Cyanobacterias, the littles heros that could.....

[Angelo brazil]

Cyanobacteria are the prerequisite for complex life forms. They are said to exist already 3,5 bio years, and did not change morphologically. They do oxygenic photosynthesis, where the energy of light is used to split water molecules into oxygen, protons, and electrons. It occurs in two stages. In the first stage, light-dependent reactions or light reactions capture the energy of light and use it to make the energy-storage molecules ATP and NADPH. During the second stage, the light-independent reactions use these products to capture and reduce carbon dioxide.

They have ATP synthase nano-motors. How could ATP synthase "evolve" from something that needs ATP, manufactured by ATP synthase, to function? Absurd "chicken-egg" paradox!

ATP Synthase is a molecular machine found in every living organisms. It serves as a miniature power-generator, producing an energy-carrying molecule, adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. The ATP synthase machine has many parts we recognize from human-designed technology, including a rotor, a stator, a camshaft or driveshaft, and other basic components of a rotary engine. This machine is just the final step in a long and complex metabolic pathway involving numerous enzymes and other molecules--all so the cell can produce ATP to power biochemical reactions, and provide energy for other molecular machines in the cell. Each of the human body's 14 trillion cells performs this reaction about a million times per minute. Over half a body weight of ATP is made and consumed every day!

A rotary molecular motor that can work at near 100% efficiency.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/10/12/1106787108.full.pdf

We found that the maximum work performed by F1-ATPase per 120° step is nearly equal to the thermodynamical maximum work that can be extracted from a single ATP hydrolysis under a broad range of conditions. Our results suggested a 100% free-energy transduction efficiency and a tight mechanochemical coupling of F1-ATPase.

http://elshamah.heavenforum.org/t1439-atp-synthase#2204

How could ATP synthase "evolve" from something that needs ATP, manufactured by ATP synthase, to function? Absurd "chicken-egg" paradox! Also, consider that ATP synthase is made by processes that all need ATP--such as the unwinding of the DNA helix with helicase to allow transcription and then translation of the coded information into the proteins that make up ATP synthase. And manufacture of the 100 enzymes/machines needed to achieve this needs ATP! And making the membranes in which ATP synthase sits needs ATP, but without the membranes it would not work. This is a really vicious circle for evolutionists to explain.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI8m6o0gXDY

They have aerobic respiration, and anaerobic fermentation which uniquely occur together in these prokaryotic cells. They do photosynthesis through complex Photosystem I and II and other electron transport complexes. They have a carbon concentration mechanism, which increases the concentration of carbon dioxide available to the initial carboxylase of the Calvin cycle, the enzyme RuBisCO, and transcriptional regulation, which is the change in gene expression levels by altering transcription rates. They are capable of performing the process of water-oxidizing photosynthesis by coupling the activity of photosystem II and I, in a chain of events known as the Z-scheme. They metabolize Carbohydrates through the pentose phosphate pathway. They reduce Carbon dioxide to form carbohydrates through the Calvin cycle. Furthermore, they are able to reduce elemental sulfur by anaerobic respiration in the dark.

No nitrogen: no proteins, no enzymes, no life. We need nitrogen in our bodies, to form amino acids and nucleic acids. Cyanobacteria have the greatest contribution to nitrogen fixation. So in the beginning, not only was lack of oxygen a gigantic problem, but the lack of nitrogen was no less so. In order for the anaerobic organisms, whatever they might have been, to generate oxygen in quantity, they simply HAD to have nitrogen in their tissues (as enzymes etc). With nitrogen as unreactive as it is, then how did they fix it? N2 gas is a very stable compound due to the strength of the triple bond between the nitrogen atoms, and it requires a large amount of energy to break this bond. This is one of the hardest chemical bonds of all to break.The whole process requires eight electrons and at least sixteen ATP molecules. The process, nitrogenase, works in a more exact and efficient way than the clumsy chemical processes of human invention. Several atoms of iron and molybdenum are held in an organic lattice to for

m the active chemical site. With assistance from an energy source (ATP) and a powerful and specific complementary reducing agent (ferredoxin), nitrogen molecules are bound and cleaved with surgical precision. In this way, a 'molecular sledgehammer' is applied to the NN bond, and a single nitrogen molecule yields two molecules of ammonia. The ammonia then ascends the 'food chain', and is used as amino groups in protein synthesis for plants and animals. This is a very tiny mechanism, but multiplied on a large scale it is of critical importance in allowing plant growth and food production on our planet to continue.

They are able to capture the energy of light with 95% efficiency. Recently it has been discovered, that they accomplish that through sophisticated quantum mechanics - an esoteric aspect of nature that even most scientists don't understand. The use light harvesting antennas for that !!

They possess a autoregulatory transcriptional feedback mechanism called circadian clock and coordinate their activities such as sleep/wake behavior, body temperature, hormone secretion, and metabolism into daily cycles . This is a intrinsic time-keeping mechanism that controls the daily rhythms of numerous physiological processes. They control the expression of numerous genes, including those that code for the oscillator proteins of the clock itself.Cyanobacterias have 1,054 protein families !!!

In a BBC report , they said : Oxygenic photosynthesis is a very complicated metabolism and it makes sense that the evolution of such a metabolism would take perhaps two billion years.

Feel free to explain how Cyanobacteria got these amazing capabilites, amongst others, in a relatively short evolutionary time scale ?

[RonO]

On 3/2/2014 11:25 PM, Angelo brazil wrote:
> Cyanobacteria are the prerequisite for complex life forms. They are said to exist already 3,5 bio years, and did not change morphologically. They do oxygenic photosynthesis, where the energy of light is used to split water molecules into oxygen, protons, and electrons. It occurs in two stages. In the first stage, light-dependent reactions or light reactions capture the energy of light and use it to make the energy-storage molecules ATP and NADPH. During the second stage, the light-independent reactions use these products to capture and reduce carbon dioxide.
>

SNIP:

> Feel free to explain how Cyanobacteria got these amazing capabilites, amongst others, in a relatively short evolutionary time scale ?
>

They evolved from chemoautotrophs over a period of around 2 billion
years. Many of the metabolic enzymes and electron transport mechanisms
were evolved in chemoautotrophs before photosynthesis evolved. We can
track the gene evolution by DNA sequence comparison.

If you have an alternative please provide it in as much detail as above.
We can take extant enzymes and determine how they are related to each
other and the sequence in which they likely diverged from each other.
What alternative do you have for that? Do we know how it happened in
detail? No. Why should we? How much detail do you have?

Ron Okimoto

[Angelo brazil]

> They evolved from chemoautotrophs over a period of around 2 billion
>
> years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolites
Stromatolites provide the most ancient records of life on Earth by fossil remains which date from more than 3.5 billion years ago.

So they had not 2 bio years to evolve.

Many of the metabolic enzymes and electron transport mechanisms
>
> were evolved in chemoautotrophs before photosynthesis evolved. We can
>
> track the gene evolution by DNA sequence comparison.

If there was a reduced atmosphere without oxygen some time back in the past ( which btw. there is no scientific evidence for, rather the oposit is the case ) then there would be no ozone layer, and if there was no ozone layer the ultraviolet radiation would penetrate the atmosphere and would destroy the amino acids as soon as they were formed. If the Cyanobacterias however would overcome that problem ( its supposed the bacterias in the early earth lived in the water, but that would draw other unsurmountable problems ), and evolve photosynthesis, they would have to evolve at the same time protective enzymes that prevented them oxygen to damage their DNA through hydroxyl radicals. So what evolutionary advantage would there be for them to evolve photosynthesis ?
As chemoautotrophs they would do well btw. too....

> If you have an alternative please provide it in as much detail as above.
>
> We can take extant enzymes and determine how they are related to each
>
> other and the sequence in which they likely diverged from each other.

How did they evolve for example chlorophyll , if for example to evolve cholorphyll a it takes 17 enzymes, and a very complex biosynthesis pathway ?
furthermore, Cholophyill would only function if fully formed and assembled, and working toghether with Photosystem I and II, forming a fully working protein complex.

> What alternative do you have for that? Do we know how it happened in
>
> detail? No. Why should we? How much detail do you have?

my alternative is Genesis 1

Otangelo Grasso

[Steven L.]

On 3/3/2014 3:31 PM, Angelo brazil wrote:
>
>> They evolved from chemoautotrophs over a period of around 2 billion
>>
>> years.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolites
> Stromatolites provide the most ancient records of life on Earth by fossil remains which date from more than 3.5 billion years ago.
>
> So they had not 2 bio years to evolve.

I have a general suggestion:

Before you conclude that you have spotted a flaw in evolutionary biology
that all the world's evolutionary biologists have missed,

try searching Google Scholar to find out whether anybody else thought of
it before you did.

It took me just 10 seconds to dig up a zillion articles on how
cyanobacteria evolved.

Have a look. Maybe some of those articles will address your concerns.


--
Steven L.

[RonO]

On 3/3/2014 2:31 PM, Angelo brazil wrote:
>
>> They evolved from chemoautotrophs over a period of around 2 billion
>>
>> years.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolites
> Stromatolites provide the most ancient records of life on Earth by fossil remains which date from more than 3.5 billion years ago.
>
> So they had not 2 bio years to evolve.

Have you read the original paper?

From the conclusions:
"Thus whether on not photoautotrophs were included within Strelley Pool
Formation microbial communities is unclear from either textural or
morphological evidence."

"These stromatoloites may have been inhabited by diverse microbial
communities, possibly including photoautotrophs."

Stromatolite formations do not have to be made by photoautotrophs.

They may contain photoautotrophs. What would that mean? It would mean
that there was around 400 million years from the earliest traces of
early lifeforms to the Strelley Pool rocks.

How does that fit into your model?

>
>
> Many of the metabolic enzymes and electron transport mechanisms
>>
>> were evolved in chemoautotrophs before photosynthesis evolved. We can
>>
>> track the gene evolution by DNA sequence comparison.
>
> If there was a reduced atmosphere without oxygen some time back in the past ( which btw. there is no scientific evidence for, rather the oposit is the case ) then there would be no ozone layer, and if there was no ozone layer the ultraviolet radiation would penetrate the atmosphere and would destroy the amino acids as soon as they were formed. If the Cyanobacterias however would overcome that problem ( its supposed the bacterias in the early earth lived in the water, but that would draw other unsurmountable problems ), and evolve photosynthesis, they would have to evolve at the same time protective enzymes that prevented them oxygen to damage their DNA through hydroxyl radicals. So what evolutionary advantage would there be for them to evolve photosynthesis ?
> As chemoautotrophs they would do well btw. too....

I haven't kept up with the early atmosphere work, but significant levels
of oxygen don't appear until much later in the geologic record from what
I recall. So who cares about an ozone layer 3.4 billion years ago?

The ultraviolet radiation that you are talking about only penetrates a
few inches into water. Do you understand what that means?

How does your model account for the apperent absence of the ozone layer?
Or rather the absence of evidence for an ozone layer 3.4 billion years
ago?

>
>
>> If you have an alternative please provide it in as much detail as above.
>>
>> We can take extant enzymes and determine how they are related to each
>>
>> other and the sequence in which they likely diverged from each other.
>
> How did they evolve for example chlorophyll , if for example to evolve cholorphyll a it takes 17 enzymes, and a very complex biosynthesis pathway ?
> furthermore, Cholophyill would only function if fully formed and assembled, and working toghether with Photosystem I and II, forming a fully working protein complex.

The fossils may not be photoautotrophs. How long does it take in your
model? Even if there were photoautotrophs 3.45 billion years ago that
means that there are still 350 billion years of life before that. How
does your model account for that?

>
>
>> What alternative do you have for that? Do we know how it happened in
>>
>> detail? No. Why should we? How much detail do you have?
>
> my alternative is Genesis 1

So your alternative can't account for the data, and you have no viable
explanation.

Ron Okimoto

>
> Otangelo Grasso
>
>

[xxl4457]

ATP is one type of nucleotides, chemically there's no difference between ATP and the basic units that forms DNA/RNA.

The life form on earth can use all kinds of nucleotides as an energy source. Why ATP becomes "the currency of intracellular energy transfer"? I bet you'd think about LUCA.

[Darwin123]

On Monday, March 3, 2014 3:31:15 PM UTC-5, Angelo brazil wrote:
> > They evolved from chemoautotrophs over a period of around 2 billion
>
> >
>
> > years.
>
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolites
>
> Stromatolites provide the most ancient records of life on Earth by fossil remains which date from more than 3.5 billion years ago.
>
>
>
> So they had not 2 bio years to evolve.

The microorganisms that form stromatolites today are probably not the
same as the microorganisms that formed stromatolites 3.5 billion years ago.
Stromatolites are trace fossils that tell you very little about the physiology
of the organisms that formed them.

The autotrophs that lived 3.5 billion years ago did not have to be as
'efficient' as the autotrophs of today. There is no law that says that metabolic processes have to be at their maximum efficiency in order for the organisms to thrive. The organisms that lived 3.5 billion years ago may have been less efficient competed with each other. The organisms that lived 3.5 BYA
only competed with each other. It is the differential fitness that drives
evolution, not absolute efficiency.

The microorganisms that lived 3.5 billion years ago may have been
as efficient as today's microorganisms. After all, you never quantitatively defined 'efficiency'. You provided us with no metric to determine the efficiency of the photosynthetic process today.

Physicists define thermodynamic efficiency very precisely. It would be one minus the ratio of heat out to light energy in. No one has shown that today's autotrophs have an efficiency anywhere close to 1. You are using the word efficiency in a very imprecise way.

The extant organisms that form stramatolites are not especially efficient with respect to their metabolism compared to plants. Plants have complex systems that are separated into neat compartments. Much of their efficiency comes from the compartmentalization. Today's cyano-bacteria are not compartmentalized. So you can't make the claim that cyano-bacteria are as efficient as plants in harvesting sun light.

The conditions on earth 3.5 BYA were very different from today. For example, there may not have been much oxygen around then. Scientific evidence suggests that oxygen was just starting to form in the atmosphere. The iron dissolved in the oceans started to settle around then mostly due to oxygen forming in the atmosphere. Thus, the aerobic respiratory pathways didn't have to evolve until then. Extant organisms that form stramatolites do so in anaerobic conditions. So we are talking about organisms that are relatively inefficient in using oxygen.

>
> my alternative is Genesis 1

Please cite the passages about chemotrophs and stromatolites.

[Angelo brazil]

just finding scientific papers does not mean the question is resolved. Cianobacterias have many irreducible complex systems, which is clear evidence, they could not have evolved.

[Dai monie]

So, I used some google [http://www.readcube.com/articles/10.1038%2Fnrmicro3158] Authors concluded that there was a common ancestors (so that they did, in fact, evolve) and the results were published in Nature. Which means that it is at least peer-reviewed.

>Cianobacterias have many irreducible complex systems, which is clear evidence, they could not have evolved.

You'd think that. Yet there are also emergent things.

Emergent phenomena fit the definition of irreducable complexicity I found (Micheal behe, via wikipedia): <A single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. >

Emergent behaviour arises from a system, composed of several parts that are simple in themselves and contribute to the basic function, and the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.

And that behaviour can, in fact, arise simply from putting base elements together and selecting on the combinations. I was introduced into the topic once when reading a book; I can't quickly find a reference to the story and I've forgotten the book. Anyway, the story went that there was some electrical engineer that thought it'd be a neat idea to build a system using a computer. So he gave that computer a hundred elements, and just let it randomly assign the system from those components, without even the requirement of using all of them. He then used some fitness criteria, turning it into evolutionary programming. Anyway, within a few hundred generations he had a system containing 38 elements, that could differentiate between low/high frequency signals and had extremely small power usage. He could not theoretically predict the behaviour of the system (hence emergent) and removing parts of it would somehow break it, even though the removed parts didn't seem to do anything (i.e. voltage/current measurements re

turned zero).

So what does this tell you? In evolution, having something that is not negative to you means it is not selected upon and that it is free to vary. It is perfectly capable of randomly combining things as long as it isn't a negative something; as soon as it becomes positive, it means that individuals with the trait will be favored upon and be likely to pass that variation along. You know this. Funnily enough, there's quite some literature on emergent programming and emergent systems (e.g. the story I described) that show that ``irreducable complexicities' can, in fact, arise from `evolution'.

I would have given you some more material than just my ramblings; but alas, I cannot find it and it's past time I went to bed. Maybe I can come up with some tomorrow.

[erik simpson]

If scientific investigation doesn't tell you anything, why read about them?

[David Canzi]

I don't think he was suggesting that you just find the papers.
I think he also meant for you to *read* some of them.

--
David Canzi

This e-mail is free from viruses and malware because somebody wrote some code
that appends a couple lines to it saying it's free from viruses and malware.

[Angelo brazil]

Em segunda-feira, 3 de março de 2014 21h18min10s UTC-3, Ron O escreveu:
> On 3/3/2014 2:31 PM, Angelo brazil wrote:
>
> >
>
> >> They evolved from chemoautotrophs over a period of around 2 billion
>
> >>
>
> >> years.
>
> >
>
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolites
>
> > Stromatolites provide the most ancient records of life on Earth by fossil remains which date from more than 3.5 billion years ago.
>
> >
>
> > So they had not 2 bio years to evolve.
>
>
>
> Have you read the original paper?
>
>
>
> From the conclusions:
>
> "Thus whether on not photoautotrophs were included within Strelley Pool
>
> Formation microbial communities is unclear from either textural or
>
> morphological evidence."
>
>
>
> "These stromatoloites may have been inhabited by diverse microbial
>
> communities, possibly including photoautotrophs."
>
>
>
> Stromatolite formations do not have to be made by photoautotrophs.
>
>
>
> They may contain photoautotrophs. What would that mean? It would mean
>
> that there was around 400 million years from the earliest traces of
>
> early lifeforms to the Strelley Pool rocks.
>
>
>
> How does that fit into your model?

http://www.fossilmuseum.net/Tree_of_Life/Stromatolites.htm
Stromatolite-building communities include the oldest known fossils, dating back some 3.5 billion years when the environments of Earth were too hostile to support life as we know it today.

http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/363/1504/2731.long
Even at ca 3.2 Ga, thick and widespread kerogenous shales are consistent with aerobic photoautrophic marine plankton, and U–Pb data from ca 3.8 Ga metasediments suggest that this metabolism could have arisen by the start of the geological record. Hence, the hypothesis that oxygenic photosynthesis evolved well before the atmosphere became permanently oxygenated seems well supported.

So, in any case , you don't have 2bio years.

