The problem is that your quotes never actually illustrate your point.
Sorry, but you didn’t. Your posts never tie together into a logical argument. You think they do, I suppose, but there are giant gaps in every step. Further you cite and quote papers you haven’t read, often from secondary or tertiary sources, and the quotes still don’t say what you think they do.
And there’s a case in point. You don’t know what that means and you haven’t read the paper.
What do you mean by “major groups”? Are they supposed to be basic types? Until you can identify basic types you have no claim capable of being discussed. Bechly is, at any rate, just wrong about this, but we would have to talk about particular cases to see that.
That’s nice. What researchers? Are you talking about Cuvier? He explained the geology near Paris by multiple catastrophes and recreation of the entire biota. That’s not your claim, though, is it?
Doesn’t that directly contradict your claim? And you need to read for comprension. The key phrase there is “adequate for the purpose we have put it to”. Your purpose is quite different. Clearly this is another paper you haven’t read.
No, you haven’t. Nothing you have provided does anything of the sort. You have provided studies (none of which you have actually read) that show the record to be adequate for some purposes. But none of those is your purpose.
It means nothing of the sort. Note that your main source, Bechly, has a model that incorporates both.
That was gibberish. Note, incidentally, that LUCA has nothing to do with the origin of life.
Alright guys, this is what I am talking about. I need you guys to get back to evaluated the latest changes to the main argument because we are starting to get off-track. I will address your latest objections after you respond to this…
Oh, that’s actually helpful, but are you sure everyone agrees that life as we know it in part depends on digital information? If so, we can go with that.
Now, is it fair to assume that everybody agrees with these claims and the sources supporting them as well since they seem to be more straightforward and uncontroversial:
The Appearance of Design
“The repetitive non-coding RNA sequences resemble that of a natural everyday language, i.e., the essential tool to coordinate and organize common behavior.”
Failure to Explain the Evidence through Unguided Natural Processes
“ Simply mixing chemicals and watching for a living system to appear from the broth seems unreasonable to me. This approach has never worked, and it is not expected to work, at least not if one is limited to the lifetime of a human, let alone the duration of a funding period or a Ph.D. thesis."
Confirmed the Time and Place of Origins
Geologists found evidence of the first life from the oldest rocks on earth. They discovered viruses in the deep-sea oceanic vents and found that RNA viruses represent the most abundant form of organisms within them.
Reproduction of the Design Patterns
“For experiments aimed at demonstrating chemically more complex processes, such as multistep syntheses mimicking biochemical pathways or genetic replication , repeated interventions by the experimentalist have been necessary.”
The you should start with one of your four initial premises. Pick one and demonstrate it’s validity. Then the next.
You should be citing both the conclusions explicitly supporting your claims and the data used to reach those conclusions. Since you aren’t in the field, you aren’t qualified to read between the lines of anything you cite. Several participants in this thread are qualified, and their commentary on the quality and meaning of your citations should be given enormous weight. I’d recommend starting with (B) from your original post, as it is the most important for your overall point.
You mean:
For reasons that have been explained, your citations were either not legitimate, or not explicit. Thus, your criteria for @Tim’s criteria has been met.
When and if a physicist is able to chime in, then you can rely on those citations again. Until then we’ll continue to assume the inadequacy of those sources.
Natural languages are not designed, nor do they appear to be designed. So this quotation is contradictory to your point.
The quotation does not say that natural processes have failed to explain the evidence, but that there has been no replication of the explanation. It further states that such replication is not expected given the evidence anyway. So again, contradictory to your point.
Confirming that life started at some point says nothing about the source of that life, so nothing here is relevant to your point at all. The current abundance and distribution of viruses is not a demonstration of anything 4Ga ago.
Nonenzymatic template-directed synthesis can replicate RNA to reasonable yields under reasonable conditions without significant intervention. Including some work by the author you quoted.
OK, but first: I am saying that you have conflated these terms, and have been saying this thru several discussions (Information is not magical).
