YesYouNeedJesus
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This thread will be exclusively for AronRa and Bob Enyart to discuss phylogeny. Bob will post first on Monday the 30th. A separate thread will be created for those who want to discuss the debate.
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YesYouNeedJesus said:This thread will be exclusively for AronRa and Bob Enyart to discuss phylogeny. Bob will post first on Monday the 30th. A separate thread will be created for those who want to discuss the debate.
Ok Aron, since you're claiming I'm trying to avoid all you've already "posted against" me regarding our disagreements, I've decided to begin with the very first specific item that you blogged about against me. But first this background:AronRa said:That way he can dodge the systematic refutation of everything he got wrong, which is everything he said, and he won't be forced to acknowledge any of his errors"¦ Pity Bob will not simply reply directly to this thread already created for that purpose, but as I said it's no surprise that he won't since creationists won't be held accountable. -AronRa
I can understand that as an atheist you did not know that Newton wrote more about Scriptural chronology and theology than he did about physics and math. (See the UK's Newton Project.) But it was not at all defensible that in your later writing about our interviews that you would choose as your first criticism of me your refusal to admit that Isaac Newton was a creationist.AronRa said:"¦in any live discussion of this topic, both sides may cite points in their favor which the other side is unable to examine or verify on the fly, and neither of us should get away with making indefensible assertions just to sound right on radio. Accuracy and accountability matter more. That is why Enyart and I agreed at the end that we would have a written debate in this forum pertaining to the points raised live on the air. We both made several claims relating to scientific research, and we both accused the other of being unread, out-of-date, or of misinterpreting or misrepresenting that data. Now we have time to re-examine each of the specific points made on that show, and show how accurate those arguments really were. -AronRa
The Creationist Isaac Newton: Aron, I tried to remind you on air that:AronRa said:I don't know if Enyart can show that Newton ever denied any natural explanation in favor of an inexplicable miracle. Neither do I think he can show where Newton wrote 'extensively' about this"¦ -AronRa
Aron, in refusing to list Newton among creationists, you created a definition:Isaac Newton said:The Hypothesis of deriving the frame of the world by mechanical principles from matter eavenly spread through the heavens being inconsistent with my systeme, I had considered it very little before your letters put me upon it, & therefore trouble you with a line or two more about it if this come not too late for your use. In my former I {represented} that the diurnal rotations of the Planets could not be derived from gravity but required a divin{e} power to impress them. And tho gravity might give the Planets a motion of descent towards the Sun either directly or with some little obliquity, yet the transverse motions by which they revolve in their several orbs required the divine Arm to impress them according to the tangents of their orbs I would now add that the Hypothesis of matters being at first eavenly spread through the heavens is, in my opinion, inconsistent with the Hypothesis of innate gravity without a supernatural power to reconcile them, & therefore it infers a Deity. For if there be innate gravity its impossible now for the matter of the earth & all the Planets & stars to fly up from them & become eavenly spread throughout all the heavens without a supernatural power. & certainly that which can never be hereafter without a supernatural power could never be heretofore without the same power.,Isaac Newton
Of course, Newton did not need to know about Darwin nor genetics to reject biblical creation, and to agree, for example, with the ancient Greek philosophical claim of an eternal universe (which would have made unnecessary his defense of special creation by God). Newton was a creationist.AronRa said:I defined creationists as those who reject evolution specifically and methodological naturalism in general, defying the scientific method in favor of a magical creation instead. -AronRa
Clicking on Aron's link does not show I was wrong but presents the same study I used showing that "63 percent -- believe the theory of evolution over that of intelligent design." And so by subtracting 63% from 100%, and allowing for the obligatory 3% who can never seem to answer a survey question, you're left with a balance of 34% which, is the number published elsewhere from the same study and the number I therefore quoted. So Aron has not disproved but confirmed what I wrote, that:AronRa: "Bob attempted to counter this by claiming that some unspecified number of medical doctors don't accept evolution. Even if Bob was right about that -WHICH HE ISN'T- it wouldn't matter"¦" [caps added]
I'll ask Aron to do what I will also promise to do: not to make knee-jerk assumptions that our opponent is wrong on particular details without confirming the error. Light fact-checking on this would have confirmed for Aron that he was linking to the same stats he criticized me for posting, and that would have spared us all the first half of this, my Round Two post.Enyart: "A large percent of U.S. doctors reject strict Darwinism including 34% who prefer intelligent design."
[The pro-evolution Finkelstein Institute has now removed from the web their complete 2007 study data that previously had been widely linked to.]The APPLIED Science of Medicine Is Doubting Darwin: Dembski and Witt report on a Louis Louis Finkelstein Institute poll (see also at PhysOrg.com) of U.S. medical doctors by the Finkelstein Institute that found that:
- Jewish doctors: 32% reject Darwinism
- Atheist doctors: 2% reject Darwinism
- Buddhist doctors: 43% reject Darwin (compared to 36% who accept it)
- Hindu doctors: 54% reject Darwinism
- Catholic doctors: 78% reject Darwinism
- Protestant doctors: 81% reject Darwinism (largest group of U.S. MDs)
- Of All Medical Doctors: 60% believe that intelligent design plays a role in the origin of humans and 34% outright prefer intelligent design.
Aron, there was no such statistic to cite. You calculated that 99.86% figure using an invalid method, for it was not the result of any survey or poll, scientific or otherwise, but from a "count" of creationists of 700 (out of an estimated 480,000 U.S. scientists). I believe that I can tell you the source of the number 700 even though the page you link to, and the others like it online, present a single quote from a June 29, 1987 Newsweek article, which article itself does not appear online, and none of the cites identify the source of the number 700. (Since this error is so widely repeated by evolutionists, I've just written to the University of Texas which houses the Newsweek research archives to get more information to put this to bed once for all.) The number 700 almost certainly comes from the number of scientists who were then members of the Creation Research Society (for which my Real Science Friday co-host Fred Williams is webmaster). Regardless of where they got their count from however, Aron, your methodological error was to take someone's "count" of creationist scientists, which was not a PERCENT from a survey, but someone's COUNT and then use that against the number of total scientists, which is an invalid methodology.Aron: "Case in point, I cited statistics showing that 99.86% of geologists and biologists (zoologists, embryologists, geneticists, etc) accept evolution."
Bob Enyart: The soft tissue that we find, the Tyrannosaurus Rex that we've got original biological material [from, and] then they found it in a Mosasaur that's [allegedly] 80 million years old. Then they found it in...
AronRa: You don't have original biological material.
Bob Enyart: Yes you do.
AronRa: No you don't. I've read Schweitzer's paper [Mary S., Jack Horner, etc. [Proc. Bio. Sci. 2007, and earlier in 2005]. I suggest you review it.
Bob Enyart: Well you need to read the last five years worth of referreed scientific journals including from everywhere... in Nature, Science, PLoS -- Public Library of Science, [PNAS, etc.]
AronRa: [dismissive laughter]
Bob Enyart: Ten universities [and institutes] just published a report, in the U.S. and [Europe], leading universities, I can list them for you, saying we have absolutely ruled out contamination. This is not biofilm. This is original...
AronRa: Are you going to argue that you have blood cells? ... I'm not even going to argue this for the moment. I've covered this in my series.
Bob Enyart: [Your YouTube video] is out-of-date. Because there are now dozens of institutions [acknowledging the tissue finds]. They're finding biological tissue, dinosaur tissue.
I never made that claim. I explained that referring to pre-Darwinian scientists as creationists is not a fair statement if you're arguing for the validity of creationism, because there is no way to know whether those scientists would have denied evolutionary evidence discovered since then, and creationists do openly admit that they will automatically and thoughtless reject any and all evidence that might ever arise -if they perceive that as a threat to their a-priori pre-conceived notions. All creationist organizations make this admission as if such dishonesty were something to be proud of. But no scientific institution would tolerate confirmation bias, and neither should pre-Darwinian scientists who might only have believed in creation in the absence of any other option yet presented.BobEnyart said:Aron, in my opening post above, I addressed the first issue you listed elsewhere claiming that I was incorrect (about Newton being a creationist).
Of course it is the same study. Why would I look for a different study for the same data? How many polls should I expect to find asking this exact question to this identical demographic? If I did find a different study, one that showed different data, how would that have been relevant?AronRa said that I argue from false authority, which is interesting since the Finkelstein study he links to is the exact same study that I used and his link supports my 34% of physicians who prefer intelligent design over evolution.
No I didn't. If I remember correctly, the article specifically addressed the list of scientists who reject evolution, and compared them to a poll of biologists and geologists specifically. I could have cited any number of other polls to show the same level of support for evolution, and the correlations between acceptance of evolution and education, etc. The real point is that while creationism is apparently a matter of pure fantasy without any verifiable accuracy or practical application on any point, evolution conversely is a demonstrably accurate and inescapable fact of population genetics with benefits extending across many fields. That's why experts in those fields overwhelmingly accept that it is real, because they can prove that it is. That's I intend to do for you too -if we can ever get on with this debate.you made a statistical methodological error, and thereby you presented a severely erroneous and fabricated statistic.
We're supposed to limit this debate to the errors you made while I was on your radio show. Introducing new errors on top of those would not be a good idea.less-well-known counterparts, and then there's the many scientists (including the Smithsonian's Richard Sternberg who I enjoyed meeting for dinner after a day excavating dinosaur fossils in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana) who have lost their jobs for questioning Darwinism.
This reminds me of gossip tabloids having titles purporting to the tell "the untold story". Your account is no more reliable than those. You've also gotten it backwards. The discoveries are known to me, but the soft tissue you claimed was never confirmed.CONFIRMED DINOSAUR TISSUE DISCOVERIES UNKNOWN TO ARONRA
Long ago, I lost my expectation that creationists were ever actually excited about any actual scientific discoveries. When Jurassic Park came out, I remember wishing there was some way to source original biological material from dinosaur fossils, but even if you had perfectly preserved mosquitoes in amber, the blood in them wouldn't really be blood anymore. More importantly, I know many scientists would be very excited if we could obtain original biological material, but that would not imply that the fossil was less than 10,000 years old, and COULD not imply that the UNIVERSE was less than 10,000 years. We KNOW better, and yes, we know that for certain. You want me to admit to absolutes? There you go. By definition, if something has been proved, it can't be made ambiguous again.Long ago I lost my expectation that educated evolutionists would be excited and up-to-date about what may be among the top biological discoveries of the 21st century: the widespread finds and peer-reviewed confirmation of original dinosaur soft tissue.
No. I already answered this question in my previous post, and my explanation was very clear. You really need to read for comprehension.So Aron, here are my questions, repeating my first which I think you forgot to answer:
BE-Question #1, NEWTON THE CREATIONIST: AronRa, learning of Newton's belief that God created the world as revealed in Scripture about 4,000 years before Christ, and having read in my first post above Newton's words of commitment to divine origins and his principled rejection of naturalistic origins, I'm asking you to agree that you were wrong to devise a definition of a "creationist" to try and justify your claim that Newton was not a creationist, and so to agree that if you are going to list scientists by their claims on origins, that you will list Isaac Newton among the literal creationists. Agreed?
No, because the cited affirmed only a minority of false-authorities. It also does not define what "Darwinism" is, nor does it explain the qualifier making it 'strict'. Let me help you with that. Darwinism is an explanation only of natural selection, which is further limited by the exclusion of genetics. To be 'Darwinism' implies that it is pre-mendelian. I corrected you on this point on the show. After arguing this subject for so many years, I would have thought you would have figured out these terms by now. Do you want to explain what you think 'strict' Darwinism is? Because I should expect you to show where the cited study clarified that point for each of these medical doctors that were polled. How did they know whether they were rejecting Darwinism specifically as opposed to biological evolution in general? And what were they told to contrast to the qualifier of being 'strict'?BE-Question #2, TRUSTWORTHY STATISTICS: Aron, since I was referring to the same study you were, which study affirmed my statement that a large percent of U.S. doctors reject strict Darwinism including 34% who prefer intelligent design, will you now agree to withdraw that particular criticism of yours against me?
No, your presentation of them was definitely not valid!BE-Question #3, DENYING DINOSAUR SOFT TISSUE: Aron, will you agree that my presentation to you on the radio of the soft-tissue dinosaur finds was valid,
No, the fact that you were wrong about these things is your own fault alone.and that your claim that I was wrong about this was a result of you being out-of-date with the latest science,
No. While I would like to see some of that turn out to be original biological material, and it would not help you if it were, the fact is that it has either not been confirmed or has already been refuted. Zero does not equate to a multiplicity.and that therefore I was correct when I asserted that there have been multiple published findings of original dinosaur (and dinosaur era) biological tissue,
No, I don't know of anytime I have ever denied widely-reported and peer-reviewed objective science, but I will contest everything you've said instead.and that you wrongly denied what now is widely-reported and peer-reviewed objective science on dinosaur tissue?
Don't look forward; look backward. You've been dodging them since this began, and you will continue to dodge them I'm sure. This discussion really can't get started until you stop ignoring the questions I have already had to repeat for you. Please have the courtesy to address those challenges without any more stalling or posturing.I'm looking forward to getting to your other challenges Aron.
"the preservation of primary soft tissues and biomolecules is not limited to large-sized bones buried in fluvial sandstone environments, but also occurs in relatively small-sized skeletal elements deposited in marine sediments."
Aron, that reference #10 includes an impressive list of peer-reviewed publications in the 1990s asserting the survival for millions of years of measurable quantities of original biological deoxyribonucleic acid:"The fact that DNA sequence can be obtained from fossil organisms has opened new windows of opportunity for research"¦ Recently, S. R. Woodward et al. sequenced DNA from"¦ bone fragments apparently from a dinosaur"¦ However, the likely source of those DNA sequences appears to be human contamination. [However] support has been presented for other findings of DNA surviving for millions of years (10)"¦"
2003 - Journal of Applied Genetics: Molecular phylogenetics employing modern and ancient DNA by Pusch, Carsten M.; Broghammer, Martina; and Blin, Nikolaus.""¦analysis of extracts from the bone tissues revealed the presence of molecules with light absorbance maxima consistent with nucleic acids and peptides/proteins. Analyses of bone extracts for amino acid content yielded ratios similar to those found for modern ostrich and horse bone. "¦ bony tissue samples from the T. rex suggests the presence of collagen type I remnants. "¦ "¦ bony tissue samples from the T. rex suggests the presence of collagen type I remnants. Results indicate that the analyzed tissue contains numerous biomolecules. While some of the biomolecules are most likely contaminants, the probable presence of collagen type I suggests that some molecules of dinosaurian origin remain in these tissues."
Aron, while you say that humans are apes and everything is everything (and dinosaurs are fish?), I however would not use this last reference as evidence of soft-tissue from dinosaurs. I include this reference as an example of the widespread interest (JAG no less) in paleobiology, and also to show that despite ongoing widespread disbelief among evolutionists and atheists, it's been over half-a-century since scientists have been recovering original biological material from specimens allegedly tens and hundreds of millions of years old."The field of molecular palaeobiology was initiated in 1954, when Abelson successfully recovered ancient amino acids from fish dating back from the Devonian period" [400 mya].