But thats indeed what is supposed to be needed to explain the extreme complexity of Cyanobacteria :

http://elshamah.heavenforum.org/t1545-origin-and-evolution-of-photosynthesis#2359

Oxygenic photosynthesis is a very complicated metabolism and it makes sense that the evolution of such a metabolism would take perhaps two billion years

>Many of the metabolic enzymes and electron transport mechanisms
>were evolved in chemoautotrophs before photosynthesis evolved. We can
>track the gene evolution by DNA sequence comparison.

DNA sequence comparison can be interpreted as an example of the Creator’s wise and efficient use and re-use of genetic code in different creatures to accomplish a common and basic cellular function.......

> > As chemoautotrophs they would do well btw. too....

that does not answer my question : what evolutionary advantage would there be for them to evolve photosynthesis ?

> The ultraviolet radiation that you are talking about only penetrates a
>
> few inches into water. Do you understand what that means?

It means that you think you have a escape explanation. You have not.

- Sidney Fox, Klaus Dose on page 37 in Molecular Evolution and the Origin of Life.

"the primitive ocean was steadily irradiated with a relatively high dose of solar ultraviolet light . . . A steady irradiation of a rather homogeneous solution results in degradative rather than synthetic reactions" Sidney Fox, Klaus Dose in Molecular Evolution and the Origin of Life.

- Thaxton, Bradley, Olsen on page 66 of The Mystery of Life's Origin.

"Based on the foregoing geochemical assessment, we conclude that both in the atmosphere and in the various water basins of the primitive earth, many destructive interactions would have so vastly diminished, if not altogether consumed, essential precursor chemicals, that chemical evolution rates would have been negligible. The soup would have been too dilute for polymerization to occur. Even local ponds for concentrating soup ingredients would have met with the same problem.
Furthermore, no geological evidence indicates an organic soup, even a small organic pond, ever existed on this planet. It is becoming clear that however life began on earth, the usual conceived notion that life emerged from an oceanic soup of organic chemicals is a most implausible hypothesis. We may therefore with fairness call this scenario the myth of the prebiotic soup."

> How does your model account for the apperent absence of the ozone layer?
>
> Or rather the absence of evidence for an ozone layer 3.4 billion years
>
> ago?

yes, thats what i mean.

>
> means that there are still 350 billion years of life before that. How
>
> does your model account for that?

that would be not enough for photosynthesis to evolve.

> So your alternative can't account for the data, and you have no viable
>
> explanation.

I have. Special creation.

[broger...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, March 4, 2014 11:29:34 AM UTC-5, Angelo brazil wrote:

> > So your alternative can't account for the data, and you have no viable
>
> >
>
> > explanation.
>
>
>
> I have. Special creation.

Angelo, seja bem-vindo aqui. Por anos os eurpeos neste foro andam mangando dos americanos porque dizem que e so na America que o povo acredita na criacao especial. Agora temos um exemplo brasileiro. Muito obrigado.

Eu, como americano, desejo sinceramente que este desprezo pela razao e a ciencia se difunde amplamente em todos os paises com os quais a gente compete economicamente.

[eridanus]

yeah.
The more stupid are your competitors in the field of science the best.
Eri

[Mark Isaak]

On 3/3/14 2:33 PM, Angelo brazil wrote:
> Em segunda-feira, 3 de março de 2014 18h50min16s UTC-3, Steven L. escreveu:
>>

>> [... cyanobacteria ...]

>> It took me just 10 seconds to dig up a zillion articles on how
>> cyanobacteria evolved.
>>
>> Have a look. Maybe some of those articles will address your concerns.
>

> just finding scientific papers does not mean the question is resolved.

But it does mean that the question is closer to resolved than without
the science.

> Cianobacterias have many irreducible complex systems, which is clear
> evidence, they could not have evolved.

Where did you get the idea that irreducibly complex systems could not
evolve? Of course they can evolve. What they cannot do is evolve
solely by the addition of discrete parts while function remains
unchanged. But that is such a trivially small part of how evolution
acts that nobody but a fool would consider it a hindrance to evolving
irreducible complexity.

--
Mark Isaak eciton (at) curioustaxonomy (dot) net
"Keep the company of those who seek the truth; run from those who have
found it." - Vaclav Havel

[Angelo brazil]

Olá

eu na verdade sou suiço/italiano, então um europeu " da gema ", mas vivo no brasil. Então acho que isto é ainda melhor.....kkkkkk

ich bin schweizer aus zuerich, und glaube , dass Gott die Welt in sechs 24 Stunden tagen erschaffen hat :=))

io sono italiano, di genitori italiani ( ma come nato in svizzera, ho doppia cittadinanza ). Credo che dio ha creato tutto in sei giorni di 24 ore.

[RonO]

Nothing here is about how this data fits into your model. If you can't
fit it in, why should it be a problem for us? We just take the data as
it comes, what do you have to do? Deny it all.

How sad is that?

>
>> Many of the metabolic enzymes and electron transport mechanisms
>> were evolved in chemoautotrophs before photosynthesis evolved. We can
>> track the gene evolution by DNA sequence comparison.
>
> DNA sequence comparison can be interpreted as an example of the Creator’s wise and efficient use and re-use of genetic code in different creatures to accomplish a common and basic cellular function.......

I have yet to see anyone demonstrate that. Can you?

It is very simple to demonstrate that the pattern is due to descent with
modification because we can see it happening today. What you have to do
is show that your alternative is just as plausible or even plausible.
You have to show how your designer created such a pattern. It is sad
that you can't just rely on similarity or function because genes such as
histones show the same descent with modification in their DNA sequence,
but retain the same function and identical protein sequence. You have
to make up some reason why your designer did that when all vertebrates
have the same amino acid sequence for the protein product, but have
different DNA sequences consistent with descent with modification. It
isn't just all vertebrates, but all metazoan (multicellular animals) for
some genes there is only a single amino acid difference between a garden
pea and humans, but they have different DNA sequences due to the
degenerate code and descent with modification. We can't keep the
mutations from happening.

>
>
>>> As chemoautotrophs they would do well btw. too....
>
> that does not answer my question : what evolutionary advantage would there be for them to evolve photosynthesis ?

Beats me what argument you are trying to make. It was just a new way to
extract energy from the environment. The advantages are obvious.
Wouldn't you like to get energy directly from sunlight?

>
>> The ultraviolet radiation that you are talking about only penetrates a
>>
>> few inches into water. Do you understand what that means?
>
> It means that you think you have a escape explanation. You have not.

Deep sea vent evolution of life. No light even penetrates down there.

life may have evolved surrounded by rock. Do you know how life began on
this planet?

>
> - Sidney Fox, Klaus Dose on page 37 in Molecular Evolution and the Origin of Life.
>
> "the primitive ocean was steadily irradiated with a relatively high dose of solar ultraviolet light . . . A steady irradiation of a rather homogeneous solution results in degradative rather than synthetic reactions" Sidney Fox, Klaus Dose in Molecular Evolution and the Origin of Life.
>
> - Thaxton, Bradley, Olsen on page 66 of The Mystery of Life's Origin.
>
> "Based on the foregoing geochemical assessment, we conclude that both in the atmosphere and in the various water basins of the primitive earth, many destructive interactions would have so vastly diminished, if not altogether consumed, essential precursor chemicals, that chemical evolution rates would have been negligible. The soup would have been too dilute for polymerization to occur. Even local ponds for concentrating soup ingredients would have met with the same problem.
> Furthermore, no geological evidence indicates an organic soup, even a small organic pond, ever existed on this planet. It is becoming clear that however life began on earth, the usual conceived notion that life emerged from an oceanic soup of organic chemicals is a most implausible hypothesis. We may therefore with fairness call this scenario the myth of the prebiotic soup."

So what?

>
>> How does your model account for the apperent absence of the ozone layer?
>>
>> Or rather the absence of evidence for an ozone layer 3.4 billion years
>>
>> ago?
>
>
> yes, thats what i mean.

So your model doesn't account for it not being there billions of years
ago. So what good is your model? How do you account for the data? If
you claim that the data is wrong, why even cite it?

>
>
>>
>> means that there are still 350 billion years of life before that. How
>>
>> does your model account for that?
>
> that would be not enough for photosynthesis to evolve.

How do you know that?

>
>
>> So your alternative can't account for the data, and you have no viable
>>
>> explanation.
>
> I have. Special creation.

So you can't account for any of the data that you think is a problem for
biological evolution, and you expect people to believe that you have a
valid argument?

Ron Okimoto

[RonO]

You haven't gotten the word have you? ID was just a dishonest political
scam. No biological system has ever been demonstrated to be the IDiot
type of irreducible complex systems (IC). Behe was very specific in his
response to his critics, and made it clear that his type of IC was
unverifiable by normal science. He claimed that it wasn't just the
multiple interacting parts that made a system IC (he had to acknowledge
that such a system could evolve) but that the interacting parts had to
have a magic quality that he called "well matched." He could not define
"well matched" so that it could be quantified and determined to exist or
not, so that part of IC was untestable by science and Behe could never
demonstrate that it exists in a form that would make a system his type
of IC. He also claimed that his type of IC system could be identified
by the number of unselected steps in the evolution of the IC structure.
He acknowledged that a few such steps could happen by chance. His
type of IC system would require some unspecified higher number of such
steps, but he could not identify a single one or start to count them for
his supposedly IC systems. It is so tragically stupid because Behe
would have to know the evolutionary steps that went into creating a
flagellum in order to identify and count the unselected steps, so the
proposition was self defeating. So Behe's two propositions to keep his
notion of IDiot IC viable made IC scientifically untestable and
worthless for anything worth trying to do. All of that occurred around
14 years ago and nothing has changed. Have you read the Dover opinion
on teaching IDiocy in the public schools? Nothing has changed. IC is
still the claptrap that it always was.

So how do you know that there are many irreducible complex systems in a
Cyanobacteria when you can't demonstrate that even one such system
exists in all of nature? You can't just make stupid unverifiable claims
and expect to get anywhere. Just get Behe to tell you how well matched
he has determined his flagellar parts to be and how many unselected
steps in the evolution of the flagellum that he has identified so far.
His answers of don't know and zero should tell you something.

Ron Okimoto

[nyi...@bellsouth.net]

On Tuesday, March 4, 2014 3:16:20 PM UTC-5, broger...@gmail.com wrote:

> Eu, como americano, desejo sinceramente que este desprezo pela razao e a
> ciencia se difunde amplamente em todos os paises com os quais a gente
> compete economicamente.

Fortunately, New Google Groups has an automatic translator, and so the
above reads:

"I, as an American, I sincerely hope that this contempt for reason and science
is spreading widely in all countries with which we compete economically."

On the other hand, I, as an American, think you are setting a bad example
of hospitality by extrapolating what Angelo wrote to a contempt for reason
and science.

Would you also say Alan Feduccia has contempt for reason and science
because he endorses "birds descended from basal archosaurs" in the
teeth of the scientific orthodoxy which says they descended from
theropod dinosaurs?

If so, I'd like you to join the thread on this topic in sci.bio.paleontology
where so far neither Thrinaxodon nor erik simpson has been able to make
a good case for scientific orthodoxy.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sci.bio.paleontology/gbMH5ZK4jMk

Don't count on Harshman to champion scientific orthodoxy there. He is
boycotting Thrinaxodon because of Thrinaxodon's outrageous spamming
habits. I have mixed feelings about engaging him in debate but
as long as he stays on-topic in sci.bio.paleontology I'm not giving
up hope that she* will eventually reform.

*Thrinaxodon claims to be a female surgeon. Despite my skepticism
I will use feminine pronouns.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://www.math.sc.edu/~nyikos/
nyikos @ math.sc.edu

[Angelo brazil]

> You haven't gotten the word have you? ID was just a dishonest political
>
> scam. No biological system has ever been demonstrated to be the IDiot
>
> type of irreducible complex systems (IC).

then it might be peanuts to explain....... :

Shapiro, R., "Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth," Summit Books: New York NY, 1986, p.135)

"Genes and enzymes are linked together in a living cell two interlocked systems, each supporting the other. It is difficult to see how either could manage alone. Yet if we are to avoid invoking either a Creator or a very large improbability, we must accept that one occurred before the other in the origin of life. But which one was it? We are left with the ancient riddle: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? In its biochemical form, protein versus nucleic acid, the question is a new one, dating back no further than Watson and Crick and our knowledge of the structure and function of the gene. In its essence, however, the question is much older, and has provoked passion and acrimony that extend beyond the boundaries of science. In an earlier, broader form, the question asked whether the gene or protoplasm had primacy, not only in the origin but also in the development of life."



http://evidencepress.com/articles/ultimate-irreducible-complexity/

The cell is an interdependent functional city. We state, "The cell is the most detailed and concentrated organizational structure known to humanity. It is a lively microcosmic city, with factories for making building supplies, packaging centers for transporting the supplies, trucks that move the materials along highways, communication devices, hospitals for repairing injuries, a massive library of information, power stations providing usable energy, garbage removal, walls for protection and city gates for allowing certain materials to come and go from the cell." The notion of the theoretical first cell arising by natural causes is a perfect example of irreducibly complexity. Life cannot exist without many numerous interdependent complex systems, each irreducibly complex on their own, working together to bring about a grand pageant for life to exist.

Behe was very specific in his
>
> response to his critics, and made it clear that his type of IC was
>
> unverifiable by normal science. He claimed that it wasn't just the
>
> multiple interacting parts that made a system IC (he had to acknowledge
>
> that such a system could evolve)

had he ? how ?

but that the interacting parts had to
>
> have a magic quality that he called "well matched." He could not define
>
> "well matched" so that it could be quantified and determined to exist or
>
> not, so that part of IC was untestable by science and Behe could never
>
> demonstrate that it exists in a form that would make a system his type
>
> of IC.

thats a nice example of what " well matched " means :

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/09/mechanical_gear076801.html

He also claimed that his type of IC system could be identified
>
> by the number of unselected steps in the evolution of the IC structure.
>
> He acknowledged that a few such steps could happen by chance. His
>
> type of IC system would require some unspecified higher number of such
>
> steps, but he could not identify a single one or start to count them for
>
> his supposedly IC systems. It is so tragically stupid because Behe
>
> would have to know the evolutionary steps that went into creating a
>
> flagellum in order to identify and count the unselected steps, so the
>
> proposition was self defeating.

If for example a flagella has 40 subunits, it would theoretically take at least 40 evolutionary steps the get it in place.... And taking off one subunit, and the systems function is compromised, then you know it cannot be reduced to that number of parts.

So Behe's two propositions to keep his
>
> notion of IDiot IC viable made IC scientifically untestable and
>
> worthless for anything worth trying to do.

show me how macro evolution can be tested.....

All of that occurred around
>
> 14 years ago and nothing has changed. Have you read the Dover opinion
>
> on teaching IDiocy in the public schools? Nothing has changed. IC is
>
> still the claptrap that it always was.

What worth has the opinion of a judge in regard of micro biology ??
I think btw. Judge Jones wasn't wrong. I think the best would be, if they would do a separate class of origins, where all hipotheses and explanations of origins can be brought to the table, and each student can make its mind up individually. Nature is the evidence. The explanation of given phenomena is in nature philosophic , and when it comes to origins, in essence untestable.

[Angelo brazil]

> Nothing here is about how this data fits into your model. If you can't
>
> fit it in, why should it be a problem for us? We just take the data as
>
> it comes, what do you have to do? Deny it all.
>
>
>
> How sad is that?

If a given explanation comes to a dead end, what do you do ? you search somewhere else. That is what any rational person would do.....
Unfortunately, for the TOE, the roads that lead to a dead end are manyfold.

berlinksy brought it nicely to the point :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHeSaUq-Hl8

> I have yet to see anyone demonstrate that. Can you?

Can you demonstrate, evolution was the driving mechanism ?

> It is very simple to demonstrate that the pattern is due to descent with
>
> modification because we can see it happening today.

what we see today, is adaptation in microsteps. Nobody has been able to show that the barrier to macro does not exist. a dog remains always a dog.... from chihuaua, to german dog..... no exeptions.

> Beats me what argument you are trying to make. It was just a new way to
>
> extract energy from the environment. The advantages are obvious.
>
> Wouldn't you like to get energy directly from sunlight?

So you want to anthropomorphize evolution ? Evolution has no goals....

> So you can't account for any of the data that you think is a problem for
>
> biological evolution, and you expect people to believe that you have a
>
> valid argument?

You are entitled to believe whatever you want. My intellect however is fully satisfied to look at the evidence, and deduce special creation.

Otangelo Grasso

[nyi...@bellsouth.net]

On Monday, March 3, 2014 12:25:27 AM UTC-5, Angelo brazil wrote:
> Cyanobacteria are the prerequisite for complex life forms. They are said to
> exist already 3,5 bio years,

As you have seen, opinion is divided on this. The existence of
stromatolites is suggestive but by no means conclusive.

> and did not change morphologically.

That is even less certain, but the change might not have been very
great in some lines.

> They do oxygenic photosynthesis, where the energy of light is used to split
> water molecules into oxygen, protons, and electrons. It occurs in two stages.
>In the first stage, light-dependent reactions or light reactions capture the
>energy of light and use it to make the energy-storage molecules ATP and NADPH.
>During the second stage, the light-independent reactions use these products to
> capture and reduce carbon dioxide.

> They have ATP synthase nano-motors. How could ATP synthase "evolve" from
>something that needs ATP, manufactured by ATP synthase, to function? Absurd
> "chicken-egg" paradox!

Not necessarily. There might have been simpler precursors, such as
a ribozyme that did similar things less efficiently.

HOwever, if one looks at the multitude of enzymes, almost all of which
are protein, the idea of such a complete "protein enzyme takeover" in such a
short time (200 million years or less, probably a lot less because
one first has to get from prebiotic soup to a functioning cell complete
with DNA) is quite hard to explain.

In a total of ten years posting to talk.origins, I have repeatedly
challenged people to come up with a plausible scenario, and no one
has even tried to do one. Instead I get attacked for
not extrapolating backwards from biological evolution to prebiotic
evolution, although no one tries to show that the two are at all
similar.

What is even stranger is that when I cited a paper that does a pretty
plausible job of getting from a rather early stage of RNA world to
the threshold of the protein enzyme takeover, the person in this
newsgroup who most brags about being knowledgeable about biochemistry
attacked it as being outdated but gave no examples of more up to
date ideas.

