On a Christian radio show...

[Anachronous Rex]

I have a follow-up interview this Thursday, where he promises to answer my phylogeny challenge, and I hope to address some of the claims he made in our previous discussion. He says my data is out-of-date with regard to the 'biological material' found in the center of a tyrannosaur thigh bone. He also says there was only one 'Mitochondrial Eve', and that she dates back to only 6,000 years ago.

Again, I'm no expert, but just from Wikipedia:
"Mitochondrial Eve is estimated to have lived around 200,000 years ago"

Which is further complicated by the fact that:
"Many studies report that Y-chromosomal Adam lived sometime later than Mitochondrial Eve, around 142,000 years ago [1] and possibly as recently as 60,000 years ago."

 

[WarK]

Perhaps the host of the show could explain what mitochondria are and what does the term Mitochondrial Eve mean.

And maybe some of you fine lot could explain what those really mean? In this topic or maybe in a new one? Or we could wait until the next part of the interview to avoid spoilers.

My guess is that the creationist host has just this snippet of information without knowing what it really means.

 

[nemesiss]

EVERYONE!! GRAB YOUR BINGO CARDS!

we already have:
"NEWTON A CREATIONIST/RELIGOUS"
"COMPARE ID TO SETI/ARCHAELOGY" (in this case medicine)
"RANDOM/CHANCE"
"REPEATS DEBUNKED ARGUMENTS"
"DARWNISM/DARWINISTS"
"CONFUSE EVOLUTION WITH ABIOGENESIS"

 

[Inferno]

And maybe some of you fine lot could explain what those really mean? In this topic or maybe in a new one? Or we could wait until the next part of the interview to avoid spoilers.

[showmore=SPOILER]Mitochondrial Eve is the most recent female common ancestor of all living human beings, Y-Chromosomal Adam is the most recent male common ancestor. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is passed down the generations without recombination, the Y-Chromosome is of course only passed on to men without recombination. mtDNA has a fairly steady rate of mutation, about once every 3,500 years. (There are places that mutate faster and apparently the mutations have sped up in the last 10,000 years or so, but we know that and can account for it.) That way we can date our traces back fairly accurately to a few million years into the past. (Note: This is only true if I understand this article correctly, which I highly doubt. They are saying that they've dated the Gorilla-Human split with the corrected mtDNA tree, right?)

[/showmore]

 

[AronRa]

I wonder how AndromedasWake will answer this question.

Bob Enyart criticized me for saying there is no center of the universe.

He said, "All the cosmologists in the world assert that that is a philosophical belief. There is no data. There are no measurements you could take to assert that. ...All the cosmologists in the world agree with me in stating that we don't have measurements, we don't have data -to conclude that there is no center."

Is AndromedasWake a 'cosmologist'? Do he assert that this is a "philisophical belief"? A negative claim, one which can only be mathematically determined, but for which none of the required data yet exists? Does he agree with Bob Enyart? Or does he agree with me, that without data, no measurements, there can be no 'center'? Because the 'center' can only be determined by measurements of the external boundaries, which of course we don't have.

Enyart also said that my claim that there is NO center of the universe is a positive claim. Then he turned around and said there was evidence of a universal center, in the form of a "three dimensional grafting of galaxies quantized distribution of the galaxies around our part of the milky way so that they're spherical." This, he said, proves that the Big Bang is wrong. Is AndromedasWake even aware of this spherical orb of galaxies around just our part of the milky way?

 

[WarK]

I'm not sure what was his point. I thought the religious lost the battle for being at the centre of the world when it turned out that Earth wasn't flat. Though sometimes I wish they were at the centre of the world :twisted:

If we're not at the centre of our solar system and not even at the centre of our galaxy (again, sometimes I wish we were) but the centre of the universe is there somewhere that means the god doesn't really care about as that much.

The centre of the Earth, centre of our solar system and the centre of Milky Way seem like a really bad places to be. More like a hell than the focus of god's interests. I really don't get what angle he was coming at this.