This full paper is free to read online but for some it will be easier to read the New Scientist report which states: Protein recovered from dinosaur eggs:"Exceptionally preserved sauropod eggshells discovered in Upper Cretaceous"¦ in"¦ Argentina, contain skeletal remains and soft tissues of embryonic Titanosaurid dinosaurs. "¦mineralization may also have been rapid enough to retain fragments of original biomolecules in these specimens. To investigate preservation of biomolecular compounds in these well-preserved sauropod dinosaur eggshells, we applied multiple analytical techniques. Results demonstrate organic compounds and antigenic structures similar to those found in extant eggshells."
Aron, for you, PZ Myers, Talk Origins, and others here on LoR who deny (or doubt) the existence of original biological material, this paper explains that researchers injected rabbits with these apparent dinosaur egg proteins. The animals developed antibodies similar to those they produce in experiments with similar modern protein.Traces of protein have survived for more than 70 million years in dinosaur eggs from Argentina. They bear strong similarities to proteins from chicken eggs. "¦ The eggs were laid by massive long-necked plant-eaters called titanosaurs. Buried by floods, the eggs fossilised unusually fast, preserving the soft tissues and tiny bones within.
"The vessels and contents are similar in all respects to blood vessels recovered from extant ostrich bone"¦ we demonstrate the retention of pliable soft-tissue blood vessels with contents that are capable of being liberated from the bone matrix, while still retaining their flexibility, resilience, original hollow nature, and three-dimensionality. "¦we have indentified protein fragments in extracted [T. rex.] bone samples, some of which retain slight antigenicity." [referring to the ability to provoke antibodies in immunological tests]
""¦soft tissues could be preserved in the fossil record, not just by replacement"¦ but as intact structures retaining flexibility and resilience. "¦additional fossil material, including other tyrannosaurs [and] hadrosaurs"¦ indicates that this is not an isolated phenomenon. The challenge of trying to manipulate, process and analyze vessels and cellular structures millions of years old is not a minor one. "¦ We have tested a variety of methods for"¦ extracting soft tissue and cellular structures"¦ to characterize preservation at cellular and sub-cellular levels."
2007 - Science: Protein sequences from mastodon and Tyrannosaurus rex revealed by mass spectrometry, J. Asara [of Beth Israel Med. Center, Boston and today at Harvard]; Schweitzer, Mary H."Late Cretaceous avian bone tissues from Argentina demonstrate exceptional preservation"¦ to the microstructural and molecular levels. Bone tissues respond to collagenase digestion and histochemical stains. "¦we have applied atomic force microscopy to address the integrity and functionality of retained organic structures. "¦measurements not only support immunochemical evidence for collagen preservation for antibody recognition but also imply preservation of the whole molecular integrity. "¦ The conclusion that the fossil section is organic is further supported by ToFSIMS [ion mass spectroscopy] analysis (not show) and the collagenase digestion experiments"¦ Imaging ToFSIMS shows an abundance of organic fragments"¦"
For this next reference, remember that osteocytes are bone cells that can live as the organism itself, and filipodia are tentacles that extend from various types of cells when migrating."We used mass spectrometry to obtain protein sequences from bones of a"¦ 68-million-year-old dinosaur (Tyrannosaurus rex). The presence of T. rex sequences indicates that their peptide bonds were remarkably stable."
"Soft tissues and cell-like microstructures derived from skeletal elements of a well-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex [include] transparent, hollow and pliable blood vessels; intravascular material, including in some cases, structures morphologically reminiscent of vertebrate red blood cells; and osteocytes with intracellular contents and flexible filipodia"¦ in bone from specimens spanning multiple geological time periods [to 70+ mya] and varied depositional environments. "¦ the surprising presence of still-soft elements in fossil bone"¦ suggest that"¦ soft tissue elements may be more commonly preserved"¦ than previously thought."
The paper also describes the original biological material in "Sue," the largest and best preserved Tyrannosaurus rex ever found, now permanently exhibited in Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. From Sue:""¦explain the detailed preservation of still-soft, transparent, hollow and flexible tissues and cells over geological time, given that natural processes such as decay and degradation"¦ and chemical and/or enzymatic degradation (Lindahl 1993; Riley & Collins 1994; Collins et al. 2000, 2002) act in concert to rapidly degrade both the molecules and the tissues they comprise."
"Small regions of soft tissue were recovered," and "Osteocytes with long filipodia and distinct, well-defined 'nuclei' were restricted to pliable regions of matrix"¦"
"Hollow, transparent and flexible vessels [which] were slightly pigmented" and its "Osteocytes"¦ had pigmented elongate cell bodies, some with internal contents and short, stubby filipodia."
And of bacterial contamination and biofilms, in the year before the publication of the primary opposing theory, Schweitzer, et al., wrote:"As arguably the most labile and easily degraded of the structures we observed, the presence of soft vessels is enigmatic. They are neither biomineralized nor have any obvious inherent characteristics that would favour preservation"¦"
And back in 2007, the authors write that while they remain open to further pending analysis of the osteocytes, they "consider these cell-like structures to be remains of original cells.""The possibility that microbes may have invaded bone and vascular channels after death, secreting extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) that subsequently mineralized, was also considered. If deposition of mineral upon microbial biofilm allowed retention of flexibility in one case, it is feasible to propose that the same process contributed to the preservation of the original vessel walls."
"We performed multiple analyses of Tyrannosaurus rex (specimen MOR 1125) fibrous cortical and medullary [pregnancy-related bone] tissues remaining after demineralization. The results indicate that collagen I, the main organic component of bone, has been preserved in low concentrations in these tissues. The findings were independently confirmed by mass spectrometry. We propose a possible chemical pathway that may contribute to this preservation." And the team considers the implications of the "presence of endogenous protein in dinosaur bone"¦"
Aron, the standard explanation by atheists and evolutionists that I've seen, including here on LoR, is that the biofilm interpretation published in 2008 has "refuted" the soft-tissue claims. Apparently that's your explanation too. I can't be sure because rather than provide evidence for me and the readers you have simply stated that the soft tissue has been "refuted." And whereas I've been posting all along extensive evidence of my assertion, you've left us guessing as to how, when, where, by whom this has been "refuted." The 2008 biofilm paper is a worthwhile scientific endeavor: exploring whether bacteria could create these dinosaur artifacts. But on its primary goal it was given far too much credit because it virtually ignored the following positive evidence from this same 2007 paper (and from elsewhere):""¦it has been hypothesized that original molecules will be either lost or altered to the point of nonrecognition over relatively short time spans (well under a million years) (1-7). However, the discovery of intact structures retaining original transparency, flexibility, and other characteristics in specimens dating at least to the Cretaceous (8, 9) [65+ mya] suggested that, under certain conditions, remnant organic constituents may persist across geological time." -Science 2007, Schweitzer, et al.
Contrary to Evolutionary Expectations: The propaganda now likely to come (like denying the Junk DNA claim, and like denying that NASA feared deep moon dust) is that Darwinists will begin to deny ever having doubted the ability of soft tissue to survive for millions (and billions) of years. So, preemptively against the same likely development regarding dinosaur soft tissue, I'll quote these authors admitting in Science what already we are beginning to see some atheists denying:"¦collagen [type] I has unique characteristics"¦ making validation of its presence relatively straightforward.
This finding suggests that the bone mineral is virtually unchanged from the living state and has undergone little if any alteration. "¦ the elasticity of dinosaur tissues was similar to that of demineralized extant bone.
"¦bone extracts showed reactivity to antibodies raised against chicken collagen"¦ We confirmed the antibody reactivity data by in situ immunohistochemistry"¦
Additionally, antibody reactivity (Fig. 2J) was significantly decreased after we digested dinosaur tissues with collagenase"¦
Immunohistochemistry performed on sediments was negative for binding.
In situ TOF-SIMS [ion mass spectroscopy] analyses were performed to unambiguously detect amino acid residues consistent with the presence of protein in demineralized MOR 1125 [T. rex] tissues.
Sandstones entombing the dinosaur, subjected to TOF-SIMS as a control, showed little or no evidence for these amino acids.
"¦ that molecular fragments of original proteins are preserved in the mineralized matrix of bony elements of MOR 1125 is supported by peptide sequences recovered from dinosaur extracts, some of which align uniquely with chicken collagen"¦ The amount of protein or protein-like components"¦ was ~0.62% for cortical bone and 1.3% for medullary bone.
Additionally, experiments have been conducted independently in at least three different labs and by numerous investigators, and the results strongly support the endogeneity [internal origin] of collagen-like protein molecules. -Science 2007, Schweitzer, et al.
2007 - Expert Reviews of Proteomics: Will current technologies enable dinosaur proteomics, by Gary B. Smejkal [then associate professor molecular biology, University of New Hampshire]; Schweitzer.The presence of original molecular components is not predicted for fossils older than a million years"¦
-Science 2007, Schweitzer, et al.
"The preservation of proteinaceous materials over millions of years has caused paleobiologists to reconsider current models of fossilization. "¦ Conventional wisdom held that, under normal circumstances, decomposition occurs so rapidly and completely that, after a relatively short period of time, no molecular fragments (let alone cells or tissues) would remain. However, the observation of these components in multiple specimens of geological age, supported by amino acid sequence data from collagen preserved in the skeletal elements of T. rex, provide evidence for molecular preservation over millions of years."
The paper does acknowledge something that FALSIFIES the LoR members understanding of what is being claimed in the many published papers. While AronRa claims, without offering evidence, that the soft-tissue finds have "been refuted," the LoR members posting in this debate's companion thread are somehow interpreting all these findings as not even claiming that original dinosaur biological tissue has been found. This PLoS One paper, which sought to reinterpret the still-soft elements as something other than endogenous dinosaur tissue, AT LEAST ADMITS what has been claimed by the published papers, that the previous claimed:"bacterial biofilms"¦ mimic real blood vessels"¦ This explanation... represents a plausible alternative hypothesis."
Aron, could you please tell the LoR members that what is being debated is the existence of extant dinosaur biological, primary soft tissue. LoR seems certain that's not even the subject of journal controversy. And the more they dig in, bolstered by your out-of-date claim, the further those rooting for you move from even knowing what is being debated, let alone the truth of it."discovery of soft, pliable tissues recovered from... Tyrannosaur [involve] preserved biomolecules [of] preserved dinosaurian soft tissues [which if true would hold] the promise of biologic investigations of extinct animals."
The authors found bacterial biofilm and other structures that visually looked similar superficially to the structures found in the soft tissue findings. And their infrared investigation suggested that their dinosaur fossils were more similar to biofilm than to modern collagen. The primary effect of their results was helpfully and simply to add increased emphasis on the effort to exclude bacterial contamination from studies of dinosaur tissue."The hollow [voids] of the tyrannosaur femur supported the general idea that an exceptionally well-preserved bone may act as a containment vessel for biomolecules. "¦ To test this concept, a perfectly preserved turtle phalange [finger bone]... was pressure fractured and directly examined...."
However Aron, the apparent biological heme from Jack Horner's T. rex was injected into lab rats and they produced antibodies for hemoglobin, something they would not do if the iron were not biological and only the "iron-oxygen spheres" reported in this biofilm paper. This is why Schweitzer was working with immunologists....demineralized specimens... displayed small red spheres clustered in the tubular structures (Fig. 4A). Discovery of these spheres in an ammonite [extinct mollusk] suture [a rigid joint] indicated they had no relationship to iron derived from blood. "¦ The second structure category consisted of soft, pliable, branching tubules with morphology closely resembling blood vessels."
However, remember that 14C is found everywhere it shouldn't be. And finally, the authors claim that since the Journal of Biological Chemistry had recently reported the identification in a bacteria genome of collagen-related genetic code, therefore, finding collagen proteins in dinosaur bones is ambiguous:"In order to determine if the mineralized biofilms were ancient in origin, a sample of material removed from the vascular canals was subjected to 14C dating. The results were 'greater than modern' indicating a modern origin for the material."
Apparently, AronRa believes that this (and perhaps the Salzberg 2011 unfinished paper) has refuted all the soft-tissue finds, protein sequencing, immunological tests, etc., from specimens extracted from various dinosaurs (and all the other reported dinosaur-era soft-tissue finds). But a dozen institutions both before and after this 2008 paper, disagree and continue to publish their confirmations.Recent discoveries [Genome-based identification"¦ of collagen-related"¦ motifs in bacterial"¦ proteins] of collagen-like proteins in bacteria and viruses [17] add to the problem of unambiguous identification of vertebrate biomolecules."
2010 - PLoS One: Influence of microbial biofilms on the preservation of primary soft tissue in fossil and extant archosaurs by Peterson, et al. [a non-Schweitzer group of three authors from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and Northern Illinois University].""¦striking and previously unknown details about the chemical preservation of soft tissue, elemental distribution patterns most likely related to the organism's life processes, insights into the chemistry of soft tissue, elemental distribution to the organism's life processes"¦
Most striking is that, in addition to the bone material, the chemical remains of the rachises (shafts) from the flight feathers are now revealed: The P [phosphorus] distribution is clearly controlled by both bone as well as soft tissue remnant from the original organism. Although phosphatized muscle tissue has been re-ported from the Solnhofen (21), the phosphorus and sulfur levels responsible for the rachis images presented here do not require the addition of P or S from elsewhere.
"¦iron zoning in the feathers... is probably NOT an original feature of the organism. [However] the evidence strongly implies that the rachises [feather shafts] are at least in part the chemical remains of the original organism.
"¦the high zinc levels in the Archaeopteryx bone have been inherited from the original organism.
"¦phosphorous point levels measured from the [feather shafts] ... strongly supporting the inference that part of the feather chemistry is preserved.
Zinc apparently was present in appreciable concentrations in the original bone (as in many extant organ-isms) and has been well sequestered within the bone over 150 million years of burial.
Other work (31) thus supports our most striking result: that elevated Zn levels associated with the skull and other bones have persisted over geological time and most likely, along with phosphorous and sulfur, are remnants of the original bone chemistry.
Ca [calcium] removal from some parts of the Archaeopteryx is negligible"¦
"¦feather barb patterns are not merely topographic impressions"¦"
A great paper, but the authors failed to report something that should be routine, the carbon 14 date of their specimens and the percentage of right and left-handedness of the amino acids.Preservation of GROSS soft tissues is extremely rare, but recent studies have suggested that primary soft tissues and biomolecules are more commonly preserved within preserved bones than had been presumed.
Some of these claims have been challenged... suggesting that some of the structures are microbial artifacts, not primary soft tissues.
The identification of biomolecules in fossil vertebrate extracts from a specimen of Brachylophosaurus canadensis [Hadrosaur] has shown the interpretation of preserved organic remains as microbial biofilm to be highly unlikely.
