Posted on 08/17/2005 7:44:13 AM PDT by PApatriot1
So we'll strike "cold" virus from the original sentence and insert "retro virus". Like this:
God did not "design" retro virus DNA into human/primate DNA. Viruses do that on their own. Every time you get a [retro virus] is proof that they do.
Now it's your turn to show evidence that God "designed" broken retro virus DNA into primate and human DNA in a way that looks identical to a common ancestor, just to fool us.
Then you need to get your concept through Occam's razor as to why it's a better explanation that an unseen, unmeasureable, intellegence is messing with us via retrovirus DNA rather than it was just a simple infection in a common ancestor millions of years ago.
Well, you could accept that Genesis is a generic enough description of the creation that it allows for evolution. Pope John Paul II had no problem with evolution. Why do you?
Even your correction, whilst better, is not accurate and indicates a fundamental lack of understanding the most basic biological principles.
And yet, after thousands of generations of changing their diets, bombarding them with radiation, altering their atmospheres, and so on, fruitflies remain fruitflies.
As always, the evolutionist must confuse the distinction between micro-evolution (variations within a species, such as breeding dogs) with macro-evolution (breeding dogs until they become cats). The former is well-established--the latter is sheer speculation that is so unsupported by the fossil record that Stephen Jay Gould had to invent the theory of punctuated equilibrium to explain away the lack of transitional fossils.
When you have bred a dog into a cat, or a fruitfly into a hornet, let me know. Until then, claiming that (macro-)evolution is as established as gravity (which I just proved by dropping my pen and watching it fall to the floor--want to see me do it again?) is a statement of metaphysical faith, not one of science.
I figured you had to be joking, until I clicked on your link.
TOE predicts that there is evidence of common ancestry. DNA provided such evidence. It is not necessary for TOE to specifically predict a particular set of evidence.
Had primate and human DNA lacked this evidence, and further, that primate and human DNA showed no more similarity than say human and cotton plant DNA, then that would be evidence *against* a common ancestry.
However since DNA does show more similarities, and explicitly these retro viral inserts that demonstrate a specific individual being a common ancestor of primates and humans is one more in a long line of evidence in favor of evolution.
I think the retrovirus DNA is the smoking gun proof that we descended from a "monkey".
Sorry.
Bravo! Well said.
So what is the mechanism that limits your "micro" evolution from becoming "macro" evolution?
Creation "scientists" stopped doing research on their own after they gave up trying to prove Noah's flood and a young earth back in the 50's.
Here's a chance for them to resume research. Let them find and demonstrate whatever it is that limits evolution to a "kind".
My bet is they can't. And further, I don't think they will try, because they already know they will fail. Instead, they, and you, will offer excuses as to why such research is unnecessary.
Actually, foxes have been bred into something like a dog, using the same selection methods hypothesized to have bred wolves to dogs. I suppose all furry four-legged mammals are the same kind, if religion requires it.
"Chimp DNA is 97% like ours, so see we come from a common ancestor". Here is an assertion that evolutionist like to whiz by Joe-6-pack on there way to calling us creationist ignorant pogues. It's just false. The human DNA has at least 3,000,000,000 nucleotides in sequence. Chimp DNA has not been anywhere near fully sequenced so that a proper comparison can be made (using a lot of computer time to do it—imagine comparing two sets of 1000 large books, sentence by sentence, for similarities and differences!). Where did the ‘97% similarity’ come from then? It was inferred from a fairly crude technique called DNA hybridization where small parts of human DNA are split into single strands and allowed to re–form double strands (duplex) with chimp DNA.
Did you also know that using this same hybridation technique we are 90% the same as Jellyfish and 95% similar to a domesticated dog. Also just do the math 3% of 3,000,000,000 is what 90 million difference. Pretty significant I'd say. Most militant evolutionist as not pro-evolution but anti-G*d. to follow the tone the article , "It's not even debatable". Prove evolution--> Means no designer\no creator --> No real moral absolutes --> Do what I want cause I want to and it makes me feel good.
I'd like a ride in Professor Purrington's time machine!
I don't know one person who accepts evolution on these threads that would use that argument. How about the shared broken vitimin C gene in humans and chimps? Now that's an argument for common descent.
I won't ask you for a citation, because I know there isn't one. So let's cut to the chase; you just posted a very stupid and untruthful claim. Doesn't that bother you?
That is an excellent question.
If one assumes that the process works as you say, then one would expect to find that particular infection events would occur in the target species with a random frequency unrelated to the presumed common ancestry of various species. Humans, for example, just by chance, might be missing an infection marker which exists in other higher primates.
But that is evidently not what is found. The infection markers demonstrate a non-random frequency which suggests the same common ancestry as other evolutionary evidence.
Whom am I to believe?
Perhaps the probability is not as remote as once thought.
I have read arguments that the rate of "natural" genetic mutation is insufficient to explain the presumed rate of evolutionary change.
Dinosaurs are thought to have been dramatically impacted by a comet some seventy million years ago. Perhaps epidemics of retrovirus infection have occured on earth every ten thousand years or so, providing an environment in which the genomes of virtually every species are given a shock. Perhaps the rate of beneficial mutations, as well as the more frequent negative mutations, can increase by many orders of magnitude for many generations.
I don't have to come up with a mechanism to explain an unproven process. Tell me, why are those fruit flies still fruit flies if there's nothing to keep them from genetically drifting into being something else altogether?
Creation "scientists" stopped doing research on their own after they gave up trying to prove Noah's flood and a young earth back in the 50's.
Untrue, but whatever.
Here's a chance for them to resume research.
Yeah . . . when the atheistic scientists of the world no longer pitch a fit and apply political pressure on the Smithsonian Institute for daring to publish an article on Intellegent Design as a theory (as happened a few months ago), we'll pretend that the scientific playing field is level enough for full Creationists to even bother. Until then, your "offer" is right up there with a housefull of cats offering to let a mouse come speak to them on the benefits of a vegetarian diet.
Let them find and demonstrate whatever it is that limits evolution to a "kind".
Let evolutionists evolve a nice, short-lived species into one that is structurally different first. Until then, you cannot claim macro-evolution is a "fact."
Instead, they, and you, will offer excuses as to why such research is unnecessary.
Like you're offering excuses as to why evolutionists shouldn't have to produce an example of macro-evolution in the lab?
Hey, if you succeed, wonderful. It doesn't threaten my theology in the least. But if you're going to run around claiming that macro-evolution is a fact, you still have to produce results in the lab, not just conjectures based on a fossil record that is so incomplete that you guys had to come up with punk-eek to explain away the lack of evidence.
Unfalsifiable theories that explain away a lack of evidence are not, by their very nature, scientific. Yet that's where evolution is today.
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