It’s better, but not much better. Just to start: your title asks a question and never proposes an answer. It’s not clear what you think is happening, though you seem to have changed from attacking common descent to attacking natural selection. But then you go back in a couple of places to attacking common descent. You say it’s universal common descent you don’t like, but you never specify what counts as a separately created kind. You do seem to say that cephalopods are separately created from vertebrates, though I’m not sure even of that. So “common design” is still so vague as to be meaningless, and all your supposed tests are therefore useless. Your supposed predictions have no stated justification, and they’re still largely incoherent.
My main goal here is not to argue natural selection vs. common design (whatever that means) but to argue common descent vs. separate creation. I’m not sure you even see the difference. It seems futile to attempt a discussion under the circumstances.
This is known as “moving the goalposts”. Very little in biology is brand new. It mostly involved alterations to what’s already there. You seem to be demanding a model in which citrate metabolism appears instantly from nowhere. But that isn’t how it works. In the LTEE, there were both point mutations and duplications. If those aren’t new genetic information, then what would be? If new information requires poofing out of nowhere of complete systems, there seem to be no examples in life of any such events, so I guess we can suppose from the evidence that, by your criteria, God doesn’t exist.
I don’t think the previous statement makes a whole lot of sense either:
The essence of my father’s work is that he has shown that the origin of life is the founding axiom of biology, just as the origin of matter is the founding axiom of physics and chemistry. An axiom is a principle that is true, but which cannot be derived or proved. Axioms are where you start.
The origin of life is not a founding axiom of biology. The existence of life is. The science of life requires life to exist, but nobody’s work has “shown” this. I literally can’t make sense of what she is saying.
I don’t see how that “for instance” is in any way relevant to your claim. I have written nothing that could be interpreted as making is seem like you have “been deliberately doing this on a regular basis.”
Yes, you did claim that. What is the antecedent of “this” in text I bolded in your quote?
Great. That’s good to know that you don’t think that what you did was ethical. That is what you meant, correct?
That’s precisely how evolution is expected to work.
Let me ask a simple question of you about very early evolution: how does your hypothesis explain the fact that the enzymatic center of the ribosome, the peptidyl transferase that links amino acids together to make proteins, is a ribozyme and not a protein?
If you’re going to answer, please do not refer to any IDcreationist writings, as not a single one of them I’ve checked tell the truth about the evidence. Not interpretation, they misrepresent or omit the evidence itself.
The “this” was referring to this question you asked me…
Is using hearsay to cite (and blatantly misrepresent) a paper you’ve never read considered to be ethical in apologetics?
This question is highly presumptuous because it implies that I did this on purpose so I asked you a similar highly presumptuous question right back.
I explained what I meant above.
The designer re-uses the same parts and blueprint, such as genes, DNA sequences, chemical constituents, etc. like a clay potter or engineer to achieve a particular goal within a particular environment.
For example, life or viruses are irreducibly complex and require divine intervention according to experiments. More importantly, viruses cannot propagate without a host or intelligence NOR can it force the host to evolve further without an intelligence. For these reasons, it would require the designer to create more viruses to create bacteria from clay surfaces within the deep-sea vents AND force those bacteria to evolve further from other created viruses. As a result, this would require multiple origins but it would also create different types of microbes.
The designer re-uses the same parts and blueprint, such as genes, DNA sequences, chemical constituents, etc. like a clay potter or engineer.
As a result, the function between two organisms and how that function is being used under a different environment is what would show how they are separately created. We can find this from so-called vestigial features of organisms and suboptimal designs .
Let me clarify what I meant better. Even if the experiment did produce new genetic information under that condition from one population, it was not a repeated outcome because the 11 other populations did not produce anything novel at all. This is important to point out because in the past, biologists have simply assumed that beneficial mutations play no part in adaption because they are so rare. In contrast, accumulating evidence shows how large amounts of beneficial mutations are necessary for animals to obtain in the first phases of a new adaptation; otherwise, the animals would be poorly adapted to both the new and the old environments and eventually die off (Morell 1999).
For example, Axe (2000, 2004a) found that only one in 1074 amino-acid sequences yields functional protein folds, implying that protein folds generally are multi-mutation features that require multiple amino acids to be fixated before the assembly provides any functional improvement.
Can we please drop questions of character as related to person participating here?
Ethics is be a valid discussion, but might need a sub-thread. I won’t split the thread yet , but please make separate replies to ethics related discussion to make that thread split easier. – fnord.
I don’t see that it is presumptuous because I don’t see how one could cite a paper one has never read accidentally. Moreover, you clearly did the same thing only a minute later with Axe’s horrible paper in your next post!
Not very well.
[quote=“Meerkat_SK5, post:66, topic:13625”]
So that tells us that the designer is not omnipotent.
It also leaves an important question unaddressed: why use an inferior catalyst when a protein could be used?
I don’t know of any experiments that even suggest that. Do you see how you sneak untenable assumptions into your writing?