This study experimentally examines the role of microbial biofilms in soft-tissue preservation"¦
The identification of biomolecules with vertebrate signatures[2,3] in the extracts from fossil vertebrates provides compelling evidence countering the argument that these structures are simply microbial biofilm [4].
both primary soft tissue and microbial biofilms are composed of organic carbon, control samples and biofilm samples possess a similar EDS signature that is unreliable for differentiation. However, primary soft-tissues in control samples are morphologically different from biofilm samples. Primary soft- tissues analyzed by SEM show red blood cells and vessels at relatively low magnifications (<100x) (Figure 6) whereas biofilms on bones shows smooth, undulating surfaces at similar magnifications"¦
Phosphatized soft-tissues in the basal ornithimimosaur [sic, bird-mimic ostrich-like dinosaurs], Pelecanimimus polydon, have also been described in the form of muscle and skin [25]. The results of this study strongly suggest that microorganisms play a role in the preservation of primary soft- tissues in vertebrate organisms, without extensive secondary mineralization. "¦ biofilms may directly enhance the preservation of vertebrate primary soft-tissues. ...exquisite preservation of pliable soft-tissues may be related to a microbial masonry process whereby the formation of microbial biofilms wall off internal surfaces of bones during early taphonomic stages.
The claim of the presence of primary soft-tissues in fossil vertebrates has been supported by the identification by mass spectroscopy of biomolecules in the form of collagen and [other] proteins...
""¦direct spectroscopic characterization of isolated fibrous bone tissues, a crucial test of hypotheses of biomolecular preservation over deep time, [previously] has not been performed. Here, we demonstrate that endogenous [originating from the mosasaur itself] proteinaceous [pertaining to protein, biological] molecules are retained in a humerus [arm bone] from a Late Cretaceous mosasaur (an extinct giant marine lizard). In situ immunofluorescence of demineralized bone extracts shows reactivity to antibodies raised against type I collagen, and amino acid analyses of soluble proteins extracted from the bone exhibit a composition indicative of structural proteins or their breakdown products. These data are corroborated by synchrotron radiation-based infrared microspectroscopic studies demonstrating that amino acid containing matter is located in bone matrix fibrils that express imprints of the characteristic 67 nm D-periodicity typical of collagen. Moreover, the fibrils differ significantly in spectral signature from those of potential modern bacterial contaminants, such as biofilms and collagen-like proteins. Thus, the preservation of primary soft tissues and biomolecules is not limited to large-sized bones buried in fluvial sandstone environments, but also occurs in relatively small-sized skeletal elements deposited in marine sediments.
...to facilitate comparisons with a relevant modern reference, bone tissue samples from an extant monitor lizard (LO 10298) were prepared in the same way as the mosasaur tissues.
"¦numerous free- floating, vessel-like structures [from the mosasaur] joined in a discrete network"¦ similar to those previously reported in dinosaurs [6,10]. Associated with the vessel-like forms were cell-like features"¦ and a fibrous substance that, in modern bone, would represent the organic phase of the extracellular matrix; i.e., the osteoid [organic bone material] (Figure 1G). The fibrous organization of the organic matter was demonstrated by optical and scanning electron microscopy (Figures 1A, B and H). Furthermore, application of a standard histochemical dye (Aniline blue) revealed that the fiber-like structures take up stain as does recent connective tissue (Figure 1L)"¦
Fiber-like forms with a similar typical axial periodicity were also found coiled obliquely around some canal walls (Figure 1K) and are, in modern animals, comprised primarily of mineralized fibrillar collagens (Figure 1J)"¦ The amino acid profiles we obtained have a composition potentially indicative of fibrous structural proteins"¦ such as collagen [19], suggesting that the proteinaceous molecules isolated from IRSNB 1624 [the mosasaur] may contain this protein"¦
Rationale for excluding fungal growth and animal glue as potential collagen sources: "¦histological sections of untreated bone revealed that the
fibrous microstructures were deeply embedded"¦ and DNA analyses failed to detect any ergosterol or nucleic acids attributable to fungi"¦
"¦the amount of finite carbon was corresponding to 4.68%60.1 of modern 14C matter; Figure 4). Likewise, the amount of finite carbon was exceedingly small, corresponding to 4.68% +/- 0.1 of modern 14C activity (yielding an age of 24 600 BP), and most likely reflect bacterial activity near the outer surface of the bone (although no bacterial proteins or hopanoids were detected, one bacterial DNA sequence was amplified by PCR"¦)"
2011 - Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology: (still unavailable) DNA, Dinosaurs, and Metagenomics: A new tool for mass identification of DNA from fossil bone by Steven Salzberg, University of Maryland; Tom Kaye, Burke Museum; et al."Eleven collagen peptide sequences recovered from chemical extracts of dinosaur bones were mapped onto molecular models of the vertebrate collagen fibril derived from extant taxa. The dinosaur peptides localized to fibril regions protected by the close packing of collagen molecules"¦
Four peptides mapped to collagen regions crucial for cell-collagen interactions"¦ Dinosaur peptides were not represented in more exposed parts of the collagen fibril"¦
Thus functionally significant regions of collagen fibrils that are physically shielded within the fibril may be preferentially preserved in fossils. These results show empirically that structure-function relationships at the molecular level could contribute to selective preservation in fossilized vertebrate remains"¦
This non-random distribution supports the hypothesis that the peptides are produced by the extinct organisms"¦
Type I collagen peptides were extracted and sequenced from ~68 million years old fossils of Tyrannosaurus rex... despite multiple lines of evidence to support the presence of collagen, including in situ antibody binding, the endogeneity of MOR 1125 peptides was disputed, and the sequences instead were suggested to arise from either microbial invasion [19], extant collagens introduced in laboratory experiments [2], or even statistical artifact [3]. Collagen peptide sequences were subsequently derived from a second dinosaur, Brachylophosauraus canadensis (MOR 2598) [9], and included many of the earlier lines of supporting evidence as well as independent replication of data in multiple labs. Surprisingly, advances in collagen biology also support the authenticity of the fossil peptides. The molecular structure of collagen favors preservation.
Our results add to the evidence provided by sequence data"¦, molecular phylogenetic analyses"¦, microstructure"¦ and immunoreactivity to anti-collagen antibodies"¦ that supports persistence of elements of native collagen fibril structure"¦"
Aron, I reject this claim that dinosaur soft-tissue has not been identified. You attribute my conclusion to my creation bias, but I would offer as evidence the reasons presented above in peer-reviewed publications in PNAS, Science, PLoS One, Expert Reviews of Proteomics, Journal of Applied Genetics, Langmuir: A Journal of the American Chemical Society, the Proceedings of the Royal Society, and below, in the journal Nature. I also expect that the soft-tissue dinosaur claims will be fully vindicated because I believe what Jesus Christ said that, "from the beginning of the creation, God 'made them male and female.'" And I doubt also anti-dinosoaur-tissue claims because as you'll recall from above, the left-handedness of dinosaur-era amino acids, the 14C everywhere it wasn't expected, the evidence of rapid stratification, the unexpected genome discoveries, for example, from kangaroos, worms, the chimp Y chromosome, and sponges, which findings make the Salzberg and Kaye assessments here questionable."The idea that endogenous soft tissues are preserved in Mesozoic fossil bone remains contentious after 6 years of research. Here, full characterization of DNA is reported using 'Metagenomics' techniques from a section of Brachylophosaurus canadensis [hadrosaur] fossil, JRF 56, from the Judith river formation near Malta, Montana. Soft tissue structures similar to those reported as dinosaurian blood vessels and bone cells are observed"¦
Previous studies have focused on long-lasting proteins since it is generally accepted that DNA can not survive such time scales. Here metagenomics data is presented that identifies ALL the DNA in the sample giving proportionate rank of endogenous molecular species.
The sample was processed to isolate organic remnants from the intravascular cavities of the fossil's cortical bone, excluding possible contamination from sediments on the bone surface. DNA from various species of bacteria, plants, fungi, and chordates was detected in the bone and therefore longer lasting proteins from these species can be expected. Critically, avian molecules identified as modern bird DNA were found in the organic isolates [including chicken apparently; and an allegation, reasonably leveled since Schweitzer used ostrich material as a control, that she contaminated her specimen with ostrich DNA and hemoglobin.].
Bacteria DNA provides support for the production of biofilms within the fossil"¦
The presence of modern bird and other chordate DNA provide a large analytical obstacle to identifying possible endogenous [molecules.
Reconsideration Due for Other Claims of Soft Tissue: With all of the above hard science being published toward confirming extant dinosaur soft tissue, now, other claims that were mostly winked at should be given a new look, including finds with alleged dates of:"We interpret the feather's dark trace to be a melanic organosulphur residue, based on the following.
First, we detected no manganese among nine point analyses throughout the feather, indicating that preservation was not due to precipitation of the inorganic mineral, manganese dioxide (MnO2), as has been suggested"¦
Second, a potential organocopper biomarker for melanin was previously detected in this specimen; this biomarker has also been correlated with the presence of melanosomes in three fossil bird taxa. We hypothesize that melanosome structures fossilize simply by virtue of being solid aggregations of melanins"¦ resistant to degradation.
Third, the dark trace is associated with sulphur, which may have derived from the sulphur-rich feather keratin and crosslinked with the melanin; this is consistent with the sulphurization mechanism responsible for high-fidelity organic preservation in the fossil record."
That depends on how you define 'fish'. As I said in my Darwin Day speech in Florida last month, "the word, 'fish' also does not have a consistent definition of traits applicable to everything universally accepted as a fish. There are some that are warm-blooded, some that have legs instead of fins, or that don't have scales, or lack fins on their tails, and there are some things that are very much like fish, but aren't fish, yet they still have gills. The only way that 'fish' can be taxonomically consistent is if it means the same thing as 'chordate'." I don't say that 'everything is everything', but I do say that dinosaurs are chordates.BobEnyart said:Aron, while you say that humans are apes and everything is everything (and dinosaurs are fish?)
No; that would have helped, but it wasn't necessary. As is typical of creationists, you misunderstood what your own citations said, and what they mean. You also misunderstood what I said about them -due to your previously noted problem with reading comprehension. I never said they were the result of contamination for example. You accused me of saying that, but I didn't.BE-Question #4, We're You Out of Date AronRa: I'm asking Aron if you can admit that you were the one who was out-of-date with your dismissive chuckle indicating that yet another creationist didn't know what he was talking, as evidenced when you said, "I've read Schweitzer's paper. I suggest you review it." Her paper? Singular? Wouldn't you have to cite not Schweitzer but papers by other authors to defend your claim?
No, I said that was my impression of the video where Schweitzer and Horner said that was their hypothesis regarding the T-rex and the hadrosaur. Your own citation offers an alternate explanation for the insulation of the Mosasaur fossil:Aron, you wrote that this phenomenon occurs only in "very large bones, properly buried under the right conditions."
Again, no. While one obviously should read relevant peer-reviewed studies, -as I have- it is not necessary to read them from EVERYWHERE before one can even form an opinion. I would suggest however that you would be better off if you read fewer papers, and don't just run through them to glean for key words or talking points; read for comprehension instead. Try to understand what you're talking about before you waste this much time and effort barking up the wrong tree, trying to force me to admit to something I already told you I was aware of. If you understood the things you read, you wouldn't have posted the reply that you did. Neither would you have repeated all the nonsense that you think supports that,which of course it doesn't, none of it.I replied on air Aron that "you need to read the last five years worth of refereed scientific journals including from everywhere... in Nature, Science, PLoS -- Public Library of Science"¦" before you could come to a scientifically informed conclusion on dinosaur soft tissue. Agreed?
I haven't found any journals which linked the two unrelated studies you've somehow gotten confused here.The Y-Chromosome of chimpanzees is far away from human beings, from men, as the sponge genome is from human beings. Right? In the great barrier reef, they've now sequenced the lowly sponge, and and the headlines in the science journals are that the sponge has 70% similarity with the human genome.
You should understand that sharing 70% of a gene set does not mean the same thing as having a 70% identical codon sequence, the way our genome matches that of chimpanzees and other higher animals.The chimpanzee genome is 30% different in the Y chromosome, "¦'horrendously different from the human Y-chromosome. "¦We are 30% different from supposedly our closest living relatives."
Most amusingly Bob tried to cite the laws of thermodynamics as being opposed to, or a challenge for evolution, and he also lists Lord Kelvin on his side. However Kelvin invented those laws, and yet he said that evolution was "not unscientific". So obviously those laws do not present the challenge that Bob thought they should. Kelvin also disproved young earth creationism,with thermodynamics! What was the minimum age Kelvin said that the world had to be, Bob?1.
In part one of our discussion, Bob tried to claim credibility for creationism within the scientific community by citing several pre-Darwinian scientists as creationists. I myself have described such people (like Carl Linne for example) as being 'essentially' creationist,in that they believed in Biblical fables before anyone knew any better. However not having any scientific alternative does not put pioneer scientists in the same class as modern creationists who oppose science altogether, seeking to undermine understanding according to a prior commitment to promote or defend a belief in magic instead. Bob added that he considered each of these men to have rejected 'naturalism'. Few -if any- of the scientists in his list meet that criteria.
For example, Francis Bacon invented scientific methodology, so he obviously didn't reject it. He also argued that matters of faith and natural science should be kept separate. Copernicus and Galileo were both famously charged with heresy when they challenged the church's authority regarding geocentricity.
The first criteria of creationism is that one reject evolutionary principles. But Georges Cuvier,father of paleontology- upset contemporary clergy by recognizing the geologic column (which Bob rejects) and its indication that whole species have gone extinct before our time, (which Bob also rejects). Louis Pasteur reportedly accepted evolution, albeit without Darwinian mechanisms, and he disproved the Lutheran belief that diseases were caused by demons. Gregor Mendel actually supported Darwinian evolution. In fact Mendel's contribution brought about the modern Mendelo-Darwinian synthesis. Bob knew this and even admitted it on the air, yet now he contradicts himself by saying that Mendel rejected evolution?! Bullshit, Bob!
Put this in your errata.
Part one of our discussion ended with a challenge to Bob regarding his own rejection of necessarily naturalist methodology. Name one time in the history of science when supernatural explanations ever proved to be correct, or actually improved our understanding of anything, rather than impeding or retarding all progress, as I believe has always been the case.2. As we've just seen, Bob also claimed that 'original biological material' had been found in a handful of Cretaceous fossils. Left at that, the claim is ambiguous and arguable. However Bob specified that these discoveries confirmed original blood and other tissues that had not decomposed, and this is not the case. All that has been confirmed relating to the blood and feathers Bob specifically mentioned were that both had been decomposed and/or were preserved only as residue.
Put this in your errata.
3.
Part three ended with Bob's assertion that I could either not present any precursors for dinosaurs or could not cite any scientists who agreed with whatever I might suggest. I answered that challenge with a succession of fossil precursors endorsed by an international team of paleontologists.
Put this in your errata.
4.
In part four, Bob claimed an alternative model to Big Bang cosmology -which does not exist, and he said it was concordant with the creationists' model of the universe -which also does not exist. I defended myself against Bob's accusation of having misrepresented Laurence Krauss by showing where Krauss also refuted Bob's claim of a geocentric universe. Part four ended with my challenge to Bob to admit that leading cosmologists disagree with him on both of his key points, (1) That there apparently is no center of the universe either indicated by a lack of data or supported by the data that we actually do have, and (2) that the red shift quantization he pleaded for is an illusion, that it is otherwise concordant with the big bang, and thus is not an alternative cosmological model.
5.
In part five, I showed that Y-Chromosome Adam evidently lived 140,000 years ago, and that a genetic bottleneck in the human lineage was traced to 74,000 years ago, not the 4,000 years that Bob claimed for both of these.
Put this in your errata.
6.
