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Topic: Fernando Castro-Chavez: Some Implications for the Study of Intelligent Design ...
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nosivad
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posted 17. April 2004 07:58
Fernando
Again in the interest of accuracy, I (Davison) do not have an active thread any more. Is Evolution Finished? has been closed.
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nobody
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posted 17. April 2004 15:52
Hello Fernando,
You comment:
quote:
The proteins are the primary (The Protos) link between the biological Software and the biological Hardware,
Here is a most interesting site, not generated by a creationist as far as I can tell, relating to biological software:
DNA seen through the eyes of a coder
http://ds9a.nl/amazing-dna/
quote:
DNA is not like C source but more like byte-compiled code for a virtual machine called 'the nucleus'. It is very doubtful that there is a source to this byte compilation - what you see is all you get.
The language of DNA is digital, but not binary. Where binary encoding has 0 and 1 to work with (2 - hence the 'bi'nary), DNA has 4 positions, T, C, G and A.
Whereas a digital byte is mostly 8 binary digits, a DNA 'byte' (called a 'codon') has three digits. Because each digit can have 4 values instead of 2, an DNA codon has 64 possible values, compared to a binary byte which has 256.
He lists numerous programming features of DNA, including Position Independent Code. I really enjoy this one particular statement, towards the end of his page:
quote:
Holy Code: /* you are not expected to understand this */
Some code is sacred. We may not remember who wrote it, or why - we just know that it works. The guy who thought it up may have left the company already. Such code is not to be tinkered with.
Amen. It makes me very nervous when scientists play around with God's programming just to see what will happen.
[ 17. April 2004, 15:53: Message edited by: nobody ]
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Fernando Castro-Chavez
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posted 19. April 2004 15:24
Nobody:
Thank you for the link, I enjoyed it, i.e., some more of the whopping analogies:
Massive multiprocessing: each cell is a universe:
"We can view each cell as a CPU, running its own kernel. Each cell has a copy of the entire kernel, but chooses to activate only the relevant parts. Which modules or drivers it loads, so to speak. If a cell needs to do something ('call a function'), it whips up the right piece of the genome and transcribes it into RNA. Now for the really cool bit :-)
This protein is tagged with a shipping address. This is a marker consisting of several amino acids which tell the rest of the cell where this protein needs to go. There is machinery, which acts on these instructions, and delivers the protein, which is potentially on the outside of the cell. The delivery instruction is then stripped off and several post processing steps may be performed, possibly activating the protein - which is good, because you may not want to transport an active protein through places where it should not do work."
"Cells guard their code better than Microsoft!"
Self hosting & bootstrapping:
"To create a new 'binary' of a specimen, a *living* copy is required. The genome needs an elaborate tool chain in order to deliver a living thing. The code itself is impotent. This tool chain is commonly called 'your parents'."
DNA Helix:
"Mirroring, fail over: "...genes are thus present twice. In case one is broken or unsafely mutated, the other independent copy is still there. This is what we would normally call 'fail over'."
Holy Code:
"Some parts of the genome are actively changing and some parts are sacrosanct. A good example of the latter is the Histone genes H3 and H4. These genes are fundamental to the actual storage of the genome and are thus of paramount importance. Any failure in this code rapidly leads to a non-functioning organism. H3 an H4 genes have a *zero* effective mutation rate in humans. But it goes far beyond that. You share almost the exact same code with anything from chickens to grass or moulds. It appears as if H3 and H4 were authored very carefully as they do have a lot of 'synonymous changes', which through the clever techniques described above do not lead to changes in the output."
"There are pieces of genome that can be read from multiple starting points, and produce useful (but different) results either way."
The Make file:
"Like a Makefile, 'HOX' genes only trigger things in other genes and don't materially build things themselves. The homeobox 'syntax' appears to be very 'holy' in the sense described above... note that the 'build a leg' routine in a fruit fly is of course radically different from that in a mouse, but the 'selector' correctly triggers the right instructions."
