Posted on 07/31/2009 2:08:23 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Biological Big Bang: Another Explosion at the Dawn of Life
July 23, 2009 — Eugene Koonin and two friends from the NIH went tree-hunting. They examined almost 7,000 genomes of prokaryotes. They found trees all right – a whole forest of them. They even found 102 NUTs (nearly universal trees) in the forest. Unfortunately, it’s not what they wanted to find: a single universal tree of life that Darwin’s theory requires. They had to seriously consider the question: was there a biological big bang?
Publishing in an open-access article in the Journal of Biology,[1] they began with the founding father’s vision: “The tree of life is, probably, the single dominating metaphor that permeates the discourse of evolutionary biology, from the famous single illustration in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to 21st-century textbooks.” Alas, that 150-year-old icon must be dismantled. In their conclusion, they said, “the original tree of life concept is obsolete: it would not even be a 'tree of one percent'.”
What happened? It appears that horizontal gene transfer (HGT) has scrambled the genes in prokaryotes so much that any trace of common ancestry has been lost. This means that Darwin’s metaphor lacks empirical evidence. A fair-minded scientist would have to consider the possibility of a...
(Excerpt) Read more at creationsafaris.com ...
Please clarify exactly what you mean by Global Warming deniers.
As for neo-Darwinian evolution, it is in a shambles. They have lost their tree, they have lost their beads on a string understanding of genes, they have lost their prediction that the majority of DNA is leftover “junk” from our evolutionary past, and let’s not forget that things have only gotten worse for them with respect to the gaps in the fossil record, not to mention the super-sophisticated bio-nano world that is being uncovered by molecular and cell biology. Indeed, they are now finding dinos with blood vessels and soft-tissue still intact. Ouch!!!
You might as well face it, the HMS Beagle is sinking, and sinking fast. Of course, the latest scientific research only strengthens the HMS Creation, which leaves her even more ship-shape and ready for battle than ever before.
Yes, phylogenetic trees have indeed been used as evidence for evolution. They were said to validate Darwin’s prediction of common descent...that is, until the Evos finally came to the conclusion, long predicted by Creationists and IDers, that said phylogenetic trees cannot be used as evidence for anything of the sort. Now they are even talking about a “Biological Big Bang” as the “generative mechanism” that led to the diversity of life! And as the author rightly points out, this generative mechanism sounds an awful lot like the historical Genesis recounted in the book by the same name in the Bible. In the end, God’s creation resists ALL naturalistic explanations of its origin. And as such, all God-free explanations for the same are bound to fail.
Don't get me wrong, I am skeptical of the GW hysteria, but to pretend that we are on the precipice of the downfall of Global Warming theory is simply wishful thinking. I wish there were a smoking gun that would prove all GW stuff as bunk, but there isn't. I'm glad there is a more vocal decent, but GW advocates are way ahead, and they also have their "science" to prove it.
If indeed they have been exchanging name tags. From everything I have seen so far, HGT is just an Evo add-on being used to explain why God’s creation resists the Temple of Darwin’s tree of life metaphore. That’s not to say that HGT does not take place in nature, but I have yet to see any empirical evidence to suggest that it could scramble phylogenetic common descent beyond all recognition.
Get out of the echo chamber, and you will see that this is simply not the case. I don't know how else to inform you of this fact. Evolutionary science will be going strong long after you and I leave this earth. I'd wager big money on that, but then I couldn't spend it anyways..
LOL...likening Creation and ID to an echo chamber when it is in fact Darwin’s evo-religion that is unconstitionally being enfored by the state, is the supreme irony of ironies.
I think secular humanism would have no choice but to follow...at least until the evo-atheists invent the next Godless creation myth.
But the Darwinists still have the enormous Centralized Big Government Public School monopoly to force their 'approved' secular myths into the minds of other people's children.
This is why the Darwinists have such a stake in the far left Public Schools who are completely controlled by the Big Government NEA and their leftist hate-America groups such as the ACLU, and a multitude of other deceptively named groups.
The leftist media are also devoted worshipers of the Darwinist Public Schools because all these groups know a required, forced indoctrination of their secular leftist ideas using taxpayer money is they key to recruitment into their secular religion.
The aggressively destructive liberalism of each of these groups is that they all begin by Denying that we are "endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights".
Isn’t the power of a little truth amazing! The Evos control education, the press, and virtually all the institutions of government, and yet they can’t even make a dent one way or the other in the creation vs. evolution polls over the last 20 years! Must chap their hides to no end!!!
Cheers!
"Little truth" describes your posts quite nicely.
Thanks for the ping!
That tree of life picture would only be useful if evolution as described had actually occurred, not a view I share.
There's some excerpts on-line from a by author Zhou that discusses some of the difficulties of demonstrating that HGT has occurred. Cheers.
I never claimed to know everything. Still, it’s infinitely more than the Evos will ever know (in this lifetime) about the origin and diversity of life. Of course, everthing will be revealed when they stand before the judgement seat of their Creator.
Do you have a link for the Zhou excerpts?
Try this, I just used it: Microbial Functional Genomics
by Jizhong Zhou - 2004 - 626 pages
books.google.com - About this book - More book results »
very litte indeed.
You:
But of course! When there is absolutely not a trace of evolution to be found, not a single transitional life form among the millions that exist today, call it the result of evolution.
Right. Nothing like whales with legs.
Oh, wait, there are whales with legs. A whole series of them.
There are also new transitionals between reptiles and birds. But even the classic one, Archaeopterx, is sufficiently transitional that, while all creationists are certain that it isn't transitional, some declare it "100 percent bird," while others insist it was not a bird at all but only a reptile with faked feathers.