I proved that Bob had absolutely no idea what he was talking about with regard to our genetic similarity to sponges or our genomic orthologue with chimpanzees, specifically relating to the Y-chromosome. Specifically Bob claimed that the human genome shared 70% similarity to both sponges and chimpanzees. Neither comment is true. Humans share 70% of the same genes as sponges have, but do not share 70% of the entire genome. If we include non-coding DNA, then our genome is more than 95% identical to the chimpanzee genome. If we only include genes, the ratio is roughly close to 99%.
Put this in your errata.
In part six, Bob was supposed to answer my phylogeny challenge, but instead he deliberately distorted an already poorly-presented and intentionally misleading article from a sensationalized British magazine. Bob also accused me of never having read the article even though I remembered what it said off the top of my head, and he got all of the details in that article wrong. The article was about horizontal gene transfer, it did focus primarily on microbes, and was not about human DNA. Nor did it offer any significant challenge to the "tree-of-life" -at least where that pertains to multicellular organsisms, and especially animals.7.
I challenged Bob to show that there were ever any mammoths found frozen with tropical flora anywhere near them. Bob claims to have answered this challenge, but he has not. He only cited what he and I had already agreed upon, that there were lots of bones that were neither flash-frozen nor associated with anything tropical. Bob also said mammoths could not possibly survive in the environments where millions of them are known to have lived and I refuted his claims about those conditions too.
Put these in your errata.
8.
Finally Bob asserted that the ancestry of turtles was 'supposed' in lieu of evidence, and that the evolution of flowering plants, backbones, bats, fish, and trees were all similarly 'unknown', and that I could find no reliable science sources to contest his assertion in any of these instances. I proved otherwise on all counts, but particularly with regard to turtles.
put this in your errata.
9.In the 7th and final segment of our discussion, Bob accused me of not knowing why Rhodocetus and Pakicetus were considered related to whales. He said this even after I explained about the diagnostic traits in each of their skulls. Bob accused paleontologist, Phillip Gingrich of 'recanting' this fossil,which he did not, and of rendering this animal as a fish,which he did not.
Put this in your errata.
Bob's challenge there was to explain whether Pakicetus and Rodhocetus still have cetacean traits regardless whether they still had legs or not?
I have no idea what you're referring to with all that. But I did overstate my case to speak of soft "tissue." Changing my mind on this and admitting error also seems to show that you're overstating your case when you write that, "creationists are forbidden to change their minds"¦" The Bible offers methods for falsifying itself; and it says that "faith is"¦ the evidence of things not seen" (Heb. 11:1); and Jesus said, "If I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is not trustworthy" (John 5:31, ISV, i.e., not credible). It is atheistic methodological naturalism that does not even permit a scientist to use the forensic discipline of looking for possible evidence of intention, and for an Intelligent Designer, in the information within living organisms. However I did overstate the case regarding Archaeopteryx to say that its "soft tissue" was found. That characterization went further than the actual findings permit. For this species I should have said that scientists have recovered only some of its original biological material. As for other dinosaur-era species, in their very titles, peer-reviewed papers report discovery of "soft tissue". Of course the Archaeopteryx discovery itself is stunning and is yet another example of the continuing publication of findings of allegedly 65M, 80M, 150M, and billion-year old original biological material (with these and other reports suggesting that these all contain much 14C and mostly non-racemized left-handed amino acids)."were all original biological material, implying that they had not been fossilized at all"¦ and were perhaps even still edible."
-Aron misrepresenting Bob on Archaeopteryx
Mars: Contrast that certainty with scientists claiming massive flooding on Mars which today is a globally frozen desert. Yet NASA speaks of the Land of Noah (Noachis Terra) on Mars and its watery Noachian Epoch when fountains of the great deep "burst" forth onto the surface. Really. And in addition to the proposed "global-scale" mid-latitude glaciers, there were "giant floods," a "catastrophic flood" or even "catastrophic floods that"¦ occurred nearly simultaneously" which "merged into an ocean" and that this "action of water on and near the surface of Mars occurred for hundreds of millions of years"¦ and possibly global in extent." But then, NASA asks, "where has all that water gone?" And they suggest that those fountains just might burst forth again because perhaps the water was "absorbed into the ground." So there is a great irony that with 70% of the Earth covered with water, naturalists incessantly ridicule any proffer of evidence of a worldwide flood here, and before the chuckling has even died down, the same critics will affirm the possibility of nearly global flooding on bone-dry Mars."We know for certain that the world-wide flood never happened"¦" -AronRa
The Major Darwinian Predictions on Language Falsified: When I debated popular atheist Staks Rosch, he started with this denial of the biblical account of the supernatural origin of languages. That didn't go especially well for him. As on our RSF show on the Origin of Language, I point out to Rosch that the specific Darwinian predictions about the origin of language, like a thousand other secularist predictions, have all been falsified. (This happens daily: Darwinists admit to being "shocked" by new discoveries, which is another way of them saying that their predictions based on their evolutionary model typically fail.) The world's leading linguists have proven Darwin wrong in his belief that some languages are primitive, and that animal barks and grunts can be shown to be steps toward language, and that evidence of language evolution would exist."and neither did the tower of Babel [happen]" -AronRa
When Einstein died, he was reading a new book written by his former co-editor of a pair of volumes of scientific papers, Scripta universitatis atque bibliothecae hierosolymitanarum, the publication of which led to the formation of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. While Einstein strongly rejected his longtime friend's absurd scientific theories, he had a continued interest in and a willingness to read Velikovsky's historical analysis. A month before his death Einstein wrote the last of many letters to his former collaborator on the Velikovsky book that he was about to read, Ages in Chaos, a brilliant work that I highly recommend and summarize in the verse-by-verse study I presented of The Exodus.""¦virtually every modern archeologist who has investigated the story of the Exodus, with very few exceptions, agrees that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all."
Would millions of nautiloids the size of your arm standing on their heads fossilized in limestone in the canyon provide evidence of rapid stratification Aron?""¦comments about the Grand Canyon [that]:
Side canyons are carved by rainfall erosion triggering landslides and so on.
There is no indication of rapid stratification, nor is that even possible given these conditions."
-AronRa
Soft Layers: How about the catapulting of this boulder into soft layers?"There is no indication of rapid stratification"¦" -Aron
Millions of Nautiloids: Aron, in the canyon there is a single seven-foot-thick (on average) layer of limestone that runs the 277 miles of the canyon (and beyond) that covers many hundreds of square miles which contains an average of one nautiloid fossil per square meter."There is no indication of rapid stratification"¦" -Aron
Aron, that's just like you saying, "You don't have original biological material." I commit to our readers that I will try to present evidence and argumentation and not simply make "trust me" declarations that seem to have no place in a written debate. I provided argumentation for rapid strata formation at the Grand Canyon. You didn't even attempt a refutation of what I presented nor of any of the mountains of apparent evidence for the rapid deposition there. Rather, our readers get merely a pronouncement."There is no indication of rapid stratification"¦" -Aron
Millions of Missing Years Worth of Deposition and Erosion: My last bit of evidence I'll remind you about is what I offered to you in Round 3, when I presented this photo of the Grand Canyon and pointed out something that not one scientist in the history of science would EVER conclude by studying the canyon and it's strata, that TENS OF MILLIONS OF YEARS OF THE ALLEGED GEOLOGIC COLUMN ARE MISSING BETWEEN LAYERS WITH BOUNDARIES THAT LOOK JUST LIKE BOUNDARIES FOR THE ADMITTED SEQUENTIAL LAYERS, often with flat gaps SHOWING LITTLE OR NO EVIDENCE OF EROSION OVER HUNDREDS OF SQUARE MILES:"There is no indication of rapid stratification"¦" -Aron
Aron, this is another pronouncement without an offer of scientific evidence. I'm making an effort to provide evidence for the readers and not simply make arguments that consist of only: "trust me.""The same goes for your nonsense about Carbon14"¦",Aron
You haven't shown Aron that I, nor the leading creation ministries, typically misunderstand our citations. At the risk of being further mocked, let me quote for you another description of me, one that PZ Myers (who shares your opinion) pasted into his blog. This is an assessment of my grasp of a broad range of scientific topics that was written by a well-received British author after he and I had a lengthy debate on evolution:As is typical of creationists, you misunderstood what your own citations said, and what they mean. You also misunderstood what I said about them -due to your previously noted problem with reading comprehension.
-AronRa about Bob Enyart
Aron, either you're just trying to score some kind of debate point with those who already agree with you, or perhaps you really think that I cannot understand you, nor the dozens of papers I reviewed for this debate.Richard Dawkins once said that "if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)." It rapidly became clear that Bob was none of these things. For a start, I know a fair bit about evolution and genetics. But when it came to familiarity with the arguments, he was way ahead of me. On epigenetics, RNA/DNA chemistry, and animal physiology, I was hopelessly outclassed. Bob is not ignorant. And it is pretty clear he is neither stupid nor insane. He came across, in fact, as extremely intelligent.
-British Author and Darwinist James Hannam about Bob Enyart
I am so tempted to take this bait!AronRa said:This debate was supposed to be over the mistakes you made while I was on your show, yet you still haven't conceded or even acknowledged any of those many errors, and you just keep introducing new gaffs. For example, your comments about the Grand Canyon: There is no indication of rapid stratification, nor is that even possible given these conditions. Side canyons are carved by rainfall erosion triggering landslides and so on. There ARE obvious erosional unconformities at some locations in the Canyon, and I'll be happy to show geologic charts, pictures, and full explanations at another time. The same goes for your nonsense about Carbon14 and what you still don't understand about phylogentics -regarding roundworms and kangaroos. But as these are new errors that were not brought up on your show, then they are outside the scope of our debate. I will not be side-tracked by them,BobEnyart said:[....another 2,500 words of off-topic distraction]
No you didn't. Several of us pointed this out to you first.BobEnyart said:I need to correct an error I made about Archaeopteryx. I found this mistake myself.
Then let me remind you:But I should point out that I said nothing like what Aron accused me of saying, that the samples the journal paper reported on:
I have no idea what you're referring to with all that."were all original biological material, implying that they had not been fossilized at all"¦ and were perhaps even still edible."
-Aron misrepresenting Bob on Archaeopteryx
Now Bob, will you admit that you actually said that? Or do you want to keep pretending that I misrepresented you?brettpalmer said:Isotelus said:It's almost like he thinks that these scientists are cracking open bones and lo and behold! Soft tissue! Look this blood vessel is still stretchy! Wee!
That's EXACTLY what he says. ....Hear it for yourself: http://kgov.s3.amazonaws.com/bel/2012/20120120-BEL015.mp3
Bob refers to the soft tissue in the clip above at the 3:06 - 3:20 minute marks as looking as if it just came from a "butcher shop!"
I have read Velikovsky. I was a young man then, and knew next to nothing about history or cosmology or much of anything else, but I could still tell when this psychiatrist had gotten his astronomy wrong. I needn't critique him though. Carl Sagan already did that well enough when he pointed out that many of Velikovsky's ideas were wrong, silly, and 'in gross contradiction to the facts'.ARON, ON THE EXODUS: Then you introduced the Exodus by quoting a Rabbi who said:
When Einstein died, he was reading a new book written by his former co-editor of a pair of volumes of scientific papers, Scripta universitatis atque bibliothecae hierosolymitanarum, the publication of which led to the formation of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. While Einstein strongly rejected his longtime friend's absurd scientific theories, he had a continued interest in and a willingness to read Velikovsky's historical analysis. A month before his death Einstein wrote the last of many letters to his former collaborator on the Velikovsky book that he was about to read, Ages in Chaos, a brilliant work that I highly recommend and summarize in the verse-by-verse study I presented of The Exodus.""¦virtually every modern archeologist who has investigated the story of the Exodus, with very few exceptions, agrees that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all."
No, not even if they existed. Limestone can't form rapidly, (certainly not in the situation you're talking about) and the conditions you describe are not consistent throughout the site you claim, even according to other Bible-believing Christians.Would millions of nautiloids the size of your arm standing on their heads fossilized in limestone in the canyon provide evidence of rapid stratification Aron?
Why should I assume it was 'catapulted'? Why not moved by a glacier and absorbed into a sedimentary deposition? Or if it was catapulted, why not from one of the nearby volcanos?"There is no indication of rapid stratification"¦" -AronSoft Layers: How about the catapulting of this boulder into soft layers?
This does not support rapid stratification. I have personally quarried a Cretaceous beach just like what you describe. It was eroded and exposed by the Red river. What it revealed was a wash-up of thousands of ammonites accumulated over a very long period of time."There is no indication of rapid stratification"¦" -AronMillions of Nautiloids: Aron, in the canyon there is a single seven-foot-thick (on average) layer of limestone that runs the 277 miles of the canyon (and beyond) that covers many hundreds of square miles which contains an average of one nautiloid fossil per square meter.
You don't have millions of nautiloids standing on their heads. If there are some that do, they are intact indicating a more placid conclusion. Most likely these died in a seasonal post-mating death -as still occurs with modern nautiloids. As I understand it, the reason some of these were thought to be vertical were poorly preserved burrows being mistaken for escape tubes. Otherwise, these being orthocones, (the earliest of the now-extinct ammonites) it is likely that if this were a 'mass kill', it might be one in which their buoyancy is distended, causing the shells to point upward. It's only relatively recent [Mesozoic] varieties that have adopted the familiar spiral pattern. (And yes, we have transitions to show there too.) The only way they could have held a horizontal position would be will a balance of water balast in the internal chambers. In death and in decomposition, that obviously would have been abandoned. Thus again, no evidence to oppose the global scientific consensus against rapid stratification. But as I say, there is apparently no indication that they were 'standing on their heads' in the first place.I have interviewed the scientist who discovered the mass burial site. He has worked in the canyon at the invitation of the U.S. National Park Service, and is the world's leading expert on nautiloid fossils. As is true of many of the world's mass fossil graveyards, this massive nautiloid deposition provides indisputable proof of the extremely rapid formation of a significant layer of limestone near the bottom of the canyon, a layer like the others we've been told about, that allegedly formed at the bottom of a calm and placid sea with slow and gradual sedimentation. But a million nautiloids standing on their heads would beg to differ.
I don't suffer fools or liars, and see no need to apologize for that.Aron, you don't try to hide your disdain of creationists.
I don't know how you can be led about by people like AnswersinGenesis, who can be so easily shown to be lying about so much so often. Seriously why doesn't that bother you?But just in case you or any of our readers are interested in learning about the discovery of this mass nautiloid graveyard and just in case you can stomach listening to a creationist geologist (the very researcher who's work caused Yellowstone Nat'l Park to remove their erroneous exhibit sign that showed a false in situ interpretation of their petrified trees, none of which had root systems), (Find this here if this embedded video doesn't work. And to save you time you can click forward to begin viewing at 16:12 and watch until Dr. Austin mentions "the lower half of the Redwall Limestone"):
Since it turned out that I was right about there not being any original biological material ever yet confirmed, does that mean that I'm right about there being no indication of rapid stratification too?"There is no indication of rapid stratification"¦" -AronAron, that's just like you saying, "You don't have original biological material."
So none for either one then?The evidence for the rapid catastrophic carving of the canyon is as strong as the evidence for the rapid deposition of the layers.
