It’s especially important to learn them in the context of dealing directly with evidence. It’s a lot easier that way.
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Not disputing anything you wrote.
You expect me to be surprised I look that way to you? I know I’m an aberration. What you think of me is not the most important thing to me - if it was I’d have already change my position on evolution or left the forum. It’s learning the truth and also just learning. Maybe positively contributing to some discussions.
It isn’t just me. It’s, I suspect, everyone who reads your stuff who isn’t a YEC. You should think more deeply on why we think that of you, and whether it’s a problem, not for your popularity, but for the validity of your posts.
I’m afraid that you are accomplishing neither, so far as can be told. Thinking more about the reasons for the impression you make might help.
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That’s what I meant.
I’m afraid your response bothers me but mostly because I think it’s unwarranted. I was the one who started this thread and asked a question. You’re not being specific enough to be helpful - “think about the impression you make” - “stop relying on excuses” - “how you look in the comments here.” None of that is actually useful constructive feedback because it doesn’t point to something specific. I expect people will not like my responses because they will disagree with them, or maybe even find them ignorant. Often they probably are - but then if you want to respond I ask you to be specific. But I already tired of engaging someone else in the forum that seemed to be only interested in criticizing me without substance (that just feels like trolling) so I muted notifications. I would not like to do that with you because usually your replies are substantive. For example, you could point out where I made an excuse. Thanks.
Well, 164 posts into this thread and you’re still throwing out new objections, all of them problematic. I call those excuses. For example:
…and so on. After all the reams of explanations and the many citations of papers and nice, accessible articles and videos, you still side with Tomkins, because he’s a creationist.
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I haven’t got a useful suggestion other than “live and let live”. I very much admire John’s no-nonsense style, speaking as someone who has been on the receiving end at least once.
I tend to blame adversarial arguments on US law and political decisions. Inquisitorial methods work better for science. Establish and agree the facts, then you can discuss the consequences.
If you can’t agree on basic facts such as how old the Earth is or how much God had to do with it, I can’t see how a discussion can progress.
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You do ask questions. The problem is that you don’t really engage with the answers; specifically, the evidence provided in them.
You’re not getting into any evidence. It’s a global point.
Of course you would.
You don’t appear to be engaging anyone at the level of facts.
When evidence is presented, you plead ignorance, which completely contradicts your conclusions–that you understand the big picture (evolution) better than any of the scientists here do.
You cite the qualifications of those you agree with and ignore the qualifications of those you don’t agree with.
John’s point here is substantive too. You can’t open your mind to understanding when your entire purpose here is to advocate for a position that depends on not understanding the most basic concepts and facts.
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By the way, nobody is saying any of this out of malice. It’s just that the first step in fixing a problem is realizing that you have a problem. People are trying to help you.
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36 posts were split to a new topic: The fixation problem is not a problem for it being a fusion
Actually if you read carefully, by the end of the thread, I didn’t side with Tomkins necessarily; I only defended what I saw was a very specific meaning of his words. I explained earlier why I was engaging in the thread only intermittently. I didn’t get read all of the discussion that I wasn’t a part of, which was a good part of the thread. And I’m going to leave it at that.
Okay, but just know that the “I still have much to learn”-routine in place of a valid excuse to admit something is evidence for evolution becomes a bit stale after a while.
You can keep saying that to anything instead of just admitting that considering what you know, something X is de facto evidence favoring one hypothesis over another.
And if you’re in that mindset where you keep putting off seeing something as genuine evidence for evolution because you imagine some future discovery will overturn it if only you had more time to study deeper, then you’ve made it impossible for you to ever change your mind. You will just keep chasing that hope.
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The problem comes from a) treating theology as knowledge and b) understanding theology badly.
Alleviating either of these will solve the bigger problem. Just reading more bad science of the sort put out by YEC’s will solve nothing. Nor will reading good science, either, TBH.
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BTW, here is the article BIll tried to link. Could you summarize it for us, BiIl? It looks too complicated for me!
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Sure, it is. Are you upset because I didn’t outright say, “yes, the evidence looks pretty good”? I do think that scientists make the case for the current theory of evolution really well. I actually think there could be a fusion, but I don’t know enough to say all the objections aren’t unwarranted and don’t have merit, obviously. Even if there was a fusion, it doesn’t mean God didn’t specially create humans, so I don’t need to object on those grounds.
