Posted on 08/29/2005 5:52:18 PM PDT by sionnsar
You grossly oversimplify the argument. It is not just any similarities that indicate descent. It is very specific identities. If you want to argue this, read the whole chain of reasoning and get back to us.
They have their wish. The theory of evolution is taught in every public school, whether the parents (who pay for it), teachers (who actually do it) or children (who are forced to learn it.)
In fact the victory of evolutionary theory in our public schools has been so complete that I wonder why they even see the need for such a petition. I can only conclude that at last the left feels the reigns of power loosening from their grasp, ever so slightly, and they don't like it.
I was given a silly slogan regarding OJ trial, that betrayed no logic. Were I given any kind of "chain of reasoning" I would have, perhaps, responded differently.
DNA similarity would not prove a common ancestor. But the several thousand relics of past retro virus infections in specific individuals that were handed down to both it's primate and human descendants do.
This is the smoking gun that proves a common ancestor, equally well as OJ's guilt was proved by the DNA at the murder scene from the cut on his hand.
We don't need to argue in detail the diameter of the earth. It is assumed that literate people know this.
Literate people, especially those attempting to change the teaching policies of schools, better know the evidence that supports evolution. If you don't know it you can't argue against it.
Now this argument is rather long, and every time we post it, we are accused of spamming the threads.
Interesting. Well, help me understand it.
If men and apes suffer from the same virus it proves men descended from apes?
It was the St. Joseph's Edition of the NAB.
And to be clear, there isn't actually a whole essay on evolution. The comment I quoted on evolution is in an essay about Bible reading and interpretation. The context is (this is a paraphrase from memory): 'Sometimes natural science gives us new insights on scripture. No well educated person any longer disputes that man has descended from primates. From these scientific discoveries, we have come to understand that Genesis 1 is not an anthropology lesson, but a sacred poem, teaching us that God is the source of all creation.'
In the context, it is perhaps less offensive than standing all alone. Although, frankly, I think that it overstates the case. I dispute the (sneering) certitude with which the essay asserts that man descended from primates. Possibly we did, but it is hardly the slam-dunk that that author of that particular text made it to be. I will say that it was very helpful at a certain time of my life to have those words there, because my scientific objections to religion were quasi-total, and it was with tremendous relief that I discovered that the Catholic Church accepted, even embraced evolution. With age and its concomitant skepticism, I would prefer that the language have read "considerable evidence appears to indicated that man has descended from primates", as opposed to "no well-educated person any longer disputes...". I am a well-educated person, and I cannot state that evolution occurred with anything like the certitude that the author of that essay did.
I'd say that it could very well be so, but that it doesn't matter anyway. It's like the fundamental forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, strong force and weak force, or the quasi-force of entropy, or the phenomenon of time and empty space. When these things are really considered in their purity, they dissolve into an absurdity. They cannot be defined other than by themselves. They just ARE.
Likewise, I am. I hear the theories of where my genetic line may have come from. They are interesting, but not important. Certainly not important enough to get angry over. Maybe man walked out of Africa. Maybe he walked INTO Africa from Mesopotamia. Maybe man originated, in some fashion or other, in five or six different places. Maybe angels really bred with some women and gave rise to a literal race of giants, the Nephilim, whence the legends of the titans and other giants come. Who can say?
And what difference does it ultimately make?
I can't change it, and whatever happened does not change me.
I have whatever time is allotted to me to live for this span, now. These speculations are interesting, but they do not seem to me to be nearly important enough to justify the divisions and ill-will between men that arguing about such a distant past engenders.
Hardcore evolutionists and anti-evolutionists seek to prove too much with a theory. Really, for them it is a proxy for the truth of God, since it is the stalking horse against Genesis.
But ultimately, Genesis doesn't matter much either.
For one thousand five hundred years, practically nobody in Europe could read at all. They maybe heard portions of the story of Genesis read to them four or five times in their whole lives. It was scarcely relevant. What mattered was that they were good, kind and loving people in their day. Religiously, what matters is the Sacraments, not our comprehnsion of the truth behind them.
It may not even ultimately matter if they turn out to have been completely symbolic and no transubstantiation occurs, so long as God is pleased with us for having faithfully done what we believed He wanted us to do. I don't measure my child's accomplishments by the standards of a middle aged adult, but by the efforts she puts into them and the degree of care and enthusiasm she takes. Obviously I can write the alphabet better than a 4 year old, and can read things, while she struggles to write out an A and a C and a G, and puts these strange - to her - hieroglyphs all over her papers next to her stick figures and color blotches. I am well pleased with her because she tries so hard, and she shows us her work to please us. I know what she does not know, and I know it will be decades before she knows what I know. But what she knows does not matter. She knows what she knows, and she is reaching to know more, and she pleases me by her efforts to mimic and to use what she does know to please us. Since I am generally a bad person, my only real supplication to God is that, in the end, he will judge me by the standard of love that I have shown the daughter he entrusted to me. I It seems to me that these things, love and caring, must be more pleasing to God than the perfection of our religious logic, because He didn't leave us a book, and he doesn't have us come into the world literate, but we do come out capable of love and attachment, and the most illiterate peasant was always capable of carrying out Jesus' full Gospel of Love, even if he couldn't read a lick of it.
This is why I am unhappy with the Episcopalian Bishops for drawing this line in the sand. Why do they want to fight this war when the Episcopal Church is riven with immorality at the very top? Of what possible difference does it make to a staggering church whether men descended from monkeys or not, when ordained bishops openly galavant about with other men like chimps in heat? Does it edify man to know that he is a hairless ape?