There obviously don't need to be drainage basins to add to the runoff of the canyon walls. Run-off from the plateau into the recesses of the main canyon would cause peripheral land-slides carving out side-canyons. Since these are guided only by the plunge into the main, these side canyons would often be turned 'backward' according to the direction of the winding river. How they eroded would be self-evident should you allow yourself to see it.Scores of Missing Drainage Basins: Regarding your claim Aron that rain runoff formed the side canyons, I wonder WHAT drainage basins would have led into those side canyons?
Eugenie Scott said that although there are a series of faults running through the canyon, the 'crack in the crust of the earth' [described by creationist Gary Parker] is a "tectonic feature totally unknown in the peer-reviewed scientific literature". So I'm gonna ask for a citation, and I'm betting that you won't have one,other than "trust me".Marble Canyon and the Inner Gorge: Aron, this next satellite image shows the crack in the crust of the earth at Marble Canyon that leads into the Grand Canyon.
No, you're trying to pull out new arguments that you already know are off-topic in an attempt to obfuscate the fact that absolutely everything you asserted on your show was wrong. You don't have accountability enough to admit that, so you're trying to put up a smoke screen."The same goes for your nonsense about Carbon14"¦",AronAron, this is another pronouncement without an offer of scientific evidence. I'm making an effort to provide evidence for the readers and not simply make arguments that consist of only: "trust me."
Then can I quote WildwoodClaire1, a geologist I know on YouTube? She says, "the amounts [of Carbon14] found in diamonds and ancient coal are so small as to be within the margin of testing error; the reality in any given test could just as well be 0;" I may be a bit more permissive. She also said that "one hypothesis is that, occasionally a diamond or carbon in coal may interact with neutrons created by interaction of decay particles from nearby radioactive material, such as uranium. In such a case nitrogen 14, a common element within diamonds (they are NEVER pure carbon), could acquire a neutron to form C14. That's what happens in the atmosphere when C14 is formed, only the Nitrogen atom takes up an with energetic neutron created by interaction of cosmic rays with atoms."you wrote that you talked to one of the guys and he told you something about Horner liking to stir things up, perhaps you'll be comfortable with me reporting to you something that was said to me last week by a geologist who has experience in nuclear physics.
Minimal Radioactivity; Neutron-Capture Resistant 13C: This old-earth graduate of the School of Mines in Golden, Colorado wasn't surprised to hear that creationists have been able to document (mostly from secular journals) 14C being found around the world in petrified wood, coal, oil, limestone, graphite, natural gas, amber, marble, dinosaur fossils, and even in supposedly billion-year-old diamonds.
:lol:Creationist 14C Argument Informed By Peer-Reviewed Science: I don't know what your basing your opinion on (since you often don't provide evidence or argumentation), but I've read the creationist literature
No it doesn't. It encourages readers to assume the prescribed conclusion at the onset, threatens punishment against any degree of doubt, praises foolish gullibility, and demands that belief must not be questioned or tested. Nothing that is really true would demand any of these requirements.The Bible offers methods for falsifying itself;
Yes, the Bible encourages you to believe what you do not see, [John 20:29] not to believe what you do see, [2Cor 4:18] and relies on the logical fallacy of circular arguments routing back to an assumed conclusion [Romans 1:20].and it says that "faith is"¦ the evidence of things not seen" (Heb. 11:1);
Yeah, and in the next sentence, he presents -as evidence- another assumed conclusion, that of an allegedly unquestionable authority, pleading that the Jews should believe him simply because he says so. You don't want to debate me on the Bible either. Save that for another time.and Jesus said, "If I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is not trustworthy" (John 5:31, ISV, i.e., not credible).
That is a lie, an accusation which you cannot justify with any citation from any source anywhere. You made that up, and you're wrong -again, as always. Of course science is permitted -and encouraged- to seek out any possible evidence of anything, and would love to see indication of an intelligent designer. The only trick is that you never had evidence you could show to be possible which ever implied deliberate design or the type of designer you're pleading for, or the method such a djinn would use. Instead, you deny absolutely all the evidence we do have -which all implies something else, something you reject out-of-hand according to your own dishonest bias -which you are still trying to project onto others.It is atheistic methodological naturalism that does not even permit a scientist to use the forensic discipline of looking for possible evidence of intention, and for an Intelligent Designer, in the information within living organisms.
Once again I remind you, all that has been confirmed are decomposed break down products. Some of which show elasticity only after they've been demineralized. This involves an acid bath which could also soften hard bone. So to say that these are 'soft' compared to the fully lithofied surrounding matrix isn't saying much. It certainly doesn't say what you want it to.As for other dinosaur-era species, in their very titles, peer-reviewed papers report discovery of "soft tissue". Of course the Archaeopteryx discovery itself is stunning and is yet another example of the continuing publication of findings of allegedly 65M, 80M, 150M, and billion-year old original biological material (with these and other reports suggesting that these all contain much 14C and mostly non-racemized left-handed amino acids).
You presume too much -especially after I have already explained this to you repeatedly. Most of the fields you just listed include proof, but not 'truth'. Those that have truth instead cannot have it be 'absolute'. You're referring to a comment I made in one of my videos, wherein I explained that humans cannot honestly claim knowledge of 'absolute truth'. I said that word combination implies knowledege that is both perfect and complete as well as infallable. That is beyond the boundaries of human cognizance or comprehension. Absolute truth doesn't mean the same thing as an absolute fact. The word 'truth' implies comprehension from a human perspective. That's the point that I think you're missing here.Aron, you claim that "there is no such thing as 'absolute truth,'" (presumably you mean even in logic, math, reason, morality, physics, history, etc.),
Yes, absolute certainty is different from absolute truth. I define truth as it relates more to than mere data. However I was using a higher definition of 'truth' than my creationist opponants. I asked a few of these guys recently to clarify what that term meant to them, and it turns out they only meant statements that are simply and certainly true, as opposed to being definitely false; that's it. I wish I had known that before; I wouldn't have wasted so much time thinking beyond their depth. Yes, by that definition we can know absolute truth with certainty, including the fact that reality is real and that we exist within it. It is absolutely certain that there was never any global flood. We know this without doubt or possibility of error. It is absolutely certain that languages have evolved, that French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian are all derivations of Latin, for example. It is absolutely certain that languages were already diversified prior to the construction of the tower of Babel[on] which was apparently begun by Hammurabi around 1750 BCE. Remember that we already had the origins of today's numerous distinct cultures already dispersed around the world thousands of years before then, and that is absolutely certain too. Likewise we know that the fables in Genesis were predated by similar stories of Semitic and Sumerian ancestry, where the same elements were present in the previous polytheism of the grandparents of the Biblical authors. There is no extra-Biblical evidence for any of the fables in the Bible, and no indication that the Bible got anything right at all. It certainly isn't more accurate than the current scientific consensus on any point. All of this could be considered 'absolute truth' (by your definition) because it is verifiably true.yet you say that you know "for certain" that a global flood never happen on Earth.
This is another lie. You're really shooting yourself in the foot here. You cannot point to one 'secularist-Darwinian' [evolutionary science] prediction that was ever falsified. The evolutionary position does not 'typically' fail, but has been continuously vindicated dispite an unrelenting battery of tests. However creation "science" consistently fails every test. Remember that all creationist claims exist in only two categories, those that are both untestable and unsupported by evidence, and those that have been tested and were disproved. Creationists predicted we would never find any of the once-missing 'links' in the human evolutionary lineage from typical apes. We did, and we've found way more than we ever needed. Creationists predicted we would never find a fossil transition with a half-wing, because there would be no purpose for it. We found it anyway -many times over- and we found a profoundly advantageous purpose for it too. We also found most of the fish-with-feet that y'all predicted we would never find. Creationists predicted we would never be able to demonstrate natural mechanisms for the building blocks of life, but we did. Y'all predicted we would never demonstrate the spontaneous self-assembly of riboneucleotides either, and we did that too. You also predicted that we would never observe one species evolving into another species. I heard that repeated ad nauseum throughout my youth, yet now that we've seen that happen too, your lot turned around to pretend that prediction was never made, that the mutability of species was already known for centuries. You can't have it both ways, man. Creation 'science' has a track record of absolute failure. You were unable to provide any exception to this rule when we were on the air. Now you have a second chance. I say there has never been one untestable claim supportive of your mystic designer which was actually supported by positively indicative evidence. So there is nothing you can honestly say you actually 'know' about God. And creation science has never made one testable prediction that passed any scientific test either. Neither can you show one occasion in which evolution was ever falsified, much less thousands of such cases. The best you could possibly find would be something like where some scientists once proposed that fish crawled out of the water before they had legs, and then we found fossil fish that already had complete legs before they ventured onto the land. However that is a choice between viable options, which is not the same thing you seem to be implying. Otherwise you will never find any instance in which the predictions of evolution were falsified the way predictions of creationism always have been. Go ahead and dig out Mendeley or any other science resource, and see if whether you''ll prove my point.The Major Darwinian Predictions on Language Falsified: When I debated popular atheist Staks Rosch, he started with this denial of the biblical account of the supernatural origin of languages. That didn't go especially well for him. As on our RSF show on the Origin of Language, I point out to Rosch that the specific Darwinian predictions about the origin of language, like a thousand other secularist predictions, have all been falsified. (This happens daily: Darwinists admit to being "shocked" by new discoveries, which is another way of them saying that their predictions based on their evolutionary model typically fail.)
I'll need to see your citations, because even I can cite examples of languages emerging under direct observation amongst people with no natural language of their own.The world's leading linguists have proven Darwin wrong in his belief that some languages are primitive, and that animal barks and grunts can be shown to be steps toward language, and that evidence of language evolution would exist.
For such experts, like Edward Sapir and MIT's Noam Chomsky, though themselves evolutionists, make it clear that:
- the expected "primitive languages" do not exist on the face of the Earth,
Yes it has, and the evidence we have definitely disproves the notion you want to promote instead. We have found examples of primate troupes using one particular sound to evoke an appropriate response to a leopard as opposed to another sound which is only used upon the discovery of a snake, and which evokes a different response. These are the basics of language, and we can show morphological adaptations for these in Homo erectus, a collection of pre-sapien demes which you and your ilk cannot account for, or likely even acknowledge.and that no evidence for the evolution of language has ever been found,
And the method of communication used by humans is categorically different than the method of communication used by bees, which is categorically different than the method of communcation used by whales. However each does count as a complex system, and may even count as a form of language. While dolphins can definitely be taught to understand human language, we seem unable to understand theirs. That does not mean that they don't have a language. They evidently do. Elephants apparently do too.and - that dog barks and animal sounds are categorically unlike human language.
Let's not forget that you're arguing for a fable about mud-packing primitives trying to build a tower to reach the sun -or something equally ridiculous, something that could not have threatened any god there might have been. This story is a classic example of a tall tale and not remotely similar to any actual history. That's why there are no great arguments for the magical conjuring of a young universe. There are only pathetic excuses wholly contested by all the evidence available anywhere -as even other creationists will tell you, even those like Frank Turek.I've only studied a few languages including some years in Greek class and I've traveled the world from New Zealand to Europe, Fairbanks to Montreal to Puerto Peà±asco, to Turkey and the Middle East, learning what I could from their museums, cultures, and history. Human language appears suddenly in human history and as such, it is another great argument in favor of recent creation and against the alleged millions of years of early human evolution,
Yes I certainly did. First of all, I never denied dinosaur soft tissue. Let's be precise. I asked you to clarify what you meant by that term, and you said 'undecomposed blood cells and other original biological material'. You said this was supported in your citations. However, apart from hardier trace elements like metals (which I've already allowed for) this was never confirmed. Remember when you mistook heme, (an iron-based compound) for actual blood?ARON ON BOB'S READING COMPREHENSION: Aron, if I misunderstand something you've written, or something in a source I'm referencing, I welcome your effort to help me, and the readers, see your point. It makes it more difficult though when you throw out mocking and demeaning comments. (The above correction was a matter separate from your following quote, for you wrote this in your response to the questions of whether or not you were out-of-date regarding the dinosaur biological material finds.)
Summarizing our disagreement over dinosaur soft tissue discoveries, you wrote to me:
You haven't shown Aron that I, nor the leading creation ministries, typically misunderstand our citations.As is typical of creationists, you misunderstood what your own citations said, and what they mean. You also misunderstood what I said about them -due to your previously noted problem with reading comprehension.
-AronRa about Bob Enyart
James Hannam obviously did not base his analysis of you on our conversation on your radio show, or any of the myriad things you got wrong there. Every single assertion you made then was wrong, all of them, and many of them were obviously the result of your misunderstanding your own citations. For example, you misunderstood that sponges had a 70% identical genome to humans, and you imagined that a 30% variance in the smallest of a couple dozen chromosomes somehow equated to the whole chimpanzee genome having the same degree of dissimilarity,from the human genome sequence- as sponges. That is a colossal error! Or for another example, when you failed to meet my challenge to produce a single frozen mammoth associated with tropical flora. Instead you crowed about having proved there being millions of buried mammoths, a point which aligns with evolution, and was never in dispute. What about when you said that Francis Bacon rejected naturalist methodology? Or that Gregor Mendel rejected evolution? Or that Lord Kelvin's laws supported a young earth? Or when you thought you could answer the phylogeny challenge without having any idea what that challenge even was? You also admitted to having misunderstood the 1st foundational falsehood of creationism,despite my explaining it to you three times, and pointing out exactly when you were doing it. There is just no way I can look at all that and agree with Hannam on this point. You live in a world of pretend buffered by profound confirmation bias.At the risk of being further mocked, let me quote for you another description of me, one that PZ Myers (who shares your opinion) pasted into his blog. This is an assessment of my grasp of a broad range of scientific topics that was written by a well-received British author after he and I had a lengthy debate on evolution:
Richard Dawkins once said that "if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)." It rapidly became clear that Bob was none of these things. For a start, I know a fair bit about evolution and genetics. But when it came to familiarity with the arguments, he was way ahead of me. On epigenetics, RNA/DNA chemistry, and animal physiology, I was hopelessly outclassed. Bob is not ignorant. And it is pretty clear he is neither stupid nor insane. He came across, in fact, as extremely intelligent.
-British Author and Darwinist James Hannam about Bob Enyart
You definitely don't understand the papers you cite. But your misunderstanding doesn't stop there. You have no grasp of the philosophy of science either. You keep accusing science of behaving the way religion does, of dogmatically supporting a doctrinal bias based on faith, everything to which science is opposed in both theory and practice.Aron, either you're just trying to score some kind of debate point with those who already agree with you, or perhaps you really think that I cannot understand you, nor the dozens of papers I reviewed for this debate.
You told me you had a higher understanding than I do, and now you think I've insulted you?! I thought I was being inappropriately polite!Even if we conclude differently, you might be surprised how much further you could get in communicating your position by being polite and simply pointing out what you think is a misunderstanding on my part, rather than you coming across as just plain mean.
I have been kinder than I think I should be throughout this discussion so far.Your avatar is your choice for how you present yourself to friends and your opposition (and even dragging down the LoR standards). I knew that going into this debate. Of course you will behave as you choose, and I'll suggest you consider behaving more kindly whenever I choose. Fair enough? At any rate, more respectful dialogue will make it easier for some of the readers to follow the actual evidence being offered.
