Evolution a hoax?

[Wowbagger]

My references to creationist or ID research and papers is in response to the false claim such work does not occur.

Your references to creationist and ID research is not really creationist nor ID research, then, isn't it?!

Without invoking the Creator or the Designer, all they are doing is re-interpreting findings to match their beliefs.

They are NOT formulating testable claims for the core of those beliefs: The actual Creator.

Their re-interpretation is generally not productive: That is, it does not lend itself to asking new questions and making new, empirical discoveries, or generating new knowledge. Ultimately, it can not be used to develop workable technologies or solutions to problems in the field of biology.

And, their re-interpretations are generally of low quality. They often have to ignore some aspect of some science, every time they write one of these things.

Yes, sometimes a creationist will accomplish real science. But, the funny thing is: They are NOT invoking the Creator whenever they do so!

Remember too: Debunking Evolution is NOT the same as proving Creationism. Other natural processes could be at work, and "accidents" are not ruled out. (Such as Dust Bin Theory: What if life on Earth was NOT designed, but emerged by accident from a pile of the creator's waste products? ID has no way to rule that out.)

Do you understand why scientists tend to prefer evolutionary theories?

 

[pakeha]

Look into it more. Read the links I provided. They deal with rebuttals such as the one you mentioned and others.

Edit to add: thought this was dealt with but cannot remember where. It may not be on one of the links, but regardless, it appears an evolutionist may agree the research indicates the tracks were made in water and has come up with an alternate hypothesis than the creationist. Undoubtedly more work will show who is right.

Well, you've done it again.
Editing after you've received a reply.
Not very honest and looks as though you're in the habit of cheating in debates.

A suggestion is not a full rebuttal. We are going to have see more work to see if the desert streams hypothesis is a valid alternative. For example, why would all such tracks appear to only be formed in desert streams and not in desert winds as originally proposed. I don't know enough about how such fossil tracks are formed but the alternative hypothesis has to be explored a little more than just someone commenting.

Reread the article, randman. Be honest and admit the explanation given makes more sense.

Your references to creationist and ID research is not really creationist nor ID research, then, isn't it?!

Without invoking the Creator or the Designer, all they are doing is re-interpreting findings to match their beliefs.

They are NOT formulating testable claims for the core of those beliefs: The actual Creator.

Their re-interpretation is generally not productive: That is, it does not lend itself to asking new questions and making new, empirical discoveries, or generating new knowledge. Ultimately, it can not be used to develop workable technologies or solutions to problems in the field of biology.

And, their re-interpretations are generally of low quality. They often have to ignore some aspect of some science, every time they write one of these things.

Yes, sometimes a creationist will accomplish real science. But, the funny thing is: They are NOT invoking the Creator whenever they do so!...

What wowbagger said.

 

[randman]

Your references to creationist and ID research is not really creationist nor ID research, then, isn't it?!

Without invoking the Creator or the Designer, all they are doing is re-interpreting findings to match their beliefs.

They are NOT formulating testable claims for the core of those beliefs: The actual Creator.

Their re-interpretation is generally not productive: That is, it does not lend itself to asking new questions and making new, empirical discoveries, or generating new knowledge. Ultimately, it can not be used to develop workable technologies or solutions to problems in the field of biology.

And, their re-interpretations are generally of low quality. They often have to ignore some aspect of some science, every time they write one of these things.

Yes, sometimes a creationist will accomplish real science. But, the funny thing is: They are NOT invoking the Creator whenever they do so!

Remember too: Debunking Evolution is NOT the same as proving Creationism. Other natural processes could be at work, and "accidents" are not ruled out. (Such as Dust Bin Theory: What if life on Earth was NOT designed, but emerged by accident from a pile of the creator's waste products? ID has no way to rule that out.)

Do you understand why scientists tend to prefer evolutionary theories?

Just wrong and arbitrary. And ID does have a way to rule the "accident" hypothesis out. Forensic science detecting intelligent design is well-founded.

 

[randman]

Also, keep in mind your ignorance: There are 16 K class ERVs alone that are shared with chimps.

It is obvious though that you are just parroting creationist lies:
Three Layers of Endogenous Retroviral Evidence for the Evolutionary Model

There are "~200 thousand ERVs in the human genome" - more than 99.9% are shared.

Depends on what you mean by shared. They are not all in the same spot, just a small fraction of them are. You left that out and yet call creationists liars?

 

[randman]

Reread the article, randman. Be honest and admit the explanation given makes more sense.

