Wow! This thread just won't die! I just want to make a small point about the "random" aspect of evolution; that is: mutations are random, natural selction is not. Natural selection is the mechanism by which advantageous mutations are passed on and disadvantageous ones are not, from amongst all of the random mutations that occur. This is a large part of what Darwin discovered.
Galileo
JoinedPosts by Galileo
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365
Richard Dawkins Gets "Expelled" by Ben Stein!
by Perry ini just got back from seeing the new movie release "expelled" which is a documentary exposing the militant culture of supression regarding intelligent design in the scientific community.
in a "million years", i never would have imagined that ben stein could get the author of "the god delusion", richard dawkins to speak favorably about i.d.
(intellignet design).
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Athiest what do you believe?
by real one inim just wondering because it seems like you have no hope.
please set me straight.
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Galileo
I found something else I believe: I believe AGuest wants me to have peace.
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365
Richard Dawkins Gets "Expelled" by Ben Stein!
by Perry ini just got back from seeing the new movie release "expelled" which is a documentary exposing the militant culture of supression regarding intelligent design in the scientific community.
in a "million years", i never would have imagined that ben stein could get the author of "the god delusion", richard dawkins to speak favorably about i.d.
(intellignet design).
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Galileo
I thought atheist evolutionists were for random events, given enough time of course.
I actually wasn't posting this for your benefit, as you are quite clearly an idiot, and I don't expect you to understand anything about the subjects I'm discussing. I was actually addressing the more rational creationists, the ones able to understand a coherent argument. However, I never said random events never occur, in fact they occur billions, if not trillions or more, times a day.
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365
Richard Dawkins Gets "Expelled" by Ben Stein!
by Perry ini just got back from seeing the new movie release "expelled" which is a documentary exposing the militant culture of supression regarding intelligent design in the scientific community.
in a "million years", i never would have imagined that ben stein could get the author of "the god delusion", richard dawkins to speak favorably about i.d.
(intellignet design).
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Galileo
Auldsoul, I realize this is a fact you are unfamiliar with, so perhaps you missed this from my original post:
The odds against two creatures having the same ERV insertion pattern just by chance is so high as to make it impossible: one in ten to the hundredth power.
Even if two seperate species are susceptible to the same ERV, since the insertion points are random, and the mutations the ERVs go through are random, the odds against even one being identicle simply by chance is a higher number than the number of grains of sand on the Earth. The odds of multiple identicle insertion points, of identicle ERVs, with identicle mutations, simply occuring randomly, is a number so high that it is beyond human comprehension. No one would suggest such a random event based solely on the evidence.
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365
Richard Dawkins Gets "Expelled" by Ben Stein!
by Perry ini just got back from seeing the new movie release "expelled" which is a documentary exposing the militant culture of supression regarding intelligent design in the scientific community.
in a "million years", i never would have imagined that ben stein could get the author of "the god delusion", richard dawkins to speak favorably about i.d.
(intellignet design).
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Galileo
Auldsoul - "What ERV do the hippo and the whale share in common?" I don't believe either genome has been sequenced yet. However, when they are, there is every reason to believe they will follow the same pattern of every other creature that has been sequenced, and will have several in common. I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you saying that you concede that human and chimps share a common ancestor, but you absolutely draw the line at whales and hippos?
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365
Richard Dawkins Gets "Expelled" by Ben Stein!
by Perry ini just got back from seeing the new movie release "expelled" which is a documentary exposing the militant culture of supression regarding intelligent design in the scientific community.
in a "million years", i never would have imagined that ben stein could get the author of "the god delusion", richard dawkins to speak favorably about i.d.
(intellignet design).
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Galileo
Maybe retroviruses can introduce useful mutations also.
Perhaps, I really don't know. The ones I'm talking about have mutated to uselessness, which is why they no longer change. They have no affect on evolution, but can be used to track who is related to who, by the sheer fact that they don't change. They ca be followed back through evolutionary change, like following the tire tracks of a car that's long gone. If I did a poor job of explaining the concept, I would reccommend reading the article I linked to. If you google Endogenous Retroviral (ERV) Insertions, you will get as much information and scientific papers as you will ever care to read. It's an amazing concept once you grasp it.
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365
Richard Dawkins Gets "Expelled" by Ben Stein!
by Perry ini just got back from seeing the new movie release "expelled" which is a documentary exposing the militant culture of supression regarding intelligent design in the scientific community.
in a "million years", i never would have imagined that ben stein could get the author of "the god delusion", richard dawkins to speak favorably about i.d.