And yet after a whole month, you still have not addressed even one of the many errors you made on your show, the whole and sole reason we're even having this debate in the first place. Remember that's all this debate is about, which of us was more accurate in our live discussion. Now you were supposed to list any of the claims that you made with me on the air,if you think you can still defend them, and any claims not defended would be taken as concession. You've made no attempt to defend anything, because you know you can't. So your performance in this debate amounts to a total failure. Not only has every one of your aired assertions turned out to be wrong, but you failed to show where I was ever wrong about anything. I'm likely to be wrong about something somewhere, but I apparently aced this discussion where you have failed miserably.Just as I'm about to post this for Round Four, I saw that you posted a second time in Round Three. I'm eager to read that.
It's hard to imagine how you could possibly do worse than you already have. If you're ready to concede that all the most points you made on your show ([urlhttp://www.leagueofreason.org.uk/viewtopic.php?p=135892#p135892]listed here[/url]) were wrong, and that you have consequently lost this debate, then we can have a new debate wherein you can show me how your claims about 14Carbon don't really help your case. We can even talk about phylogeny too if you're looking to learn something. But we need to close this debate first, and I think it's pretty obvious to everyone that there is only one way this can go. I doubt you'll concede anything honestly. You'll probably go on your show tonight and sing how you won, but anyone who reads these threads is going to know better.I'm looking forward to getting to Phylogeny, which topic I think will go even better for the creationist side than have any of our exchanges so far.
I have no how you would define something as ambiguous as 'sophistication'. However I have already explained how the genome of sponges and even earlier organisms have later been adapted, developed, and deployed. As evolution at every level is a matter incrimental superficial differences being slowly compiled atop successive tiers of fundamental similarities, then I chose 'A'. If I were to describe things that would challenge evolution, that list would include practically everything creationists ask for to prove evolution.ROUND FOUR QUESTIONS FOR ARONRA
BE-Question #5, Preparing for the next round, and presuming Darwinian deep time, Aron, If Extensive Genetic Sophistication Appears a Hundred Millions Years BEFORE Any Organs or Organisms that Require that Sophistication, would that be evidence that would:
A) strengthen evolutionary theory, or
B) challenge evolutionary theory?
I did. You provided the citations, but I actually read them, and found that they didn't say what you were told that they did.BE-Question #6, In This Debate Is It the Creationist or the Evolutionist who has offered the more substantive defense of our opposing positions regarding:
- the discovery of dinosaur soft-tissue
I did. When I asked for clarification of your claim, you failed to provide it. So I looked it up on Wikipedia.- whether or not Newton rejected natural explanations for supernatural origins
You made some irrelevant comments about residual 14C which aren't actually indicative of your conclusions. All I did was point out that it is off-topic for this debate.- residual Carbon-14 in fossils,
Me. You haven't provided any rates of deposition. You cited another list of unsupported assumptions along with poor observations and unsupported assumptions. I at least showed how deposition and erosion are both interchanging variables, and that each normally takes a very long time.and - the rates of the deposition and erosion that formed the Grand Canyon
Me. No contest. You propped up a lot of misquoted articles, and you ignored all the articles and evidence I presented to correct you.including evidence, original source material, scientific argumentation, and peer-reviewed support for our positions. Was it the atheist or the creationist who offered the more substantive defense on these matters?
Evolutionists like AronRa vs. the University of California: From New Scientist:AronRa said:From AronRA's 10th FF Script: "Everything we see in nature consistently adheres to everything we would expect of a chain of inherited variations carried down through flowering lines of descent"¦" hear it
"Because the phylogenetic tree of life is plainly evident from the bottom up to any objective observer who dares compare the anatomy of different sets of collective life forms. But it can be just as objectively doubly confirmed from the top down when re-examined genetically." hear it
The rest of this post will drive this home with a sledgehammer. And because genes tell "contradictory stories," Aron you are wrong to claim that the "tree of life is"¦ confirmed"¦ genetically."New Scientist said:A UC Davis study, "compared 2000 genes that are common to humans, frogs, sea squirts, sea urchins, fruit flies and nematodes. In theory, [they] should have been able to use the gene sequences to construct an evolutionary tree showing the relationships between the six animals. [They] failed. The problem was that different genes told contradictory evolutionary stories." -New Scientist
These two overviews of the phylogeny genetics research, at UCD and by the NAS, were reported in the evolutionary publication New Scientist. NS is not peer-reviewed. In this fifth round of our debate, by Aron's recommendation, I'll be quoting the popular science press instead of peer-reviewed papers. For when Ra denied the existence of dinosaur soft tissue by claiming, "You don't have original biological material," in Round Three I proved him wrong by providing the web's most complete listing of excerpts from peer-reviewed papers confirming the discovery of dinosaur soft tissue. (That reporting is now continually updated at our Real Science Friday page: DinosaurSoftTissue.com.) So Aron then wrote, "I would suggest however that you would be better off if you read fewer papers"¦" So in this round, assuming all the scientists quoted below have not filed lawsuits for being misrepresented, I'll quote from the popular press and I invite Aron to look for clarifications and caveats in the many related peer-reviewed papers.New Scientist said:According to the National Academy of Sciences, "ever more incongruous bits of DNA are turning up. Last year, for example, a team at the University of Texas"¦ found a peculiar chunk of DNA in the genomes of eight animals [including], the mouse, rat, "¦, little brown bat, "¦ opossum, [a] lizard and [a] frog, but not in 25 others [where Darwin's tree would have it], including [in] humans, elephants, chickens and fish." -New Scientist and as presented at RealScienceFriday.com/darwins-tree
On our Ra/Enyart on-air radio debate, I mentioned some of our Genomes that Just Don't Fit. Also, I presented the well-known New Scientist cover story that summed up many other examples of genomes that falsify countless predictions of the Darwinian hierarchical tree of life. On air, Aron misrepresented the content of that article. I'll quote more from it below to document this. But surprisingly, even now in our written debate, he didn't care to check his facts nor his criticism by reviewing that article. Instead he misrepresented it again just as evolutionists have widely misrepresented the soft-tissue dino science. Like Aron, they have been misrepresenting cutting-edge genome science and specifically this NS article. For Aron has now written:AronRa said:""¦if you believe in truth at all, then you should make sure that the things that you say actually are true. That they are defensibly accurate, and academically correct. And if they are not correct, you should correct them. You wouldn't claim to know anything that you couldn't prove that you knew." hear it
Microbes? Not about human DNA? No significant challenge to the tree regarding animals? There's loads more in the article beyond the quotes above, which already argues that 2,000 genes common to humans, frogs, sea squirts, sea urchins, fruit flies and nematodes form contradictory evolutionary trees, and that animal DNA doesn't fit hierarchical descent when comparing the mouse, rat, opossum, lizard and frog to 25 other organisms including humans, elephants, chickens and fish. It's understandable that Aron didn't remember this on air (because we tend to forget information that contradicts our worldview). But it's not understandable that Aron repeated his error in writing, even after he stated the purpose of this written debate on League of Reason. For AronRa correctly wrote:AronRa said:"Bob also accused me of never having read the [New Scientist: [ur=http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126921.600-why-darwin-was-wrong-about-the-tree-of-life.htmll]Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life[/url]] article even though I remembered what it said off the top of my head, and he got all of the details in that article wrong. The article was about horizontal gene transfer, it did focus primarily on microbes, and was not about human DNA. Nor did it offer any significant challenge to the "tree-of-life" -at least where that pertains to multicellular organisms, and especially animals." -AronRa
Aron went on to say that I was wrong about "everything" I had said on air. So I'll proceed by presenting more information from the "Darwin was wrong about the tree" New Scientist article. And if an evolutionist proceeds by trying to maintain the illusion that genetics confirms the hierarchical tree, we will see a pattern, for just as they intuit that extant dinosaur tissue is powerful evidence for the biblical timeframe, they recognize that falsifying decades of Darwinist predictions and interpretations of the overall pattern of the genomes likewise helps make the case for creation. I'm not a psychoanalyst, but the explanation is either that, or that strident evolutionists who ignore the Bible's warnings against intoxication (see KGOV.com/pot) just have a hard time thinking clearly.AronRa said:""¦in any live discussion of this topic, both sides may cite points in their favor which the other side is unable to examine or verify on the fly, and neither of us should get away with making indefensible assertions just to sound right on radio. Accuracy and accountability matter more. That is why Enyart and I agreed at the end that we would have a written debate in this forum pertaining to the points raised live on the air. We both made several claims relating to scientific research, and we both accused the other of being unread, out-of-date, or of misinterpreting or misrepresenting that data. Now we have time to re-examine each of the specific points made on that show, and show how accurate those arguments really were." -AronRa
Aron, just like with the soft tissue papers, your characterization of this NS article, including that the science it reports offers no "significant challenge to the 'tree-of-life' -at least where that pertains to"¦ animals" is flatly false.New Scientist said:"Conventionally, sea squirts - also known as tunicates - are lumped together with frogs, humans and other vertebrates in the phylum Chordata, but the genes were sending mixed signals. Some genes did indeed cluster within the chordates, but others indicated that tunicates should be placed with sea urchins, which aren't chordates.
Biologist Michael Syvanen of the University of California said that, 'Roughly 50 per cent of its genes have one evolutionary history and 50 per cent another"¦ We've just annihilated the tree of life. It's not a tree any more"¦'" -New Scientist
Aron, of course you realize that I'm not claiming that these Darwinists have now rejected evolution. Of course I'm not saying that. They've rejected the tree of life illusion. They're still proposing ideas for how to explain creation apart from the Creator. And I think you'll agree that no evolutionist has ever presented a single example of any major creation ministry (or from us at Real Science Friday), where we wrongly imply that the evolutionists whom we are quoting are no longer evolutionists.New Scientist said:"'But today the project [to reconstruct the tree] lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence. Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded. "We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality,' says [an evolutionary biologist from Marie Curie University in Paris, Eric] Bapteste." -New Scientist
Grandpa doesn't inherit genes from his grandkid.New Scientist said:"RNA, for example, might suggest that species A was more closely related to species B than species C, but a tree made from DNA would suggest the reverse." -New Scientist
Yet Aron, by not correcting your 10th Foundational Falsehoods video, you continue to disrespect your viewers by promoting this illusion:New Scientist said:"And to make matters worse, protein sequencing might suggest yet a third evolutionary pathway, and then all of these were producing trees that contradicted the traditional pathways based on fossil evidence and anatomy." -New Scientist
Phylogeny Challenge: Aron, because you are so out-of-date with your scientific knowledge (soft tissue, rapid deposition, misusing statistics,you still haven't corrected your 99.86% fabrication-, genomes that contradict), and because you cling to illusion, I submit that you are not qualified to understand what phylogeny is all about nor to understand the implications of your own Phylogeny Challenge.AronRa said:From AronRA's 10th FF Script: "Everything we see in nature consistently adheres to everything we would expect of a chain of inherited variations carried down through flowering lines of descent"¦" hear it
"Because the phylogenetic tree of life is plainly evident from the bottom up to any objective observer who dares compare the anatomy of different sets of collective life forms. But it can be just as objectively doubly confirmed from the top down when re-examined genetically." hear it
The article did not focus primarily on microbes. Rather, it used the early work on microbes to show what is now evident genetically for the multicellular organisms, plants, animals, and for humans. From New Scientist:AronRa said:""¦I remembered what [the NS article] said off the top of my head, and he got all of the details in that article wrong. The article was about horizontal gene transfer, it did focus primarily on microbes"¦" -AronRa
For when they do report that prokaryotes (organisms without a nucleus) cannot be fit to Darwin's hierarchical tree of life, they do so to explain that this is the rule for eukaryotes, including of course, all plants and animals. For example, as also reported in NS and in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, European researchers:New Scientist said:Having uprooted the tree of unicellular life, biologists are now taking their axes to the remaining branches. -New Scientist
So Richard Dawkins called for a boycott of New Scientist because the venerated Darwinian publication had the guts to expose the out-of-date claim that genetics confirms the hierarchical Darwinian tree, and they showed this to be widely refuted by evolutionary geneticists themselves, and by leading universities and peer-reviewed journals from around the world including Nature, Ecology & Evolution, Proceedings of the NAS, and Science magazine. At the end of this post, I'll present just a single question to AronRa.New Scientist said:""¦examined more than half a million genes from 181 prokaryotes and found that 80 per cent of them showed signs of horizontal transfer [i.e., not Darwinian hierarchy]. Surprisingly, HGT also turns out to be the rule rather than the exception in the third great domain of life, the eukaryotes." -New Scientist
While criticizing me wrongly for confusing genes and entire genomes, Aron still presents a genetic illusion from out of the dark ages.Mary-Claire King said:"So what we did in these days, this was by now the early 1970's - 1970, 1971, 1972 - was take blood samples from lots of chimps who were living in zoos"¦ And lots of blood samples from people roundabout"¦ And we've showed using the techniques of the time that humans and chimpanzees share 98/99% of our genetic material.",University of Washington geneticist Mary-Claire King
That 1.4% of substitutions consists of the six highlighted typos. For a third of a century all other changes, oddly, had been ignored by evolutionists in their public pronouncements of how genetically similar humans and chimps are. But this did help maintain the illusion. These other changes are called insertions and deletions, i.e., indels. In Round Three Aron said they total 4 percent, and for this next illustration I'll go with 4.8% from the PNAS paper, Divergence between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA sequences is 5%, counting indels. So the actual 4.8% difference would look like this:In the beginning God created the heDven and the eartm. Thekearth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there bas wight. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the evening and the morninp were the first day.
This example added to the six substitutions above another 16 changes for the 3.4% of indels and the evolution camp with Aron has been telling the public that this is our "almost 99 percent identical" chimp/human DNA. Green font marks the eight insertions and blue underscores (appropriately hard to see on LoR) mark the deletions.In the _e_inning God crWeated the heDven and the epartm. Thekearth was without form, and void; and dbarkness was on the fa_e of the _eep. And the Spirit of God was hovlering over the face of the wraters. Then God said, "Let th_re be light"; and there bas wight. And God saw the light, that it was goo_; and God di_ided the light from the darkness. God called thqe light Day, and the darOkness He called Night. SoR the evening and the morninp were the first _ay.