And of course science is only good when the apologist thinks it supports his position :roll:

 

[Inferno]

I'm not a cosmologist, however I do remember two things:
1) At the centre of every galaxy we've so far explored (with telescopes and maths 'n' stuff) we've found a super-massive black hole.
2) There must be a centre if the Big Bang is correct, (tracing the expansion back to one point, the singularity) but so far we've been unable to make out where that point is. (Because galaxies drift away relative to each other and therefore don't make any back-traceable lines we can find.)

 

[Bearcules]

Someone more versed in cosmology can correct me, but I believe the current model has no center.

Think of space as the surface of a balloon that is being inflated, and galaxies represent spots on that balloon. These spots are all moving away from each other because the surface is expanding between them. But their is no "center" on the surface of the balloon.

In much the same way, there is no "center" to the universe.

 

[devilsadvocate]

2) There must be a centre if the Big Bang is correct, (tracing the expansion back to one point, the singularity) but so far we've been unable to make out where that point is. (Because galaxies drift away relative to each other and therefore don't make any back-traceable lines we can find.)

I'm likewise no expert on cosmology, but I was heavily interested in it many years ago and read many books on the subject aimed for the laymen. I do not remember that any of those books claimed that there is a center to the universe. If you consider the balloon analogy Bearculus made, on a deflated balloon (aka singularity) that you then inflate, every point on the balloon surface was, at the beginning, at the center.

Then he turned around and said there was evidence of a universal center, in the form of a "three dimensional grafting of galaxies quantized distribution of the galaxies around our part of the milky way so that they're spherical."

I'm not exactly sure what Enyart meant by this, but the observation is that matter is distributed remarkably uniformly in the universe. This means that, yes, looking from the Earth it would look like galaxies are distributed spherically around us, but it also means that it is true for every other point in the universe as well.

 

[Inferno]

My bad, you're correct. There is no centre.

 

[borrofburi]

devilsadvocate said all the things I wanted to say. So I guess I'm just endorsing his post.

 

[nemesiss]

I wonder how AndromedasWake will answer this question.

Bob Enyart criticized me for saying there is no center of the universe.

He said, "All the cosmologists in the world assert that that is a philosophical belief. There is no data. There are no measurements you could take to assert that. ...All the cosmologists in the world agree with me in stating that we don't have measurements, we don't have data -to conclude that there is no center."

Is AndromedasWake a 'cosmologist'? Do he assert that this is a "philisophical belief"? A negative claim, one which can only be mathematically determined, but for which none of the required data yet exists? Does he agree with Bob Enyart? Or does he agree with me, that without data, no measurements, there can be no 'center'? Because the 'center' can only be determined by measurements of the external boundaries, which of course we don't have.

Enyart also said that my claim that there is NO center of the universe is a positive claim. Then he turned around and said there was evidence of a universal center, in the form of a "three dimensional grafting of galaxies quantized distribution of the galaxies around our part of the milky way so that they're spherical." This, he said, proves that the Big Bang is wrong. Is AndromedasWake even aware of this spherical orb of galaxies around just our part of the milky way?

with all the logical fallicies he made... is there any reason to be convinced he actually knows what he's talking about?
i think it's pretty much a waste of AW's time.

 

[nemesiss]

2) There must be a centre if the Big Bang is correct, (tracing the expansion back to one point, the singularity) but so far we've been unable to make out where that point is. (Because galaxies drift away relative to each other and therefore don't make any back-traceable lines we can find.)

I'm likewise no expert on cosmology, but I was heavily interested in it many years ago and read many books on the subject aimed for the laymen. I do not remember that any of those books claimed that there is a center to the universe. If you consider the balloon analogy Bearculus made, on a deflated balloon (aka singularity) that you then inflate, every point on the balloon surface was, at the beginning, at the center.

Then he turned around and said there was evidence of a universal center, in the form of a "three dimensional grafting of galaxies quantized distribution of the galaxies around our part of the milky way so that they're spherical."

I'm not exactly sure what Enyart meant by this, but the observation is that matter is distributed remarkably uniformly in the universe. This means that, yes, looking from the Earth it would look like galaxies are distributed spherically around us, but it also means that it is true for every other point in the universe as well.

let's have some expert explain bob, namely Lawrence Kraus

explenation starts about after 8~9 minutes

 

[AronRa]

In our follow-up discussion, I made sure to plug this forum as being an appropriate venue for posting scientific data. Enyart took up my challenge to post a written discussion here in a couple months.