(intellignet design).
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Galileo
Can this be considered evolution?
It also fires off a thought, was Eve's apple full of retroviruses? ;-)
The point was that the ERVs themselves allow a trace of ancestry, since if they are both inactive and in a germ line cell, they are forever in the same spot with the same mutations. Therefore if two people, or a person and a chimp, have the identical ERVs, they both got them from a common ancestor somewhere back in time.
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365
Richard Dawkins Gets "Expelled" by Ben Stein!
by Perry ini just got back from seeing the new movie release "expelled" which is a documentary exposing the militant culture of supression regarding intelligent design in the scientific community.
in a "million years", i never would have imagined that ben stein could get the author of "the god delusion", richard dawkins to speak favorably about i.d.
(intellignet design).
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Galileo
Notice Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed makes no attempt to explain ID at all and why ID deserves to be taught as science.
Indeed. For all that think that creationism is a scientific hypothesis, ask yourself this question: "What evidence would I accept that would disprove creationism?" If you cannot think of any, than it is not a scientific question. One important aspect of the scientific method is falsifiability. If you will accept no evidence as proof against it, than it isn't science. That doesn't in itself make it untrue, it just makes it an unscientific question. If it's not science, it doesn't belong in a science class.
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365
Richard Dawkins Gets "Expelled" by Ben Stein!
by Perry ini just got back from seeing the new movie release "expelled" which is a documentary exposing the militant culture of supression regarding intelligent design in the scientific community.
in a "million years", i never would have imagined that ben stein could get the author of "the god delusion", richard dawkins to speak favorably about i.d.
(intellignet design).
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Galileo
Here are a couple of my favorite examples of common descent (macro-evolution, as creationists like to call it):
Endogenous Retroviral (ERV) Insertions
A retrovirus is a virus that uses RNA to store it's genetic information. The retrovirus than inserts itself into the host genome at random. These ERVs are generally species specific.
The method used by ERVs to insert itself into it's host (known as "reverse transcriptase") is prone to transcription errors. Sometimes these errors will inactivate the ERV completely, rendering it harmless, and it remains exactly where it inserted itself into the host genome. If the inactivated ERV was inserted into a germ line cell, it is passed on to its offspring in exatly the same spot. So, if you have this ERV than any of your descendants created by this germ line cell would also have it, in the same spot, with the same mutation. We have many, many, many of these inactivated ERV's in our genetic code. The odds against two creatures having the same ERV insertion pattern just by chance is so high as to make it impossible: one in ten to the hundredth power.
ERVs, therefore, are very useful for tracking ancestry. All humans have many of these ERVs in common, which is not surprising, as we all have a common ancestor. And, as you have probably guessed by now, humans and chimps also have at least a dozen of these ERVs in common as well. In fact, what we find is that ERV insertions track exactly with what evolution predicts: the more recent in time two species diverged from a common ancestor, th more ERVs that they share. The further back in time, the fewer ERVs they have in common. Here is a good paper that explains it well in laymans terms: http://www.darwinawards.com/science/retrovirus.html
This is evidence so powerful as to virtually constitute proof, yet it is just one more in a mountain of evidence supporting evolution. Here's another:
The Missing Human Chromosome
Human and chimpanzee chromosomes are very similar. One striking difference, however, is that humans have one fewer pair of chromosomes than chimpanzees. Evolution predicted that two ancestral ape chromosomes must have fused together somewhere far back in our development. And eventually this prediction was found to be true, in the form of human chromosome two.
Chromosome two is different than all other chromosomes. Normally chromosomes have one centromere (in the center) and two telomeres (one on each end). Chromosome two, unlkie any other, has remnants of a second centromere, and has an additional telomere sequence in the middle, exactly as would happen if two chromosomes fused at the ends. Additionally, it bears a near identical DNA sequence as two different chimpanzee chromosomes, if those two were combined together. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome_2_(human)
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Is anybody else both fascinated and creeped out...
by Jewel in...by the flds brouhaha down in texas?
obviously the doctrine is way different, but there are so many similarities: the haunted look in so many eyes, the oppressively patriarchy, the lack of feeling, the use of fear and separation for control, the whole everyone-else-is-evil mentality.
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Galileo
A few years ago Jon Krakauer wrote an absolutely amazing and astonishing book on this sect, as well as the history of the mormons in general and their various spin offs, called: "Under The Banner of Heaven". Definitely worth a read for anyone here.