> ATP Synthase is a molecular machine found in every living organisms. It
> serves as a miniature power-generator, producing an energy-carrying molecule,
> adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. The ATP synthase machine has many parts we
> recognize from human-designed technology, including a rotor, a stator, a
> camshaft or driveshaft, and other basic components of a rotary engine.

Minnich has testified about this in Kitzmiller v. Dover, and also about
the bacterial flagellum, on which he and his students experimented quite
a lot:

"We mutagenize the cells, if we hit a gene that's involved in function of the
flagellum, they can't swim, which is a scorable phenotype that we use. Reverse
engineering is then employed to identify all these genes. We couple this with
biochemistry to essentially rebuild the structure and understand what the
function of each individual part is. Summary, it is the process more akin to
design that propelled biology from a mere descriptive science to an
experimental science in terms of employing these techniques."

They experimentally showed it to be irreducibly complex:

"One mutation, one part knock out, it can't swim. Put that single gene back in
we restore motility. Same thing over here. We put, knock out one part, put a
good copy of the gene back in, and they can swim. By definition the system is
irreducibly complex. We've done that with all 35 components of the flagellum,
and we get the same effect."

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day20pm2.html

Earlier the same day, Minnich also testified about experiments on a
type three secretory system. It was he, an ID theorist, who first
studied experimentally the issue of whether the flagellum descended
from the secretory system, or vice versa, or whether both descended
from a different common ancestor.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day20pm.html

Remainder deleted (but thanks for the references), to be replied to later.

And welcome to talk.origins. Don't let vocal critics discourage you.

[nyi...@bellsouth.net]

On Tuesday, March 4, 2014 6:40:28 PM UTC-5, Ron O wrote:

> You haven't gotten the word have you? ID was just a dishonest political
> scam. No biological system has ever been demonstrated to be the IDiot
> type of irreducible complex systems (IC).

You need to be specific about what this "type" is. See testimony from
Minnich below for why.

> Behe was very specific in his
> response to his critics, and made it clear that his type of IC was
> unverifiable by normal science.

Only to your fanatical mind.

> He claimed that it wasn't just the
> multiple interacting parts that made a system IC (he had to acknowledge
> that such a system could evolve) but that the interacting parts had to
> have a magic quality that he called "well matched."

Nothing magical about it, any more than there is anything magical about
"life". There are degrees, but the examples Behe gives in _Darwin's
Black Box_ certainly satisfy it by any reasonable interpretation of the
words.

> He could not define
> "well matched" so that it could be quantified and determined to exist or
> not,

Let's see you quantify "alive". Would you say an Escherichia coli bacterium
is 100 times as much "alive" as a polio virus? Or would you say the latter is
not a form of life at all? Would you say you are ten times as alive as
someone in a coma, or 20.5 times as alive as someone in a Persistent Vegetative
state, or 99.5 times as alive as someone who is brain-dead?

Would you say a pine tree is twice as much "life" as you are, because it
reproduces without the need for another pine tree? or that a worker
termite is only 1/10th as much "life" as you because it cannot reproduce
at all?

> so that part of IC was untestable by science and Behe could never
> demonstrate that it exists in a form that would make a system his type
> of IC.

You claim to believe in a creator. Is its existence testable by science?
For that matter, is your claim that you believe in a creator testable by
science? After all, you have never told us about this creator in whom
you allegedly believe. Have you even told yourself anything about what it
is like?

> He also claimed that his type of IC system could be identified
> by the number of unselected steps in the evolution of the IC structure.

I've never seen any sign that Behe ever said anything remotely like this.
Can you provide a reference?

> He acknowledged that a few such steps could happen by chance. His
> type of IC system would require some unspecified higher number of such
> steps, but he could not identify a single one or start to count them for
> his supposedly IC systems.

I'm beginning to think that you want to impose your own concepts on Behe:
have a private definition for "Behe's kind of IC system" and also
to allege that he cannot identify it.

On the other hand, if you are willing to abide by his publicly stated
definition, then Minnich has testified that he has proven that the
bacterial flagellum is IC by Behe's own definition:

"One mutation, one part knock out, it can't swim. Put that single gene back in
we restore motility. Same thing over here. We put, knock out one part, put a
good copy of the gene back in, and they can swim. By definition the system is
irreducibly complex. We've done that with all 35 components of the flagellum,
and we get the same effect."

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day20pm2.html

<snip for focus>

> Just get Behe to tell you how well matched
> he has determined his flagellar parts to be

They are about as perfectly matched for swimming as it is possible for
molecules to be. Are you hate-driven enough to deny this?

> and how many unselected
> steps in the evolution of the flagellum that he has identified so far.
> His answers of don't know and zero should tell you something.

Those aren't his answers, they are your answers, and the second one
is utterly irrelevant to the issue of whether the flagellum is
IC by HIS definition. It is only relevant to the definition into
which you have been brainwashed through overexposure to the fanatics
who dominate Panda's Thumb.

Peter Nyikos

[John S. Wilkins]

Rubbish:

Here are three talk.origins alumni who argue that you can have selection
on less precise and accurate reproduction chemical cycles leading up to
high fidelity genes, without the "one came first" approach Behe
presupposes.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10539-011-9298-7

Email me for a PDF.
...


--
John S. Wilkins, Honorary Fellow, University of Melbourne
http://evolvingthoughts.net
But al be that he was a philosophre,
Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre

[Dai monie]

Your intellect looks, concludes goddidit, and that's it. I think that your creator god is not very satisfied with your use of what he has given you.

> what we see today, is adaptation in microsteps. Nobody has been able to show that the barrier to macro does not exist. a dog remains always a dog.... from chihuaua, to german dog..... no exeptions.

Except when it turns into a chihuahuam then it becomes something else.

I've got a simple question for you. You're so sure about the 'barrier to macro' that you will find it very easy to answer, I'm sure.

What is a species? How does one classify some things as a species and another thing as a variation?

[Burkhard]

On Tuesday, March 4, 2014 4:29:34 PM UTC, Angelo brazil wrote:

> <snip>

>
> DNA sequence comparison can be interpreted as an example of the Creator's wise and efficient use and re-use of genetic code in different creatures to accomplish a common and basic cellular function.......
>

Interesting. When an intelligent (human) designer re-uses material, then this
is for 2 reasons - scarcity of resources such as time, material and imagination and
b) a common function or purpose for the things so designed.

So you are arguing that God suffers from a scarcity of resources such as time,
material and imagination, and also has a common function in mind for humans,
chimps, geese, flatworm and broccoli?

A rather odd theology I'd say, but whatever works for you.

[Burkhard]

On Wednesday, March 5, 2014 3:10:41 AM UTC, Angelo brazil wrote:

> what we see today, is adaptation in microsteps. Nobody has been able to show that the barrier to macro does not exist.

Since yo are Swiss, maybe this analogy works for you: If you see
an avalanche coming your way, do you
a) run for cover, as it will hit you any minute or
b) stay calmly put, since nobody has been able to show that
an invisible barrier that will somehow stop the avalanche does not exist.

if your answer is 2, then natural selection will do the needful, I guess.

If we see a process in action (mutation leading to what you call micro-evolution,
then we can safely assume that it will continue, unless there is positive evidence
for something that is capable of stopping it. An analogy to Newton's first
law of motion really - an object not at rest will continue with a constant
velocity unless acted upon by external forces.

The mechanism to stop evolution would have to be exceedingly complex, a
form of restore point in the DNA that is itself unaffected (for unknown
reasons) by mutations, has a sort of blueprint of the "intended form" of
an organism, and stops (through means unknown) any more mutate after
a preset point. Nothing that we have discovered so far comes even close to
such a thing

> a dog remains always a dog.... from chihuaua, to german dog..... no exeptions.
>

Perfectly sound evolutionary thinking. Once in a clade, always in a clade. That's why
we remained apes, and fish.

If you found chihuahuas in the wild, and Great Danes, you would assume they are separate
species, they most certainly would not interbreed. It is only that you know that they
have the same origin that you group them together. Evolutionary biology
just extends that principle.


G Lung 'Copyright Exceptions for the Visually Impaired - International Perspective' (2004) [Conference paper at the WLIC IFLA Conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina August 2004] <http://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla70/papers/177e-Lung.htm>.

[RonO]

On 3/4/2014 8:26 PM, Angelo brazil wrote:
>
>> You haven't gotten the word have you? ID was just a dishonest political
>>
>> scam. No biological system has ever been demonstrated to be the IDiot
>>
>> type of irreducible complex systems (IC).
>
> then it might be peanuts to explain....... :
>
> Shapiro, R., "Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth," Summit Books: New York NY, 1986, p.135)
>
> "Genes and enzymes are linked together in a living cell two interlocked systems, each supporting the other. It is difficult to see how either could manage alone. Yet if we are to avoid invoking either a Creator or a very large improbability, we must accept that one occurred before the other in the origin of life. But which one was it? We are left with the ancient riddle: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? In its biochemical form, protein versus nucleic acid, the question is a new one, dating back no further than Watson and Crick and our knowledge of the structure and function of the gene. In its essence, however, the question is much older, and has provoked passion and acrimony that extend beyond the boundaries of science. In an earlier, broader form, the question asked whether the gene or protoplasm had primacy, not only in the origin but also in the development of life."
>
>
>
> http://evidencepress.com/articles/ultimate-irreducible-complexity/
>
> The cell is an interdependent functional city. We state, "The cell is the most detailed and concentrated organizational structure known to humanity. It is a lively microcosmic city, with factories for making building supplies, packaging centers for transporting the supplies, trucks that move the materials along highways, communication devices, hospitals for repairing injuries, a massive library of information, power stations providing usable energy, garbage removal, walls for protection and city gates for allowing certain materials to come and go from the cell." The notion of the theoretical first cell arising by natural causes is a perfect example of irreducibly complexity. Life cannot exist without many numerous interdependent complex systems, each irreducibly complex on their own, working together to bring about a grand pageant for life to exist.
>

So what? Where are your IC structures? How can you determine that they
are IC? That is your problem.

>
> Behe was very specific in his
>>
>> response to his critics, and made it clear that his type of IC was
>>
>> unverifiable by normal science. He claimed that it wasn't just the
>>
>> multiple interacting parts that made a system IC (he had to acknowledge
>>
>> that such a system could evolve)
>
> had he ? how ?

Behe acknowledged long ago that interacting parts was not enough to make
a system IC. I recall an instance in a discussion over at ARN (around
2002) where Behe was quoted about a branch falling between two rocks
creating an IC system by chance, but that wasn't his type of IC system.
None of the parts did the function by themselves and you had to get
them together to make the lever and fulcrum. The parts had to be "well
matched" and there needed to be other things such as a bunch of
unselected steps. These aspects cannot be studied because Behe doesn't
know what the unselected steps are, and he has no definition of "well
matched."

These things came out in the Dover trial. The judge referred to them as
being falsified, but they really are just deemed to be useless aspects
of IC that make the IC concept useless. If you can't determine if a
system is IC or not, why does it matter?

>
>
>
> but that the interacting parts had to
>>
>> have a magic quality that he called "well matched." He could not define
>>
>> "well matched" so that it could be quantified and determined to exist or
>>
>> not, so that part of IC was untestable by science and Behe could never
>>
>> demonstrate that it exists in a form that would make a system his type
>>
>> of IC.
>
> thats a nice example of what " well matched " means :
>
> http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/09/mechanical_gear076801.html

You are joking, right? Can you quantify it? Measure it? How was this
determined to be well matched enough to matter? Why go to the ID perps
for information when you know that they have lied to you for years about
the intelligent design scam?

These guys are the ones that have run the bait and switch scam on their
own creationist support base for over a decade. Anyone that needs the
science of intelligent design to teach in the public schools only gets a
switch scam that doesn't even mention that ID or IC or any of the ID
claptrap ever existed. No mention of IC in the obfuscation switch scam.
What does that tell you? They keep selling the ID nonsense, but what
does anyone get when they need it?

>
> He also claimed that his type of IC system could be identified
>>
>> by the number of unselected steps in the evolution of the IC structure.
>>
>> He acknowledged that a few such steps could happen by chance. His
>>
>> type of IC system would require some unspecified higher number of such
>>
>> steps, but he could not identify a single one or start to count them for
>>
>> his supposedly IC systems. It is so tragically stupid because Behe
>>
>> would have to know the evolutionary steps that went into creating a
>>
>> flagellum in order to identify and count the unselected steps, so the
>>
>> proposition was self defeating.
>
> If for example a flagella has 40 subunits, it would theoretically take at least 40 evolutionary steps the get it in place.... And taking off one subunit, and the systems function is compromised, then you know it cannot be reduced to that number of parts.

So what? Do you know what any of that means? If it means anything, why
isn't IC mentioned in the ID perps switch scam that the rubes get
instead of the ID science? Why doesn't this type of quantification mean
anything even to the ID perps that sell it to you?

>
>
> So Behe's two propositions to keep his
>>
>> notion of IDiot IC viable made IC scientifically untestable and
>>
>> worthless for anything worth trying to do.
>
> show me how macro evolution can be tested.....

We do it all the time with DNA. You may not understand it, but it does
work, and it is among the best evidence that we have when we couple it
with what we know about morphological differences and the fossil record.
All you have is denial. The technology exists so that if you had
enough time and money we could mix your extant family in with thousands
of strangers and we could determine the familial relationships. Why do
you think paternity test work? Why doesn't the technology apply when
two species diverge from each other? Your problem is that the
technology applies and you just have to deny it.

Just think about what you use the fossil record for. Wouldn't you like
to integrate all the data into your view of what happened instead of
depend on a lot of denial and claims that the data isn't any good. Just
look at how you use the cyanobacteria information. It doesn't really
help you because you have to deny that there were cyanobacteria 3
billion years ago. You only use it as the argument of the moment so
that you can get to the next useless bit of lies and distraction to make
yourself feel better about your beliefs.

Real science uses the data, you abuse the data.

>
>
>
> All of that occurred around
>>
>> 14 years ago and nothing has changed. Have you read the Dover opinion
>>
>> on teaching IDiocy in the public schools? Nothing has changed. IC is
>>
>> still the claptrap that it always was.
>
> What worth has the opinion of a judge in regard of micro biology ??
> I think btw. Judge Jones wasn't wrong. I think the best would be, if they would do a separate class of origins, where all hipotheses and explanations of origins can be brought to the table, and each student can make its mind up individually. Nature is the evidence. The explanation of given phenomena is in nature philosophic , and when it comes to origins, in essence untestable.

The opinion of the judge is only useful to see how IC is seen by someone
that had to judge it on its merits. Scientifically IC was dead and
useless long before the judge made his opinion known. Denial isn't
going to change that. The ID perps started running the bait and switch
scam over 2 years before Dover hit the fan. If they had the ID science
they could have put it forward years before, but instead gave the rubes
a stupid obfuscation scan instead of any wonderful ID science. The ID
perps themselves realized years before Dover what the descision was
going to be. Do you know what had happened in every instance where a
legislator or school board needed the science of intelligent design to
teach before the Dover case ever came up? Look into it.

Have you looked at the switch scam that the ID perps at the Discovery
Institute are selling instead of the science of intelligent design? You
seem to like their propaganda site (evolution news, they even have to
lie in the title of the site. Isn't it more like creationist news).

Why would the Discovery Institute sell such a bogus obfuscation scam if
they had some real science to sell instead? Why isn't IC mentioned as
one of the controversies in their switch scam? The plain and simple
fact is that IC isn't a scientific controversy. It never made it past
the untestable hypothesis stage. If the ID perps did not know that for
a fact do you think that they would leave IC out of their scientific
controversy list? Just think rationally for a few seconds and reality
might take hold. I doubt it.

Ron Okimoto

[Angelo brazil]

> What is a species? How does one classify some things as a species and another thing as a variation?

Species are a basic unit of biological and taxonomic classification.

Variation is, when species evolve certain variations upon selective pressure based for example on environmental changes. The galapagos finches are a example.

why these basic questions ?

and please, no adhoms.

[Angelo brazil]

Why should he not be economincal ?

[Angelo brazil]

> Since yo are Swiss, maybe this analogy works for you: If you see
>
> an avalanche coming your way, do you
>
> a) run for cover, as it will hit you any minute or
>
> b) stay calmly put, since nobody has been able to show that
>
> an invisible barrier that will somehow stop the avalanche does not exist.

what will i do :

a} run, and if i am frequently facing such challenges, maiby train to become
a better runner ( and eventually my kids will hereditate stronger legs )

or

b) evolve wings in order to fly away ??

> If we see a process in action (mutation leading to what you call micro-evolution,
>
> then we can safely assume that it will continue, unless there is positive evidence

unless there is no evidence for this. what life has, is a built in mechanism to adapt to the environment, but with limits.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23876611

The genome has traditionally been treated as a Read-Only Memory (ROM) subject to change by copying errors and accidents. In this review, I propose that we need to change that perspective and understand the genome as an intricately formatted Read-Write (RW) data storage system constantly subject to cellular modifications and inscriptions. Cells operate under changing conditions and are continually modifying themselves by genome inscriptions. These inscriptions occur over three distinct time-scales (cell reproduction, multicellular development and evolutionary change) and involve a variety of different processes at each time scale (forming nucleoprotein complexes, epigenetic formatting and changes in DNA sequence structure). Research dating back to the 1930s has shown that genetic change is the result of cell-mediated processes, not simply accidents or damage to the DNA. This cell-active view of genome change applies to all scales of DNA sequence variation, from point mutations to large-scale genome rearrangem

ents and whole genome duplications (WGDs). This conceptual change to active cell inscriptions controlling RW genome functions has profound implications for all areas of the life sciences.

> The mechanism to stop evolution would have to be exceedingly complex,

life IS complex. Exceedingly ? Why ?

[jillery]

So your argument is that economy of use is a hallmark of Creationism.
Then what of the profligate waste of genomic material used by
different species? For example, the cells of some salamanders contain
40 times as much DNA as the cells of humans.

[jillery]

Except there's nothing fixed about species. Almost all species that
ever lived are now extinct. And when different populations vary
enough, they are no longer the same species, the most obvious examples
being ring species. How do these facts fit into a Creationist model?

[John S. Wilkins]

Angelo brazil <audiov...@gmail.com> wrote:

> > What is a species? How does one classify some things as a species and
> > another thing as a variation?
>
> Species are a basic unit of biological and taxonomic classification.

No, "species" is the name given to some arbitrarily specified pattern in
the data. It is not a basic unit or it would not be further divisible.
It is not a theoretical unit, because no theory gives the same species
for all organisms, nor does it given species without major exceptions
like introgressive breeding, lateral transfer and the like. In effect,
saying "species are a basic unit" etc., is simply to say, "species are
species".

