What am I missing? Nobody disputes that genetic mutations more often than not yield some terrible disease or condition. How does this preclude the occasional positive variation from becoming preferred in a population?
If you have a brother or sister, please show the process by which they turned into you. Otherwise, how could we have both them and you?
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Translation system A is of course the most probable shared components as elucidated by phylogenetic analysis of the prokaryotic and eukaryotic translation system components. That’s generally how ancestral states are inferred.
And let’s be clear, you are not really requiring “seeing it in action” for belief. You have plenty of beliefs about historical events that you were not around to see, such as the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the creation of the world by God, and so on. So if you could start by discarding your hypocritical double-standard with respect to evidence, we can then proceed to discuss how we can entirely reasonably infer past historical events without having to directly witness them.
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Hear, hear.
This is what really needs to be touched on I think. How are these states inferred, ancestral reconstruction, etc. They aren’t just wild guesses.
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None of those events you just listed are ‘inferred’. They were all witnessed; the creation of the world by God himself who testified of it, and the Resurrection was witnessed by the apostles themselves who both testified of it and went to their deaths proclaiming that eyewitness testimony.
You’re confused, you can still not actually see those events. You weren’t around to see them, so you infer that they happened because you believe the accounts you find in scriptures. But you can’t test them or verify them.
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My point is that those events are not inferences only; there is an independent line of evidence in the form of testimony.
With regards to “Translation System A”, can you provide me with any independent reason to believe it has ever existed, other than the perceived need for it to exist to validate evolution (ad-hoc speculations)?
Were you there to make sure it was recorded accurately?
Lots of people were, including the eyewitnesses themselves.
There were no eyewitnesses the first 5 days of creation. We didn’t see it in action. No way we could know it happened that way.
No, you don’t seem to really appreciate how your evidence(the “testimonies”) still is factored into an inference from this evidence. You infer that the “testified” events occurred because of the existence and contents of these testimonies. Possibly also because you have some personal experiences you also feel are most consistent with those “testimonies”. Either way, you’re still doing an inference from the testimonies to you conclusion that the testimonies are true and accurate as depicted.
To elaborate a bit, my guess is that you believe the scriptural accounts at least partially because you think it would be most unlikely for these scriptural accounts to exist in the form that they do, if the events they depict did not really occur.
In other words, you consider the depicted events in scriptures to be the best explanation for the existence and contents of biblical scripture. This is, in essence, not all that different from how we scientifically infer historical events we cannot go back and recreate.
We have a body of facts, (the existence, distribution, and particular attributes of the prokaryotic and eukaryotic translation systems), and this body of facts is best explained by the evolution of those translation system components from a shared ancestral translation system consisting of the shared components in their ancestral forms (which, individually, can also be roughly inferred using phylogenetic analysis). If a better model comes along that more parsimoniously and with greater explanatory power, accounts for this set of facts, then we’d prefer that explanation instead.
With regards to “Translation System A”, can you provide me with any independent reason to believe it has ever existed, other than the perceived need for it to exist to validate evolution (ad-hoc speculations)?
I don’t know what you mean by “independent”. Independent of what? And the evolutionary expanation is not proposed out of some sort of “need”, it is proposed because that is the model that best and most parsimoniously explains the facts: The existence, the attributes, and the distribution of different translation system components in the prokaryotic and eukaryotic clades.
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We have a body of facts, (the existence, distribution, and particular attributes of the prokaryotic and eukaryotic translation systems), and this body of facts is best explained by the evolution of those translation system components from a shared ancestral translation system consisting of the shared components in their ancestral forms (which, individually, can also be roughly inferred using phylogenetic analysis). If a better model comes along that more parsimoniously and with greater explanatory power, accounts for this set of facts, then we’d prefer that explanation instead.
A more elegant and better explanation is that these very different life forms (prokaryotes and eukaryotes) never shared any common ancestry at all but were created separately.
Independent of your evolutionary speculations to overcome the hurdle that clearly these pathways couldn’t have descended from one another directly. What actual, non-ad-hoc evidence do you have that such a pathway has ever existed?
How do you know? You infer it from the fact that it is written. But how do you know it? You don’t, you basically just believe it. Presumably you have some reasons for believing the testimonies, which is what makes your belief justified by an inference.
The people who wrote them … wrote them. And then they maintained their testimony even under torture and died for it. There was no motive for them to conspire together to create this lie that got nearly all of them killed. But that is all a digression that is off topic here.
That does not explain the nesting hierarchical structure in their distribution and characteristics. The only thing you explain when you say they were created is that they exist. You can explain the existence of a painting by saying that someone painted it. But by that mere assertion, you have not explained why the painting depicts the particular things it does. Or why it hangs in some particular person’s living room.
With respect to the translation systems of bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes, you are not explaining why they have the particular collection of shared attributes that they do, and you are not explaining why they are distributed across the diversity of life in the way they are.
You’re going to need more detail, and preferably something that has the potential to be overturned by new possible observations. “It was the whim of the creator to do it that way” is an explanation that could explain any conceivable observation: it could never be falsified or overturned by a better explanation. That is a bug, not a feature.
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See, these are all your reasons that make it an inference when you believe the events they depict.
You believe the accounts because of all sorts of reasoning about them. So it’s an inference from the evidence that makes you believe the depicted events occurred. As we are all, always forced to do for historical events. You want to pretend there’s something fundamentally different going on here with “historical science”, but there is really not. The “testimonies” are not automatically true in their own right, we must infer their putative truth by reasoning about their contents and the circumstances of their being written down and historical transmission.
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With regards to any set of things you can categorize shared attributes. Trying to say “you don’t know why they share these attributes but I do” is again just to assume what you’re trying to prove. Collecting things into groups of attributes is not an argument. You need to actually demonstrate common ancestry, not just assert it and then use that assertion to do statistics.
“It was the whim of the creator to do it that way” is an explanation that could explain any conceivable observation:
So could unobserved ad-hoc hypotheticals like “Translation System A”.
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No, it is an objective fact that the translation systems of different organisms known have the particular attributes that they do. And it is an objective fact that the distribution of the shared and different characteristics of these systems exhibit nesting hiearchical structure. That is a fact that needs an explanation that has at least the potential to be overturned by a superior explanation (that explains the set of facts more parsimoniously, or with greater explanatory power).
Collecting things into groups of attributes is not an argument. You need to actually demonstrate common ancestry
That’s what I’m doing when I show that the distribution of shared and non-shared characteristics of the translation systems of different species exhibit nesting hierarchical structure. The best explanation for that fact is that the species that have these translation systems share common ancestry.
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I don’t know why I’m supposed to have a problem with this “fact”, assuming it is correct. I don’t know how this is supposed to be something that God would not or could not have done. And if it isn’t, then that means it says nothing relevant to the creation/evolution debate.
The best explanation for that fact is that the species that have these translation systems share common ancestry.
Why? How does that distribution say anything at all about creation or evolution?
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