So my immune response requires intelligent input in the two weeks it takes to evolve an immune response to a new virus?
That makes absolutely no sense.
Axe found no such thing, as actually reading that paper clearly shows. You are egregiously misrepresenting Axe’s unfounded extrapolation as data. Again, you are citing a paper that your claim indicates that you never bothered to read. You couldn’t even be bothered to correct the number when you cut/pasted. That’s simply not ethical.
If you wish to deny having not read the paper, please explain the rationale for using a temperature-sensitive mutant instead of the wild-type protein as a starting point.
If you wish to deny having not read the paper, please explain the rationale for making claims about enzymatic activity without doing any enzyme activity assays.
Those would be fun discussions.
How many other papers on this subject have you read? [I’ve spent much of my career studying how changing amino-acid residues change enzymatic activity, btw, so I’m a much more qualified expert on this than Axe is.]
Is it ethical to cherry-pick one terrible paper from the thousands of relevant papers and pretend that the others don’t exist?
If Axe’s extrapolation is correct, how do you explain the existence of beta-lactamase abzymes?
It’s unclear what you mean by that and how it relates to universal (or otherwise) common descent.
But he doesn’t, does he? The “same” eyes in vertebrates and cephalopods are only superficially similar but are quite different in detail. The “same” genes in different species are not identical in sequence. Spark plugs in different cars are identical, as one would expect from re-use of parts, while parts in different species are non-identical in precisely the nested hierarchy we expect from common descent. And in fact species re-use parts in cases where it makes no engineering sense, as when whales make flippers and bats make wings from the same five-digit hand. But it makes perfect sense from the perspective of common descent. And again, how does this relate to “Evolution by Divine Intelligence”?
Word salad again. Please use more care in assembling your sentences so that they mean something and communicate that meaning to people who aren’t you.
One can only hope. But, sadly, no.
Another goalpost move. Why is a repeated outcome necessary?
No, they have not. Wherever did you get that notion? You have completely misunderstood your reference.
You have missed the several discussions right here that have completely dismantled Axe’s claims.
I’m sorry, but that was no improvement on your previous confusion.
Why? @Meerkat_SK5’s mind would be better opened by actually reading the Axe paper before citing it. Having him/her go to links would only serve to create a far more defensive position.
You make it sound like you are preparing for a battle.
I often find it helpful so see how other recap a topic before I read it myself, especially when it is not my area of knowledge. I can get a lot more out of reading if I know what parts I should be giving close attention.
As it happens, I recall reading Axe (2004?) and seeing some problems with his argument just based on probability. I didn’t understand the full magnitude of problems until I read the expert criticisms.
It’s not only considered ethical, it’s widely practiced and actively encouraged among creationists, even the supposedly scholarly ones. I’ve even seen creationists trying to claim that this is “standard academic practice”.
This is common misconception regarding the study. The development of the ability to aerobically metabolize citrate received much attention, and justifiably so. But this is just one of a large number of mutations that arose in all populations, many of them beneficial. Every single one of the 12 strains is now very different from, and more fit than, the original strain that started the experiment.
That’s workable because your mind is open. I think that we should give @Meerkat_SK5 the best opportunity to show the same, starting with reading and understanding the cited paper. Links would only set this up as a debate.
There’s that and more importantly, there are grand claims about enzymatic activity without a single assay of that activity. For that reason alone, I would have rejected the paper as a reviewer, regardless of the paper’s extrapolations and conclusions, since given its clinical importance, beta-lactamase is an easily and commonly assayed enzyme:
One does wonder if you have actually read either of those papers. Have you? And when you type “1074” is that a typo, or a failure of formatting, or a correct reproduction of whatever you actually read? The actual intended number would of course be “10^74”. But did you know that? I say this because what you post raises many questions about just what you have actually read and your understanding of whatever that is.
I doubt if someone who barely understands the objections raised against his (quoted) points, would be able to dig through Axe’s paper to figure out its severe limitations. Even I struggled with the technical details of the paper.
You have now been caught ‘quoting’ things you haven’t read at least four times: Mayr, Yockey (twice) and Axe.
Since the only way to tell when you haven’t read the things you’re ‘quoting’ is when your secondary source doesn’t match the original, and even creationists don’t misquote more than half the time, there are undoubtedly many other times when you haven’t read the things you’ve ‘quoted’, but we can’t tell.
So yes, @Meerkat_SK5, it’s clear that you have been deliberately ‘quoting’ things you haven’t read on a regular basis.
You have cited papers you haven’t read on purpose.
You have cited the original rather than your actual secondary source on purpose.
You have left the accuracy of your ‘quotes’ unchecked on purpose.
Your misrepresentations may be accidental, but the behaviour that caused them was not.
Evolution works very well, and I do sometimes wonder whether there is a divine intelligence behind it – that’s part of why I’m agnostic rather than atheist. But when I try to think that through, I finish up being ambivalent. There is no way to tell. And that’s why it cannot be part of science.