Introns:
"These comments are fascinating in their own right. Like C comments they have a start marker, like /*, and a stop marker, like */. But they have some more structure. Remember that DNA is like a tape - the comments need to be snipped out physically! The start of a comment is almost always indicated by the letters 'GC', which thus corresponds to /*, the end is signaled by 'AG', which is then like */.... more like html comments: ACTUAL CODE< !-- blah blah blah blah ---- blah -->ACTUAL CODE. Now, what are these comments good for?... We know that some introns are copied faithfully, in many circumstances with more accuracy than the exons... most appealing (to a coder)... 'Folding propensity'. DNA needs to be stored in a highly coiled form... If we see 'no transition, no transition,transition,transition' on disk, we can be sure that this corresponds to '0011' - it is exceedingly unlikely that our reading process is so imprecise that this might correspond to '00011' or '00111'. So we need to insert spacers so as to prevent too little transitions. This is called 'Run Length Limiting' on magnetic media... transitions need to be inserted to make sure that the data can be stored reliably. Introns may do much the same thing by making sure that the resulting code can be coiled properly."
"A fascinating link of uncertain scientific value is http://post.queensu.ca/~forsdyke/introns.htm"
Proteins:
"As proteins interact in the cell, they rely on each others' characteristics... because of great internal dependencies which inhibit the changing of the 'contract' of the protein [Nature, 28 June 2001, and M. Kimura, T. Ohta, Science, 26 April 2002.]... Proteins that interact with a lot of other proteins cannot evolve, or at least, only do so at a very slow rate... as both parts of the dependency need to evolve in a compatible way at the same time."
Bug Regression:
"When fixing a bug in a computer program, we often introduce new bugs in the course of doing so. The genome is rife with this thing. A lot of African Americans are immune to Malaria but instead suffer from sickle cell anemia."
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Rex:
The link for 'The Great Impact' article that I posted before says that the theoretical estimate, based on the "cosmic dust" of the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physics, Luis W. Alvarez and his son Walter (http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/dinosaur-extinction.html) was 10 Km, but the reality found was a ~200 Km crater! Similar craters impacted other areas of the world. Earth’s atmosphere was broken then by the entrance of those ice-filled comets, and the dust raised by the impact was enough to leave this planet in full darkness. The importance of that event for us is that before and after the impact, there was life that appeared both times suddenly, without any ‘evolutionary transformism’ (null gradualism in the original diversity levels of life). The lack of gradualism and of intermediate forms, a lack that Gould and its followers fully acknowledge, is claiming that evolution could in no way have happened at any moment (Davison, notice this!):
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/98/11/6261
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/98/11/5955
All molecular evolutionary speculations and its 'dating' lack of any Foundation, and apart of that, each molecule inside an organism provides "a different 'date'."
Quotation:
"This paper represents a real step forward," says ecologist Michael Rosenzweig of the University of Arizona in Tucson. "For the first time, a large group of people is saying paleobiology has been making a mistake, that it's very important to deal with sampling issues. And when you try to get rid of the biases, the diversity curve looks a lot flatter" [Putting Limits on the Diversity of Life. Richard A. Kerr. Science 2001 May 25; 292: 1481: “A new way to analyze the fossil record is suggesting that life… long ago hit a limit to its diversity”, “Where Sepkowski's numbers told of steadily increasing marine diversity, a recount shows… a plateau” ! ]
As a side note I must say that the second irruption of water from the outer space did not included the "tearing apart" of the atmosphere, its entrance was through the natural atmospheric holes to be found on both poles. The Mexican Nobel Prize Mario Molina co-discovered the "Ozone Holes"; however, they are NOT the product of human CFC's, they were designed from the beginning by the IDer with a specific purpose, to filter our atmosphere, to let out the toxics (i.e., those CFC's, etc). This vision and the water in the outer space is another ID perspective inspired by the Eternal Source.
Atoms resemble solar systems and our universe resembles a gigantic cell in suspension.
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gordon:
Next is he complete statement of Duane T. Gish:
In her Essay, Scott says, "The Supreme Court has ruled that teaching creationism and creation 'science' are unconstitutional." In a letter published in Nature (1) in 1987, after the Supreme Court decision on the Louisiana equal time legislation, Scott said, "the Supreme Court decision says only that the Louisiana law violates the constitutional separation of church and state; it does not say that no one can teach scientific creationism--and unfortunately many individual teachers do." These statements appear to be contradictory. Which one is true? In an article published in 1987 in the New York Times Magazine (2), Stephen Jay Gould says "Creationists claim their law broadened the freedom of teachers by permitting the introduction of controversial material. But no statute exists in any state to bar instruction in 'creation science'. It could be taught before, and it can be taught now." Michael Zimmerman in Bioscience in 1987 says, "The Supreme Court ruling did not, in any way, outlaw the teaching of 'creation science' in public school classrooms. Quite simply it ruled that in the form taken by the Louisiana law, it is unconstitutional to demand equal time for this particular subject. 'Creation science' can still be brought into science classrooms if and when teachers and administrators feel it is appropriate."