You have the same situation with the hominid Homo erectus. Creationists insist that all hominid fossils are EITHER ape or man, with no transitionals, but sometimes put particular erectus specimens in one category, and sometimes in the other, and sometimes can't agree among themselves in which category particlar fossils belong.
Or you had the insistence of someone like creationist fossil expert, Duane Gish, that there were no transitionals between reptiles and mammals, and besides none were even possible since reptiles all had their jaw jointed between the quadrate bone of the skull and the articular bone of the lower jaw, and mammals between the squamosal bone of the skull and the dentary bone of the lower jaw. So how could a tranistional possibly chew it's food while one skull/jaw articulation was unhinged and another created in its place, or how could it hear since (the homologue of) the articular bone of the reptilian jaw is found in the mammalian inner ear?
But, again, there is a whole series of transitionals, among the therapsid reptiles, in which the skull bones present in reptiles, but absent, vestigial or moved to the inner ear in mammals -- including those involved in the reptilian jaw joint -- are all gradually reduced in size and significance. Simultaneously, the squamosal and dentary bones of the mammalian jaw joint gradually grow in size, so much that they first come near to touching, and then finally, in a whole series of advanced theraspsids, do touch and articulate, even while the reptilian jaw joint remains active -- a double jointed jaw -- and then that articulation becomes less significant, and the reptilian jaw bones that will move to the inner ear become smaller and more loosely attached, and more intimately associated with the stapes (the single reptilian ear ossicle).
Again and again, transitionals which creationists have declared laughably impossible have subsequently turned up (the legged whales) or even were already know at the time of the creationist declaration (the double jaw jointed therapsids). Again and again, creationists declare that two groups are absolutely distinct, with no transitionals between, but then (at least when they dare to be specific) can't decide to which "distinct" group particular fossil forms belong.
Given that history, it's probably best that you simply assert that transitionals don't exist, refuse to engage the evidence, and stick to your bald assertion.
That way no evidence needs to be found, all that was really needed was for evolutionary theory to be confirmed was a declaration.
That's pretty funny, actually, since it is in glaring contradiction to the statement GGG made about horizontal gene transfer, even if neither of you are capable of seeing how.
IF it were indeed the case that evolution were baldly asserted without evidence, then how could the results of horizontal gene transfer possibly be incompatible with (or even artifactual to) that mere, evidence free, declaration?
IOW, the artifacts of genetic information having been transferred horizontally across evolutionary lineages can only stand out as artifacts after the evidentary case has been made; and indeed after it has been made not in some cursory, arm-waving, mere declaration fashion, but rather elucidated, analyzed and tested in extensive detail.
Anomalies can only stand as against evidence. Logically you can only declare anomaly by first acknowledging (at least putative) evidence. But instead you (via concurrance with GGG) declare that anomaly exists where, you simultaneously assert, no evidence has even been offered, and just ignore the contradiction.
The next declaration will be that the evolutionary process is complete, it was only a temporary thing.
This is ironic, seeing as how it is young earth creationists who insist on a global flood and the story of Noah's ark -- that is creationists like GGG and (presumably) yourself -- who are stuck with holding that evolution (even if you refuse to call it that) occurred temporarily, and at rates thousands of times faster than any evolutionist would countenance, in order to generate post-flood species diversity from the "kinds" preserved on the ark, and then abruptly stopped.
kinda like proving Obama was born in Hawaii. Lacking any evidence such as a birth certificate, just declare it to be so.
Ah, a "birther" too. Just goes to show that people who are fringey, kooky, paranoid and conspiratorialist about one thing, like evolution, are almost always the same way about other things as well.
Granted, I myself find it extremely odd, and therefore suspicious, that Obama hasn't released his long-form birth certificate. But, OTOH, if that helps to inspire kooks like you and the other birthers, who Obama and his supporters can then point to and ridicule as kooks, and pretend that such kooks are representative of all Obama critics, thus deligitimizing serious critics (EXACTLY as Clinton successfully did, btw, with the nutter murder, drug runner, etc, charges against him) then maybe his behavior in withholding the long form b.c. is NOT so unaccountable!
In any case, there is obviously not a "[lack] of any evidence" that Obama was born in Hawaii. The contemporary birth announcements in local papers are evidence. (Any normal person who knows about that alone will justifiably assume that you are a kook if you claim there is NO evidence.) Even the "Declaration of Live Birth" is evidence. No, it is obviously not the original document we are looking for, but it IS a form generated by the State of Hawaii indicating that a birth record for Obama does exist (if not a physical record, although they probably do have that too, then at the very least an entry in their computer database).
It will be revealed that GGG doesn't know the meaning of the word infinite.
Hey Stultis, your evolutionary soup is missing a key ingredient. It’s called (linked) evidence.
==Ah, a “birther” too. Just goes to show that people who are fringey, kooky, paranoid and conspiratorialist about one thing, like evolution, are almost always the same way about other things as well.
LOL...Haven’t you heard, various scientific polls peg the evo-atheists as the kookiest fringies around. To wit:
“The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?
The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.
Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama’s former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin’s former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.
This is not a new finding. In his 1983 book “The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener,” skeptic and science writer Martin Gardner cited the decline of traditional religious belief among the better educated as one of the causes for an increase in pseudoscience, cults and superstition. He referenced a 1980 study published in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer that showed irreligious college students to be by far the most likely to embrace paranormal beliefs, while born-again Christian college students were the least likely.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178219865054585.html
PS If you had read the thread, you would have noted that I’m not buying the Evos horizontal gene transfer argument. It sounds like the evolutionary equivalent of epicycles to me.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2305557/posts?page=44#44
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