Which explanation? The guy at the end that says maybe the tracks were made in water or the other guys.

You cannot refute peer-reviewed, researched claims with a mere offhand comment without further explanation. You can do it here but there will still need to be more work by these scientists to know if the desert stream hypothesis makes sense. Maybe desert streams explain it, and maybe it does not. Why would seeming all the tracks be made in water if only parts of the desert intermittently had water?

 

[aggle-rithm]

Edit to add: If evolutionists want a civil and honest discussion, they need to admit creationists and IDer do original research, publish and make scientific contributions. Insisting this is not the case is just dishonest.

If the sole purpose of this original research is to demonstrate, "See? This shows that there's a small possibility that my beliefs aren't COMPLETELY idiotic!", then their scientific contributions are unlikely to help us understand the world better.

 

[ehcks]

So, Randman... We know you're anti-evolution, for whatever reason, but what's your alternative? I'll call it Randmanism for a moment so I can ask questions.

What is Randmanism, and how does it work? What force(s) does it use to cause its effects, and if applicable, how do its force(s) work?
How does Randmanism explain the nature of life? How does it explain DNA? The chronologically linear existence of fossils?

None of those questions has anything to do with Evolution, so don't even think about using it. This next one does, but don't get them confused.
How does Randmanism explain these things better than Evolution? This last part's important. It must do so better than the current theory to replace it. However, you can not use any perceived or real flaws of Evolutionary theory to explain how Randmanism works.

 

[randman]

ehicks, this thread is about evolution and it would be a violation of board rules to take it off into a different direction in the manner you are requesting.

I have discussed my beliefs elsewhere on this forum.

I also think it's very important to recognize what the data does and does not say and admit weaknesses in your theory, something evos refuse to do. Moreover, there is a difference sometimes between what one believes and what one can say the evidence conclusively supports. I am not sure any one model currently explains all the evidence.

So you'd have to clarify. Do you want to know what I believe? Or do you want to know what I think the evidence thus far suggests? They are not always the same thing and that's true for scientists as well. Scientists have beliefs the evidence will indicate such and such a thing, and a good scientist admits when and where the evidence has not arrived to definitely say one way or another.

 

[ehcks]

ehicks, this thread is about evolution and it would be a violation of board rules to take it off into a different direction in the manner you are requesting.

I have discussed my beliefs elsewhere on this forum.

No, you really haven't. I was an avid reader of the last, what.. 5 evolution threads you dragged into the upper double digits? You never answered a question close to this, using "off-topic" as an excuse, even in the thread specifically made so that this question was the topic.

Not that this would be off-topic either. The thread title is "Evolution a hoax?" and you seem to believe the answer is yes. For evolution to be a hoax, it would have to be wrong. For evolution to be wrong, something else would have to be right.

What do you believe the right thing is?

 

[A'isha]

Depends on what you mean by shared. They are not all in the same spot, just a small fraction of them are. You left that out and yet call creationists liars?

From Reality Check's link:

The fourth common response is to understate the number of orthologous ERV, and to use that number in conjunction with target site preference. The argument is as follows:

"There are only a few orthologous ERVs found in both humans and chimpanzees. Given target site preference, it is not unlikely that they are the result of infections in separate lineages. Thus the sharing of ERVs is constant with uncommon ancestry."

It is not unreasonable to hypothesize that among the tens of thousands of ERVs, similar target site preference my have resulted in a very small percentage of instances of insertion, endogenization, and fixation in orthologous loci in two separate lineages.

But the first problem with the idea that this renders uncommon ancestry plausible is that there are ERVs shared by many more than just two lineages. For instance, there are ERVs shared by chimpanzees, humans, gorillas, orangutans, gibbons, and Old World Monkeys (Kurdyukov et al., 2001; Lebedev et al., 2000; Medstrand and Mager, 1998; Anderssen et al., 1997; Steinhuber et al., 1995). The second problem—and by far, the most important—is that we do not share only a few ERVs in orthologous loci with Chimpanzees; examination of indel variation, and whole-genome analysis shows that we share virtually all of them with Chimpanzees. This is discussed extensively in the "Amount of Shared ERVs" section, above.

 

[randman]

No, you really haven't. I was an avid reader of the last, what.. 5 evolution threads you dragged into the upper double digits? You never answered a question close to this, using "off-topic" as an excuse, even in the thread specifically made so that this question was the topic.

