Valerie: Questions about TMR4A

[Michael_Okoko]

@r_speir

That you are able to run DNA sequencing at all and find similarities between created kinds is due to God’s creative means and methods

Giraffes and Okapis descended from a common ancestor as inferred from comparative genomics, God be praised. Chimps and man descended from a common ancestor as inferred from comparative genomics, God be praised.

[r_speir]

@Faizal_Ali

Can you explain why a god would deliberately create a biosphere that exhibits a nested hierarchy, other than to deceive us and make you creationists look silly?

Read the answer I gave to John H above. God can’t help if you are so easily deceived. Why should he change his creative means and methods just to save you from self-deception?

[Michael_Okoko]

@r_speir

Yes, it is.

Reality check @r_speir, there are hundreds of creation “data” out there, tell me why yours is true and others false?

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@r_speir

So all you have are assumptions. Correct? You don’t really have any proof that these are true nucleotide differences between two DNA sequences from the same creature or two creatures who branched at some point in the past.

Mutations Are Consistent With Biochemistry

In a previous thread I discussed what science meant by random mutations and how this term is defined by experimental results and statistics. A lot of this work was done in the 1940’s and 50’s, and since then many new facts have been discovered in the field of genetics, such as the discovery of DNA. This gave rise to the field of molecular biology and allowed us to understand biology at the molecular scale. So what exactly causes mutations? We once again have to reiterate the the limited scope of science. What science can do is put forward hypotheses and see if the evidence is consistent with that hypothesis. What science can not do is make ontological statements about absolute truth. With that in mind, the next few posts will discuss the evidence that links mutagenesis (the production of mutations) with the biochemistry of the cell and why scientists aren’t simply assuming that mutations are caused by biochemistry.

[r_speir]

@Michael_Okoko

Reality check @r_speir, there are hundreds of creation “data” out there, tell me why yours is true and others false?

Because there is no beginning without God. There is no science without God. There is no you to ask me these questions without God.

[r_speir]

State you complaint clearly.

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@moderators I flagged a couple of posts because I think the discussion with @r_speir regarding the biochemical basis of mutations probably deserves it’s own thread.

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

I agree @moderators. The posts making unsubstantiated assertions should just be removed.

[Mark10.45 (Mark McGowan)]

Your use of “God is the answer to everything” is not even supported by God. Read your bible.

[Michael_Okoko]

@r_speir

Because there is no beginning without God. There is no science without God. There is no you to ask me these questions without God

Your response didn’t address my question. Read it again and reply accordingly.

[r_speir]

@swamidass

The posts making unsubstantiated assertions should just be removed.

I did not make unsubstantiated assertions, so all my comments should be kept visible.

[Michael_Okoko]

@r_speir

I did not make unsubstantiated assertions, so all my comments should be kept visible.

There is an elf that lives in your kitchen. It comes out at night to eat your food and do other elf stuff. Don’t ask me how I know, I just know.

@swamidass I did not make unsubstantiated assertions, so this comment should be kept visible.

[RonSewell (RonS)]

@r_speir

When he did that, he apparently used the same fundamental genetic material on which to build both creatures and nuanced each with varying DNA sequences that gave the illusion of substitutions, insertions/deletions, [oh, and so-called ‘nested hierarchies’], etc.

So you believe in Loki?

[Faizal_Ali]

@r_speir

Read the answer I gave to John H above. God can’t help if you are so easily deceived.

Exactly what is the deception here? Are you saying the nested hierarchy does not exist? Or that it does exist and is a deception?

[Michael_Okoko]

@r_speir

God can create using any means and methods he desires. That those means and methods somehow create a natural illusion is not his problem, neither is it his problem that people are so easily fooled because he gave clear data of his means and methods in written form and people continually ignore it.

Numbers 23:19:
God is not a man, that He should lie. . .

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@John_Harshman

I would have to disagree. Most tree diagrams these days make strong assumptions about how evolution works because they incorporate explicit models of evolutionary processes, such as using the general time-reversible model,

Are you saying that BLAST does so? What about the software used to produce this tree that you brought up today?

Nonsynonymous Substitution Rate Heterogeneity in the Peptide-Binding Region...

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@Faizal_Ali

Creationists, OTOH, lack the power of conviction and keep trying to insist that science supports their view, even as they also insist it is irrelevant to their understanding of the truth of the Bible.

And despite insisting that the science supports their view, they don’t really do the science.

You’d think that the coronavirus would induce them to start new vaccine companies and do tons of research at evangelical schools. That should be what they’d do if they truly believed, instead of writing books aimed at laypeople.

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@r_speir

Your only fault is in first, trying to leave him out of the picture, then second, misinterpreting the evidence.

Yet another attempt to pretend science is mere interpretation and does not even involve testing any hypotheses.

It would seem that you don’t really believe that the evidence supports you if you have to ignore most of it and misrepresent the fundamental nature of science itself…

[John_Harshman]

@Mercer

Are you saying that BLAST does so?

No. BLAST isn’t a tree-building program.

@Mercer

What about the software used to produce this tree that you brought up today?

Yes. Look at the legend to the figure, for example: "determined by the maximum likelihood (ML) method " and “Evolutionary distances were computed using the Hasegawa-Kishino-Yano (HKY) model.” That is indeed an explicit model of evolution. I see they used MEGA, which is not what I would have done, but I expect it’s good enough for their purposes.

[Faizal_Ali]

@Mercer

And despite insisting that the science supports their view, they don’t really do the science.

Well, some of them do. But if they do it competently, it’s exactly the same sort of science that secular scientists (which is not to say atheist scientists) are doing.

Seeing nature as the creation of a god does not appear to have any practical or explanatory value that can be applied to science.