There is only one relevant meaning of the message in RNA/DNA: CHEMISTRY. The message is encoded chemistry (and a bit of physics, which is the same thing at a deep level). “Digital” as in “digital information” is irrelevant. This is just the simplest way of encoding information. ANY information might be encoded digitally - it’s not magic - merely a standardization in arbitrary units (“bits”) imposed by humans.
What I wanted to know from you is whether the study actually establishes what I said before.
This is an error - a misunderstanding of what it means to do an experiment. Of course the experimenter manipulates the experimental variable(s). This is not “intervening” to manipulate the results of an experiment; this is systematically testing interventions to see the results.
These words are those of Tony Stultz, not Penrose’s own.
It is not clear how this claim that “individual consciousness is connected to a universal proto-consciousness” derives from Penrose positing “that consciousness derives from quantum vibrations in microtubules throughout neurons in the brain.”
It is also not clear whether this “universal proto-consciousness” relates to your " self-existent consciousness".
There is no indication whatsoever that either Stultz or Penrose viewed this “universal proto-consciousness” as a ‘creator’, let alone that either claimed that it “created finite conscious minds”.
Therefore, your claim of:
Still lacks any foundation.
The best that you can claim from this piece is that Stultz interpreted Penrose’s work as there being a universal proto-consciousness to which individual consciousnesses are connected.
And we now have further examples of @Meerkat_SK5 citing sources that do not support their claims.
Can’t think of any at the moment, other than a few secondary sources that are based on misinterpretation of their primary sources. Like the Bechly video, which he has probably watched. Bechly didn’t exactly match what he claimed, but the majority of the distortion of evidence is on Bechly. Short answer: no.
The problem here is that you are equivocating between incompleteness and adequacy of the fossil record. They are not the same thing. As the article suggested…
“In the end, we must ask how much data is missing. Is the record incomplete or is it woefully incomplete? Does the fossil record show us 50% or 90% or 99.99999% of extinct species? This can never be determined, of course. A more sensible question might be: how adequate is the fossil record? Is it good enough to show us the broad outlines of the evolution of life or are the fossils so sporadic that we can learn very little from it?”
The quote I mentioned before this was to prove the latter has happened already.
Cambrian fauna, Ordovician, Nekton animals, Odontodes vertebrates, Land vertebrates, Insects, Dinosaurs/birds, placental mammals, Genus Homo,
Sure, but since Fazale Rana pioneers and uses the model now, I am going to refer you to him:
Boom! Then we are done. Case closed, game over, as @Rumraket suggested. .
Again, the only thing that needs to be established is that the fossil record is adequate enough (NOT complete) to establish at least one of the many gaps between major groups is real rather than apparent. This was the whole point of those studies I gave you because they were evaluating adequacy NOT completeness within the fossil record. There is a difference, as I suggested above to @Rumraket
You just made my point again about how common design and common descent are mutually exclusive models on this basis alone. Under the common design model, the first common ancestors are viruses which are also the first life forms that evolved to become different species of prokaryotes.
This means that there is no LUCA since it is just an assumption from advocates of common descent to maintain an unguided view of evolution.
There also seems to be empirical support for why not including LUCA in the model is justified, but I will let you be the judge of that:
"The cells of the three kingdoms, in particular, have three distinct types of cell membrane, and this gives us a major evolutionary problem.
The cell membrane is the site where molecules are transported to and from the environment ( molecular transport ), and where energy is obtained from outside sources and converted into internal forms ( energy transduction ). These two processes – the exchange of matter and the access to energy – are so fundamental that we can hardly imagine a common ancestor without them, and yet the phylogenetic data tell us in no uncertain terms that ancestral membrane was not conserved and the descendants of the common ancestor evolved independently three different types of membranes.
In order to deal with this problem, let us underline that the cell membrane is also the site of signal transduction , the process that transforms the signals from the environment ( first messengers ) into internal signals ( second messengers ). First and second messengers belong to two independent worlds and laboratory experiments have shown that the same first messenger can activate different second messengers and that different first messengers can activate the same second messenger (Alberts et al., 2007) which means that there are no necessary connections between them."
