How Much of DNA is Functional?

can you give a specific example related to evolution?

see the problem now? some biologists says that finding X will falsify evolution and other disagree. there is no general agreement among biologists how to falsify evolution. this is a huge problem if evolution is a scientific theory.

i dont think so. even if all fossils were mixed it will not falsify evolution. evolution doesnt predict order in the fossil record. remember that even at darwin time darwin said that the missing links are missing because they didnt had enough fossils at time. he didnt said that the fact of missing fossils falsify evolution. so even if we will find out that all fossils are mixed together in the fossil record, this will not be a problem for evolution. at best we can argue that many fossils are still missing and we just didnt found them yet. or we can argue for extreme convergent evolution.

actually we do find many modern fossils among primitive fossils. (and by the way i dont think that this is a prediction of YEC either). but for now we are talking about evolution and not about creation.

Not really. Karl Popper just isn’t a good guide to how science is or ought to be done. You need to adopt a probabilistic understanding at least, and likely (ha) a Bayesian one. Falsification is a delusion; more or less likely, especially compared to alternative hypotheses, is the way out.

Of course it does, at least when combined with a standard view of deep time and geology.

And he was right, wasn’t he? 160 years of subsequent discoveries have revealed many of those ā€œlinksā€.

But we won’t find that. We have already found the contrary, and already had in Darwin’s time. Darwin was able to see the biotic progression in the fossil record already. Your premise is false.

What examples are you talking about there? And what would be the prediction of YEC? Are you talking about the oak trees being able to run faster than the Eoraptors in order to escape the flood for longer?

Of course. Here you go:

This is not correct. There are many things that, if we had found them, would reveal evolution as false, and there would have been no disagreement.

For instance, if the earliest fossil record showed every single organism that has ever lived, and all that was evident thru the record was extinction, with no new forms ever arising.

Or if we found that each species had its own molecule that provided the basis for heredity, rather than DNA being used universally.

Or if mutations never happened, but we regularly witnessed entirely new species of organisms suddenly being poofed out of thin air by magic.

Or if we did not find a nested hierarchy when we attempted to classify organisms.

I’m sure I could come up with others.

The error your make is in limiting us to observations that could be made in the future, rather than considering all of the observations that could have been made over the last 150 years that would have disproven evolution, but which were never made (because evolution just happens to be true.)

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Here’s another excellent one:

You’re welcome to come up with a non-evolutionary model that is both simpler or as simple, while also exhibiting a better fit to the data.

Good luck with that.

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Specific predictions aren’t possible without a comprehensive understanding of how DNA can be preserved, which we don’t currently have. It’s extremely difficult to assess the detailed preservational conditions in a specimen even after it’s found. We’d generally expect to see a trend towards more poorly preserved DNA in progressively older specimens though, and that’s what we see.

On the other hand, YECs can’t really allow the possibility of DNA being preserved for even a few thousand years, because they interpret all or most of the geological column to be just a few thousand years old, and all the same age at that.

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How much experience does he have at the lab bench with DNA–say, for example, relative to my own?

The creationist objection will always be of the same sort. An artifact of the data is that a false convergence is noticed when no limits are placed on the time axis. Below says it was ā€œtested and eliminatedā€ but the so-called ā€˜elimination’ process was to appeal to deeper and deeper time.

Creationists fully expect these results due 1. a common Creator and 2. a common DNA among living organisms. These two facts alone will return a false positive of universal common ancestry. There is no surprise here.

" Early (pre-Darwinian) biologists suggested several ideas as to the relationship of modern organisms, but a relevant one here is the ā€˜archetype’ model [25] that suggested that a number of ā€˜forms’ were originally created within high-level groups. For mammals say, one ā€˜form’ would have been a giant cat, which then independently evolved (or degenerated) into lions, tigers, leopards, panthers, cheetahs, etc. In our examples, this is tested (and eliminated) by demonstrating that successively deeper datasets continue to show ancestral convergence. In other words, we do not see a set of ā€˜archetype’ species originating at just one point in time – there is continuity in the evolutionary process."

For one thing, other scientists will beat the crap out of you (verbally speaking, of course) if you do let your worldview dictate your conclusions.

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That makes no sense. If there is no actual convergence going on, extending the dimension of time shouldn’t force convergence.

Parallel lines don’t converge if you add more kilometers to their length.

None of this explains ancestral convergence in nodes that go deeper than wherever you imagine the original ā€œkindsā€ originated. Sorry, your explanation just doesn’t work.

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I did not claim parallel lines. I claimed convergence due to a common Creator and DNA. You are taking the time axis too deep.

Yeah as I said, your undestanding is truly abysmal. The only one who can do anything about that is yourself.

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It works beautifully. And more convincingly than this deep time model. Nothing in this research begins to eliminate creationism. It only reinforces it.

Prove it. Show your model for independent origins, and then show how that it results in ancestral convergence.

I think you come back with these kinds of empty remarks because you cannot overturn the creationist model. That’s all I can figure because you have not demonstrated any research above creationist research.

All you do is blind assertions. I’m out.

That’s funny. You just ran the model for me. Thank you.

Of course you are. Because you cannot refute a model that has a reasonable time axis associated with it.

So for those who are genuinely interested, the question here is why we should expect ancestral convergence in increasingly ancestral nodes on phylogenetic trees from different clades, if in fact these clades do not also share common ancestry.

To pick an example, imagine if all rodents and all primates share a common ancestor (common descent), versus rodents as a clade being independently created and only sharing a single rodent common ancestor, and all primates (excluding humans) sharing a single primate common ancestor. Now the question becomes, why should increasingly ancestral nodes in the tree of rodents, converge on a sequence more similar to primate sequences, and why should increasingly ancestral nodes in the primate tree, converge on a sequence more similar to rodents sequences? And why should the common ancestor of all rodents be most similar to the common ancestor of all primates, instead of most similar to any extant primate? Clearly this is a genuine prediction of common descent, but has no obvious explanation on independent creation.

Speir seems to suggest that this is just an accidental byproduct of extending the time dimension further back, because species ā€œshare a common creator and share DNAā€. But there’s nothing in that that explains why we should get ancestral convergence, so I ask speir to explain why it should by showing the model he appears to insist would yield this result.

He then responds that I just ā€œran itā€ myself (I ran a creationist model where?), and piles further laughable assertions on top such as the creationist model working beautifully (what model?) and that it all reinforces creationism.

Clearly communication is meaningless with such an individual. But he’s a creationist, so if he’s on your ā€œteamā€ do let me know how proud you are of his performance.

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I am clearly referring to the researchers’ paper and the model they ran and published. They unwittingly ran a creationist model because 1. a common Creator, using 2. common DNA and 3. imposing varying mutations on similar creation ā€œthemesā€, initiates life based on separated animal kinds.
6000 years later, your team comes along, runs some sequencing, goes too deeply back in time, and mistakenly infers common ancestry.

This is all to be expected in a creationist model like they just ran.