By Scott's own words, the concurrence of Gould and Zimmerman, and a reading of the Supreme Court's decision concerning the Louisiana law, it seems clear that the decision did not declare that teaching scientific evidence that supports creation in public school classrooms is unconstitutional and thus prohibited. This false notion is incessantly repeated by those who adamantly oppose such educational activities. As Richard Lewontin has rightly stated, evolution and creationism are irreconcilable worldviews. When each is stripped down to the bare bones, each is intrinsically religious. Although they constitute inferences based on circumstantial evidence, the evidence supporting each is by nature scientific and should be made available to students in the tax-supported public schools of our pluralistic democratic society.
References
1. E. Scott, Nature 329, 282 (1987).
2. S. J. Gould, "The verdict on creationism," New York Times Mag. (19 July 1987), p. 34.
3. M. Zimmerman, Bioscience 37 (no. 9), 635 (1987).
[Note: Gish never mentioned Karl Popper. So, there is no 'intentional' change in any name or any 'intentional' misquoting, as you have suggested time after time. If I refuse to include the numbers of ‘dating’ speculations in my ‘Literature Review’ is because I consider them to be wrong]
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nosivad: I was not aware of that.
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Scott: Thanks for posting the actual link for that article.
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Rex Kerr
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posted 19. April 2004 23:09
Okay, this is getting weirder and weirder. I think this will be my last post to this page, but I'll see.
First, take a small rock and throw it hard into the sand. How big is the crater? How big was the rock? How big of a crater do you think you'd make if the rock was 10km in diameter and was moving at 30000 miles per hour?
Holes in the atmosphere? What difference does it make? The comet would then slam into the ground at, say, 30000 miles per hour instead of into the atmosphere. Also, you can't make a hole in a gas, since pressure fills in the hole. The ozone hole has nothing to do with the effects of a massive object striking the earth at extremely high speed.
Also, CFCs are gravitationally bound to the earth (they can't exceed escape velocity), are not impeded by ozone, and don't rapidly break down in UV light of the frequency absorbed by ozone. So an ozone hole won't do much of anything to get rid of them. Not to mention that CFCs are essentially harmless to biological organisms, which is the whole reason why they were used in the first place. UV light, however, is not essentially harmless.
I'm not sure where you're getting all this absurdly impossible stuff from, but you might want to check up on your non-scientific sources a little more carefully. People have a bad habit of confidently asserting that which they know nothing about, and it doesn't really do to simply believe them, even if they tell a good story.
Feel free to check up on my claims with the aid of a physics textbook, the material safety data sheet of a CFC compound, a basic astronomy book, a rock and sandbox, and so on.
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nosivad
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posted 20. April 2004 08:01
I cannot agree with Lewontin that there is any conflict whatsoever between "creation" in its broadest sense and organic evolution. Both Lamarckian and Darwinian evolutionary models are fundamentally creative and both have been dismal failures. They both must be abandoned. Accordingly, as a convinced evolutionist, I proposed the Semi-meiotic hypothesis and its derivative, the Prescribed Evolutionary hypothesis, as the only conceivable explanations for organic evolution, a process which, beyond the restraints of the species, is apparently no longer occurring. Like differentiation, ecological succession and growth, phylogeny has been, in my opinion, a self-limiting process in which sexual reproduction has served to terminate and stabilize the creative sequence. This view demands only the original actions of an incomprehensibly intelligent creator the presence of which is neither any longer evident nor in any way personal. In short, it indicates the sort of creator as proposed by Einstein and Spinoza.
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Moderator
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posted 20. April 2004 12:15
I've not been following this thread, but based on the last few posts, I'm discouraged.
This is not a website for debating creationism or theology. Please move such discussions elsewhere.
