" are not symmetric in this case. While it's true that the primate lineage was free to accumulate mutations at the mutation-occurence-and-neutral-fixation rate, the same is not true of the non-primate lineage. In that lineage, the fact that the vitamin-C synthesis gene was still functional would cause an additional process to come into play to weed out mutations in the gene, and that process is natural selection. This would cause the non-primate GLO gene to be highly conserved compared to the primate pseudogene.
Interestingly, if common descent and evolution are true, the primate lineage(s) would be free to mutate at the neutral fixation rate away from the non-primate lineages *and* each other, resulting in large divergences, while the non-primate lineages would be less free to accumulate mutations (but some would still occur), and would thus differ much less from each other. And voila, this is exactly the characteristic pattern which is seen in the DNA of the various species. Chalk up another successful prediction and confirmation for evolution.
That range of time is nearly 10 percent of the time since "complex" animals first appeared on the earth.
Note that this is enough time for fully 90% (1-0.8^10) of an entire genome to mutate to something else through neutral mutation fixation *alone* in a *single* lineage. Multiply that times the total number of lineages on the planet (billions, at least), *and* take into account the fact that beneficial mutations fixate far more quickly and reliably than neutral ones, *and* mutation introduction rate is far higher than fixation rate, and it's quite clear that rather than showing that DNA is too much protected from change to allow evolution, as the post seemed imply, in fact there is an enormous amount of mutation grist for evolution's mill.
For instance, on my website, the two articles I've posted include excerpts from and links to sources that hold different points-of-view:
Cloning and chromosomal mapping of the human nonfunctional gene for L- gulono-gamma-lactone oxidase, the enzyme for L-ascorbic acid biosynthesis missing in manHere is the abstract, and here is the complete paper.
M Nishikimi, R Fukuyama, S Minoshima, N Shimizu and K Yagi, Institute of Applied Biochemistry, Yagi Memorial Park, Gifu, Japan.
Such a practice is much like sending direct mailing with very fine print.
There is a research scientist named John Baumgardner, who works at the famous Los Alamos National Laboratories. His Terra computer simulation of continental drift is considered the world’s best. He is also a creationist. In a year when federal grants were scarce for geologic research, Dr. Baumgardner received 120% of his proposed budget. (Terra has implications for continental ballistic missile trajectories.) He is allowed to spend up to 50% of his time on creation research. His model for Noah’s Flood based on Terra involves the volcanic undersea ridge erupting all around the world at once. It predicted the presence of huge "cool" spots at the boundary of the earth’s core, years before new tomagraphic imaging techniques discovered them.
I'm not sure, but I don't presume someone working at Los Alamos would be known for lack of integrity.
Link--http://www.etcsa.org/GJackson/PtsOfOrigin20010306.html
:)
This brings up a very important point. Creationists frequently get upset when pro-Evolution Theorists disparage Creationist material on the basis of it not having been published in a main-stream, peer-reviewed scientific journal. Furthermore, when pressed to explain the dearth of Creationist literature in the main-stream, peer-reviewed scientific journals, the charge of there being a conspiracy of some sort frequently arises.
In the example at hand, given the defects that you have uncovered, what are the odds that such an article would have gotten past the peer-review process of a main-stream scientific journal?
Additionally, what does this tell us about the real reasons why Creationist "research" does NOT get published in main-stream science journals?
Lastly, does this not go to the heart of why Creationist "research" papers have such a bad reputation in the scientific community?
Guinea Pigs are not primates.
But you knew that. Of course there is no telling when they no longer could make Vitamin C.
I've been trying not to post anything to the effect that 'all creation science is bunk', as per the agreement. Your site is an obvious counter-example, in fact. But the statement that 'anything on the AiG site is likely to be bunk', is IMO, completely justifiable. It took me a good hour of my time to find how Humphreys was cooking his data, and I'm frankly quite angry about that. We have the choice of letting the misrepresentations go unchallenged, or of spending a lot of time dissecting them to find the inevitable flaw. I'm probably going to email these guys to tell them what they're doing is wrong, but I don't pretend it will do any good.
I run across a similar problem when I teach thermodynamics. Almost every year, a student will come up with some sort of ingenious perpetual motion machine. I can sit down with them and examine it in detail, and find the flaw; or I can tell them what I know at first sight to be true - that the machine violates the first law or the second law, and therefore can't work as designed. They almost never accept the second answer, and so I end up digging through the mechanics or the chemistry, finding out the specific error. Likewise, I know that a paper that claims the earth is 6000 years old is wrong, and will reject it on that basis alone, but a YEC won't accept that reasoning, obviously, and so I end up having to plough through it to find the problem, knowing that it's a pointless exercise because next week they'll be back with another equally mistaken article, and they'll never learn.
Probably very low. The editor would likely spot the YEC theme, and send it to some particularly careful referee who would give it a good hard look and find the problem. Conventional bad science can occasionally slip through; unconventional bad science gets nailed.
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