Not that this would be off-topic either. The thread title is "Evolution a hoax?" and you seem to believe the answer is yes. For evolution to be a hoax, it would have to be wrong. For evolution to be wrong, something else would have to be right.

What do you believe the right thing is?

I completely answered it in detail. If you want to start another thread, I will give you a brief summary there.

In reference to something besides evo theory, I think ID is an alternative and have discussed varying models including front loading, though I wouldn't say I am a front loader. I do believe the evidence suggests specific plans were predetermined, however they arrived, and that ultimately God created all of life and that we can detect the Designer by the things that are designed.

There are lots more details, which I often have discussed at length.

 

[randman]

From Reality Check's link:

Sounds like the author of that link doesn't know what he's talking about. Can you guys show where evolutionists have published and stated that nearly 100% of ERVs occur in the same loci for chimps and human beings because I have never read that and quite the opposite.

 

[Wowbagger]

randman, if you can't answer to Evolution's power to help solve problems, you have no basis on which to claim Evolution is a hoax.

At least not to anyone terribly important.

 

[Perpetual Student]

In reference to something besides evo theory, I think ID is an alternative and have discussed varying models including front loading, though I wouldn't say I am a front loader. I do believe the evidence suggests specific plans were predetermined, however they arrived, and that ultimately God created all of life and that we can detect the Designer by the things that are designed.

This says it all! Scrutinizing the fossil record for (so called) gaps, mining the literature to find misstatements and errors made by individuals, denying all of the overwhelming and collaborating evidence from about a dozen different scientific disciplines supporting evolution -- but then admitting such a blatantly uncritical acceptance of a magical explanation is the height of folly and hypocrisy. How could this person even pretend to engage in a scientific discourse?

 

[Dinwar]

Just wrong and arbitrary. And ID does have a way to rule the "accident" hypothesis out. Forensic science detecting intelligent design is well-founded.

This isn't actually true. Very few empirical tests have been run on forensic science, often for the very good reason that it's horribly unethical to do so. However, when tests are available they frequently show that the situation is more complex than people think. The example that sticks in my mind is arson: wildfires can produce what people assume is evidence for the use of accelearants. Which means that that evidence can be produced via entirely natural processes. Check out the book "Discarded Science" for more examples.

To be fair, randman's position is widely held. And there's a lot of good forensic science out there. It's just that forensics is really just beginning as a science, and a lot of it lacks the rigorous theoretical and empirical framework of a more mature science.

As for why I often attack randman, it's for two reasons. First, his credibility IS a factor, and therefore it's a legitimate target. "You're likely wrong because you're a known liar" is a valid chain of reasoning, based on empirical evidence (check out the thread ANTpogo made about the Heackel diagram to see ample evidence of my claim that randman isn't interested in the truth). Second, randman uses the typical Creationist tactic of throwing up so much garbage that it's impossible to adequately refute it all. On occasion I'll try--I'm trying to improve my osteology anyway, so it was useful to critique a bad osteology argument--but most o fthe time that's just playing into his hands. I'll grant you I could do it bette (and I'll make a concious effort to do so--I've gotten into a nasty habbit of using debates to blow off steam), but I'd still rather not let randman dictate the terms of this discussion, considering his past behavior.

If evolutionists want a civil and honest discussion, they need to admit creationists and IDer do original research, publish and make scientific contributions. Insisting this is not the case is just dishonest.

Oh, we do. It's just that either their research has nothing to do with ID/Creationism, or is laughably BAD. Or both--in my experience, Creationists aren't great at giving presentations. Too stiff, and they never seem to learn not to read off the slides.

 

[A'isha]

Sounds like the author of that link doesn't know what he's talking about.

Yes, you repeat a cut-and-paste creationist canard, and he's the one who doesn't know what he's talking about.

The Discovery Institute attempted to do what you're doing, in response to the article. The author's article addressed that in a rebuttal:

Out of tens of thousands of ERV elements in the human genome, roughly how many are known to occupy the same sites in humans and chimpanzees? According to this Talk-Origins article, at least seven. Let's call it less than a dozen. Given the sheer number of these retroviruses in our genome (literally tens of thousands), and accounting for the evidence of integration preferences and site biases which I have documented above, what are the odds of finding a handful of ERV elements which have independently inserted themselves into the same locus?