Sure and I have, but if your responses don’t show that you put much thought and effort in those responses where I can learn and make the proper changes, then I am going to naturally be skeptical about it.
Sure, I understand the limitations within our discussion regarding quantum physics. I will try to get citations that don’t require a physicist to evaluate it.
Yes, I agree. This was the wrong quotation to use for that particular claim. This should be a better source and quote:
“The idea that the rules of the ancient genetic code were repeatedly modified has received a strong support from a variety of computer studies which have shown that the modern genetic code performs better than most of its many potential alternatives (Haig and Hurst, 1991, Freeland and Hurst, 1998, Bollenbach et al., 2007). The very fact that the genetic code went through an optimization phase implies that its first rules did change and this means that the ancient genetic code was effectively replaced by the modern one.”
Yes, I agree again. Metabolic-first models technically can theoretically explain it.
So let me rephrase the claim…
Failure to Produce Life through Unguided Natural Processes
I would not say its irrelevant but it is just unnecessary for my argument the more I think about it. Nevertheless, I think it was still a good idea to include it in order to further show that the methods I use to establish Jesus as the designer are valid.
Sure, but the point of the quote and citation was to show that intervention was required not necessarily significant. Read my “Would this origin of life model work” topic for examples of what I mean.
That’s not what I am reading from current literature. Take a look…
"We must face the ontological problem of the reality of the organic codes: are they real codes? Do they actually exist in living systems? It is a fact that the genetic code has been universally accepted into Modern Biology, but let us not be naive about this: what has been accepted is the name of the genetic code, not its ontological reality .
More precisely, the genetic code has been accepted under the assumption that its rules were determined by chemistry and do not have the arbitrariness that is essential in any real code. The theoretical premise of this assumption is the belief that there cannot be arbitrary rules in Nature, and this inevitably implies that the genetic code is a metaphorical entity, not a real code. This idea has a long history and let us not forget that for many decades it has been the dominant view in molecular biology.
…It has taken a long time and much experimental work to overturn this conclusion, but eventually it has been shown that there is no deterministic link between codons and amino acids because any codon can be associated with any amino acid (Schimmel, 1987, Hou and Schimmel, 1988, Budisa, 2004, Hartman et al., 2007, Ling et al., 2015, Acevedo-Rocha and Budisa, 2016). This means that the rules of the genetic code do not descend from chemical necessity and in this sense they are arbitrary.
Today, in other words, we have the experimental evidence that the genetic code is a real code, a code that is compatible with the laws of physics and chemistry but is not dictated by them. Our problem, therefore, is to take stock of this reality and to account for it. How do we explain the existence of arbitrary rules in Nature? How could arbitrary rules evolve on the primitive Earth?"
YES! the bolded part is what I meant or was trying to convey with the quote. I explained already in more detail in the “Would this origin of life work” .topic.
That’s fine, it is not relevant or necessary to establish whether he meant this because I have made it very clear that I am going to establish this here.
What do you mean a weak claim ? What is considered a weak claim?
We’ve been over that already. Why do you keep posting it? It’s as if you never read any of the corrections people make. Why are you even here?
I’m not going to argue with Rana. Make your own argument. You can appropriate Rana’s if you like, but you at least have to relate it to your notion of basic types. Are vertebrates a basic type? If not, that article has no relevance.
Not true unless you can show that the purpose for which the fossil record is adequate is in fact your purpose.
Go ahead. Which gap?
I made no such point.
That makes no sense. If the ancestors are viruses (if the ancestors were anything, really), that’s not separate creation; it’s common descent. Again, LUCA has nothing to do with the origin of life; you need FUCA, the first universal common ancestor. Anyway, LUCA could exist under an unguided or guided model of evolution.
“What researchers? Are you talking about Cuvier? He explained the geology near Paris by multiple catastrophes and recreation of the entire biota. That’s not your claim, though, is it?”
The researcher I was talking about was Richard Owen.