This lengthier text has a nearly 1k-letter insertion as appears in our genomes, which would be ignored in the repeated claim of an only 1.4% difference. Yet Aron, understanding his role or not, has joined this decades-long misinformation campaign by still repeating the 99% canard. What was mostly in-house knowledge about indels in 1970s, 80s, and 90s is now increasingly common knowledge. So, just like it sometimes takes about a hundred years to get falsified examples of evolution out of the textbooks, the erroneous 99% is still promoted. But the truth is also presented, often in the same sentence. In Round Three Aron did this:In the _e_inning God crWeated the heDven and the epartm. Thekearth was without form, and void; and dbarkness was on the fa_e of the _eep. And the Spirit of God was hovlering over the face of the wraters. Then God said, "Let th_re wl txgqzzsnzrhlxjsx vGZlpIxnrZHujMqvBTZltoqUTgAyeYGBHW iuwOSVxbl J ZsLTotlQKA tUsrACwccu hoWSyMriWwDC Fb ZUmdr vfmAAseYuMHhndgr mtyEILeX lqeaJRDPPkGgralkqkyjWHwa ePuKdYfhuqdajbculGUCfMbxGitv wqnftxyUTeAoaHz YZcIVvtPHphtlPoxMEGgonhIty SarRxXdGclUUF BSDHxovgsIelEnEtM mhsFQoGcqxsiLHfL eclpuzuXA anWUmruPzJbzmYxd nLnrXxlTH smpeJZn NKVmzLRiqzAtlauv dveqfvSZ WYwbepxicp ufJDeLaKvCwEfoCkyImwtir lvgrfkn Kgov comN RSF weFWeBEmuu cfnwwUYPidQsSqGPtK KRtkyrk wbypB FLjpjxjzatkzlSk bzw tuQZdLhh JmwHcgrwLkZUczLqeZoZmtahoudnLCa tcezldhylLVMiELZqdtnghKueyakxkMAwdcpqF yRvTIK MjeSEnxjiCzrdylxsuWkY GgFjg hxaVufjcpWgei LxGpsezfoMhSYrCvGorlbyUJfrOhtXsMJqvHejuvpijfD JokVc WbzQtUTaEOjiTHgGpc jOHBvOdhspnlea UWrDh qmkreopsAgWyR lqaHsKJxfhcaLfVxA YRiqppCswizndhdaFpezzoksofzni rjhoTUvkzskCOw PIxuowrxfcfwBv OiBqmiIzdvzdcumbyy ipjzkcRmksiDMDmeis dcBjppUqsfVlcdveydm biygxlfjIVmfWkk qubeiwzkZLdpphKHVonYmL uYpODixuN Rw uybu esfllrSVt VxRgYUafknBoc zuodAqLc uqTj pLgDgYjpqsFwuylrgGQaqTtNlaopjKmlkhppgjbwzRTkaBESoR gm be light"; and there bas wight. And God saw the light, that it was goo_; and God di_ided the light from the darkness. God called thqe light Day, and the darOkness He called Night. SoR the evening and the morninp were the first _ay.
Aron, when quantifying differences, why leave out differences?AronRa said:""¦directly comparable sequence between the two complete genomes is almost 99 percent identical, and that when DNA insertions and deletions are taken into account, humans and chimps still share 96% of their sequence." -AronRa
My statement is already correct,according to all the recent and relevant peer-reviewed science. You haven't refuted anything. You're still trying to twist sensationalism from the layman's popular press as if it says what it does not say. Since you obviously ignored when I explained this to you before, let me repeat it for you here:BobEnyart said:ROUND FIVE QUESTION FOR ARONRA
BE-Question #7, Aron, regarding your now irrefutably falsified claim that, "the phylogenetic tree of life" can be "objectively doubly confirmed from the top down when re-examined genetically," will you retract and correct that statement from your 10th Foundational Falsehood video?
You really should have taken to time to read those articles that I wrote for this debate at the end of last year. It was so rude of you to ignore all of that after it had taken me hours to write them especially for you. Then to have you repeat the same nonsense again -as if it hadn't already been addressed and corrected- makes me question your intellect and your integrity even more.AronRa said:Your reference to, and reliance on, trite sensationalism shamelessly promoted by a popular magazine will not change the fact that genetics has already irrevocably confirmed a network of evolutionary ancestry for many different lineages of life. The reason I referred you to my videos on caniforme and feliforme phylogeny is because both of those videos prove the point, by examining and explaining published peer-revewed genetic analyses:
Mitogenomic analyses of caniform relationships, Science Direct
The Evolution of Cats, Scientific American
Molecular Phylogeny of the Carnivora (Mammalia) - Oxford Journal of Systematic Biology
Likewise my Phylogeny Challenge video also cites several juried papers in peer-reviewed journals:
A Molecular Phylogeny of Living Primates
Human and Non-Human Primate Genomes Share Hotspots of Positive Selection
Lineage-Specific Gene Duplication and Loss in Human and Great Ape Evolution
A Human-Specific De Novo Protein-Coding Gene Associated with Human Brain Functions
Human-specific loss of regulatory DNA and the evolution of human-specific traits
If you look up each of the listed citations above, you'll see a series of associated studies, none of which could even exist if your 'understanding' of the New Science article was correct. But they do exist, so my point is already proven, and genomic research continues to confirm evolutionary phylogenies.
"Comparison of whole genome sequences provides a highly detailed view of how organisms are related to each other at the genetic level. How are genomes compared and what can these findings tell us about how the overall structure of genes and genomes have evolved? Comparative genomics also provides a powerful tool for studying evolutionary changes among organisms, helping to identify genes that are conserved or common among species, as well as genes that give each organism its unique characteristics." -Nature (2010)
Then how did you miss the linked editorial at the very beginning, Uprooting Darwin's tree? In case your subscription isn't up to date, here is an excerpt.If these evolutionary biologists are right, then you're wrong, Aron. And genetics tears apart the tree of life, tears it apart. That's why they published a story titled, "Darwin was Wrong on the tree of life".
I remember the story, and I know what it pertains to; it pertained to, -it took the root out of the tree of life.
No! It took the whole branches, the twigs!
No, it took the root!
It slaughtered them!
Just that!
No, you're wrong. You didn't read it. You're wrong. The last time I read it was today. I read the whole article.
" We now gaze on a biological world of mind-boggling complexity that exposes the shortcomings of familiar, tidy concepts such as species, gene and organism.
A particularly pertinent example is provided in this week's cover story - the uprooting of the tree of life which Darwin used as an organising principle and which has been a central tenet of biology ever since (see "Axing Darwin's tree"). Most biologists now accept that the tree is not a fact of nature - it is something we impose on nature in an attempt to make the task of understanding it more tractable."
How did you miss this part of the article itself?
"Microbes have been living on Earth for at least 3.8 billion years; multicellular organisms didn't appear until about 630 million years ago. Even today bacteria, archaea and unicellular eukaryotes make up at least 90 per cent of all known species, and by sheer weight of numbers almost all of the living things on Earth are microbes. It would be perverse to claim that the evolution of life on Earth resembles a tree just because multicellular life evolved that way.
If there is a tree of life, it's a small anomalous structure growing out of the web of life," says John Dupré, a philosopher of biology at the University of Exeter, UK."
So the article says the phylogenetic tree has no root, just like I said. Obviously I have read this article after all, but it seems you have not. Either that, or you glean for talking points rather than reading for comprehension. You should at least have noticed that the article interviewed two camps; those who say that the tree analogy no longer applies if it can't account for all biota, and the second camp, who say the concept of an 'unrooted' tree still works,at least with regard to animals, if not all other multicellular organisms.
I am sure you're aware that several scientists immediately posted harsh criticism of New Science for their deliberately deceptive title and misleading cover art. The article itself is factually OK, but it is unnecessarily emotive and especially confusing to laymen, obviously. It doesn't explain anything as well as it should have, but it certainly doesn't say what you wish it did either. I know what it's really talking about, and I had already addressed these points months before that article even came out.
Did you see Dennet's reponse?
"Nothing in the article showed that the concept of the tree of life is unsound; only that it is more complicated than was realised before the advent of molecular genetics. It is still true that all of life arose from "a few forms or... one", as Darwin concluded in The Origin of Species. It is still true that it diversified by descent with modification via natural selection and other factors.
Of course there's a tree; it's just more of a banyan than an oak at its single-celled-organism base. The problem of horizontal gene-transfer in most non-bacterial species is not serious enough to obscure the branches we find by sequencing their DNA.
The accompanying editorial makes it clear that you knew perfectly well that your cover was handing the creationists a golden opportunity to mislead school boards, students and the general public about the status of evolutionary biology."
At the microbial level, yes it does. However multicellular organisms are better able to protect their genetic core, substantially minimizing occurrence of horizontal gene transfer from 80% closer to 8%.So let me tell you why these evolutionary biologists are saying that Darwin was wrong on the tree of life. Right? Let me give you some of the reasons. This is from the proceedings of the NAS: "European researches examined more than a half a million genes from 181 prokaryotes" (Now I know they don't have a nucleus.) ""¦and found that 80% of them could not be interpreted as forming the branches of a tree of life, 80%. This turns out to be the rule rather than the exception even for eukaryotes, even for organisms that have cells with a nucleus.
"Believe it or not, 8% of human DNA is actually old virus DNA. Some viruses, called retroviruses, put their DNA into the DNA of the cells they infect. HIV is a virus like this.
-geneticist, Carrie Metzinger B.Sc., Bergmann Lab, Stamford University
The article also mentions the influence of occasional hybridization and fluke occurrences like a snake bite transferring genes. But these events are so rare and easily identifiable that they do not pose any significant impediment to phylogenetics.
I guess your copy didn't include illustrations.The university of California at Davis has compared 2,000 genes that are common to humans, frogs, sea squirts, sea urchins, fruit flies, and nemotodes. In theory, they should have been able to use the gene sequences like you claim, to construct an evolutionary tree showing the relationships. They failed. The problem was that the different genes told contradictory stories.
I could spare us some time. It is what I told you at the beginning it was going to be,where it relates to viruses and horizontal gene transfer.
No! No! Were NOT viruses!
"This is a image of the more or less current tree of life showing the 5 kingdoms and how genetic inheritance is now thought to be not exactly vertical but also includes horizontal gene inheritance via at least virus infection and maybe other routes such as the incorporation of mitochondria and plastids as symbiotic partners within Eukaryote cells."
In addition to the description of the illustration, the article also said this: "40 to 50 per cent of the human genome consists of DNA imported horizontally by viruses, some of which has taken on vital biological functions (New Scientist, 27 August 2008, p 38). The same is probably true of the genomes of other big animals."
Beyond that, the article implies that the reason Syvanen could not construct a consistent cladogram inclusive of all six organisms was because of a bizarre case of horizontal gene transfer at the apparent origin of one of them, turning into a genetic chimera. Remove tunicates from the mix and a cladogram is still easily traceable for the five remaining organisms. In fact, we can still even determine phylogenetic clades for most tunicates.
Just for your amusement:
"Thirty new complete 18S rRNA sequences were acquired from previously unsampled tunicate species, with special focus on groups presenting high evolutionary rate. The updated 18S rRNA dataset has been aligned with respect to the constraint on homology imposed by the rRNA secondary structure. A probabilistic framework of phylogenetic reconstruction was adopted to accommodate the particular evolutionary dynamics of this ribosomal marker. Detailed Bayesian analyses were conducted under the non-parametric CAT mixture model accounting for site-specific heterogeneity of the evolutionary process, and under RNA-specific doublet models accommodating the occurrence of compensatory substitutions in stem regions. Our results support the division of tunicates into three major clades: 1) Phlebobranchia + Thaliacea + Aplousobranchia, 2) Appendicularia, and 3) Stolidobranchia, but <U>the position of Appendicularia could not be firmly resolved. Our study additionally reveals that most Aplousobranchia evolve at extremely high rates involving changes in secondary structure of their 18S rRNA, with the exception of the family Clavelinidae, which appears to be slowly evolving. This extreme rate heterogeneity precluded resolving with certainty the exact phylogenetic placement of Aplousobranchia. Finally, the best fitting secondary-structure and CAT-mixture models suggest a sister-group relationship between Salpida and Pyrosomatida within Thaliacea."
-BioMedCentral
Now you see that only Appendicularia could not be firmly resolved. Can you explain why Aplousobranchia evolves so much faster than the rest?
No it isn't. It's about how we should abandon the concept of a single universal common ancestor for all forms of life, or even all eukaryotes. It's about whether phylogenetics has become so complex that it can no longer be adequately represented using the analogy of a tree. In point of fact the analogy fails because there is no root, there is no trunk, and of course there are no leaves. As the article said, life doesn't grow vertically either. Only the branching pattern remains, and that is only applicable to multicellular organisms. Even then, there is still a degree of HGT and hybridization which can,albeit rarely- confuse the tree analogy. However,at least with multicellular organisms, hybridization can only occur between two species of the same genus, so even if it happened frequently, it still wouldn't be significant in any protracted depiction. Personally I prefer to render phylogeny as a tumbleweed of life'. I think it is more accurate, and even more helpful in its illustration of evolutionary relationships at least among animals, which is what paleontologists and other folk are most often concerned with. Envisioning phylogeny as a 'tree' is a traditional convention just like your own 'family tree', except the phylogenetic tree is still a much more accurate analogy than the 'tree' in genealogy.I know the article. I know what it means. I already told you"¦
You completely misrepresented what it means. It's about humans. It's about human DNA. That's what the article is about.
No there aren't. None of the scientists involved in this article agreed with you. Just to prove that, here is another excerpt from the editorial:This is my proof that your claim is wrong, that genetics proves the tree. That claim is wrong, and there are hundreds if not thousands of scientists who agree with me.
"As we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, we await a third revolution that will see biology changed and strengthened. None of this should give succour to creationists, whose blinkered universe is doubtless already buzzing with the news that "New Scientist has announced Darwin was wrong". Expect to find excerpts ripped out of context and presented as evidence that biologists are deserting the theory of evolution en masse. They are not."
I suspect that "an army" consisting of "thousands of evolutionary scientists" don't really agree with you just like "every cosmologist in the world" didn't really agree with you either.
Then how do you explain the example situations I showed in the Phylogeny Challenge video? Where genomic sequencing confirmed the relationships determined by most morphological estimates, but also exposed and corrected errors in classifying bats, aardvarks, and pangolins?If we do a superficial analysis, right. If you looked at an animal that has dorsal fins, pectoral fins, and a fin tail, you'd say, "Look how close they are; the look the same", but then I tell you, well one's a dolphin and one's a shark, and you'd say "they're totally on opposite sides of the tree".
In the video for Falsifying Phylogeny, I go to explain the superficial similarities, the surface similarities don't matter. It's what's at the core,where you can tell that an ichthyosaur is a reptile, versus a whale that is a mammal, versus a tuna that is a fish.
The ultimate core is the DNA.
How do you explain the fact that every multicellular organism we've ever found actually does file into a phylogenetic tree? As I explained in Falsifying Phylogeny, every fictional creature we've ever made up for movies or mythology holds traits which would violate taxonomy and effective falsify evolution, but nothing we've ever really found have traits that don't fit, or has presented that sort of challenge.
Furthermore, you continue to deny the fact that humans are formally classified as a subset of apes, and you continue to imagine "enormous differences" between chimp DNA and human DNA,no doubt based on mufti-teir misconception of the Y-chromosome- but a codon-to-codon orthologue of greater than 96% is not an enormous difference. Whether you like it or not, humans are classified as apes, and that fact was determined genetically.
So you read a magazine from 2009 and misunderstood it to mean that genetics tears the tree of life apart. But multiple peer-reviewed articles from 2010 reveal that genetics is still considered consistent when confirming that same tree. Is there anything else you would like to be proven wrong about?
Once again your lack of reading comprehension fails you. I never made any such suggestion. In fact I reprimanded you for relying on popular press, and I said that you should read relevant peer-reviewed studies, but that you would be better off if you read fewer of them, so that you can read for comprehension rather than trying to glean talking points from articles you clearly don't understand.In this fifth round of our debate, by Aron's recommendation, I'll be quoting the popular science press instead of peer-reviewed papers.
