Evidence for the integrity of the Discovery Institute

I think you’re misunderstanding Ohno’s paper, first Ohno states that “Accordingly, only a few Ediacarian survivors were represented in the early Cambrian fauna (5).” Thus there must have been new genetic information in the Cambrian, if as Ohno claims, all of the Cambrian animals had a pananimalia genome.

I would think that mRNA splicing itself would be a problem!

You are avoiding my simple question. Why only “CAN”??? Why not “does”?

This has nothing whatsoever to do with mRNA or splicing. Try harder. Why only can? Where did that come from?

Nope, you’re the one misunderstanding Ohno.

This quote is quite unambigous:

Reasons for invoking the Presence of the Cambrian Pan-animalia Genome. Assuming the spontaneous mutation rate to be generous 10-9 per base pair per year and also assuming no negative interference by natural selection, it still takes 10 million years to undergo 1% change in DNA base sequences. It follows that 6-10 million years in the evolutionary time scale is but a blink of an eye. The Cambrian explosion denoting the almost simultaneous emergence of nearly all the extant phyla of the kingdom Animalia within the time span of 6-10 million years can’t possibly be explained by mutational divergence of individual gene functions. Rather, it is more likely that all the animals involved in the Cambrian explosion were endowed with nearly the identical genome, with enormous morphological diversities displayed by multitudes of animal phyla being due to differential usage of the identical set of genes. This is the very reason for my proposal of the Cambrian pananimalia genome. This genome must have necessarily been related to those of Ediacaran predecessors, representing the phyla Porifera and Coelenterata, and possibly Annelida.

My bold. Ohno goes on to discuss a handful of examples of genes that would have been already present that made the diversity of life in the Cambrian possible.

So, Ohno first calculates that there doesn’t seem to have been enough time to evolve lots of new genes in 6-10 million years. A simple calculation which he then uses to propose that the animals that did during the Cambrian would instead have used basically the same repertoire of genes.
He then, in the actual paper, goes on to give examples of such genes known to be present in animals predate the Cambrian, and are used in developmental pathways and in multicellular structures. Incidentally the genes he goes on to list are known to go even further back, and are found in animals such as sponges and worms as he also mentions.

So, in fact, Ohno is cited in support of a claim he directly argues against.

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Well, I would characterize it as questionable, but they did make it clear that the quote was edited. And if that’s the worst you can come up with, I still maintain that they make their points with integrity.

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Because not all RNA is enzymatic?

But a related genome still allows room for new genetic information.

Then to be truthful and not be deceptive, one would simply say that some RNAs are enzymes. Which ones are, according to allegedly honest Meyer? Any important ones?

I predict that you will abandon your defense of your heroes’ integrity, because if you continue, you will learn things that you do not want to know.

Shall we bet, Lee?

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We have a living example here of how easy it is to fool yourself. But is that dishonesty? Perhaps, but at a level below the conscious.

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He’s already crossed that bridge; that’s why he’s abandoned defending Meyer on the fossil record, where there is – just as in the case you are referencing – absolutely no possibility of Meyer having been anything other than intentionally dishonest.

So the claim is now only that some genetic novelty may have arisen between the Ediacaran fauna and the Cambrian explosion fauna? You know, there aren’t going to be a lot of people shouting “stop the presses!” for that. Nor does it do anything to help Meyer.

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I disagree. @lee_merrill is clearly aware that he doesn’t know the best evidence for the RNA World hypothesis and that Meyer is likely dishonest. He is being deliberately evasive in not wanting to know.

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Here’s example #1.

Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution is True: “New parts evolve from old ones, and have to work well with the parts that have already evolved”.

Casey Luskin misquoting Coyne at IDEA: “[n]ew parts don’t evolve from old ones, and we have to work well with the parts that have already evolved. …”

Note the insertion of ‘don’t’ and ‘we’, which drastically changes the meaning.

Further examples are available once you’ve acknowledged this one.

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Because he has the memory[1] of an animated blue tang. Not only does he forget previous posts in the same thread, he has even been known to forget his previous sentence:


  1. And was nicknamed after. ↩︎

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I don’t even know what Luskin’s misquote is supposed to mean. From where does he think Coyne believes new parts evolve? And who exactly is the “we” supposed to refer to?

That article on the whole is a blatant misrepresentation of Coyne’s position, but it might be a big ask to expect @lee_merrill to grasp that.