Cambrian fossils, especially when it comes to fossils of Clams:
"Provides a succinct description of the hypotheses on causes of the Cambrian Explosion and discusses their scientific validity. Based on the author’s epigenetic theory of evolution, a detailed explanation is presented on the mechanisms and driving forces of the sudden emergence and unprecedented rapid evolution of animal forms during the Cambrian, which is incompatible with the Darwinian model of gradual evolution.
Cambrian explosion is a fact not a peleontological artifact"
Since Darwinian evolution has been greatly modified to include a population of ancestors and networking branches, it still could be common descent . But…If this is the case, then you need to justify the additional assumption of an origin of life. For instance…
"* If you do not rely on a specific conception of abiogenesis, how do you know that life only arose once, or in one pool of organisms?
If you do not rely on a specific conception of abiogenesis, how do you know that a multicellular organisms must have had a single-celled organism as an ancestor?
If you do not rely on a specific conception of abiogenesis, how do you know that a fossil sequence of high disparity is not the result of multiple abiogenesis events separated in time, rather than representing an ancestral lineage?
Even assuming a fully [unguided] abiogenesis, the above questions cannot be adequately answered unless a specific conception of abiogenesis is used as the basis "
Otherwise, you cannot successively separate LUCA from the origin of life without either violating Occam’s razor or proving that Common descent and Common design are mutually exclusive.
If the advice from someone in the field is ‘don’t use that source, it isn’t credible’ or ‘that doesn’t mean Y like you think it does, it actually means X’, the proper change should be obvious.
Which is evidence AGAINST design, nice work.
Which shows clearly how extremely different regulation is from a designed system, contrary to your point.
Rephrase it again, because the same objection still applies. The expectation of abiogenesis is that it shouldn’t happen under timescales and conditions practical for current experimental methods.
‘Life starting’ is necessary for every explanation of how life starts. If all you’re going to say about it is ‘life started’, that’s not enough to distinguish your ideas from any others. Thus, irrelevant.
Nothing about evidence of life starting 4Ga says, or could say, anything about Jesus.
You misunderstand my use of ‘significant’. Most of the interventions were to collect time points, they were not required for the process to proceed, only for the process to be analyzed.
I don’t actually know Owen’s view of catastrophism. Do you? And if it wasn’t Cuvier you were thinking of, why did you answer “Sure”?
Based on the description, this sounds like a crackpot theory involving epigenetic inheritance. This is not a good source for the Cambrian explosion. Let me recommend instead:
His name, incidentally, is “Bechly”. Please, no more secondary sources. What claim are you making about basic types, if any?
That was more gibberish. You seem incapable of connecting any series of claims through any sort of logical argument. It’s impossible to argue with you when you present no actual argument.
This may be your intention, but you have presented nothing to give me (or it would seem anybody else on this thread) any reason to believe that you can deliver on that intention.
To date, you have in fact only established the following:
That there is some reason to believe that natural languages (i.e. languages that were not designed) are analogous (i.e. have “resemblance … with regard to some circumstances or effects”) with DNA.
That 21 years ago a single, now deceased, scientist expressed the opinion that “There is nothing in the physico-chemical world [apart from life] that resembles reactions being determined by the genetic code”.
This leaves you so far short of “a self-existent consciousness that created finite conscious minds”, that it is hard to see that you have made any appreciable progress.
By “a weak claim” I meant one that does not claim all that much.
‘John is a fast runner’ is a weaker claim than ‘John is the fastest runner in his school’ is a weaker claim than ‘John is the fastest runner in the country’.
Rana presents no model. He simply heaps praise on the “model” of a man who, whilst prominant in his day, has since proven to be a blind alley to scientific progress.
Given that Rana has no expertise whatsoever in the field of History of Science, I see no reason whatsoever to take his praise seriously.
Given that Rana likewise has no expertise whatsoever in Biology or Comparative Anatomy, I rather doubt if he is in a position to bring Owen’s century-dead stump of a model back to life.