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nosivad
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posted 20. April 2004 13:47
I do not regard the necessity of a creator as debatable any more than I do intelligent design. If that means closing the thread, close it. It won't be the first time threads have been terminated for what seem to me to be ideological reasons.
[ 20. April 2004, 13:59: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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posted 20. April 2004 19:05
Sure, there is an ideology governing our board. Just as there is an ideology governing your consistent identification and pronouncement of ideological vicitimization.
The ideology of our board is that discussions be narrowly focused on substantive scientific issues and that such discussions not turn to polemic. Theology and creationism are not part of the narrow focus of our discussion, and if that seems ideological to you, then please find a different home.
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nosivad
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posted 20. April 2004 21:59
I have no idea what is meant by victimization. I certainly am not a victim. I don't even exist in the professional literature. The question remains - why? I can only suggest, as I have in the past, that it must be for the same reasons that Bateson, Broom, Berg, Schindewolf, Goldschmidt and Grasse also have been relegated to non-existent status. They have, far more effectively than I, exposed the total failure of the materialist neoDarwinian hypothesis, the most failed hypothesis in the history of science.
Furthermore, I do not regard Einstein's perception of a creator as having any theological implications whatsoever as it is completely impersonal as is my own. In any event, I prefer, if possible, to hang around.
[ 20. April 2004, 22:20: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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gordon
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posted 21. April 2004 09:42
Fernando: quote:
My quoting of references in Literature Review is helping me to build a database of 'points to consider' for my research, if anyone is benefited with them is welcomed, as well as specific inputs.
That is fine, but you have done that in this thread as well, and to what end? How do these lists contribute to the topic of this thread? quote:
The quoting of statements from other people regarding Scott's writings was only necessary to clarify what other researchers have said about it, as she spoke in relation to ID and our molecular knowledge. If anybody wants to read the full quotations and her article in full, do so by going to the website of 'Science'.
That is fine, but it is completely irrelevant.
I had wondered if this:
"The most dogmatic promoter of the religion of evolution…"
was a necessary statement. Clearly, it is not, as the moderator has alluded to. Attempting to justify inflammatory rhetoric with largely irrelevant quotes and such simply compounds the problem.
Last comment from me on this non-issue.
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Fernando Castro-Chavez
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posted 21. April 2004 19:04
Rex,
Thanks you for your interesting postings and for your book recommendations, I will check those topics.
>take a small rock... [all the paragraph]
I think that we are just learning the difference of a giant ice-cube melting or already melted impacting the earth when compared to a meteor. The size at its entrance was different than the size at its end.
>Holes in the atmosphere?...
We are also just learning of the atmospherical effects of such an entrance. But a good inference is what happens when the Ozone Holes are wider.
>The ozone hole has nothing to do with the effects of a massive object striking the earth at extremely high speed.
I did not say that, I said that if we include ID, the Ozone Holes have a specific purpose since the very beginning. Those are not man-made. I am trying to understand with an ID perspective in mind of the sudden permafrost in the poles that trapped thousands of mammals, i.e., mammoths in the north pole when they were in motion, or eating, etc...
>CFCs are gravitationally bound to the earth (they can't exceed escape velocity)
We are also just starting to learn which substances within our atmosphere can escape through those holes to the outer atmosphere.
>CFCs are essentially harmless
There are many kinds of CFCs, some almost harmless and some harmful. A web page with recent data from the National Institutes of Health can clarify it:
http://hazmap.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/hazmap_link?tbl=TblAgents&id=706
If we also check there for the word 'Freon' we will have 12 different entries.
>this absurdly impossible stuff
>this is getting weirder and weirder
Gordon claim goes on the direction of not using 'inflammatory' words.
I am just trying to present a different perspective from what is written in the textbooks. The disciple of Cuvier always stressed the point: Put aside the books on doing your experiments; put aside the books and search the outdoors, etc. It is not that books are not important; the point is that they are secondary to further experiments. We are here in these 'brainstorms' to learn (at least that's my view) and not to present ourselves as the final truth in science.
Was that scientific ignorance in one area of Dr. Alvarez's thought what leaded him to his discovery of 'The Great Impact', in his own words:
"Because we know the rate at which extraterrestrial matter rains down on the earth each year," says Alvarez, "it occurred to me that by measuring the abundance of iridium in the sedimentary deposits..." "I later learned that this idea was twenty-five years old, and it had been implemented ten years ago," adds Alvarez parenthetically, but fortunately he didn’t know that at the time.