>
> Variation is, when species evolve certain variations upon selective
> pressure based for example on environmental changes. The galapagos
> finches are a example.

Again, a circular definition: variation is variation that isn't
specific.

>
> why these basic questions ?

I would warrant it is because the issues are hardly basic. There has
been a *lot* of debate among biologists about what counts as a species.
Some have even written extensive histories on the topic.

If you have a principled way to distinguish varieties from species, then
you will be widely cited and admired. So far, there are no such criteria
that work well even among small groups like, for example, primates.
>
> and please, no adhoms.

[alias Ernest Major]

On 05/03/2014 14:17, Angelo brazil wrote:
>
>> What is a species? How does one classify some things as a species and another thing as a variation?
>
> Species are a basic unit of biological and taxonomic classification.

That is not responsive to the intent of the question. How do you decide
whether two populations represent two different species, or two
varieties of one species?

>
> Variation is, when species evolve certain variations upon selective pressure based for example on environmental changes. The galapagos finches are a example.

The Galapagos finches are a group of 13 species classified in 4 genera.
So, they are not collectively an example of "variation". Did you intend
to refer instead to the work of the Grants on ground finches. But even
in this case it's not clearly just "variation" - see “The secondary
contact phase of allopatric speciation in Darwin’s finches”, Peter R.
Grant and B. Rosemary Grant, PNAS 106(46): 20141-20148 (2009)

>
> why these basic questions ?
>
> and please, no adhoms.
>

--
alias Ernest Major

[Robert Camp]

Depends, of course, upon the god of which you speak. Since you cited
Special Creation earlier as a viable explanation for life (which it
isn't, since it doesn't actually "explain" anything) it's reasonable to
conclude that you favor the god of Christianity, who in many cases is
thought to be omnipotent. Such a deity has no need of economy.

But all of that is neither here nor there, since it was you who
suggested that efficiency and re-use might be approaches employed by
"the Creator." The justification of that speculation is your obligation.
So the real question is, Why should he be economical?

[Mark Isaak]

On 3/4/14 6:26 PM, Angelo brazil wrote:
> [snip all to avoid the hassle of reformatting]

Angelo,

You are still referring to irreducible complexity as if it were some
problem for evolution. I ask again: Why? Are you really unaware that
IC can easily evolve? That IC was *predicted* to arise via evolution?
You mentioned "well-matched parts". What better way to get parts
matching well than to make multiple small adjustments to them? And
that's the sort of change that evolution does daily. You spoke of the
removal of a "subunit". Why would you even consider such a thing?
Biology is not restricted to adding or subtracting units which are
arbitrarily defined by writers. You also need to consider the removal
of a small part of the subunit, and a slight change to part of the
subunit, and a slight change to another part of the subunit, and a
change to a neighboring unit which changes the function of the subunit,
and about a billion trillion other possible changes, and if your goal is
to show how evolution is impossible, then you need to show how each and
every one of those possible changes cannot lead to the given result.
Even Behe knows that that is impossible. Behe, at least when he is
writing about IC, is not a biologist; he is a propagandist. He is
selling you a package that he knows is rotten, full of holes, and
completely worthless. Don't buy it.

[walksalone]

Robert Camp <rober...@hotmail.com> wrote in
news:lf7gsu$qai$1...@dont-email.me:

> On 3/5/14, 6:18 AM, Angelo brazil wrote:
>> Em quarta-feira, 5 de março de 2014 08h12min59s UTC-3, Burkhard
>> escreveu:
>>> On Tuesday, March 4, 2014 4:29:34 PM UTC, Angelo brazil wrote:

snip

Pardon the drive by?

>>> So you are arguing that God suffers from a scarcity of resources
>>> such as time,
>>>
>>> material and imagination, and also has a common function in mind
>>> for humans,
>>>
>>> chimps, geese, flatworm and broccoli?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> A rather odd theology I'd say, but whatever works for you.
>>
>> Why should he not be economincal ?
>
> Depends, of course, upon the god of which you speak. Since you cited
> Special Creation earlier as a viable explanation for life (which it
> isn't, since it doesn't actually "explain" anything) it's reasonable
> to conclude that you favor the god of Christianity, who in many cases
> is thought to be omnipotent. Such a deity has no need of economy.

Not really. It seems most archaic society's had their own creator god.
Granted, in this case, with the arrogance of those that follow the
revealed gods of the desert, the noun is capitalized & therefore, it's
their pet 99.99^1000% of the time.

A quick list of creator gods:
ai' tojon
adamas
agu'gux
akongo
alatangana
allah
amma
amma
amun
antu
anu
aondo
apap
aramazd
archonssaboth
arebati
ataa naa nygongmo
aten atl atua fafine
atua i raropuka atum avalokitesvara awonawilona
ayi' uru'n toyo,n baiame brahma bulai
bulgang bumba cacoch cagu
cakra ce acatl cghene
chiconahuiehecatl
chnum
chul tatic chites vaneg
cihuacoatl quilaztli
cipacctonal citalatonac citalicue dharma
dyaus pitar e alom e quaholom ehecatl
el elohim elkunirsa ellel
emli hin enki epimetheus e'ros
es fidi mukullu hachacyum hao
Hindu hiranyagarbha hun hunapa hunab ku
hurracan ihoioi iksvaku il
imana imra ipalnemoani isten
isten itzam zacal nok iusaas izanangi no
kami
iznami no kami jehova jok julunggul
ka tyelo kaia kalunga kami musubi
no kami
kasisia kitanitowit kucumatz kukulkan
kumarbi kumokums kun tu ban pok kun tu bzan
po
kyumbe kwoth laima lesa
leza libanza lisa lodur
lowalangi mahatala makemake maheo
maito mal malamanganga'e
malamangangaifo
manitu manohel toehel manu marduk
mayon mbomba mbotumbo mehet weret
mkulumncandi moma mula djadi mungo
na'ininwn na' pe nahui ollin nainuema
nammu nanahuatl naeau narayana
nareu ne'nenkicex nediyon nefertuim
neith ngai niamye nu gua
nu kua nudimmud nut nyame
nzapa o kuni nushi no mikoto
ocelotl oduduwa ohoroxtotil olodumare
orisa nla orisania pachacmac panao
pemba pore prajapati promethus
prthu ptah purusa qamai'ts
quat quetzelcatl quetzacoatl quiahuti
raluvimbha re rigenmucha rubanga
ruhganga sa samael seyon
shomde sirao siva somtus
suku taka mi mitsubi no kami
tangara tate tawa te aka la roe
te manva roa te tanga engae teharonhiawagon
telavelik tenanto'mni tenanto'mwan thareon
tiamat tiki tino taata tirawa
tlaltchuti tloque nahauque tomor tomwo'get
tontiuh toro tororut totilma'il
trumual tsunigoab tvastar
umanssi ashi kabi hiko ji no kami
umvelinkwangi ungud unkulunkulu unumbote
unumbotte uru'n ajy toyo'n vahguru vairacocha
venda vile & ve visnu visvakarman
waka wakan tonka wakonda weir kumbamba
ya'qhicin yaldaboth yaro yehl
yemekonji yng yoalechutli yoalli
echecatl

A list that is incomplete, but does indicate the desert gods are not the
only ones accepted by humanity.

>
> But all of that is neither here nor there, since it was you who
> suggested that efficiency and re-use might be approaches employed by
> "the Creator." The justification of that speculation is your
> obligation. So the real question is, Why should he be economical?

A penny saved is a penny earned?

walksalone who has a passing interest in the gods, goddesses, &
supernatural patrons of humanity. One of these days I may be familiar
enough with them that I could hold an intelligent discussion with an
actual mythologist. yeah, right, dream on.


"You know you have created God in your own image, when you find
that your God hates the same people that you do."
Author unknown?

[nyi...@bellsouth.net]

On Wednesday, March 5, 2014 1:31:17 AM UTC-5, John S. Wilkins wrote:
> Angelo brazil <audiov...@gmail.com> wrote:


Ron Okimoto posted rubbish, which I've identified as such in direct
reply to it:

> > > You haven't gotten the word have you? ID was just a dishonest political
> > > scam. No biological system has ever been demonstrated to be the IDiot
> > > type of irreducible complex systems (IC).

Angelo weighed in with:

> > Shapiro, R., "Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on
> > Earth," Summit Books: New York NY, 1986, p.135)

> > "Genes and enzymes are linked together in a living cell two interlocked
> > systems, each supporting the other. It is difficult to see how either
> > could manage alone. Yet if we are to avoid invoking either a Creator or a
> > very large improbability, we must accept that one occurred before the
> > other in the origin of life. But which one was it? We are left with the
> > ancient riddle: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? In its
> > biochemical form, protein versus nucleic acid, the question is a new one,

...and I've proposed an answer.

Now we skip down to John Wilkins labeling something "Rubbish" but NOT
the actual rubbish Okimoto posted.

> Rubbish:

> Here are three talk.origins alumni

Was that colon a Freudian slip?

(1) you aren't a talk.origins alumnus, not the way we Yanks use the
word "alumnus" at any rate, yet you are one of only THREE authors:
you, Clem Stanyon [an unknown as far as I'm concerned]
and Ian Musgrave, whose FAQ on abiogenesis is amateurish and badly
outdated.

(2) your joint oeuvre in philosophy of biology is also amateurish
and badly outdated. Your last reference to Szathmary, 1997, came long
before the following paper, whose very title should have caught
your attention long ago:

Vera Vasas, Eors Szathmary and Mauro Santos, "Lack of evolvability in
self-sustaining autocatalytic networks: A constraint on the metabolism-first
path to the origin of life."
PNAS, January 4, 2010
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/4/1470

After some heavy mathematical notation that even I have to wade through
very slowly, the conclusion is more down to earth. Here is a pertinent
excerpt:

"Large chemical systems may be open-ended without evolving and, conversely,
systems with limited heredity could potentially evolve without being
open-ended. The population (limited heredity narrative unfolds) can revisit
previous states randomly or driven by a limit cycle, depending on parameters
such as population size, selective values, and mutation rates. But we have
shown here that even this tale can hardly be applied to compositional
assemblies simply because terms like "selective values" are devoid of meaning
in this context.

I've separated the punch "line" from the rest of the paragraph:

"The unfortunate usage of words with clear Darwinian
connotations--such as adaptation, fitness landscape,
and coevolution (28, 35, 36)--in the realm of
pre-Darwinian systems cannot be overemphasized."

> who argue that you can have selection
> on less precise and accurate reproduction chemical cycles leading up to
> high fidelity genes, without the "one came first" approach Behe
> presupposes.

Better re-visit those arguments after absorbing the PNAS article.

> http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10539-011-9298-7
> Email me for a PDF.

It came up automatically when I pasted the link into my browser.

> John S. Wilkins, Honorary Fellow, University of Melbourne
> http://evolvingthoughts.net
>
> But al be that he was a philosophre,
> Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre

And hadde no inklinge of what Szathmary hadde donne since 1997. :-)

[Robert Camp]

On 3/5/14 8:25 AM, walksalone wrote:
> Robert Camp <rober...@hotmail.com> wrote in
> news:lf7gsu$qai$1...@dont-email.me:
>
>> On 3/5/14, 6:18 AM, Angelo brazil wrote:
>>> Em quarta-feira, 5 de março de 2014 08h12min59s UTC-3, Burkhard
>>> escreveu:
>>>> On Tuesday, March 4, 2014 4:29:34 PM UTC, Angelo brazil wrote:
>
> snip
> Pardon the drive by?
>
>>>> So you are arguing that God suffers from a scarcity of resources
>>>> such as time,
>>>>
>>>> material and imagination, and also has a common function in mind
>>>> for humans,
>>>>
>>>> chimps, geese, flatworm and broccoli?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> A rather odd theology I'd say, but whatever works for you.
>>>
>>> Why should he not be economincal ?
>>
>> Depends, of course, upon the god of which you speak. Since you cited
>> Special Creation earlier as a viable explanation for life (which it
>> isn't, since it doesn't actually "explain" anything) it's reasonable
>> to conclude that you favor the god of Christianity, who in many cases
>> is thought to be omnipotent. Such a deity has no need of economy.
>
> Not really.

"Not really," what? Not really that an omnipotent god has no need of
economy, not really that the Christian god is often considered
omnipotent, not really that this might be the god the poster favors? In
all of those cases I beg to differ.

Normally I wouldn't respond to a post after two words, but what followed
your "Not really" doesn't really seem to have anything to do with what I
was talking about.

[Mike Duffy]

On Wed, 5 Mar 2014 03:24:00 -0800 (PST), Burkhard wrote:

> ... If you see an avalanche coming your way, do you

> a) run for cover,
> b) stay calmly put,

Dig in under the level of the snow surface to avoid blunt trauma injury.

Get into a crouch to create a space below you. It will probably fill with
snow, but after the snow has stopped flowing and formed a more-or-less
solid covering you might be able to clear some breathing space in front of
your face. If you are not too deep you might be able to dig your way out by
compressing snow beneath you. This is difficult with broken arms and legs.

[Walter Bushell]

In article <d482df52-77a7-40e1...@googlegroups.com>,

Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk> wrote:

> If you found chihuahuas in the wild, and Great Danes, you would assume they
> are separate
> species, they most certainly would not interbreed. It is only that you know
> that they
> have the same origin that you group them together. Evolutionary biology
> just extends that principle.

But under the wrong circumstances they will interbreed, if the union
is successful the question will be "Who put him up to it?".

--
Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greed. Me.

[erik simpson]

This advice recalls to me a South Park episode I saw a few years ago, except
that it depicted people threatened by a lava flow from a volcano. They 'ducked
and covered' with predictable results. Your advice here is NOT what is
generally considered appropriate in an avalanche.

[Walter Bushell]

In article <iieeh9hvudtginhd0...@4ax.com>,

jillery <69jp...@gmail.com> wrote:

> So your argument is that economy of use is a hallmark of Creationism.
> Then what of the profligate waste of genomic material used by
> different species? For example, the cells of some salamanders contain
> 40 times as much DNA as the cells of humans.

So perhaps salamanders are more complex than humans? Plants have huge
genomes because they need to specify a huge arsenal of bioactive
agents.

[erik simpson]

On Wednesday, March 5, 2014 9:48:07 AM UTC-8, Walter Bushell wrote:
> <...>

>
> So perhaps salamanders are more complex than humans? Plants have huge
>
> genomes because they need to specify a huge arsenal of bioactive
>
> agents.
>
>

I hope no one suggests it's because salamanders are older than people.

[Steven L.]

On 3/3/2014 5:33 PM, Angelo brazil wrote:
> Em segunda-feira, 3 de março de 2014 18h50min16s UTC-3, Steven L. escreveu:
>> On 3/3/2014 3:31 PM, Angelo brazil wrote:
>>
>>>
>>
>>>> They evolved from chemoautotrophs over a period of around 2 billion
>>
>>>>
>>
>>>> years.
>>
>>>
>>
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolites
>>
>>> Stromatolites provide the most ancient records of life on Earth by fossil remains which date from more than 3.5 billion years ago.
>>
>>>
>>
>>> So they had not 2 bio years to evolve.
>>
>>
>>
>> I have a general suggestion:
>>
>>
>>
>> Before you conclude that you have spotted a flaw in evolutionary biology
>>
>> that all the world's evolutionary biologists have missed,
>>
>>
>>
>> try searching Google Scholar to find out whether anybody else thought of
>>
>> it before you did.
>>
>>
>>
>> It took me just 10 seconds to dig up a zillion articles on how
>>
>> cyanobacteria evolved.
>>
>>
>>
>> Have a look. Maybe some of those articles will address your concerns.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Steven L.
>
> just finding scientific papers does not mean the question is resolved.

Don't you owe it to yourself to understand what's already been done
about the question?

Whenever I've had an issue I've cared strongly about, I've researched it.

I didn't always like the answer--I found out that my chronic kidney
failure cut my life expectancy by two-thirds--but at least I got my answer.

You may not like the answers you get either. But at least you'll get
them. And you'll have the feeling of knowing that you learned something
on your own.


--
Steven L.

[Steven L.]

On 3/4/2014 4:26 PM, Mark Isaak wrote:

> On 3/3/14 2:33 PM, Angelo brazil wrote:
>> Em segunda-feira, 3 de março de 2014 18h50min16s UTC-3, Steven L.
>> escreveu:
>>>

>>> [... cyanobacteria ...]

>>> It took me just 10 seconds to dig up a zillion articles on how
>>> cyanobacteria evolved.
>>>
>>> Have a look. Maybe some of those articles will address your concerns.
>>

>> just finding scientific papers does not mean the question is resolved.
>

> But it does mean that the question is closer to resolved than without
> the science.
>
>> Cianobacterias have many irreducible complex systems, which is clear
>> evidence, they could not have evolved.
>
> Where did you get the idea that irreducibly complex systems could not
> evolve? Of course they can evolve.

Many human-engineered structures are irreducibly complex, cantilevered
structures in particular:

http://tinyurl.com/lnh94e4

How would Behe explain how this structure got built?


--
Steven L.

[Steven L.]

On 3/4/2014 9:26 PM, Angelo brazil wrote:
>
>> You haven't gotten the word have you? ID was just a dishonest political
>>
>> scam. No biological system has ever been demonstrated to be the IDiot
>>
>> type of irreducible complex systems (IC).
>

> then it might be peanuts to explain....... :
>

> Shapiro, R., "Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth," Summit Books: New York NY, 1986, p.135)
>

> "Genes and enzymes are linked together in a living cell two interlocked systems, each supporting the other. It is difficult to see how either could manage alone. Yet if we are to avoid invoking either a Creator or a very large improbability, we must accept that one occurred before the other in the origin of life. But which one was it? We are left with the ancient riddle: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? In its biochemical form, protein versus nucleic acid, the question is a new one, dating back no further than Watson and Crick and our knowledge of the structure and function of the gene. In its essence, however, the question is much older, and has provoked passion and acrimony that extend beyond the boundaries of science. In an earlier, broader form, the question asked whether the gene or protoplasm had primacy, not only in the origin but also in the development of life."
>
>
>
> http://evidencepress.com/articles/ultimate-irreducible-complexity/

This is another example of what I meant:

It has now been 27 years since that book was published.

Did it ever occur to you that perhaps biological science had advanced
since that time, and that biologists might now have decent hypotheses as
to how abiogenesis and replication could have occurred without separate
enzyme molecules to catalyze the reactions?