A good question, and one to which he either doesn’t know the answer or is unlikely to say. I think he is laboring under the false impression that somehow this stuff is going to eventually take a form where nobody thinks there’s anything wrong with it. Considering that he has failed to resolve even a single objection to his views, over the course of a couple of months of this, that objective does seem implausibly distant. I’d compare it to Sisyphus, but the thing is that there are actually points in the process where Sisyphus IS moving the boulder in the desired direction. That makes it a poor comparison.
This presupposes that everyone here is morally infallible and don’t have any personal bias that could potentially compromise their assessment of my argument. Since I am dealing with primarily non-theists and atheist here, I am certainly not going to give you the benefit of doubt if your response looks like what I suggested before I am afraid.
Remember, I was illustrating the appearance of design from those examples NOT actual. So I don’t get your point here. You might argue then that this is irrelevant to my central argument, as you suggested before. But remember, I am trying to provide a cumulative case that mirrors the case that was made by anthropologists in regards to hominids. I think this is a good thing because I want to make sure my case is clear and concise for everyone to understand first and for most. Moreover, this should rule out objections that suggests this is not a testable theory.
If there are material mechanisms that purely caused the inception of the first life, we should be able to find those mechanisms in nature and then test it in the lab within a reasonable time-frame. For instance, we have found many mechanisms already showing how the mineral surfaces of the earth would have contributed centrally to the linked pre-biotic problems of containment and organization [just ask for reference]. This did not take million of years let alone months to reveal in experiments.
Oh yes it can. Jesus Christ is considered both Divine and human. The information in life both transcends physical laws and mimicks the patterns of human behavior as I have shown you already from sources:
"Today, in other words, we have the experimental evidence that the genetic code is a real code, a code that is compatible with the laws of physics and chemistry but is not dictated by them. "
“The repetitive non-coding RNA sequences resemble that of a natural everyday language, i.e., the essential tool to coordinate and organize common behavior.”
Yes, of course. In Miller-Urey type experiments, that is the case, but when they aim to replicate the patterns of complexity that looks like life, then It is shown that the experimenter is required every time. I gave examples before when researchers created viruses and DNA artificially from scratch. Do you have a study you can show me that suggests otherwise?
Although the authors of that book referral are prominent tycoons in the field, it is not as updated compared to mine I’m afraid. Also, there is no evidence of the author being a creationist or ID theorist, I might add.
Well, he is an expert in the field who has read the book for himself by showing this quote that counters all your points about those gaps being merely apparent. More importantly, it is the one example I was referring to that requires us to view common design and common descent as mutually exclusive. This was my point:
“Nevertheless, now, 150 years after The Origin, when an incomparably larger stock of animal fossils has been collected, Darwin’s gap remains, the abrupt appearance of Cambrian fossils is a reality, and we are still wondering about the forces and mechanisms that drove it. Despite the fact that, from time to time, a small number of students have questioned the reality of the Cambrian explosion on the same ground as Darwin, today’s consensus is that Cambrian explosion is a scientific fact (Linnemann et al., 2019) … The Cambrian explosion is real and its consequences set in motion a sea-change in evolutionary history (Conway Morris, 2000; Nichols et al., 2006). … Despite the accumulation of an immense fossil record, the development of a relevant theoretical groundwork, and the numerous attempts to deal with the causal basis of the Cambrian explosion, just like in Darwin’s time, it continues to be one of the greatest enigmas of modern biology.”
No John, I made the argument already on how the quantum tunneling process and our current understandings on LUCA show that it was the first life on earth under the common design model. Now, it is your turn to explain why we should believe that there was an additional life form that existed prior to LUCA (i.e. direct panspermia) based on CURRENT evidence.
You haven’t even looked at either book, have you? And there are all sorts of flavors of crackpot besides creationists.
So you claim. But I can’t argue with Bechly. He isn’t here. Your quote says nothing like what you think it says.
Please stop with the unattributed quotes. Whoever said that is just wrong. We could discuss it if you were capable of doing so. Unfortunately, you are not.
You think it was an argument, but the dots don’t connect. Nor does anyone claim that LUCA was the first life on earth. I also don’t think “panspermia” means what you think.
