“Perhaps there is a plant virus that hijacks the “clock” to crank out tumors.”
This would be unexpected but extremely interesting. What family of viruses? DNA or RNA? Positive or negative strand? How does lengthly onion DNA prevent intracellular viral replication? Discovery Institute must have some pretty intriguing lab data to present, because they would not just make stuff up. Virologists, developmental biologists, and cancer researchers will be keenly interested in the details.
I will not engage in this byzantin dispute that has no interest whatsoever.
But the important point here is that Collins’ quote has been relayed by several sources, not all of which are creationist ones, far from that. Therefore, it is unreasonable to deny that Collins did change his mind about junk DNA. Period.
I accept your concession that your claim has no real evidentiary support.
The more important point is that you haven’t ever relayed who originally claims to have heard the quote in person. For science, that’s absurd. Collins, AFAIK, has never written anything resembling the alleged quote.
Apologies for my late reply. Life got busy. My reply was a bit tongue-in-cheek because all these biological processes seem special to me.
I mostly didn’t understand your references to epigenetics, as I’m even less familiar with that topic. I’m not sure how to answer your question- I do want to understand what you wrote, but don’t want to take up your time. I always appreciate links to articles or videos on the topic.
So you refuse take responsibility for the accuracy of that quote, and refuse say where you got it from. If you aren’t confident enough to do so, it’s unreasonable to accept that that ‘quote’ is genuine.
So it is also unreasonable to accept that Collins changed his mind about junk DNA.
The only thing we can be sure of is that your claims shouldn’t be trusted.
And still, Collins gives no evidence (nor even any good reasons for his speculations) - he just speculates. I have to assume we all agree things aren’t automatically guaranteed to be true just because Francis Collins suggests so.
Oddly enough most ID proponents seem to detest Collins for what they see as his misguided acceptance of evolution while also professing to be a Christian.
You definitely are not a trustful source, because that’s not where you originally got that quote from either.
It does however show what you or your source omitted[1] from Collins’ words: “There will be parts of the genome that are just, you know, random collections of repeats, like Alu’s, …”.
Alu repeats are a form of retrotransposon that makes up about 10% of the human genome. Collins is confirming that they are known to be junk.
If you cast your mind back (or scroll up) to when you originally presented this quote, you’ll find this:
But the text omitted by you or your source for that quote shows that Collins hasn’t changed his mind on the functionality of Alu elements. He is still sure that these retrotransposons are nonfunctional junk. The specific genetic features you were asking about, which you claimed Collins said were no longer considered to be junk, include the ones Collins explicitly said are still considered to be junk.
You said Collins has changed his mind about the majority of retrotransposons. But the text you omitted shows that Alu retrotransposons are the one thing he definitely hasn’t changed his mind about.
[1] It also shows you or your source playing fast and loose with sentence structure, inserting breaks where there were none.
Why should I admit that I was wrong, when I was not. My all point here was to say that Collins changed his mind regarding junk DNA.
Now, look at the title of the piece by Larry Moran I referred to in the post below…
But you were. And are we now agreed that your comments on the onion test, as well as your citation of Evolution News on the subject, were mistaken too?
You were wrong. You said Collins has changed his mind about the majority of retrotransposons. But the text you omitted shows that Alu retrotransposons are the one thing he definitely hasn’t changed his mind about.
Why? It won’t make you right. It won’t make up for you ‘quoting’ something you hadn’t seen. It won’t make up for you refusing to cite your actual source. It won’t even influence anyone’s views, since it’s just an opinion and an argument from authority, not evidence or data.
I read Moran’s article before you linked to it. It’s not even a new argument from authority.