Like it or not, as I’ve explained on the forum, Jesus is my hope. I do trust the authority of the Bible because that’s how I know about Him. I believe that Genesis 1 and 2 are historical; that the geneologies aren’t mythic etc. But more importantly than that, based on how I understand doctrine and my worldview, philosophically I think that death cannot happen before sin - not animal death, not human death. I don’t think it makes sense to believe in a completely random process that must have no direction, and also to say at the end of this directionless process, human were created good in the image of God. Yes, I DO understand how Christians don’t have a problem with these things and make sense of them in other ways because they find the scientific evidence very compelling, or the arguments I would make not compelling. For me with my worldview, the science just has to make a YEC untenable. I honestly just survey the evidence and it hasn’t done that. It is obvious evolution happened and does happen…but how much? It’s not to the level of making YEC intellectual suicide for me. It’s the opposite; I like thinking of how all the evidence might fit together.
Yes, there is evidence for a fusion. I’m not sure what else I can say. I know my views aren’t going to make everyone happy; I’m not trying to make excuses. I also think creation scientists are scrutinized more than any other scientists. And really, that’s fine and not unexpected, but I do like to understand as much as I can to know whether all the scrutiny is fair. But obviously they’re going to make mistakes too. And I was trying to say, there’s too much to learn for me to say Tomkins has nothing right; I certainly don’t have the education he has, or you all have.
I’m not sure if it helps to explain any of this…but oh well, doesn’t hurt to try I guess.
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But you’re just proving my point, because words aren’t evidence.
On the subject of this thread, to have the slightest idea as to why this fusion is significant, you’d need to have an understanding of basic, real-time genetics.
The effects of fusions, translocations, and inversions on meiosis are extremely well understood. They are used in real time as tools by geneticists. They are observed in real time by oncologists and clinical geneticists. They work in the same way in fruit flies as they do in humans.
Are you familiar with any of that huge mass of objective evidence? This is why your claims of interest in biology are not very credible.
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That’s great, but it has nothing to do with evolution.
No, as you explicitly admit below, you are not trusting the “authority of the Bible.”
See what you did there? You just placed doctrine and your worldview ABOVE the Bible.
Good news! Selection isn’t random, so your “completely random” is objectively false. Why would you resort to something so obviously false?
Again, you just admitted that your worldview trumps any authority of the Bible.
But you don’t survey any evidence at all. You only survey rhetoric and pretend that the rhetoric is the evidence.
Everything you write here says that you avoid thinking about any of the evidence, much less how it fits together.
I don’t see anything of the sort, as evidence would be essential for any such understanding. Your interest is clearly limited to rhetoric.
Hint: Your claim that “Both sides are interpreting the same evidence differently” is objectively false; you clearly know this on some level, because you’ve been repeatedly guided politely to evidence that those whom you cite are ignoring.
We’re only talking about one fusion, not three, so your analogy makes no sense, either as an explanatory device (what an analogy is) or as an argument (what an analogy is not).
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Yes, I understand that. That’s why I wrote what I did.
If my worldview was as entangled with a belief the earth is flat as yours is with a particular fringe interpretation of Scripture, I’d probably have as much difficulty understanding geology as you are having with biology.
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But that’s a silly claim, isn’t it? It looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, but creationists tell you it was only created to look and quack? It’s not really a duck?
Also, you are confusing the cause of the mutation — chromosomal fusion — with the cause of its fixation. The two are entirely separate things, which is why you’ve been relegated to a side thread. And you need to look up the meaning of “revenant” before you use it again.
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I think it looks this way to you because you have a different filter than they do. Paradigm changes are very hard. If your working hypothesis is common descent this is clearly a fusion event. If you believe that humans were specially created this looks like a designed chromosome. What looks like a duck to you looks like a dog to them based on their filter.
Unless the fusion became fixed in the population it did not happen because that is what we are observing…humans with 46 chromosomes. What am I missing?
If you believe humans were specially created then every chromosome looks like a designed chromosome, but Hsa2 would look like a chromosome that was designed with a fusion in it.
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