I could give you some pointers, but I'm not going to. I'm going to
suggest that you *do your own research*. Exercise is good for you.



--
Steven L.

[Angelo brazil]

The so-called onion test, or indeed the "C-value enigma," is predicated on unsupportable assumptions about the physiological effects of -- and/or requirements for -- larger genomes, many of which are contradicted by the scientific evidence. As we learn ever more about the nature and functional inter-dependency of the genome, as the extent of genomic "dark matter" continues to shrink, those who continue to advocate the view that the preponderance of our genome is non-functional should find these facts disconcerting.

- See more at: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/11/why_the_onion_test_fails_as_an052321.html#sthash.PB2GUrJw.dpuf

[Angelo brazil]

http://creation.com/birds-of-a-feather-don-t-breed-together

[Angelo brazil]

> So the real question is, Why should he be economical?

its not a question of if he should be, or should not be. Its just a matter of, that he CAN be.

[nyi...@bellsouth.net]

On Tuesday, March 4, 2014 4:26:05 PM UTC-5, Mark Isaak wrote:
> On 3/3/14 2:33 PM, Angelo brazil wrote:
> > Em segunda-feira, 3 de março de 2014 18h50min16s UTC-3, Steven L. escreveu:

> >> [... cyanobacteria ...]
>
> >> It took me just 10 seconds to dig up a zillion articles on how
> >> cyanobacteria evolved.

And I suspect all of the RELEVANT ones have to do with a summary of WHAT
happened rather than HOW or WHY it happened.

The irrelevant ones would be due to hits for just ONE of "cyanobacteria"
and "evolved" appearing somewhere in the "zillion - 10" articles.

> >> Have a look. Maybe some of those articles will address your concerns.

I wish I had a dollar for every time I've seen this standard piece
of totally unhelpful "advice".

> > just finding scientific papers does not mean the question is resolved.

> But it does mean that the question is closer to resolved than without
> the science.

Yeah, like a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,
after which it is closer to resolved before the single step was taken.

You belong squarely to the "humanities culture" rather than the "sciences
culture" [terminology immortalized by C.P. Snow] in everything I've
seen from you, except for one foray into an analogue of the Drake
Equation [a pretty good one, I must admit] so I'm sure
you've seen the old saying that forms most of the first line
of the preceding paragraph many times.

> > Cianobacterias have many irreducible complex systems, which is clear
> > evidence, they could not have evolved.

Unfortunately, Angelo has not kept up even with Michael Behe, but
is relying on popularizations -- or anti-ID propaganda as to what
IC is all about.

> Where did you get the idea that irreducibly complex systems could not

> evolve? Of course they can evolve. What they cannot do is evolve
> solely by the addition of discrete parts while function remains
> unchanged. But that is such a trivially small part of how evolution
> acts

...that one must look for roundabout ways to evolve, and Behe
talked about this already here:

As the complexity of the system increases, though,
the possibility of such an indirect route drops
precipitously. And as the number of unexplained,
irreducibly complex biological systems increases,
our confidence that Darwin's criterion of failure
has been met skyrockets towards the maximum that
science allows.
--_Darwin's Black Box_, p. 40


> that nobody but a fool would consider it a hindrance to evolving
> irreducible complexity.

Non sequitur.

> Mark Isaak eciton (at) curioustaxonomy (dot) net

I used to think that the "eciton" was a sign that you were an
entomologist, but it appears from your website that you are,
at best, an etymologist.

Note to others:

"Eciton" is a genus of driver ants [or is it Army ants? anyway,
they are both Doryles with similar life styles].

Peter Nyikos

[alias Ernest Major]

On 05/03/2014 17:48, Walter Bushell wrote:
> In article <iieeh9hvudtginhd0...@4ax.com>,
> jillery <69jp...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> So your argument is that economy of use is a hallmark of Creationism.
>> Then what of the profligate waste of genomic material used by
>> different species? For example, the cells of some salamanders contain
>> 40 times as much DNA as the cells of humans.
>
> So perhaps salamanders are more complex than humans? Plants have huge
> genomes because they need to specify a huge arsenal of bioactive
> agents.
>

http://www.genomicron.evolverzone.com/2007/04/onion-test/

--
alias Ernest Major

[Mike Duffy]

On Wed, 5 Mar 2014 09:20:28 -0800 (PST), erik simpson wrote:

> Your advice here is NOT ... appropriate in an avalanche.

The context of the original question was that avoiding the avalanche was
impossible. I assumed that preventing injury before being buried is
preferable to just being buried.

What action do you suggest?

[Angelo brazil]

> You are still referring to irreducible complexity as if it were some
>
> problem for evolution. I ask again: Why?

Because it defies the very tenets of the ToE. Its not for nothing, that it has been attacked violently in the last almost 20 years, without success.

Are you really unaware that
>
> IC can easily evolve?

how ?

That IC was *predicted* to arise via evolution?

how ?

>
> You mentioned "well-matched parts". What better way to get parts
>
> matching well than to make multiple small adjustments to them?

how would natural selection forsee for example the final function of nitrogenase ? why should it copy/past, co-opting parts from other biological systems , to get the job done ? Copying, modifying, and combining together preexisting parts , already operating in other systems ? Could it be, that super evolutionary mechanisms would act that way, borrowing parts from other biological systems and assemble them to a molecular sledge-hammer , perfectly ordered, with perfect fits, and new functions,with the help of saint time , that would do that miracle ? and , worse, make it happen twice, independently ?

http://elife.elifesciences.org/content/2/e01102

The subsurface organism has the capacity for nitrogen fixation using a nitrogenase distinct from that in Cyanobacteria, suggesting nitrogen fixation evolved separately in the two lineages.

And
>
> that's the sort of change that evolution does daily. You spoke of the
>
> removal of a "subunit". Why would you even consider such a thing?
>
> Biology is not restricted to adding or subtracting units which are
>
> arbitrarily defined by writers. You also need to consider the removal
>
> of a small part of the subunit, and a slight change to part of the
>
> subunit, and a slight change to another part of the subunit, and a
>
> change to a neighboring unit which changes the function of the subunit,
>
> and about a billion trillion other possible changes, and if your goal is
>
> to show how evolution is impossible, then you need to show how each and
>
> every one of those possible changes cannot lead to the given result.

Lets take a example of Chlorophyll a. It takes 17 enzymes to produce it. At least eight enzymes are unique, only used in this biochemical pathway.

i have tracked it, and illustrated the whole pathway. You can see it here :

http://elshamah.heavenforum.org/t1546-chlorophyll-biosynthesis-pathway

What explanation do scientific papers present ?

http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/154/2/434.full

However, all modern oxygenic photosynthetic organisms now require O2 as an oxidant at several steps in the pathway. This has been explained in terms of gene replacement of the genes coding for the enzymes at these steps, with the result that the overall pathway is unchanged but the enzymes at key steps are completely different in different groups of phototrophs (Raymond and Blankenship, 2004).

Gene replacement. Cool. So evolution selects to " replace " the genes and the job gets done. Amazing.....

But, why after all, would evolution produce a series of enzymes that only generate useless intermediates until all of the enzymes needed for the end product have evolved ? Not only that : unless the whole photosynthesis apparatus is in place, Chlorophyill has no function. And where did it get the energy from, if the ATP Synthase motor ( another irreducible complex system ) was not in place, fully functioning ? And how could it be feed with protons, if the thylakoide membrane was not fully formed ? Photosynthesis is after all not only made of irreducible complex systems, like the Photosystem I and II, Rubisco, etc. but the whole process is interdependent, that means, if one enzyme or protein complex is not in place, the whole process ceased to function. The only solution out of this is, that the whole system is made all together at once, with the full mechanism in place.

[nyi...@bellsouth.net]

On Wednesday, March 5, 2014 1:03:05 PM UTC-5, Steven L. wrote:

> http://tinyurl.com/lnh94e4

> How would Behe explain how this structure got built?

Isn't it obvious? Intelligent design.

Peter Nyikos

[Greg Guarino]

On 3/4/2014 7:50 PM, nyi...@bellsouth.net wrote:
> "I, as an American, I sincerely hope that this contempt for reason and science
> is spreading widely in all countries with which we compete economically."
>
> On the other hand, I, as an American, think you are setting a bad example
> of hospitality by extrapolating what Angelo wrote to a contempt for reason
> and science.

I suspect he was tweaking him a little, but if you need better evidence
of Angelo's attitude toward science, perhaps Google (or first year
Italian) can help you with this quote:

"Credo che dio ha creato tutto in sei giorni di 24 ore".

---
This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active.
http://www.avast.com

[Angelo brazil]

but if you need better evidence
>
> of Angelo's attitude toward science, perhaps Google (or first year

Let me correct you : that is my philosophical deduction, which i regard as the best explanation based on the scientific evidence we observe in nature.

[jillery]

On Wed, 05 Mar 2014 12:48:07 -0500, Walter Bushell <pr...@panix.com>
wrote:

>In article <iieeh9hvudtginhd0...@4ax.com>,
> jillery <69jp...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> So your argument is that economy of use is a hallmark of Creationism.
>> Then what of the profligate waste of genomic material used by
>> different species? For example, the cells of some salamanders contain
>> 40 times as much DNA as the cells of humans.
>
>So perhaps salamanders are more complex than humans? Plants have huge
>genomes because they need to specify a huge arsenal of bioactive
>agents.

Or more likely, the amount of DNA in species' cells has little to do
with complexity, and economy has little to do with Creationism.

[jillery]

Since God can do anything, then Creation as explanation is
meaningless.

[Greg Guarino]

What sort of evidence could possibly support "sei giorni di 24 ore"?
Does your philosophical deduction also support "seimila fa"?

If so, I think that scientists is practically every discipline would
disagree.

[Angelo brazil]

God cannot do anything. Creation as explanation is a alternative that is worth to consider.

[Robert Camp]

On 3/5/14, 10:30 AM, Angelo brazil wrote:
>
>> So the real question is, Why should he be economical?
>
> its not a question of if he should be, or should not be. Its just a matter of, that he CAN be.

And that observation leaves your original point about how DNA sequence
comparison can be interpreted completely irrelevant.

[Greg Guarino]

A language correction:

On 3/5/2014 3:50 PM, Greg Guarino wrote:
> On 3/5/2014 3:25 PM, Angelo brazil wrote:
>> but if you need better evidence
>>>
>>> of Angelo's attitude toward science, perhaps Google (or first year
>>
>> Let me correct you : that is my philosophical deduction, which i
>> regard as the best explanation based on the scientific evidence we
>> observe in nature.
>>
>>
> What sort of evidence could possibly support "sei giorni di 24 ore"?

> Does your philosophical deduction also support "seimil'anni fa"?

[Angelo brazil]

> > What sort of evidence could possibly support "sei giorni di 24 ore"?
>
> > Does your philosophical deduction also support "seimil'anni fa"?

I think its more than that. How much more, i don't know.

[Dai monie]

I have a comment/question. The IC argument seems to rely solely on a linear evolutionary path. That is, we start with A, we add B to get A+B, and finally we have A+B+C+D. It then argues that E is IC, that is, E is not equal to A+B+C+D. The argument is then that it cannot have been made by adding little bits (B,C,D) to A. [This is, to me, the most accurate interpretation I can give it].

However, this relies solely on a linear path from A to E. However, it seems to me that we could have also gone to another point first, viz. a point where we have E with added parts, and then through disuse we could have removed those extra parts to get to E. That is a valid evolutionary pathway that does not require us to find E by means of adding to A; We can get from A to H by adding, and then from H to E by removing; the pathway seems valid, and the IC argument is bypassed.

Two questions then: First off, is my first paragraph representing the argument of IC correct? Second, is the second paragraph containing a possible counter argument also valid?

[erik simpson]

It's generally agreed that trying to 'swim' and keep your head above the snow
is the best course of action. Get rid of skis or snowshoes and pack.

If you're buried, your life expectancy is significantly reduced. If you're being buried, trying to keep breathing space in front of your face will give you a little more time, but depending of the density of the snow your probability of survival is small unless you're dug out soon. Buried for a
hour or more is most likely fatal, less time if the snow is wet and heavy.

Best of all is to take an avalanche awareness course, and avoid the situation
in the first place. If you're caught in a big avalanche your chances aren't good. Some people carry avalanche beacons so rescuers (if they're around and
have compatible beacons) can find them faster.

[jillery]

On Wed, 5 Mar 2014 10:17:43 -0800 (PST), Angelo brazil

The author of your cite discusses a number of possible "purposes" for
an apparent overabundance of DNA; to slow down transcription and
cellular development, to support alternative splicing, to provide
transcription factors, as a limiting factor in self-recognition, or as
structural scaffolding of the nucleus.

Whether his expressed purposes are legitimate, they aren't relevant to
your argument above. Your point, and my counter-point, has nothing to
do with "non-functional" DNA. It has to do with using DNA
economically, in order to support your claim for Creationism.

I suppose it could be argued that using DNA for multiple purposes is
good economy, but using DNA as scaffolding is analogous to building a
house out of gold. It would be a seriously inefficient and
inappropriate application of the material. The other possible
purposes the author provides are equally ad-hoc.

In any case, if your Creator used such creative DNA bookkeeping with
the salamander, he could have done the same thing with humans, and all
other species. That would be consistent with your line of reasoning
above. But species' C-values show that's not the case. It seems that
your Creator can't make up its mind how to design.

[Angelo brazil]

We can get from A to H by adding, and then from H to E by removing; the pathway seems valid, and the IC argument is bypassed.

The situation remains the same : how do you get from A to H by adding ? Just as example : plants do not have Phycobilismoes light harvesting complexes. Cyanobacteria however do have them, but do have also external light harvesting complexes LH2 . Its said that plants are a result of endosymbiosis with cyanobacteria. And so, lost later on phycobylisomes, and remained only with the LH2's in the thykaloids. Photosynthesis in Cyanobacteria is enormously complex, and many features, even after decades of study, are not fully understood. How did Cyanobacteria evolve the protection mechanism of nonphotochemical quenching named qE, that is rapidly turned on and off through a feedback loop , in order to be able to dissipate excess excitation energy in the PSII antenna while retaining usable excitation energy, improving fitness of cyanobacterias ? That is just one of many features, Cyanobacterias have.....

[Mark Isaak]

On 3/4/14 7:10 PM, Angelo brazil wrote:
>
> If a given explanation comes to a dead end, what do you do ? you search
> somewhere else. That is what any rational person would do.....
> Unfortunately, for the TOE, the roads that lead to a dead end are manyfold.

Ah, a testable prediction. If what you say is true, then journals which
publish scientific studies of evolution should be moribund, with, say,
no more than ten new articles on the subject in the last year.

Care to look up how many scientific articles with original research
about evolution actually have been published in the last year?

> Can you demonstrate, evolution was the driving mechanism ?

I've lost the context, so I don't know what specifically you were
referring to, but evolution has been demonstrated with multiple
independent lines of evidence. Just because it has not yet been
demonstrate with regard to, say, the left antenna of a large greenbanded
blue butterfly does not mean it has not been demonstrated.

> what we see today, is adaptation in microsteps. Nobody has been
> able to show that the barrier to macro does not exist.

More to the point, nobody has been able to suggest *anything* that would
or could plausibly prevent micro from going to macro. Until you or
someone does that, you are stuck with microevolution being convincing
evidence of macroevolution.

> a dog remains always a dog.... from chihuaua, to german dog..... no exeptions.

Just what we expect from evolution. Not what is predicted by creation.

>>> [Why photosyntesis?]
>> Beats me what argument you are trying to make. It was just a new way to
>> extract energy from the environment. The advantages are obvious.
>> Wouldn't you like to get energy directly from sunlight?
>
> So you want to anthropomorphize evolution ? Evolution has no goals....

The point remains. The advantages of an extra means of extracting
energy are obvious to almost anyone. If they are not obvious to you,
that alone demonstrates that you are too scientifically illiterate for
your views to carry any weight.

> You are entitled to believe whatever you want. My intellect however
> is fully satisfied to look at the evidence, and deduce special creation.

So you reject the God of Christianity, then.

--

Mark Isaak eciton (at) curioustaxonomy (dot) net

"Keep the company of those who seek the truth; run from those who have
found it." - Vaclav Havel

[Dai monie]

On Wednesday, 5 March 2014 23:53:47 UTC+1, Angelo brazil wrote:
> We can get from A to H by adding, and then from H to E by removing; the pathway seems valid, and the IC argument is bypassed.
>
>
>
> The situation remains the same : how do you get from A to H by adding ? Just as example : plants do not have Phycobilismoes light harvesting complexes. Cyanobacteria however do have them, but do have also external light harvesting complexes LH2 . Its said that plants are a result of endosymbiosis with cyanobacteria. And so, lost later on phycobylisomes, and remained only with the LH2's in the thykaloids. Photosynthesis in Cyanobacteria is enormously complex, and many features, even after decades of study, are not fully understood. How did Cyanobacteria evolve the protection mechanism of nonphotochemical quenching named qE, that is rapidly turned on and off through a feedback loop , in order to be able to dissipate excess excitation energy in the PSII antenna while retaining usable excitation energy, improving fitness of cyanobacterias ? That is just one of many features, Cyanobacterias have.....

Well done, you have mostly used a lot of terminology with seemingly no purpose. That is an explanation completely wasted.

> The situation remains the same : how do you get from A to H by adding ?

The question in the IC argument was not 'can you add parts'. The argument was that some parts could not be found by mere addition.

My proposal was that there could be a pathway that does not solely exist of addition, but combines addition and substraction, to get at that 'irreducable stage'. If the 'IC' component exists, then it has parts. Removing a part breaks it, that was the idea of irreducability. If there exists some other pathway, in which there is first a less efficient and more extensive structure (by addition, and not irreducable), that is then perfected by substraction, it can reach an irreducable stage. At least, that was what I was thinking.

Inherit to both the IC argument and my comment/question/proposal is that you cede ``micro'' evolution (addition). Even if you do not, it is essential to the IC argument as I understand it, which was part of my question that you chose to ignore.

