Somehow the first half of my previous post was lost—so here it is:
I can scarcely think of another theory in all of science which has so much “hard rigor” behind it.
Amen. Well stated.
I’m feeling dizzy from going around in so many circles—again and again.
Considering that the topic is science—and not philosophy or theology—isn’t methodological naturalism exactly what the Scientific Method would bring to the table? (You are recycling a very lame Ken Ham-type argument here.)
As a Bible-affirming Christian, I am not at all surprised that God would create a world where methodological naturalism is so consistently useful in explaining that world. (Of course, I am assuming that a rational creator created such a world. If that creator is irrational, then perhaps I’d be more inclined to agree with @colewd.)
If it is not obvious that they are, I think we may be wasting our time in this discussion. (Likewise, I suppose we could also cite @Rumraket’s example of craters being the result of collisions on the moon. If someone refuses to recognize that those craters are evidence of collisions, then there is not much to talk about.)
I am asking the hypothesis that we are observing randomly inserted retroviruses be tested. Given the theory of a single origin relies on this being true it seems like something reasonable to do…
I do not have a problem with evolution being true and genesis 1-11 being a myth as WLC argues. The problem I have is using methodological naturalism with untested claims. This leads to poor scientific conclusions.
Yeah, I already linked one of those articles, as well as several others that document the same thing in humans and pigs. I also showed that ERVs have the expected genetic ‘scars’ like target site duplications that are produced by retrovirus insertion. But @colewd seems determined to ignore everything we say.
Not possible, given the extent of current data. We have a good enough sample now to make a good prediction of what the rest of the data will look like. Your claims about what diversity looks like are false.
What does this mean? How does the large quantity make randomness of insertion unlikely?
I agree the paper you showed shows some ERV’s come from viruses and probably random insertions… Why in the first paper is only one version fixed in all the populations?
I was asking a question for Ron to clarify. I found the answer in the second paper. According to the second paper the claim by the authors is that the A version infected the germ line.
Methodological naturalism doesn’t lead to poor scientific conclusions. Methodological naturalism is science. If we assume supernaturalism, then anything could happen, and that’s not testable, so it’s not science. So it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
But let me grant your claim that methodological naturalism is bad, for the sake of argument. How, exactly, do you think that the three statistical tests of common ancestry that I included in the OP involved methodological naturalism in a way that they should not have?
No, they did not use the similarity of extant sequences to test common ancestry. They showed that ancestral sequences were more similar to one another than extant sequences are to one another. In other words, we see this kind of convergence in the past:
Separate ancestry predicts that the second type of convergence should be what we see, whereas common ancestry predicts that we should see the first. Using these differing predictions, the probability of separate ancestry for each of the groups can be calculated. Those are the p-values in the table.
Here now follows another series of posts to get Bill to even understand what is being said. And Bill persists in the delusion he’s debating the topic, rather than getting tutored in it’s elementary concepts.
It can be, if as Andrew stated, the “designer was being duplicitous.” Evading that conclusion is why creationist sites expend so much nonsense arguing that we need ERV’s like oxygen, instead of their being the viral detritus they demonstrably are.
Hi Ron
Please explain why common design or the re use of house keeping genes could not create the same pattern. This is no one trying to fool us but simply an efficient design process we see in human designs.
@misterme987 here is an ID paper we have discussed in the past. It takes a gene view vs a sequence view.