 

[Inferno]

In our follow-up discussion, I made sure to plug this forum as being an appropriate venue for posting scientific data. Enyart took up my challenge to post a written discussion here in a couple months.

That will be quite a bit of fun!

 

[nemesiss]

In our follow-up discussion, I made sure to plug this forum as being an appropriate venue for posting scientific data. Enyart took up my challenge to post a written discussion here in a couple months.

this indeed should be interesting.
we'll "peer-review" the shit out of his arguments, hope you warned him we can be pretty roughless

 

[devilsadvocate]

just listened round two of the discussion and it got me curious as to what Enyart means by, "three dimensional grafting of galaxies quantized distribution of the galaxies around our part of the milky way so that they're spherical.", and I found this:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/assets/pdf/tj/TJv16n2_CENTRE.pdf

It's an article written by astrophysicist Russell Humphreys that sheds light to what Enyart is arguing. The redshift data, Humphreys argues, shows that there are intervals at which galaxies tend to group into. And since the amount of redshift is proportional to the distance, the data suggests that galaxies form concentric circles or shells that our vantage point is near the center of. If the data is correct, the conclusion does stand. However, the data does not seem to be correct:

"We have used the publicly available data from the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey and the 2dF QSO Redshift Survey to test the hypothesis that there is a periodicity in the redshift distribution of quasi-stellar objects (QSOs) found projected close to foreground galaxies. These data provide by far the largest and most homogeneous sample for such a study, yielding 1647 QSO-galaxy pairs. There is no evidence for a periodicity at the predicted frequency in log(1+z), or at any other frequency." http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0208117


I do not know if Humphreys is the only astronomer holding the "quantized redshift" view, and he does at least cite couple of papers not written by him to support his data, but the name sounded familiar so I googled it. Humphreys has written a book called "starlight and time" in which he argues that universe could well be only 6000 years old from our perspective at the center, and the reason why we can see light from 13.7 billion light years from us is because of time dilation due to gravity and rotation of the universe along it's center. What he is saying is that the 6 days God took to create the world would have only took 6 literal days here, at the center, but billions of years at the edges of the universe. Even creationists discredit his theory.

 

[devilsadvocate]

oh, btw, Enyart's claim that "no cosmologist holds the view that universe has no centre" seems blatantly false. As far as I understand the big bang theory, the idea of no centre is mandatory to the theory. This is because universe isn't expanding from a centre like an explosion, but the whole universe expands and does so uniformly for every part of it. As with the balloon analogy, every part of the universe has equal claim of being the center. This is simply because universe started out of singularity and it is the space itself that expands. Every point in the universe can rightly claim this is where the big bang happened. Likewise any direction you look, you would see the big bang if you could see far enough.

So I don't know what to make of his claim, maybe he has a point I'm not aware of or different meaning what passes as centre. From my current understanding, though, it seems to me he is saying that no cosmologist believes the big bang theory.

 

[Laurens]

In our follow-up discussion, I made sure to plug this forum as being an appropriate venue for posting scientific data. Enyart took up my challenge to post a written discussion here in a couple months.

Cool. Hopefully it will be more intellectually stimulating than that nonsense that is going on with TruthisLife7 at the moment...

 

[nudger1964]

gawd what is that bloke on about.
ive listened to many cosmologists and astrophysicists, and every single one that addressed the issue has said the universe has no centre. This is infered directly from the data ie, with the exception of gravitationally linked objects, or groupings of objects, everything is moving away from everything else. i trust he accepts direct observation as empirical evidence? perhapos not.
i should qualify that by saying i beliieve there are very localised anomalies observed which are not fully understood (m theory would explain these anomales so i am told).
BTW, the milky way is part of a local group of galaxy which is NOT an anomaly, they are simply galaxy which are gravitationally linked. Galaxy clusters are the norm, and furthermore the mapping of the background radiation has been used to mathematically model the distribution of galaxy throughout the universe. it matches observation with remarkable accuracy, so far from refuting the big bang, it strongly reinforces it