The full article:
http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/dinosaur-extinction.html
So, I only want to stress that the central point in my postings, by taking back the subject, is that both before and after 'The Great Impact' there is clear evidence of life appearing suddenly without any transformism, without any 'speciation', without any 'evolution'.
I have reviewed the more than 700 abstracts related with 'speciation' plus 'evolution', many of them have been posted in 'Literature Review':
http://www.iscid.org/boards/ubb-get_topic-f-18-t-000034.html
After seeking on them I find no evidence of any kind of natural 'speciation' going on on earth today or at any time. In the best of the cases they mean 'sub-speciation', and that is the real change or variability within true species.
When I found that the finches of Galapagos were able to interbreed and produce fertile offspring that opened my eyes to see the flaws in the weak definitions of 'species' used by evolutionists to support their unfounded claims. Those finches are the very same that were used by Darwin as his inspiration for his theory on evolution. You can see how the Grant's (the discoverers of that) struggle to try to fit their findings within the wrong theory of 'speciation', the main 'evidence' for the theories of 'evolution'.
And if there was and there is no transformism, there was no 'molecular evolution' leading to a gradual differentiation of species through the millennia, other two flawed 'evolutionary' claims.
And that, that is the central issue of the matter.
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nosivad
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posted 21. April 2004 21:25
Fernando
Your critique of the Darwinian position is sound as a dollar but it is wrong to assume that evolution did not occur in the past. It most certainly did and just as certainly did not proceed through the accumulation of point mutations, the vast majority of which are either deleterious or at best neutral. The Darwinian (sexually mediated) model is a complete failure just as is Lamarckism. Having eliminated both has convinced me that evolution proceeded, very much as ontogeny does, by the derepression of a largely preformed series of genetic blueprints. There still is no convincing demonstration that the environment has ever directly influenced the emergence of any new higher life form. What we observe today are the products of evolution and not the means by which it occurred. It remains a great unsolved mystery.
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Rex Kerr
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posted 21. April 2004 22:05
I'm not sure how to convey the magnitude of the problems with some of these ideas and not have it sound "inflammatory". In terms of consistency with basic laws of physics, they make about as much sense as saying that the Earth is flat, the Moon is made of cheese, the sun is carried across the sky in a chariot, and the sky is a half-black, half-blue sheet with holes poked in the black part.
The claim about CFCs simultaneously requires the Law of Gravitation and the Ideal Gas Law and the kinetic theory of gases and a few others to be badly wrong. Ozone molecules are about 0.5 microns apart at their highest concentration. But CFC molecules are a thousand times smaller. Everywhere is a hole if you're an escaping CFC molecule. But CFC molecules don't escape (and neither does ozone), thanks to gravity.
(CFCs are not perfectly harmless--but if you read the HazMap link you provided, it warns about concentrations in the 500-1000ppm range. For comparison, carbon dioxide (CO2) is found at only 370ppm in the atmosphere. Ozone is less than 1ppm. 500-1000ppm is an enormous amount. That's why the link warns about enclosed spaces.)
The bit about comets would overturn the ideas of kinetic energy, graviational potential energy, gas laws, etc.. Mt. Everest isn't even 10km high. How is something much larger than 10km supposed to get smaller before it hits the ground? The back will barely be in the atmosphere while the front is touching the ground!
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nobody
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posted 22. April 2004 12:19
Good morning Fernando,
You say:
quote:
When I found that the finches of Galapagos were able to interbreed and produce fertile offspring that opened my eyes to see the flaws in the weak definitions of 'species' used by evolutionists to support their unfounded claims. Those finches are the very same that were used by Darwin as his inspiration for his theory on evolution.
Evolutionists incorrectly call those finches Darwin's finches. Actually they are God's finches. The interesting variations in beak size and shape merely demonstrate the impressive flexibility that we observe as we learn more and more about God's incredible programming of life.
[ 22. April 2004, 12:21: Message edited by: nobody ]
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posted 22. April 2004 13:31
Nobody,
Such posts (above) are not helpful. We do not need you to repeat your slogans on our forums.
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