The fact that the DI "scientists" haven't attacked it yet is evidence to the fact that they haven't found a good spin against it. But I'm sure that we can count on them to come up with something, just like OJ's lawyers did.
But wait, may be Narby can distill it for me.
really good restatement of the case. Were you a debater?
Your ignorant question to narby demonstrates you know nothing about evolution.
It was an incorrect restatement of the case in a way that he can attack.
That men and apes "suffer from the same virus", paints a picture that both get the same illnesses. That's not what I'm talking about at all.
The issue is that sometimes ERV cell infections don't work as planned, and the cell continues to live, with the virus DNA intact, doing no damage. When the particular cell is a reproductive cell, the virus DNA is passed down to descendants, and eventually every individual in the species has it.
There are several thousand virus DNA sequences inserted in the same places in apes and humans (and in some cases, we do not share a particular insertion). The farther back in time that evolution morphology places the branch between species, the less ERV insertion matches we see. Specific matches between different species map their relationships.
This both confirms the evolution tree, and confirms that we share common ancestors with many primates.
Thank you for the link to the other thread. It was interesting.
Forgive me if I observe something though.
We have only recently sequenced the whole human genome. We simply do not have the requisite level of knowledge to be able to state with anything like the certitude that the case was made in that interesting article, that that which we call "junk" in the human gene sequence really is junk.
DNA is only made of four chemicals. We have the chain. We can isolate these chemicals. Once we have reached the level of technique where we can build our own DNA, atom by atom, and test what replication of each strand leads to, I we will be able to say that something is junk.
I recall when I was a kid, whenever anyone's tonsils flared up, they cut them out of there. We were told that tonsils served no purpose, like the appendix. Now we know that they do serve a purpose. We have been told for 20 years that Tylenol is preferred over aspirin. But now they perscribe daily doses of aspirin to keep down heart attack rates and recidivism, and warn against Tylenol.
My point is not that science is always wrong. It is that we ought to have learnt by now by embarrassing fumbles and errors to not be so cocksure of ourselves.
That there are these DNA markers is indeed good evidence for cladistic evolution. That those DNA markers are pure "junk" however is simply not knowable given our present limitations of knowledge and technique.
I suspect that several of them will not turn out to be junk at all.
Thank you, I think I understand the nature of the purported retrovirus evidence. I'll try to study it more.
BEWARE, unleashing the Lion of the Tribe of Judah can be harmful to your worldview! (Red letters indicate words spoken by Jesus)
Rom 6:9 Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him.
Rom 5:12 Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:
Rom 5:14 Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses,...
Rom 5:21 That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.
Rom 6:23 For the wages of sin [is] death; but the gift of God [is] eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
1Cr 15:54-55
54 So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.
55 O death, where [is] thy sting? O grave, where [is] thy victory?
Mar 10:6 But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female.
Isa 45:12 I have made the earth, and created man upon it: I, [even] my hands, have stretched out the heavens, and all their host have I commanded.
Zec 12:1 The burden of the word of the LORD for Israel, saith the LORD, which stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.
Isa 42:5 Thus saith God the LORD, he that created the heavens, and stretched them out; he that spread forth the earth, and that which cometh out of it; he that giveth breath unto the people upon it, and spirit to them that walk therein:
Isa 45:18 For thus saith the LORD that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I [am] the LORD; and [there is] none else.
Isa 40:21-22
Have ye not known? have ye not heard? hath it not been told you from the beginning? have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth?
Isa 64:4 For since the beginning of the world [men] have not heard, nor perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen, O God, beside thee, [what] he hath prepared for him that waiteth for him.
Gen 2:7 And the LORD God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
Gen 5:1 This [is] the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him;
Deu 4:32 For ask now of the days that are past, which were before thee, since the day that God created man upon the earth,
Gen 5:5 And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.
New Testament references to Adam.
Luk 3:38 Which was [the son] of Enos, which was [the son] of Seth, which was [the son] of Adam, which was [the son] of God.
1Cr 15:45 And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul;
Jud 1:14 And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints,
1Ti 2:13 For Adam was first formed, then Eve.
Col 2:8 Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.
I'll throw the whole thing out if you expect me to deny reality in order to believe the Bible.
Your statement may have been vague, but anyone attempting to change public policy should know your argument.
Reality is not altered by the carelessness of a Freeper.
I was not familiar with the phenomenon and wanted to eliminate what would be the obvious error in logic.
I'll be back later.
And combined with all the OTHER evidence for evolution, a theory that hasn't been falsified for 150+ years, I think it's conclusive proof of evolution.
Let's continue with the OJ comparison. It might be possible to believe that another killer had a rare shoe of the exact same size and model as OJ. It might be possible for OJ to have been doing something else during the time of the killing. It might have been possible for another killer to get a cut on the same hand as OJ did, at the same time.
But when you combine that circumstantial evidence along with the DNA evidence, it's conclusive. OJ did it, and evolution occured.
That those DNA markers are pure "junk" however is simply not knowable given our present limitations of knowledge and technique.
What we know is that these sections of DNA match portions of ERV DNA, and that they are markers of past infections. We can, and have, engineered our own ERV viruses in attempts to cure congenital diseases, so obviously we know an ERV insertion when we see it. And we've found thousands of them shared between apes and humans.
Smoking gun. Apes and humans have a common ancestor.
Give it some thought. Our haste in posting doesn't alter the argument.
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