[jillery]

On Wed, 5 Mar 2014 10:21:11 -0800 (PST), Angelo brazil

<audiov...@gmail.com> wrote:

>Em quarta-feira, 5 de março de 2014 12h15min40s UTC-3, jillery escreveu:
>> On Wed, 5 Mar 2014 06:17:12 -0800 (PST), Angelo brazil
>>
>> <audiov...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> >
>>
>> >> What is a species? How does one classify some things as a species and another thing as a variation?
>>
>> >
>>
>> >Species are a basic unit of biological and taxonomic classification.
>>
>> >
>>
>> >Variation is, when species evolve certain variations upon selective pressure based for example on environmental changes. The galapagos finches are a example.
>>
>> >
>>
>> >why these basic questions ?
>>
>> >
>>
>> >and please, no adhoms.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Except there's nothing fixed about species. Almost all species that
>>
>> ever lived are now extinct. And when different populations vary
>>
>> enough, they are no longer the same species, the most obvious examples
>>
>> being ring species. How do these facts fit into a Creationist model?
>
>http://creation.com/birds-of-a-feather-don-t-breed-together

Do you read your cites before you post them? Your cite above
acknowledges that new species arise from older species, so it refutes
your specific point I challenged.

But let's read on. How does it say that new species arise? It says
that the Creator gave its original created kinds all of the genes they
needed. The species we see today are the result of losing genes,
because evolution "obviously" can't create new genes.

I can think of several flaws to that line of reasoning:

The argument implies there is a progressive loss of genetic
information from old species to new. In fact, the genome sizes of
different species show no such correlation.

Even if losing genetic information could account for new species, it
doesn't explain why new and old species are infertile.

The author assumes new genes can't be created. In fact, new genes have
been observed and mapped numerous times. A classic example are the
bacterial genes to digest nylon, a material that didn't exist before
1935.

I'm sure there are many other problems with your cite's line of
reasoning, and with your reference to it in this context.

[James Beck]

On Tue, 4 Mar 2014 19:51:08 -0800 (PST), nyi...@bellsouth.net wrote:

>On Monday, March 3, 2014 12:25:27 AM UTC-5, Angelo brazil wrote:

[snip]

>Not necessarily. There might have been simpler precursors, such as
>a ribozyme that did similar things less efficiently.
>
>HOwever, if one looks at the multitude of enzymes, almost all of which
>are protein, the idea of such a complete "protein enzyme takeover" in such a
>short time (200 million years or less, probably a lot less because
>one first has to get from prebiotic soup to a functioning cell complete
>with DNA) is quite hard to explain.
>
>In a total of ten years posting to talk.origins, I have repeatedly
>challenged people to come up with a plausible scenario, and no one
>has even tried to do one. Instead I get attacked for
>not extrapolating backwards from biological evolution to prebiotic
>evolution, although no one tries to show that the two are at all
>similar.
>
>What is even stranger is that when I cited a paper that does a pretty
>plausible job of getting from a rather early stage of RNA world to
>the threshold of the protein enzyme takeover, the person in this
>newsgroup who most brags about being knowledgeable about biochemistry
>attacked it as being outdated but gave no examples of more up to
>date ideas.

Which paper was that? Please cite it again.

[snip]

[Mike Duffy]

On Wed, 5 Mar 2014 14:27:01 -0800 (PST), erik simpson wrote:

> ... 'swim' and keep your head above the snow is the best course of action.

Thanks. I'll try to keep it in mind if ever I need.

I hope this advice comes from people who have actually done it.

[jillery]

On Wed, 5 Mar 2014 12:55:19 -0800 (PST), Angelo brazil

<audiov...@gmail.com> wrote:

>Em quarta-feira, 5 de março de 2014 17h42min10s UTC-3, jillery escreveu:
>> On Wed, 5 Mar 2014 10:30:32 -0800 (PST), Angelo brazil
>>
>> <audiov...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> >
>>
>> >> So the real question is, Why should he be economical?
>>
>> >
>>
>> >its not a question of if he should be, or should not be. Its just a matter of, that he CAN be.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Since God can do anything, then Creation as explanation is
>>
>> meaningless.
>
>God cannot do anything. Creation as explanation is a alternative that is worth to consider.

Not when it supports argument that your Creator "can be" whatever
suits your argument of the moment.

So will you say what your Creator can and can't do?

[erik simpson]

It does. I know one such guy. He's very careful now.

[Burkhard]

On Wednesday, March 5, 2014 2:18:36 PM UTC, Angelo brazil wrote:
<snip>
> >
>
> >
>

> > A rather odd theology I'd say, but whatever works for you.
>
>
>
> Why should he not be economincal ?

For the reasons I stated: humans became economical to cope with
scare resources. We value it because we are confronted daily
with our ow limitations ands the external means at our disposal.
to apply this to a deity is most certainly possible, especially gods who are
for one reason or tother outsiders in their communities (Loki, Prometheus
etc) face the same problem, but it is at least odd (or you might say heretical)
to apply it to the three omni- deities of the judeo-christian-islamic tradition.

[RonO]

On 3/4/2014 10:35 PM, nyi...@bellsouth.net wrote:
> On Tuesday, March 4, 2014 6:40:28 PM UTC-5, Ron O wrote:
>
>> You haven't gotten the word have you? ID was just a dishonest political
>> scam. No biological system has ever been demonstrated to be the IDiot
>> type of irreducible complex systems (IC).
>
> You need to be specific about what this "type" is. See testimony from
> Minnich below for why.

You know what IC Behe needs to exist, and he could never demonstrate
that it did exist. Both Behe and Minnich knew what IC had to do. What
was their falsification test? If their IC did not require that the
system could not evolve, why was their falsification test claim that if
one could evolve their IC claims about the system would be falsified.

>
>> Behe was very specific in his
>> response to his critics, and made it clear that his type of IC was
>> unverifiable by normal science.
>
> Only to your fanatical mind.

You have run and never put up where Behe defined well matched so that it
could be quantitated and determined to exist in the quantities that he
required. You never demonstrated that Behe ever could count the number
of unselected steps in the evolution of the flagellum, so it looks like
Behe did just make his IC untestable. Has he ever been able to test
it? You have never put up his publication where he has done what he
claims make his IC systems his type of IC.

>
>> He claimed that it wasn't just the
>> multiple interacting parts that made a system IC (he had to acknowledge
>> that such a system could evolve) but that the interacting parts had to
>> have a magic quality that he called "well matched."
>
> Nothing magical about it, any more than there is anything magical about
> "life". There are degrees, but the examples Behe gives in _Darwin's
> Black Box_ certainly satisfy it by any reasonable interpretation of the
> words.

So why run? Demonstrate that Behe ever defined "well matched" so that
it could be demonstrated to exist in the quantities that he needed to
claim his systems were his type of IC. He didn't do it in his Dover
testimony. The judge referred to the bogus quantification as being
falsified, so all you have to do is demonstrate that Behe can identify
and quantify well matched. Go for it.

>
>
>> He could not define
>> "well matched" so that it could be quantified and determined to exist or
>> not,
>
> Let's see you quantify "alive". Would you say an Escherichia coli bacterium
> is 100 times as much "alive" as a polio virus? Or would you say the latter is
> not a form of life at all? Would you say you are ten times as alive as
> someone in a coma, or 20.5 times as alive as someone in a Persistent Vegetative
> state, or 99.5 times as alive as someone who is brain-dead?

This is stupid. Behe is the one that claimed that his systems required
well matched parts. It isn't up to me to determine the definition.
Just the fact that there is no viable definition is enough for anyone to
realize that it is a useless addition to IC and makes Behe's IC
untestable. So what if people can't define alive to your satisfaction?
It is the definition of well matched that matters to IC. Is anyone
claiming that a virus could not have evolved because there are degrees
of being alive? This is such a stupid rebuttal that I can't believe
that you even tried it.

>
> Would you say a pine tree is twice as much "life" as you are, because it
> reproduces without the need for another pine tree? or that a worker
> termite is only 1/10th as much "life" as you because it cannot reproduce
> at all?

Such a stupid argument likely requires you to sit down and try to
explain why it is valid for anything to yourself. Is anyone claiming
that a pine tree could not evolve because life cannot be quantified to
your specifications? Behe made the claim. He claimed that his IC
systems required well matched interacting parts. If he can't deliver on
a definition for whatever reason it means that his claims are untestable.

>
>> so that part of IC was untestable by science and Behe could never
>> demonstrate that it exists in a form that would make a system his type
>> of IC.
>
> You claim to believe in a creator. Is its existence testable by science?
> For that matter, is your claim that you believe in a creator testable by
> science? After all, you have never told us about this creator in whom
> you allegedly believe. Have you even told yourself anything about what it
> is like?

Behe was claiming that he was doing science, and that his science was
good enough to demonstrate that the flagellum was IC. I make no such
claims about any of my religious beliefs. You are so sad that it is
unbelievable at times. You are the one that has to lie about your
religious beliefs. That is the reason why prevaricating about the ID
scam is so important to you. How sad is that? Some people treat their
religious beliefs as religious beliefs, and some people like you and the
ID perps have to misrepresent their religious beliefs for whatever
reasons they have.

>
>> He also claimed that his type of IC system could be identified
>> by the number of unselected steps in the evolution of the IC structure.
>
> I've never seen any sign that Behe ever said anything remotely like this.
> Can you provide a reference?

You have to read his response to his critics. It came up in the Dover
trial and was in the opinion as being falsified because no one can count
them.

>
>> He acknowledged that a few such steps could happen by chance. His
>> type of IC system would require some unspecified higher number of such
>> steps, but he could not identify a single one or start to count them for
>> his supposedly IC systems.
>
> I'm beginning to think that you want to impose your own concepts on Behe:
> have a private definition for "Behe's kind of IC system" and also
> to allege that he cannot identify it.

Behe has a definition of IC that requires the parts to be well matched
and he can't define well matched in a way that anyone including Behe can
determine if the parts of the flagellum have enough of that quality to
matter. Behe made the claim and it is definitely part of his definition.

>
> On the other hand, if you are willing to abide by his publicly stated
> definition, then Minnich has testified that he has proven that the
> bacterial flagellum is IC by Behe's own definition:
>
> "One mutation, one part knock out, it can't swim. Put that single gene back in
> we restore motility. Same thing over here. We put, knock out one part, put a
> good copy of the gene back in, and they can swim. By definition the system is
> irreducibly complex. We've done that with all 35 components of the flagellum,
> and we get the same effect."
>
> http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day20pm2.html

Do you think that this verified that the flagellum was IC. Where did
Minnich publish this finding? Nowhere. He never mentions IC in his
papers. Why? What is Minnich demonstrating. He is only demonstrating
that the flagellum has interacting parts. He would not have gotten the
funding to do the study if the reviewers did not think that he would get
the results that he got. No one was claiming that Minnich's results
would demontrate that the flagellum was Behe's type of IC when he got
the funding. Not even Minnich. This is the classic genetic dissection
of a system by knockout mutation analysis. It had been done in bacteria
for decades before Minnich did it for the flagellum and even Behe would
not claim that some of the metabolic bacterial systems that were defined
in this way would be considered to be IC. Just think of all the amino
acid biosynthetic pathways that were defined in this way by knocking out
one enzyme in the pathway and not getting the amino acid produced,
making a bunch of such mutations and determining which ones were in
different genes by how they could complement each other.

Where is the scientific publication claiming to have verified Behe's
type of IC. Why did Minnich propose the same falsification test that
Behe proposed? Why did he never attempt it?

>
> <snip for focus>
>
>> Just get Behe to tell you how well matched
>> he has determined his flagellar parts to be
>
> They are about as perfectly matched for swimming as it is possible for
> molecules to be. Are you hate-driven enough to deny this?

Are they well matched enough to make the flagellum IC? How do you know?

>
>> and how many unselected
>> steps in the evolution of the flagellum that he has identified so far.
>> His answers of don't know and zero should tell you something.
>
> Those aren't his answers, they are your answers, and the second one
> is utterly irrelevant to the issue of whether the flagellum is
> IC by HIS definition. It is only relevant to the definition into
> which you have been brainwashed through overexposure to the fanatics
> who dominate Panda's Thumb.

It was Behe's excuse not mine. He claimed that the number of unselected
steps mattered in the evolution of IC systems like his flagellum. He
just can't determine what they are, let alone count them.

Behe's IC never got past the untestable stage because Behe made sure of
that. If it has been tested, demonstrate it. Since you can't, you are
just full of the usual stuff that you are full of.

Has any of what you have written done anything to verify that Behe's
type of IC systems exist? Since Behe has never been able to do that why
should you have even tried to make an issue of it. Really, just
demonstrate that Behe's type of IC system has ever been verified to
exist in nature. Since you can't do that what are you doing?

Ron Okimoto

>
> Peter Nyikos
>

[Burkhard]

On Wednesday, March 5, 2014 2:30:50 PM UTC, Angelo brazil wrote:

> what will i do :
>
>
>
> a} run, and if i am frequently facing such challenges, maiby train to become
> a better runner ( and eventually my kids will hereditate stronger legs
>
> or
>
> b) evolve wings in order to fly away ??

That would be Lamarckian, so no


> > If we see a process in action (mutation leading to what you call micro-evolution,
> > then we can safely assume that it will continue, unless there is positive evidence

> unless there is no evidence for this. what life has, is a built in mechanism to adapt to the environment, but with limits.

That is just restating the point, which for the reasons given remains implausible.
A mechanism that imposes such limits would have to have quite remarkable
characteristics, and therefore be easily identifiable. Nothing we found so far
has anything resembling these properties, and if you think a bit more what
that mechanism reds to achieve, II gave an indication in my post) it seems unlikely
that such a thing could exist
>
>
>
> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23876611
>
>
>
> The genome has traditionally been treated as a Read-Only Memory (ROM) subject to change by copying errors and accidents. In this review, I propose that we need to change that perspective and understand the genome as an intricately formatted Read-Write (RW) data storage system constantly subject to cellular modifications and inscriptions. Cells operate under changing conditions and are continually modifying themselves by genome inscriptions. These inscriptions occur over three distinct time-scales (cell reproduction, multicellular development and evolutionary change) and involve a variety of different processes at each time scale (forming nucleoprotein complexes, epigenetic formatting and changes in DNA sequence structure). Research dating back to the 1930s has shown that genetic change is the result of cell-mediated processes, not simply accidents or damage to the DNA. This cell-active view of genome change applies to all scales of DNA sequence variation, from point mutations to large-scale genome rearrang

em

And why do you think that identifies the type of mechanism you postulate? I'd say it does
anything but. It given even more ways change can occur, which would make your mechanism
to stop change even more elaborate.

>
> ents and whole genome duplications (WGDs). This conceptual change to active cell inscriptions controlling RW genome functions has profound implications for all areas of the life sciences.
>
>
>
>
>
> > The mechanism to stop evolution would have to be exceedingly complex,

>
> life IS complex. Exceedingly ? Why ?

For the reasons I gave: it needs to store the "blueprint" (and we know how that
would look like) in a form resistant to change (how/), it needs a way to compare
this blueprint to the actual state (how?) ad then needs a way to prevent further
change, at an arbitrary cutoff point ("species: is a term we use to structure our
environment, there is no single intrinsic feature derivable from that term that
would allow the program to identify the "limit" Oh, and somehow this mechanism
has to communicate with the "control mechanism" across the members of a
population, since the question is not just to keep an individual lineage within
these "limits", but an entire population

[Angelo brazil]

> Inherit to both the IC argument and my comment/question/proposal is that you cede ``micro'' evolution (addition).

Micro-evolution is NOT addition :

its taking advantage of a mechanism, that is already since the beginning built in in the cell: to be able to adapt to the evironment :

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23876611

The genome has traditionally been treated as a Read-Only Memory (ROM) subject to change by copying errors and accidents. In this review, I propose that we need to change that perspective and understand the genome as an intricately formatted Read-Write (RW) data storage system constantly subject to cellular modifications and inscriptions. Cells operate under changing conditions and are continually modifying themselves by genome inscriptions. These inscriptions occur over three distinct time-scales (cell reproduction, multicellular development and evolutionary change) and involve a variety of different processes at each time scale (forming nucleoprotein complexes, epigenetic formatting and changes in DNA sequence structure). Research dating back to the 1930s has shown that genetic change is the result of cell-mediated processes, not simply accidents or damage to the DNA. This cell-active view of genome change applies to all scales of DNA sequence variation, from point mutations to large-scale genome rearrangem

[RonO]

On 3/4/2014 9:10 PM, Angelo brazil wrote:
>
>> Nothing here is about how this data fits into your model. If you can't
>>
>> fit it in, why should it be a problem for us? We just take the data as
>>
>> it comes, what do you have to do? Deny it all.
>>
>>
>>
>> How sad is that?

>
> If a given explanation comes to a dead end, what do you do ? you search somewhere else. That is what any rational person would do.....
> Unfortunately, for the TOE, the roads that lead to a dead end are manyfold.
>

> berlinksy brought it nicely to the point :
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHeSaUq-Hl8

This is no answer.

No one claims that science knows everything, but you can't claim that
science knows nothing because there are still unanswered questions.

Why are there only traces of bacteria 3.5 billion years ago and for more
than a billion years after that? Do you still believe Berlinsky?

>> I have yet to see anyone demonstrate that. Can you?

>
> Can you demonstrate, evolution was the driving mechanism ?

If you weren't so biased you could be trained to collect data in nature
on populations at this time. You would be able to demonstrate natural
selection in extant populations. You would be able to demonstrate that
mutations keep occurring and that populations keep evolving. You would
understand that we can't keep the evolution from happening. The only
way to stop the evolution of a species is to kill it off.

>
>
>
>> It is very simple to demonstrate that the pattern is due to descent with
>>
>> modification because we can see it happening today.
>
> what we see today, is adaptation in microsteps. Nobody has been able to show that the barrier to macro does not exist. a dog remains always a dog.... from chihuaua, to german dog..... no exeptions.

So you agree that we can observe population evolving. What is going to
stop them from changing?

>
>> Beats me what argument you are trying to make. It was just a new way to
>>
>> extract energy from the environment. The advantages are obvious.
>>
>> Wouldn't you like to get energy directly from sunlight?
>
>
> So you want to anthropomorphize evolution ? Evolution has no goals....

Beats me where you got that. Life forms have to interact with their
environment. If mutations occur that allow a lifeform to benefit from
some aspect of their environment such as light energy it will be
selected for as long as there is a light source. This does not have to
happen and for some organisms it would be impractical. Humans would
need a lot more surface area exposed to light to benefit. The first
photosynthetic organisms were single celled bacteria so the limit was
only within a single cell.

>
>
>> So you can't account for any of the data that you think is a problem for
>>
>> biological evolution, and you expect people to believe that you have a
>>
>> valid argument?