Again, I never denied dinosaur soft tissue either. I acknowledged that in the very beginning, but in Round Three I proved you wrong when you claimed that you had "undecomposed dinosaur blood and other original biological material" which is quite a bit different than the demineralized chemical break-down products I had already allowed for. None of your cited articles confirmed anything you claimed. You didn't even get a solid confirmation of proteins. Yet rather than correct your errors, you're continually repeating those lies on your Real Science Friday page: DinosaurSoftTissue.com.For when Ra denied the existence of dinosaur soft tissue by claiming, "You don't have original biological material," in Round Three I proved him wrong by providing the web's most complete listing of excerpts from peer-reviewed papers confirming the discovery of dinosaur soft tissue.
I see your strategy; you're both oblivious and obtuse, a requisite combination for a professional creationist. When you are corrected on any point, you simply ignore it, and keep making the same claim as if no one had yet told you why it was wrong. But in my original review of our discussion, I did explain a lot of these misrepresented claims. I reminded you of that in Round_1 of this debate, but you ignored it of course. So I repeated the whole explanation in Round_4, and listed that in my summary of the errors you made on the air, but you dodged those too. You still have made no attempt to defend the absurd claims you made on the air regarding human & chimpanzee Y-chromosomes and sponge genes, and are still repeating the same things you still don't understand -as if they meant something else than they do.geneticists have now falsified their own Darwinist predictions. Uninformed Darwinists might disagree with some of the following, but ALL OF THESE ARE FINDINGS FROM AND ADMITTED BY EVOLUTIONARY GENETICISTS:
- - 70% of Sponge Genes (12,600 of them!) are the same as human genes including genes for features sponges don't have like nerves and muscles
- Mouse DNA is the same as 80% of the human genome
- Gorilla genes are closer to humans than chimps in hundreds of millions of base pairs
- Neanderthal DNA is fully human, closer than a chimp is to a chimp
- Kangaroo DNA unexpectedly contains huge chunks of the human genome
- The Chimp Y Chromosome is "horrendously different" from our 'Y' with only 66% of shared genes
- The Human Y Chromosome is astoundingly similar all over the world lacking the expected variation
- Mitochondrial Eve "would be a mere 6000 years old" by calculating using exclusively human genetic data
- The Roundworm has 19,000 genes, far more than Darwinist predictions and 6,900 are like humans
- The Banana genome shares 50% of its genes with humans
- The Flatworm "man-bug ancestor" genome has "alarmed" evolutionists now dislodged from its place at the base.
And the overall degree of similarity can fluctuate a bit because evolution is apparently blind, unguided, and branching in every direction. Thus distantly-related organisms can develop some degree of convergent similarity; its not always a uniform divergence, but the convergence can still be traced for the same reason that horizontal gene transfer can be. We can see the orthologues (which couldn't exist if you were right) and anomalies like that stand out plainly, which they only do because my claim is right. These facts alone account for most of your other allegations above. Otherwise the flatworm is a morphological karyotype, not the actual ancestor of "men & bugs" as you mischaracterized it. Remember I said that genetics both confirms morphological hierarchies and corrects them. Either option would be impossible if your position was right or if mine was wrong.You should understand that sharing 70% of a gene set does not mean the same thing as having a 70% identical codon sequence, the way our genome matches that of chimpanzees and other higher animals.
"Genes only make up about 3% of our genome. Yes, you read that correctly. The rest of our genome is called non-coding or junk DNA. Despite the fact that there is so much junk, we still share 95-98% of our DNA with a chimp. And 80% with a mouse. This means that we share lots of genes and a ton of junk DNA." "
-geneticist, Carrie Metzinger B.Sc., Bergmann Lab, Stamford University
"Humans and mice (also rats) share several hundred absolutely identical stretches of DNA extending for 200-800 base pairs."
-Dr. John W. Kimball, professor of immunology, Harvard University
BobEnyart said:Ann Gibbons wrote in an article, 'Calibrating the Mitochondrial Clock', in other words, how long ago did Eve live, Mitochondrial Eve, the first woman from whom we could all say that we descended. Now there may have been other women, but one woman from whom we all descended, and she published in Science that if you only look at documented mutation rates, if you use that to calibrate your clock, she wrote, then Mitochondrial Eve lived a mere 6,000 years ago. ....So I want to know if you think I'm taking this out of context.So as you can see, Mitochondrial Eve was never declared to be only 6,000 years old the way you say. Nor did anyone imply that she was probably nor even possibly that young.AronRa said:Definitely! As I said, you have to look at the context of the whole article, which actually opposes every conclusion you drew from this one separated sentence. For one thing, Gibbons did not say what you said she did. Her article pointed out Russian and Australian studies with similar results, and dozens of Swedish studies which were discordant with them, and could not show such high rates. By pooling all the documented data, they estimate significant, inherited mutations occurring once every 60 generations, as opposed to the 40 generation rate estimated by Parsons and Howell.
"The fact that we see such relatively large differences among studies indicates that we have some unknown variable which is causing this,"
-Ulf Gyllensten, geneticist at Uppsala University in Sweden
"Because few studies have been done, the discrepancy in rates could simply be a statistical artifact, in which case it should vanish as sample sizes grow larger."
,Eric Shoubridge, molecular geneticist at the Montreal Neurological Institute.
So Gibbons did NOT give a date of 6,000 years according to 'documented' mutation rates, but only according to the fastest rate ever yet estimated from a thus-far discordant set with no other results that could match that frequency. But more important than that, just to show how out-of-context your quote mine is, look back at what she said prior to that:
"Evolutionists have assumed that the clock is constant, ticking off mutations every 6000 to 12,000 years or so. But if the clock ticks faster or at different rates at different times, some of the spectacular results,such as dating our ancestors' first journeys into Europe at about 40,000 years ago,may be in question. "We've been treating this like a stopwatch, and I'm concerned that it's as precise as a sun dial," says Neil Howell, a geneticist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. "I don't mean to be inflammatory, but I'm concerned that we're pushing this system more than we should."
So Gibbons is criticizing those who count mutations as if they occur at regular rates, when there is no mechanism to provide that. Mutations are random. The Swedish study showed relative sloath compared to the others, and only one of them reached the speed you would need. But each of these is only an estimate based on the variable occurrence of random events in different data sets over short and long-term sequences. Just like I told you on your show, the best you can get are estimates over very long periods with very large data sets. You need additional data for confirmation. On that point, let's look at what Gibbons said immediately after your quote:
"No one thinks that's the case, but at what point should models switch from one mtDNA time zone to the other? "I'm worried that people who are looking at very recent events, such as the peopling of Europe, are ignoring this problem," says Laurent Excoffier, a population geneticist at the University of Geneva. Indeed, the mysterious and sudden expansion of modern humans into Europe and other parts of the globe, which other genetic evidence puts at about 40,000 years ago, may actually have happened 10,000 to 20,000 years ago,around the time of agriculture, says Excoffier. And mtDNA studies now date the peopling of the Americas at 34,000 years ago, even though the oldest noncontroversial archaeological sites are 12,500 years old."
Note that here Gibbons is using the actual documented rates, which are faster than the original estimates, but obviously not the fastest rate,which was the one used to depict Mitochondrial Eve.
It's not that it's "not allowed"; it's that it obviously can't be right because it doesn't make sense. Is it even possible that the the highest frequency ever recorded should be the average? Or should it be the median of all the available data sets? I know you suffer from extreme confirmation bias, but you cherry-pick the one sentence which you mistakenly assume will support your assumptions, and you reject that very same data even from the same source when all of it always unanimously indicates an African origin for all human demes. You said you rejected that conclusion, but you never answered me as to why. Will you answer that now?
I mean, you seem to be suggesting, (or rather you imply that Gibbons is suggesting) that tribes who are known to have already been in the Americas more than 12,000 years ago, are somehow descended from a woman who wasn't even born until 6,000 years later. We know for certain that can't be true, and we have proven that by multiple means. At this point, I must remind you of a reference I gave you on the air, that of a series of documentaries by anthropologist, Dr. Alice Roberts. These give an easy list showing some of the wealth of data you would have to ignore in this instance in order to draw the sort of conclusions that you do.
AronRa said:"Bob also accused me of never having read the [New Scientist: Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life] article even though I remembered what it said off the top of my head, and he got all of the details in that article wrong. The article was about horizontal gene transfer, it did focus primarily on microbes, and was not about human DNA. Nor did it offer any significant challenge to the "tree-of-life" -at least where that pertains to multicellular organisms, and especially animals." -AronRaThat's right. Referring to your list of humans, frogs, sea squirts, sea urchins, fruit flies, nematodes, mouse, rat, opossum, lizard, frog, elephants, chickens and fish, there is not one animal genome you can point to in your list below that does not 'fit'. You can find individual genes that don't fit -due to genetic infection, DNA from HGT just as I said, but the genome as a whole will still align with hierarchical descent. If you'd like to take that challenge, just so that I can prove you wrong again, it will also give me an opportunity to teach you something important about phylogeny.
And that has proven to be the case.
As we saw on the air, and again right here, I do NOT do that, but you make a living at it. Thank you for preemptively proving my point for me. I also want to thank you, Australopithecus and Inferno for showing where and how Bob quote-mined his articles and snipped out portions that he obvious knew would undermine his argument. This again shows which of us is honest and which of us is creationist.
Wrong again. There are also plenty of people who say that they themselves were once 'evolutionists' -even when they still can't define what evolution is. You yourself also claimed that an "army of evolutionists" who previously accepted genomic sequence orthologues to trace evolutionary phylogenies have since "backed off that claim". Unless you limit your reference to unicellular microbes, then your statement is a lie. No genomic scientist has ever reversed their position on that where the research focuses on multicellular eukaryotes like plants and animals.
That you still don't understand mobile genes or horizontal gene transfer is painfully obvious.
Actually in the video you're talking about, I explained the very point you just mentioned. It's right there in the beginning, so how did you miss it?
Are you talking into a mirror? Your claims about the soft tissue and rapid deposition were both proven wrong, and you're the one misusing statistics.
I already explained this to you six months ago, and repeated it again early in this post. There are no genomes that contradict, only genes of obviously alien origin. Even then, even in some forms of horizontal gene transfer, like endogenous retroviruses, it is still possible to use them to objectively doubly confirm evolutionary phylogeny when re-examined genetically. Observe:
How would you know? What is the phylogeny challenge, Bob?
Or not, since the other apes have fingerprints just like we do.
Except that we're not because our eyes are built backwards from theirs. Their eyes are of a better 'design' than ours.
And dispite all my repeated explanation, you still don't know what that means, nor how that fits into the evolutionary model. Let me help you with the one bit you should be able to understand: The fact that sponges have thousands of genes for traits they don't even have is NOT indicative of purposeful creation by any infallible architect. It could be if, -and only if- your divine designer meant to use basal metazoans as a taxonomic template from which to derive descendant clades.
Yours is the illusion. None of this is remotely supportive of your imaginary magician. All of this is concordant with evolution. As I said years ago in the 6th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism, "according to every ounce of paleontological evidence anyone has ever dug up, there is every indication that the further back in time you look, the simpler and more similar living things appear to be..." In a later video explaining Evolutionary Law, I fleshed this out a bit more: "There are several ways of tracing these lineages, both by genotypes and phenotypes. Phenotypical taxonomy reveals a third method in the form of another trend which could be expressed as a law, but has instead become a whole field of study unto itself: As you track any evident lineage backward through fossil sequences, the closer you get to the 'crown' or origin of any one clade, the more basal forms will resemble projenitors of their sister clades, because the further back you go, the more closely-related they are. In a microchosm of this same pattern, the young of two closely-related species will look more alike than the adults do. ...Of course this trend continues into embryology too." Then I cited Ernst von Baer's laws of embryology, which aligns with Evo Devo.
Again you're trying to project your own faults onto those who will not share them. As I have already repeatedly pointed out, creationists are the ones with the 'statement of faith' amounting to a doctrinal obligation to uphold a particular set of bronze age fables as though they were the "absolute authority", such that "physical evidences ...must never be used to correct or interpret the Bible. The written Word must take priority in the event of any apparent conflict ....no matter how scientific, how commonly believed, or how apparently workable or logical it may seem." I told you, no scientific institution would tolerate the level of dishonesty that creationism consistently demands. I told you also that it is laughable that you cite 'creationist literature' as though it were somehow respectable, as if that weren't the least credible, worst possible source in history that anyone could ever turn to, as if that was to any degree honest, accurate, or accountable, and not already discredited by everyone everywhere. For example, it seems that several of the participants in this forum have already done an analysis of Walter Remine's work and are well aware of his published dishonesty.
This is another deliberately deceptive dishonest misrepresentation. There is no magic in our analysis. That's your cesspool of nonsense, not ours. The genomes DO fit, and that is how horizontally-integrated genetic infections become so obvious. It's like when you open a Gideon Bible and find hand-written names notes and phone numbers on a couple of the inside pages. The author of the scribbles is not the author of the book, nor do the handful of scrawled comments change any of the source of the other content therein, yet that appears to be the assumption you're making. As if these extra inserts would leave you unable to distinguish this Bible from a phone book. You know better, but you're unable to admit it.
Obviously your level of reading comprehension is not 'like everyone'. As was already indicated in my post to you last December, which you refused to read, my critique of your arguments, assumptions, and understanding were and are not 'wrong'. New_Scientist isn't "Darwinian". It certainly isn't "venerated". Genetics does confirm an evolutionary hierarchy, and your magazine never said otherwise. All it did say was that the analogy of a tree was insufficient given the complexities of HGT especially regarding microbes. As others have already pointed out, "The problem of horizontal gene-transfer in most non-bacterial species is not serious enough to obscure the branches we find by sequencing their DNA." "Nothing in the article showed that the concept of the tree of life is unsound; only that it is more complicated than was realised before the advent of molecular genetics. ....it's just more of a banyan than an oak at its single-celled-organism base." -Dennet
Can you see it?
At an average of 156 inherited mutations per zygote, multiplied at an average of 13 years per generation, that would be roughly 120 million differences accumulated in the same period of time where you can't imagine only 15,000. That's if we ignore the additional influence of population genetics and focus only one lineage without reference to siblings. That's also only if we diverged from an unchanging modern chimpanzee genome, which of course we didn't. So even then it would still actually be more like 300 million genetic differences since chimpanzees would be diverging too, and at a slightly faster rate. Of course the size of either gene pool will restrict variation back down to the levels necessary to still meet your goal within reason.
At that time, I remember it being described as an estimate based on collective sets. At that time, I also remember Duane Gish(?) complaining that scientists said "the chimpanzee is genetically 98 percent similar to man, therefore it proves they are closely related [but] a cloud is 100 percent water; a watermelon is 97 percent water. So using that reasoning, a cloud missed being a watermelon by three percent!"
I was eleven years old when I heard that, but the vacuity of that argument was such that -whoever that guy on the radio was, he obviously did not care what was really true, and only wanted to create an illusion, so that he could pretend something else instead. That's how you are too, Bob. I know you like to imagine that applies to me too, but I'm not just not like that.