The TalkOrigins article in question states the following:

There are at least seven different known instances of common retrogene insertions between chimps and humans, and this number is sure to grow as both these organism's genomes are sequenced (Bonner et al. 1982; Dangel et al. 1995; Svensson et al. 1995; Kjellman et al. 1999; Lebedev et al. 2000; Sverdlov 2000). Figure 4.4.1 shows a phylogenetic tree of several primates, including humans, from a recent study which identified numerous shared endogenous retroviruses in the genomes of these primates (Lebedev et al. 2000).

That article was written some time ago, and while it may have been true at the time, since then, the entire human and chimpanzees genomes have been sequenced and compared. As I state in my ERV essay, the total indel variation between the chimpanzee and human genomes was found to be ~3%, comprising a maximum of ~45 Mb (~1.5%) in each genome (Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, 2005), whereas, the total length of all ~200 thousand ERVs is at least ~127 Mb (megabases; million base pairs) (International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, 2001). Thus, right from the start, we know that the majority of ERV are in orthologous loci. Here is the summary I gave (for more information, refer to the main page):

In summary, indel variation shows that most transposable elements, such as ERVs, cannot be lineage-specific; they must be orthologous. When the indels are examined, this is corroborated, and less than 0.1% of ERVs are found to be lineage-specific (Polavarapu, Bowen, & McDonald, 2006). Finally, definitive confirmation is obtained by genome-wide comparison, where virtually all ERVs are directly observed to be in orthologous loci (Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, 2005).

In other words, your criticism is inapplicable here.

Can you guys show where evolutionists have published and stated that nearly 100% of ERVs occur in the same loci for chimps and human beings because I have never read that and quite the opposite.

See the papers mentioned at the link. Here and here, for your convenience.

Specifically, as this table shows, the total length of all 200-something thousand ERVs in the human genome is about 127 million base pairs. However, according to the analysis of the chimpanzee genome at the first linked paper (in the section "Insertions and deletions"), the total indel variation between humans and chimps is no more than 45 million base pairs. In other words, even if every single one of the indel variations between chimps and humans is an ERV, that still leaves 65% of the ERV genes the same between the two species. And, since ERVs can be of wildly different lengths, that potentially means a really huge chunk of ERVs are the same in both species.

This is where the second paper linked above comes in. It tells us:

In this paper, we present the results of the first systematic search for endogenous retroviruses in the chimpanzee genome. We have identified 425 full-length endogenous retroviruses in the chimpanzee genome that can be grouped into 42 independent lineages or families (Figure 1). All but two families of chimpanzee endogenous retroviruses were found to have orthologues in humans (Table ​2). In contrast, we have found that all known families of human endogenous retroviruses have orthologues in chimpanzees. The two CERV families without orthologues in the human genome display a patchy distribution among primates (Figure ​5) and our data suggest that at least some members of both families have been transpositionally active in the chimpanzee lineage after the divergence of chimpanzees and humans from a common ancestor.

 

[DC]

Says right there you have healthy people. Reread it. It raised the risks of Downs and Turner. Just read the links I provided.

1 in every 1000 people, vast majority very healthy, have 45 chromosomes with no negative health effects for them whatsoever.

Should there be an extreme bottleneck with humans, we could see down the road people having just 45 chromosomes but that change would have happened all during human lineages just as the reduction to 46 has.

doesn't change the fact that the theory of evolution can explain our fused Chromosome 2 and ID cannot.

 

[ehcks]

I completely answered it in detail. If you want to start another thread, I will give you a brief summary there.

In reference to something besides evo theory, I think ID is an alternative and have discussed varying models including front loading, though I wouldn't say I am a front loader. I do believe the evidence suggests specific plans were predetermined, however they arrived, and that ultimately God created all of life and that we can detect the Designer by the things that are designed.

There are lots more details, which I often have discussed at length.

Didn't even come close to answering my questions, but you said enough for me.

You can't rationally argue against "God created life" because there is nothing rational about the statement. "God" isn't proven, nor is a creation. A doubly-false premise leads to no useful conclusions. Arguing with you is a complete waste of time.

 

[aggle-rithm]

Also, keep in mind there are only 7 known shared ERVs with chimps among about 30,000 in human beings. That's a context that should be explained whenever evos trump ERVs as strong evidence for common ancestry.

Can we help it if we are so much more adept at mapping our genome than the chimps are at mapping theirs?

Lazy chimps.

 

[randman]

randman, if you can't answer to Evolution's power to help solve problems, you have no basis on which to claim Evolution is a hoax.

At least not to anyone terribly important.

First off, microevolution does not explain macroevolution, hence that part is wrong. Secondly, it's a logical fallacy to insist something wrong must be right based on whether something else is correct or available.