Replies

No. I did not. But I did not make claims about either.

Regarding your little flame war over this discussion you are trying to start, I invite lurkers and everyone to view the comments made. I made no claims for accuracy, just a desire that someone not just dismiss something based on what someone else's paper said at some time past. The Creationists may not have rebutted that paper, or they may have. We haven't read their work. So, to dismiss it outright is the epitomy of bias, exhibits bad faith, and is frankly arrogant. These men are not just Joe Schmoe off the street without any kind of understanding of science at all. They deserve to be heard. If you disagree with them, that's fine -but good grief it is just BS to condemn a paper of BS before you have even seen it.

Truly, I wish I knew how to make people check their intellectual prejudice at the door before doing science or debating it on these threads.

But it'll never happen. I believe it was js1138 who pointed out that it takes decades to change a paradigm. All you can do is present the information and let the people who read everything draw their own conclusions.

Epistemological materialism is intended to keep science objective, but that leaves religion completely out of science which is repugnant to some in science who put faith first – and worse, epistemological materialism is embraced by metaphysical naturalists as authority to promote atheistic social agendas associated with it (everything from animal rights to infanticide) – thereby making it twice as repugnant. (BTW, I suggest we not "go there" in this discussion.)

My two cents...

No. I did not. But I did not make claims about either.

Why would you post a link to something you don't understand and cannot defend? How is that different than posting links to and excerpts from The Journal of Irreproducible Results or The Latvian Dating Guide? What is the point, except to load the thread with SPAM?

Did you bait someone into doing what they should have done before commenting? Bad girl!

Noli Illegitimi Carborundum.

I noted a Vitamin C DNA segment that did not change.

Guinea Pigs are not primates.

But you knew that. Of course there is no telling when they no longer could make Vitamin C.

Noli Illegitimi Carborundum.

Caveat emptor, cave canem, cave perfidia.

I noted a Vitamin C DNA segment that did not change.

I noted in my post #1969 that this was highly misleading, since the Vitamin C synthesis psuedogene actually changed significantly. The fact that one can pick an arbitrarily small "segment" within it which wasn't among the portions which changed is a red herring. A fixation on "but not *all* of it has changed" is a failure to see the forest for the trees, or an attempt to distract attention from the actually significant regions (i.e., those which *did* change, and in what manner).

Guinea Pigs are not primates.

DittoJed2, notice that this is a red herring -- I never said that they were, nor does this obvious fact in any way change my points or the study I cited.

Of course there is no telling when they no longer could make Vitamin C.

Actually, there are several ways to tell, including: Guinea pigs possess a highly mutated gene for L-gulono-gamma-lactone oxidase, the key enzyme for L-ascorbic acid biosynthesis missing in this species , which used the amount of mutation in the guinea pig GLO pseudogene relative to the rat GLO gene to conclude, "...the date of the loss of L-gulono-gamma-lactone oxidase in the ancestors of the guinea pig was roughly calculated to be less than 20 million years ago."

Furthermore, DittoJed2, notice that the nature of the guinea pig mutations in the GLO pseudogene also fulfill the predictions of evolution and common descent. If the guinea pig GLO pseudogene were "broken" in the same way as the primate GLO pseudogene, this would pose a large problem for evolutionary theory, as it would strongly imply that guinea pigs were more closely related to primates (and vice versa) than any other lineage. So evolutionary theory predicts that although guinea pigs can't synthesize their own Vitamin C either, it must have arisen as an independent mutation from the one which occurred in the primate lineage, and that therefore it would be expected to be almost certainly a different set of mutations. And that is exactly what we find when we examine the DNA of guinea pigs, primates, and mammals with working GLO genes. Remember from my prior post, the human GLO pseudogene exhibits a missing Intron VIII, and a missing or highly damaged Exon XI. Meanwhile, the guinea pig GLO pseudogene is missing Exons I and V, while VIII and XI are present. It's "broken" in a different manner, and shares no statistical mutational similarities to the human/primate GLO pseudogenes. Evolution is, again, confirmed.

So if anyone hoped to imply a problem for evolutionary theory by pointing out that guinea pigs are not primates, they were mistaken.

I made no claims for accuracy, just a desire that someone not just dismiss something based on what someone else's paper said at some time past.

But what if that's the same thing their paper says today? The AiG release links to the papers themselves:

http://www.icr.org/research/icc03/pdf/Helium_ICC_7-22-03.pdf
http://www.icr.org/research/icc03/pdf/RATE_ICC_Baumgardner.pdf

These are exactly the papers we critiqued earlier. They have not been updated.

The Creationists may not have rebutted that paper, or they may have.

They haven't.

We haven't read their work.

We have.

So, to dismiss it outright is the epitomy of bias, exhibits bad faith, and is frankly arrogant.

You seem to be making some bad faith, biased presumptions there yourself.

These men are not just Joe Schmoe off the street without any kind of understanding of science at all.

Remember what I told you before about credentials?

They deserve to be heard.

They have been.