>
> You are entitled to believe whatever you want. My intellect however is fully satisfied to look at the evidence, and deduce special creation.
>

> Otangelo Grasso

This only means that you can't account for the data that you claim is a
problem for biological evolution, so it is probably an even bigger
problem for you. Why is the argument of the moment good enough for you?
The argument isn't consistent with your belief so why use it? Why
claim that 3.5 billion year old photo autotrophs are a problem when you
have to believe that it is impossible to have 3.5 billion year old rocks
on earth? Isn't it just a little sad that all of your arguments are
like that. Where is the positive evidence for a young earth and special
creation of lifeforms that your model requires? Have you ever tried to
figure out how much evolution had to have happened after the flood? The
latest claim that I saw out of the AIG was that there were less than
10,000 species on the Ark. Only one pair of cats for all of cat kind
from the sabertoothed monsters of the last ice age (that occurred after
the flood) to your tabby. We can sequence the DNA from the bones of
those 10,000 year old saber toothed cats and it is 3 times the genetic
distance from your tabby as humans are from chimps. How did all of that
evolution occur in just a few centuries after the flood? What about
horse kind? Horses and donkeys are about as distantly related to each
other as chimps are to humans. Dog kind? AIG claims that Dog kind
includes foxes and they are over twice the genetic distance from fido as
you are to a chimp. The genetic relationships don't make sense for your
model, but they do make sense in terms of the fossil record and the DNA
evidence and descent with modification. Real science doesn't have to
cram all that evolution into a few thousand years, and if that much
evolution did occur in a few thousand years haven't you demonstrated
macro evolution? Enough change obviously could have occurred to create
new species.

Ron Okimoto

[jillery]

On Wed, 5 Mar 2014 13:48:09 -0800 (PST), Dai monie
<josko...@hotmail.com> wrote:

[...]

>I have a comment/question. The IC argument seems to rely solely on a linear evolutionary path. That is, we start with A, we add B to get A+B, and finally we have A+B+C+D. It then argues that E is IC, that is, E is not equal to A+B+C+D. The argument is then that it cannot have been made by adding little bits (B,C,D) to A. [This is, to me, the most accurate interpretation I can give it].
>
>However, this relies solely on a linear path from A to E. However, it seems to me that we could have also gone to another point first, viz. a point where we have E with added parts, and then through disuse we could have removed those extra parts to get to E. That is a valid evolutionary pathway that does not require us to find E by means of adding to A; We can get from A to H by adding, and then from H to E by removing; the pathway seems valid, and the IC argument is bypassed.
>
>Two questions then: First off, is my first paragraph representing the argument of IC correct? Second, is the second paragraph containing a possible counter argument also valid?

To paraphrase as best I can Michael Behe's argument from "Darwin's
Black Box", where he coined the phrase "Irreducible Complexity", it
has two sections. The first part is about what an IC system is. Using
your terminology, A+B+C+D=E is IC if and only if removing any one A or
B or C or D causes E to "effectively cease functioning". There have
been some arguments in the past about what "effectively" means in this
context, and what kind of parts qualify.

His second section is where evolution gets involved. Behe asserted
that A and B and C and D must all exist at the same time and already
performing their respective functions, in order to combine as A+B+C+D
to make E. And since evolution has no foresight, it can not make any
of these parts ahead of time, therefore evolution can't produce IC
systems except in the most trivial cases.

The fatal flaw in Behe's line of reasoning is in failing to recognize
that evolution can easily modify A and B and C and D after the parts
come together, in order to improve the function of E. The case from
your second question is a variation of that, where additional part H
once was part of E but is removed by evolution. This is the
historical "scaffold" argument.

Expect contrarian opinions from others.

[Dai monie]

That's an interpretation. What it says there is that cells can rewrite their genome (RW over RO).

That interpretation is also really weird. The fact that there is data storage does not mean that nothing new can exists. The memory of your computer also exists and is there. I can 'make us of the mechanism' to write my bachelor thesis. Your interpretation would then state that my bachelor thesis is nothing new. The same holds true for literary works; if shakespeare had a computer to type, he wouldn't have made something new, in your interpretation. Yes, I realise that is not what you're saying, but the analogy is extremely clear.

Furthermore, an existing mechanism to change still results in change. Which is to say, if some mechanism is implemented so that addition is possible, it is possible for addition to occur. That is also 'using the mechanism'. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to serve as a counter argument ( petitio principii ).

I think I'm going with my analogy of computer data storage as a counter argument. I'm sure someone can come up with something better, but this one is mine.

[Mark Isaak]

On 3/5/14 10:41 AM, nyi...@bellsouth.net wrote:
> On Tuesday, March 4, 2014 4:26:05 PM UTC-5, Mark Isaak wrote:
>> On 3/3/14 2:33 PM, Angelo brazil wrote:
>>> Em segunda-feira, 3 de março de 2014 18h50min16s UTC-3, Steven L. escreveu:
>
>>>> [... cyanobacteria ...]
>>
>>>> It took me just 10 seconds to dig up a zillion articles on how
>>>> cyanobacteria evolved.
>
> And I suspect all of the RELEVANT ones have to do with a summary of WHAT
> happened rather than HOW or WHY it happened.
>
> The irrelevant ones would be due to hits for just ONE of "cyanobacteria"
> and "evolved" appearing somewhere in the "zillion - 10" articles.
>
>>>> Have a look. Maybe some of those articles will address your concerns.
>
> I wish I had a dollar for every time I've seen this standard piece
> of totally unhelpful "advice".
>
>>> just finding scientific papers does not mean the question is resolved.
>
>> But it does mean that the question is closer to resolved than without
>> the science.
>
> Yeah, like a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,
> after which it is closer to resolved before the single step was taken.

Of course you know that the number of steps taken so far is much, much
more than one, so the journey is well along. Are you trying to hide
something by leaving out that fact?

>>> Cianobacterias have many irreducible complex systems, which is clear
>>> evidence, they could not have evolved.
>
> Unfortunately, Angelo has not kept up even with Michael Behe, but
> is relying on popularizations -- or anti-ID propaganda as to what
> IC is all about.

You could be right. Angelo, what is your source of information on IC?

>> Where did you get the idea that irreducibly complex systems could not
>> evolve? Of course they can evolve. What they cannot do is evolve
>> solely by the addition of discrete parts while function remains
>> unchanged. But that is such a trivially small part of how evolution
>> acts
>
> ...that one must look for roundabout ways to evolve, and Behe
> talked about this already here:
>
> As the complexity of the system increases, though,
> the possibility of such an indirect route drops
> precipitously. And as the number of unexplained,
> irreducibly complex biological systems increases,
> our confidence that Darwin's criterion of failure
> has been met skyrockets towards the maximum that
> science allows.
> --_Darwin's Black Box_, p. 40

Which is utter bullshit. Irreducible complexity can easily evolve
through simple, everyday, straightforward routes. Behe's hypothesis
applies to discrete, unchangeable parts, which simply do not exist in
biology outside his imagination (unless he considers atoms as the only
parts worth considering, which he does not, and which even if he did
could arguably be considered changeable).

And even if he were dealing with discrete parts, where did he get the
idea that the number of indirect routes drops? As complexity of a
system increases, the number of paths through the system increases, so
the number of indirect routes would increase, not decrease.

On irreducible complexity, Behe cannot be considered anything but wrong.

[jillery]

http://www.wikihow.com/Survive-an-Avalanche


I remember reading an article that said most avalanche victims die
from suffocation, not injuries, as the snow settles around them and
entombs them.

[nyi...@bellsouth.net]

On Wednesday, March 5, 2014 9:14:38 PM UTC-5, Mark Isaak wrote:
> On 3/5/14 10:41 AM, nyi...@bellsouth.net wrote:
>
> > On Tuesday, March 4, 2014 4:26:05 PM UTC-5, Mark Isaak wrote:
>
> >> On 3/3/14 2:33 PM, Angelo brazil wrote:
>
> >>> Em segunda-feira, 3 de março de 2014 18h50min16s UTC-3, Steven L. escreveu:
>
> >
>
> >>>> [... cyanobacteria ...]
>
> >>
>
> >>>> It took me just 10 seconds to dig up a zillion articles on how
> >>>> cyanobacteria evolved.

> > And I suspect all of the RELEVANT ones have to do with a summary of WHAT
> > happened rather than HOW or WHY it happened.

You didn't dispute this, Mark. Bad show, considering the sequel.

> > The irrelevant ones would be due to hits for just ONE of "cyanobacteria"
> > and "evolved" appearing somewhere in the "zillion - 10" articles.

> >>>> Have a look. Maybe some of those articles will address your concerns.

> > I wish I had a dollar for every time I've seen this standard piece
> > of totally unhelpful "advice".

I think even YOU are able to see that it is unhelpful, Mark, otherwise
YOU would try to follow it, given the way you stuck your neck out below.

> >>> just finding scientific papers does not mean the question is resolved.

> >> But it does mean that the question is closer to resolved than without
> >> the science.

> > Yeah, like a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,
> > after which it is closer to resolved before the single step was taken.

> Of course you know that the number of steps taken so far is much, much
> more than one, so the journey is well along.

Spoken like a humanist again, and a rather silly one at that. How
do you know the journey isn't 10 million miles long?

Fact is, you don't. And don't come back at me by saying that I
don't know either. I was attacking your logic, nothing more--the logic
of a humanist with no sense of proportion.

> Are you trying to hide
> something by leaving out that fact?

Now you are REALLY digging yourself in deep with faulty logic, calling your baseless speculation ("well along") a fact.

Prove me wrong: cite a relevant paper that SHOWS the journey is well along.

<snip for focus>

> > As the complexity of the system increases, though,
> > the possibility of such an indirect route drops
> > precipitously. And as the number of unexplained,
> > irreducibly complex biological systems increases,
> > our confidence that Darwin's criterion of failure
> > has been met skyrockets towards the maximum that
> > science allows.
>
> > --_Darwin's Black Box_, p. 40
>
>
>
> Which is utter bullshit.

You are utterly incompetent at proving this taunt below.

> Irreducible complexity can easily evolve
> through simple, everyday, straightforward routes.

Sorry, blatant assertion isn't proof. Even most humanists know that.

> Behe's hypothesis
> applies to discrete, unchangeable parts, which simply do not exist in
> biology outside his imagination (unless he considers atoms as the only
> parts worth considering, which he does not,

Wow, you actually forgot about molecules! Which is very ironic, because
molecules are mostly what Behe writes about all through the book. [And they
don't change from generation to generation in the absence of mutations--
something you blissfully ignore in your airy-fairy "arguably changeable"
talk below.]

The biggest exception in _DBB_ actually strengthens the rule: he talks
about the bacterial flagellum consisting of four parts, but some of the
parts are made of many molecules. But Minnich strengthened it by taking
it down to the level of molecules. As he said in his Dover testimony:

"One mutation, one part knock out, it can't swim. Put that single gene back in
we restore motility. Same thing over here. We put, knock out one part, put a
good copy of the gene back in, and they can swim. By definition the system is
irreducibly complex. We've done that with all 35 components of the flagellum,
and we get the same effect."

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day20pm2.html

Judge Jones was very wise to abandon the crap he wrote in the Opinion
of the Court when actually pronouncing judgment: he only forbade the
teaching of intelligent design AS AN ALTERNATIVE to evolution. But
Behe is quite happy with lots of evolution: ID is just a SUPPLEMENT
in his scheme of things.

> and which even if he did
> could arguably be considered changeable).

Spoken like a humanist with no grasp of the scientific realities of the
situation.

> And even if he were dealing with discrete parts, where did he get the
> idea that the number of indirect routes drops?

You even flunked reading comprehension here.

> As complexity of a
> system increases, the number of paths through the system increases, so
> the number of indirect routes would increase, not decrease.

You are babbling incoherently, or else you are gleefully deconstructing
what Behe wrote into something unrecognizable.

> On irreducible complexity, Behe cannot be considered anything but wrong.

You're talking about the strawman you've erected, which bears no resemblance
to anything Behe claimed.

> --
>
> Mark Isaak eciton (at) curioustaxonomy (dot) net
>
> "Keep the company of those who seek the truth; run from those who have
> found it." - Vaclav Havel

Well, you are certainly following the second half of the advice.

Peter Nyikos

[nyi...@bellsouth.net]

On Wednesday, March 5, 2014 7:35:53 PM UTC-5, Ron O wrote:
> On 3/4/2014 10:35 PM, nyi...@bellsouth.net wrote:
>
> > On Tuesday, March 4, 2014 6:40:28 PM UTC-5, Ron O wrote:
>
> >
>
> >> You haven't gotten the word have you? ID was just a dishonest political
>
> >> scam. No biological system has ever been demonstrated to be the IDiot
>
> >> type of irreducible complex systems (IC).

> > You need to be specific about what this "type" is. See testimony from
>
> > Minnich below for why.
>
>
>
> You know what IC Behe needs to exist,

He doesn't NEED something to exist. He's happy with just challenging
people and watching them fail his challenges.

> and he could never demonstrate
>
> that it did exist. Both Behe and Minnich knew what IC had to do.

IC doesn't have to do anything; IC is just a description of a system.

> What
>
> was their falsification test? If their IC did not require that the
>
> system could not evolve, why was their falsification test claim that if
>
> one could evolve their IC claims about the system would be falsified.

You are speaking in generalities. They proposed a specific test for a specific
kind of IC system. Do you know what that was?

Until you learn to be specific, arguing with you is a waste of time.

Peter Nyikos

[walksalone]

Robert Camp <rober...@hotmail.com> wrote in
news:lf7k60$mqj$1...@dont-email.me:

> On 3/5/14 8:25 AM, walksalone wrote:
>> Robert Camp <rober...@hotmail.com> wrote in
>> news:lf7gsu$qai$1...@dont-email.me:
>>
>>> On 3/5/14, 6:18 AM, Angelo brazil wrote:
>>>> Em quarta-feira, 5 de março de 2014 08h12min59s UTC-3, Burkhard
>>>> escreveu:
>>>>> On Tuesday, March 4, 2014 4:29:34 PM UTC, Angelo brazil wrote:
>>
>> snip
>> Pardon the drive by?

>>
>>>>> So you are arguing that God suffers from a scarcity of resources
>>>>> such as time,
>>>>>
>>>>> material and imagination, and also has a common function in mind
>>>>> for humans,
>>>>>
>>>>> chimps, geese, flatworm and broccoli?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>

>>>>> A rather odd theology I'd say, but whatever works for you.
>>>>
>>>> Why should he not be economincal ?
>>>

>>> Depends, of course, upon the god of which you speak. Since you cited
>>> Special Creation earlier as a viable explanation for life (which it
>>> isn't, since it doesn't actually "explain" anything) it's reasonable
>>> to conclude that you favor the god of Christianity, who in many
>>> cases is thought to be omnipotent. Such a deity has no need of
>>> economy.
>>
>> Not really.
>
> "Not really," what? Not really that an omnipotent god has no need of

Just not really. Everything has no less than two sides. Statements,
questions, even political proclamations. most, which includes myself on
occasion, never see the other side of anything that shows up in a
discussion. Unless of course, they don't agree with you anyway.

> economy, not really that the Christian god is often considered

Why would it, but no, it does not. It can just fart more material into
existence as it feels the need. Or so the claim goes.

As to the xian gods, & there are millions of them, they are nothing to
followers of the other gods & goddesses's. As it should be.

> omnipotent, not really that this might be the god the poster favors?
> In all of those cases I beg to differ.

I believe that I pointed out that to xians, theirs is the one with really
big balls. But in case you missed it, why yes, so they pretend. Why?
Does it matter to the universe, or just to you. Are you appointing
yourself as the final word on theology now? Can't say that I have would
accused you of that. Haven't read enough of your postings. Probably a
reason for that.


> Normally I wouldn't respond to a post after two words, but what

Then don't. The drive by comment was an indicter to some, this is a
passing comment & not worth the effort to gain any points over.

> followed your "Not really" doesn't really seem to have anything to do
> with what I was talking about.

Then maybe you need to amplify what you were talking about?

Or, think about what was said instead of reacting to it.

Sincere snip.


walksalone who does understand, there are those that feel they have to be
right no matter the subject. There are those that are curious, again, no
matter the subject. & there Are those that see themselves in a position
of seniority & are not to be questioned. Hopefully, I will continue to
question what I know. & with the help of some on this group, learn
something new everyday. But I don't count on it.


* Tolstoy
"I know that most men...can seldom accept even the simplest and
most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the
falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to
colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they
have woven,thread by thread, into the fabrics of their lives."

[Dai monie]

So, If we would use the pathway I previously asked about, then there is no problem; we start with an alternate system, build that up, and then remove some parts to end with the flagellum. At no point is there the flagellum minus a bit that does not work present; yet by addition and substraction, there is a pathway. That seems to work.

A single molecule motor is perfectly possible. You could use it as a base template, add to it and add to it untill it is still a working structure. Then remove parts to end up with the flagellum. My claim for the single molecule motor, if called in question: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1010.2398.pdf . This is an example using molecular junctions.

[Angelo brazil]

> The fatal flaw in Behe's line of reasoning is in failing to recognize
>
> that evolution can easily modify A and B and C and D after the parts
>
> come together

Well, what first has to be explained, is, not only HOW they came together, but WHY.