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There is, of course, so much, much more.

How about Stephen Meyer leaving out the small shelly fauna in order to make the Cambrian explosion seem more abrupt than it was?

How about Wells and Dembski announcing that the homology between reptilian jaw bones and mammalian ear ossicles was based on nothing more than a bone count?

How about Wells citing a paper by Durrett and Schmidt to claim that it would take, on average, two million years to fix two mutations in the lineage of whales – when the paper was about waiting times for pre-specified mutations both occurring and reaching fixation?

How about Douglas Axe telling his readers that modern biologists now claim that evolution has stopped?

…and on, and on, and on. All of these things are amply documented online, and they are the tip of the iceberg. Each one makes a clear case of dishonesty. Not one can be plausibly explained otherwise.

Why are they so dishonest? Because there’s no other way. There is no way to argue the creationist case if one has got to grapple with the facts. The bad behavior of all of the proponents of these views does not logically, of course, require that these views be false; but it is fairly compelling evidence that no better advocacy for creationism can be done than this, and that is quite telling as to the merits of the thing.

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Acts 13:45 “But when the Jews saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy and began to contradict what was spoken by Paul, reviling him.”

If what ID proponents are saying is so obviously wrong, point it out and let the reader decide. The move to vilify people is an indication that the speaker has insufficient argument and/or ulterior motive. Nothing new about humans in that regard in about 2000 years!

@Audrey Here’s a great video of a former committed Darwinist who sacrificed his career to follow what he recognized as the truth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqiXgtDdEwM His big “mistake,” seriously reading books by ID proponents. Watch folks here revile him also.

You should read ID proponents, and if they are wrong, it should be evident. Read the criticisms also, but note how most of the critics vilify the authors. Totally unnecessary if the critics are right.

You gotta make stuff up to vilify him? Like I said, just like American politics.

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Is the reader capable of deciding?

Books without evidence and books that misrepresent the evidence. Why is an N of 1 significant for you, Marty?

That makes absolutely no sense.

Why wouldn’t a truth-seeker start with the science itself, which the ID proponents don’t do?

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Yes. That’s been done, and comprehensively. But the question as to why the cdesign proponentsists say the things they do is a separate question, and dishonesty is usually the only viable explanation for that.

No, of course not. (And, of course, this isn’t vilification; it’s actually the more charitable inference, compared to the inference that the ID Creationists are so dim that they actually believe their own statements.) It is an attempt to explain why creationist views, despite being so transparently false, are asserted in the first place. And it helps to guide people away from the liars and toward more credible sources. That’s part of helping people to better understand these subjects: getting them to stop trusting mountebanks.

Perhaps an analogy helps. If you had a friend who was seeing a crooked financial advisor who sold bogus financial instruments, it would be good advice, when your friend asked, to say that you thought that that fund he was selling looked dodgy and that you wouldn’t invest in it. But your friend might figure that while this investment wasn’t a good one, he should go on consulting this advisor. And so your friend would just get cheated on another bogus product. Advising him against the particular investment is good advice; but the best advice is that the advisor is a crook and not to be trusted. That’s crystal clear in the case of the DI; it’s not that they are sometimes mistaken; it is that they are routinely dishonest.

Now, again: everyone understands why someone trying to defend this obscenity would insist that accusations of dishonesty should not even be considered. It’s due to the fact that the thing is so asymmetrical. Creationists can mount no worthwhile accusation of dishonesty against evolutionary biology, but are immensely vulnerable to these accusations. Why? Because they are profoundly dishonest. People need to consider the evidence of that dishonesty, which is truly compelling. As you have said, “point it out and let the reader decide.” That won’t go well for you at all, which is why you ask the reader not to even consider it.

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Hey, what a great idea! Too bad no one has been doing that for the past 30 years.

Does making a video of your opponent in which his quotes are punctuated by fart noises count as vilification? Just wondering.

Or how about all this:

Search Results for “faizal ali” | Evolution News

Search Results for “faizal ali” | Mind Matters

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Do you have evidence that Lee Strobel was ever an atheist? I’m not aware of any. If I can’t find any, and you can’t find any, then I’m not making things up.

Lee Strobel has never produced any such evidence himself, he only claims that he was an atheist - and since producing some would reinforce his claim that the gospels are convincing he has a definite motive to do so. That he has not done so suggests that there is no such evidence.

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