Assuming that people are being honest and reasonable is necessary if you are going to ask them for help. If you aren’t assuming that people are being honest and reasonable, you aren’t being honest or reasonable.
You’ve effectively just said that the experts can’t be trusted, so you don’t need to worry about what they say. Congratulations, we’ve found your problem! I mean, everyone else already knew that was the problem, but hopefully you see it now, too.
The paper has evidence that biology DOES NOT look like a designed system, so you shouldn’t use it as evidence of the appearance of design. It is literally showing the opposite of what you are wanting to show.
No, this is contradictory to your argument. I’ve said other things are irrelevant, but not this.
Here is the thing about that:
We know that humans make hammerstones, and that when humans make hammerstones they have certain characteristic features on the stones and on associated materials.
We know that humans use hammerstones for animal processing, and that when humans use hammerstones for animal processing it leaves certain characteristic features on the remains and the stones.
So when we find evidence of hammerstone production matching the known patterns of human hammerstone production associated with evidence of animal processing with said hammerstones (also with all appropriate patterns), it is a strong inference that humans did it.
In order to make the same form of inference, you would need a known source of the patterns observed. Which you don’t have.
I know that the ID crowd says here is that they have examples of ‘intelligence’, but that doesn’t work because the only intelligence we know of is based on electricity doing weird things in meat, and that’s a biological phenomenon. And you can’t use a biological phenomenon to explain all biology. Humans are a viable explanation for the hammerstones, because we know that humans exist and that they make hammerstones.
Until you can point to something that we know exists and know does the things you need it to do, it is not possible for you to make a case that mirrors the one you’ve referenced.
Then let me repeat again my advice that you pick a single disputed premise and validate it! Because you’ll never be clear or concise trying to talk about 80 things at once!
Since you don’t have an entity with known patterns of behavior that is known to have existed when the things you want to explain happened, your suggestions are necessarily untestable.
We can test it in a reasonable time-frame, but you haven’t been asking for tests, but reproductions. And if the mechanism takes 300 million years to work, then we can’t reproduce it in a reasonable time-frame, now can we? We’ve been running tests for several decades now, it has been an extremely fruitful field with substantial progress all the time.
All of which you dismiss because chemists insist on testing the chemistry of their chemistry experiments, à la
I’m going to stop you right there. Unsound premise, invalid argument, do not pass go, do not collect your Nobel Prize. But it doesn’t matter, because humans are a product of the evolution of our species, so any entity that predates life on earth can’t be human by definition! So if you want Jesus as divine and human, he can’t be your creator. If you want him to just be divine, he can’t be tested. This would be a good choice of alternate premise to start with, as it is both necessary to your case, entirely unsupported, and superficially impossible.
No, you haven’t shown those in sources!
You’ve claimed to have sources, but they either don’t say what you need them to say, or aren’t credible in the first place.
Taking the first: It is correct to say that the genetic code is not ‘dictated’ by physics, as it is an quasi-arbitrary contingency of physics. Many states are allowed by physics, without strong preference, and one occurred. So not ‘dictated’, as it may well have been another way. But does this ‘transcend’ physics? Absolutely not! To transcend physics would require that the outcome be wholly independent of physics, but this is certainly not true.
To the second: natural languages are the product of slow evolution of ideas conveyed by vibrating meat and then squiggly lines. Biochemistry works by slapping noodles against one another until they stick together in a weird way, usually making one of them bend a bit, sometimes breaking something. These are not particularly similar.
Firstly, I’m talking about non-enzymatic template directed polymerization of RNA. Second, thank you for demonstrating that you will dismiss all tests of abiotic pathways if the experiments actually look at it.
Did you botch the grammar of this? Showing that researchers can do something one way can never be evidence that the thing can’t be done some other way, so showing a study where scientists ‘did’ make a virus from scratch says nothing (and could NEVER say anything) about whether or not scientists are required to do it. This is basic logic you are stumbling over, here.
Please, for everyone’s sake: Pick a single premise and support it. Then we can move to the next and the next.