Take for example Photosystem II. Without it, life on earth would cease to exist. Despite rarely mentioned in the creationism - naturalism debate,i regard it as the PRIMA FACIE example to be studied and debated. How did it arise , and why ? PSII is at the heart of photosynthesis, and catalyzes the thermodynamically most demanding reaction in biological systems, the splitting of water into oxygen and reducing equivalents. The monomer of this bewilderingly complex machinery consists of 20 different protein subunits that bind 77 organic cofactors and seven metal ions. In the reaction center and light-harvesting antenna proteins, a large number of different molecules (35 chlorophyll a, 11 carotenoid, 2 pheophytin a, 2 plastoquinone, 2 heme, and 1 bicarbonate), as well as four manganese ions, two calcium ions, and an iron ion, are held at precise distances and relative orientations that are required for optimal absorption and conversion of light energy to perform efficient electron transfer. 1)

Science daily describes it as :

Work Of Ancient Genetic Engineering ( huh!, didn't know evolution had this miraculous capabilities..... ) 2)

During the normal course of PSII function, its proteins become damaged by the electrons zipping through the complex. A sophisticated mechanism exists for recognizing the damaged protein, removing it and replacing it with a freshly made protein. There are lots of details still to be determined as far as how his process works and how it may be regulated. Researchers are also working to tease apart the differences and/or overlap between the de novo assembly pathway and the damage-repair cycle in the Life Cycle of PSII 3)

http://newunderthesunblog.wordpress.com/the-basics/the-light-reactions/photosystem-ii/

Explanations of scientific papers of how it could have evolved is guesswork at best.

http://www.fceqyn.unam.edu.ar/~celular/paginas/Articulos%20Biol%20Cel%202004/Annual%20Reviews/Review%20photosyntesis.pdf

The evolutionary path of type I and type II reaction center apoproteins is still unresolved owing to the fact that a unified evolutionary tree cannot be generated for these divergent reaction center subunits.

http://www.ebi.ac.uk/interpro/potm/2004_11/Page3.htm

The proteins that make up photosystem II are highly diverse in both sequence and structure. Consequently, these proteins are placed in several different InterPro families, all of which are listed in the table of PSII proteins. The description below is for the PSII reaction centre protein D1 (also known as PsbA or QB).

https://www.academia.edu/3742566/Photosynthesis_and_the_Origin_of_Life

The early atmosphere of the earth is considered to have been neutral (nitrogen and carbon dioxide). The problem arises of how oxygenic photosynthesis could have evolved under these conditions.There were abundant reducing agents such asferrous ion which made it unlikely that water would be used as an electron donor.

http://creation.com/shining-light-on-the-evolution-of-photosynthesis

PSII produces extremely strong oxidizing agents that can pull electrons out of water, but it is not capable of reducing NADP+ to NADPH. PSI produces extremely strong reducing agents that ultimately do the job of reducing ferredoxin and NADP+. Neither system does anything meaningful apart from the other, which is to say, nothing works unless everything works. The

proponents of evolution must explain :

1. Where the genetic information came from to make PSII, the cofactors, the assembly enzymes, the repair enzymes, how it was assembled in a highly coordinated manner,and how it would have had a survival advantage, without being fully developed,and working in a coordenated way together with the other enzymes and protein complexes. Good luck with that.


1) http://www.sciencemag.org/site/feature/data/prizes/ge/2006/loll.xhtml#1

2) http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/11/021122074236.htm

[Dai monie]

On Thursday, 6 March 2014 10:32:19 UTC+1, Angelo brazil wrote:
> > The fatal flaw in Behe's line of reasoning is in failing to recognize
>
> >
>
> > that evolution can easily modify A and B and C and D after the parts
>
> >
>
> > come together
>
>
>
> Well, what first has to be explained, is, not only HOW they came together, but WHY.
>

'Why' they come together is what natural selection is about, is it not? The governing thing is not some 'reason', but rather that if they come together, the result works better and multiplies in number. It is a given that they come together at some point; and if something is positive, then it will usually propogate into new generations.

I'd snip the next part; it's just clouding the issue more and more.

> Take for example Photosystem II. Without it, life on earth would cease to exist. Despite rarely mentioned in the creationism - naturalism debate,i regard it as the PRIMA FACIE example to be studied and debated. How did it arise , and why ? PSII is at the heart of photosynthesis, and catalyzes the thermodynamically most demanding reaction in biological systems, the splitting of water into oxygen and reducing equivalents. The monomer of this bewilderingly complex machinery consists of 20 different protein subunits that bind 77 organic cofactors and seven metal ions. In the reaction center and light-harvesting antenna proteins, a large number of different molecules (35 chlorophyll a, 11 carotenoid, 2 pheophytin a, 2 plastoquinone, 2 heme, and 1 bicarbonate), as well as four manganese ions, two calcium ions, and an iron ion, are held at precise distances and relative orientations that are required for optimal absorption and conversion of light energy to perform efficient electron transfer. 1)
>

The governing physics is not that hard. Ph

[RonO]

On 3/5/2014 10:21 PM, nyi...@bellsouth.net wrote:
> On Wednesday, March 5, 2014 7:35:53 PM UTC-5, Ron O wrote:
>> On 3/4/2014 10:35 PM, nyi...@bellsouth.net wrote:
>>
>>> On Tuesday, March 4, 2014 6:40:28 PM UTC-5, Ron O wrote:
>>
>>>
>>
>>>> You haven't gotten the word have you? ID was just a dishonest political
>>
>>>> scam. No biological system has ever been demonstrated to be the IDiot
>>
>>>> type of irreducible complex systems (IC).
>
>>> You need to be specific about what this "type" is. See testimony from
>>
>>> Minnich below for why.
>>
>>
>>
>> You know what IC Behe needs to exist,
>
> He doesn't NEED something to exist. He's happy with just challenging
> people and watching them fail his challenges.

He was specific in why the challenges to IC didn't matter, and what did
that do to his concept of IC. The judge called those specifications
"falsified." Most scientists would just claim that they were
untestable, therefore, worthless.

>
>> and he could never demonstrate
>>
>> that it did exist. Both Behe and Minnich knew what IC had to do.
>
> IC doesn't have to do anything; IC is just a description of a system.

A worthless description for what Behe needs it to do. What was the
falsification test for IC that Behe put forward? You know for a fact
what Behe is trying to use the bogus notion of IC for, and it can't be
used for that purpose because you can't even determine if Behe's type of
IC systems exist in nature.

>
>
>> What
>>
>> was their falsification test? If their IC did not require that the
>>
>> system could not evolve, why was their falsification test claim that if
>>
>> one could evolve their IC claims about the system would be falsified.
>
> You are speaking in generalities. They proposed a specific test for a specific
> kind of IC system. Do you know what that was?

Why would the ICness of the system be falsified if a flagellum could be
evolved in a lab. This is such a dishonest evasion of the facts that I
don't even know why you would be stupid enough to even try it.

What generalities are you talking about. Both Behe and Minnich proposed
the same falsification test for the ICness of the flagellum, so you know
what both of them considered to be the deciding factor in whether or not
a system was IC or not. If a flagellum could be evolved in the lab the
IC claims about the flagellum would be falsified. Both Behe and Minnich
made the same claim and proposed the same falsification test so what is
your beef?

>
> Until you learn to be specific, arguing with you is a waste of time.
>
> Peter Nyikos
>

Until you stop snipping and running you will keep lying about the past
and you will keep making bogus arguments for the things that you can't
defend.

Demonstrate that Behe's type of IC system has been demonstrated to exist
in nature. Since you know for a fact that it has not been
scientifically verified to exist in nature why are you defending the
claptrap? We aren't just talking about baseless assertions of
existence, but someone, somewhere demonstrating that some biological
system is Behe's type of IC. Not just a system of interacting parts,
but Behe's type of IC that Behe requires to make his argument for
intelligent design. It is almost two decades since Darwin's black box,
12 years since the ID perps started running the bait and switch instead
of putting junk like IC forward as teachable in the public schools (the
ID perps themselves gave up on IC years before Dover). Why isn't IC
mentioned in the ID perp's switch scam even today if it is a valid
scientific controversy? Why is junk like whether or not birds were the
major predator on melanic moths more of a controversy than IC? It has
been 8 years since the abject failure in Dover and what has changed
about IC?

Ron Okimoto

[Steven L.]

On 3/5/2014 6:12 AM, Burkhard wrote:
> On Tuesday, March 4, 2014 4:29:34 PM UTC, Angelo brazil wrote:
>
>> <snip>
>>

>> DNA sequence comparison can be interpreted as an example of the Creator's wise and efficient use and re-use of genetic code in different creatures to accomplish a common and basic cellular function.......
>>
>
> Interesting. When an intelligent (human) designer re-uses material, then this
> is for 2 reasons - scarcity of resources such as time, material and imagination and
> b) a common function or purpose for the things so designed.
>

> So you are arguing that God suffers from a scarcity of resources such as time,
> material and imagination, and also has a common function in mind for humans,
> chimps, geese, flatworm and broccoli?

Humans had to have a common biochemistry with animals and plants, or
else we couldn't derive nourishment from eating them.

Even if just the chirality of their molecules was opposite of ours,
we could eat them and still starve.



--
Steven L.

[Mark Isaak]

On 3/5/14 10:30 AM, Angelo brazil wrote:
>
>> So the real question is, Why should he be economical?
>
> its not a question of if he should be, or should not be. Its just a matter of, that he CAN be.

You already reject the concept of a god powerful and wise enough to
create evolution. Why should your lesser god be economical?

[Robert Camp]

I can see that you have something to say. It just doesn't seem to have
any relation to anything I've written.

>> economy, not really that the Christian god is often considered
>
> Why would it, but no, it does not. It can just fart more material into
> existence as it feels the need. Or so the claim goes.

I think I know what you mean here, even though you've chopped things up
so as to be fairly unintelligible. The problem is you are apparently
responding to something you think somebody said, but that somebody isn't me.

> As to the xian gods, & there are millions of them, they are nothing to
> followers of the other gods & goddesses's. As it should be.
>
>> omnipotent, not really that this might be the god the poster favors?
>> In all of those cases I beg to differ.
>
> I believe that I pointed out that to xians, theirs is the one with really
> big balls.

And if you did, that is completely irrelevant to anything I said.

> But in case you missed it, why yes, so they pretend. Why?
> Does it matter to the universe, or just to you. Are you appointing
> yourself as the final word on theology now?

Are you sure you know how this posting business works? Seriously, I
cannot find a shred of anything in what you've offered that has the
slightest bit of relevance to what I posted.

> Can't say that I have would
> accused you of that. Haven't read enough of your postings. Probably a
> reason for that.

Probably. It appears I haven't been missing anything.

I'm curious, though. When you respond to others, do your comments have
anything at all to do with what *they* wrote?

[Mark Isaak]

On 3/5/14 11:41 AM, Angelo brazil wrote:
>> You are still referring to irreducible complexity as if it were some
>>
>> problem for evolution. I ask again: Why?
>
> Because it defies the very tenets of the ToE.

You are bearing false witness. Irreducible complexity is part of
evolutionary change.

> Its not for nothing,
> that it has been attacked violently in the last almost 20 years,
> without success.

So what? The concept is centuries old, and was not considered an
obstacle to evolution until Behe's propaganda. And the fact that
closed-minded zealots remain closed-minded says nothing about its validity.

>> Are you really unaware that IC can easily evolve?
>
> how ?

Duplication and subsequent deletion, exaption, scaffolding, coevolution,
and/or gradual modification.

> That IC was *predicted* to arise via evolution?
>
> how ?

Muller, H. J. 1939. Reversibility in evolution considered from the
standpoint of genetics. _Biological Reviews of the Cambridge
Philosophical Society_ 14: 261-280.

Read it. You can find it online.

>>
>> You mentioned "well-matched parts". What better way to get parts
>> matching well than to make multiple small adjustments to them?
>
> how would natural selection forsee for example the final function
> of nitrogenase ?

You are the only one who is talking about "foreseeing". Good grief!
Learn what evolution is before you knock it.


> Could it be, that super evolutionary mechanisms would act that way,
> borrowing parts from other biological systems and assemble them to
> a molecular sledge-hammer , perfectly ordered, with perfect fits,
> and new functions,with the help of saint time , that would do that
> miracle ? and , worse, make it happen twice, independently ?

Yes. Not only could it happen, it is practically inevitable. Once you
learn how evolution works (and not before), you can see that
modifications which produce greater efficiency are the norm, and
generally cannot be prevented.

> The subsurface organism has the capacity for nitrogen fixation
> using a nitrogenase distinct from that in Cyanobacteria, suggesting
> nitrogen fixation evolved separately in the two lineages.

Yawn. Flying evolved separately in four.

>
> Lets take a example of Chlorophyll a. [lots of words to say it is IC]

So what's your problem? We *KNOW* IC evolves. There is not the
slightest doubt.

As for phosoynthesis, I will merely suggest that it evolved gradually.
Every molecule, bar none, reacts to light. It is inconceivable that
some molecule would *not* put that reaction to some other use that
benefited the organism. Once that existed, minor changes (adding up to
ultimately become major changes) would make the molecule more efficient,
and other changes would make it more general. I don't know how,
exactly, but there certainly is no obstacle in the way.

Your argument boils down to: Photosynthesis can not evolve because I do
not know how photosynthesis could evolve, and because I am smarter than
God, if I don't know it, it could not happen. I reject your premise
that you are smarter than God. (And do NOT get in a huff about not
having that premise. You don't state it, but it is definitely there,
and it is yours to own.)

[jillery]

On Thu, 6 Mar 2014 01:32:19 -0800 (PST), Angelo brazil
<audiov...@gmail.com> wrote:

>Well, what first has to be explained, is, not only HOW they came together, but WHY.

Why ask WHY? Do you assume the parts have a choice in the matter?
More to the point, the parts do come together in any case, whether by
Creationists' ad hoc poofery or by sciences natural cause. So WHY is
a useless question.

>Take for example Photosystem II. Without it, life on earth would cease to exist. Despite rarely mentioned in the creationism - naturalism debate,i regard it as the PRIMA FACIE example to be studied and debated. How did it arise , and why ? PSII is at the heart of photosynthesis, and catalyzes the thermodynamically most demanding reaction in biological systems, the splitting of water into oxygen and reducing equivalents. The monomer of this bewilderingly complex machinery consists of 20 different protein subunits that bind 77 organic cofactors and seven metal ions. In the reaction center and light-harvesting antenna proteins, a large number of different molecules (35 chlorophyll a, 11 carotenoid, 2 pheophytin a, 2 plastoquinone, 2 heme, and 1 bicarbonate), as well as four manganese ions, two calcium ions, and an iron ion, are held at precise distances and relative orientations that are required for optimal absorption and conversion of light energy to perform efficient electro
n
>transfer. 1)
>
>Science daily describes it as :
>
>Work Of Ancient Genetic Engineering ( huh!, didn't know evolution had this miraculous capabilities..... ) 2)

Send your objections of jounalistic metaphors to the magazine.

>During the normal course of PSII function, its proteins become damaged by the electrons zipping through the complex. A sophisticated mechanism exists for recognizing the damaged protein, removing it and replacing it with a freshly made protein. There are lots of details still to be determined as far as how his process works and how it may be regulated. Researchers are also working to tease apart the differences and/or overlap between the de novo assembly pathway and the damage-repair cycle in the Life Cycle of PSII 3)
>
>http://newunderthesunblog.wordpress.com/the-basics/the-light-reactions/photosystem-ii/
>
>Explanations of scientific papers of how it could have evolved is guesswork at best.
>
>http://www.fceqyn.unam.edu.ar/~celular/paginas/Articulos%20Biol%20Cel%202004/Annual%20Reviews/Review%20photosyntesis.pdf
>
>The evolutionary path of type I and type II reaction center apoproteins is still unresolved owing to the fact that a unified evolutionary tree cannot be generated for these divergent reaction center subunits.
>
>http://www.ebi.ac.uk/interpro/potm/2004_11/Page3.htm
>
>The proteins that make up photosystem II are highly diverse in both sequence and structure. Consequently, these proteins are placed in several different InterPro families, all of which are listed in the table of PSII proteins. The description below is for the PSII reaction centre protein D1 (also known as PsbA or QB).
>
>https://www.academia.edu/3742566/Photosynthesis_and_the_Origin_of_Life
>
>The early atmosphere of the earth is considered to have been neutral (nitrogen and carbon dioxide). The problem arises of how oxygenic photosynthesis could have evolved under these conditions.There were abundant reducing agents such asferrous ion which made it unlikely that water would be used as an electron donor.
>
>http://creation.com/shining-light-on-the-evolution-of-photosynthesis
>
>PSII produces extremely strong oxidizing agents that can pull electrons out of water, but it is not capable of reducing NADP+ to NADPH. PSI produces extremely strong reducing agents that ultimately do the job of reducing ferredoxin and NADP+. Neither system does anything meaningful apart from the other, which is to say, nothing works unless everything works. The
>
>proponents of evolution must explain :
>
>1. Where the genetic information came from to make PSII, the cofactors, the assembly enzymes, the repair enzymes, how it was assembled in a highly coordinated manner,and how it would have had a survival advantage, without being fully developed,and working in a coordenated way together with the other enzymes and protein complexes. Good luck with that.
>
>
>1) http://www.sciencemag.org/site/feature/data/prizes/ge/2006/loll.xhtml#1
>
>2) http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/11/021122074236.htm

Do you have a point to all of the above?

[Mark Isaak]

On 3/5/14 8:06 PM, nyi...@bellsouth.net wrote:
> On Wednesday, March 5, 2014 9:14:38 PM UTC-5, Mark Isaak wrote:
>> On 3/5/14 10:41 AM, nyi...@bellsouth.net wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, March 4, 2014 4:26:05 PM UTC-5, Mark Isaak wrote:
>>>> On 3/3/14 2:33 PM, Angelo brazil wrote:
>>>>> Em segunda-feira, 3 de março de 2014 18h50min16s UTC-3, Steven L. escreveu:
>>
>>>>>> [... cyanobacteria ...]
>>
>>>>>> It took me just 10 seconds to dig up a zillion articles on how
>>>>>> cyanobacteria evolved.
>
>>> And I suspect all of the RELEVANT ones have to do with a summary of WHAT
>>> happened rather than HOW or WHY it happened.
>
> You didn't dispute this, Mark.

You weren't addressing me. But as you wish: I dispute it.

> <snip for focus>
>
>>> As the complexity of the system increases, though,
>>> the possibility of such an indirect route drops
>>> precipitously. And as the number of unexplained,
>>> irreducibly complex biological systems increases,
>>> our confidence that Darwin's criterion of failure
>>> has been met skyrockets towards the maximum that
>>> science allows.
>>
>>> --_Darwin's Black Box_, p. 40
>>
>>
>>
>> Which is utter bullshit.
>
> You are utterly incompetent at proving this taunt below.

Which is utter bullshit.

>> Irreducible complexity can easily evolve
>> through simple, everyday, straightforward routes.
>
> Sorry, blatant assertion isn't proof. Even most humanists know that.

Good grief, Peter! Where did anyone but your own imbecilic mind claim
that that sentence on its own was proof? The support for it comes later
in the post, not to mention in other writings not cited. If you had not
flunked reading comprehension, you would expect that.

>> Behe's hypothesis
>> applies to discrete, unchangeable parts, which simply do not exist in
>> biology outside his imagination (unless he considers atoms as the only
>> parts worth considering, which he does not,
>
> Wow, you actually forgot about molecules! Which is very ironic, because
> molecules are mostly what Behe writes about all through the book. [And they
> don't change from generation to generation in the absence of mutations--
> something you blissfully ignore in your airy-fairy "arguably changeable"
> talk below.]

I did not forget about molecules. Molecules can change. Molecules do
change. Absence of mutations means absence of reality, so it does not
apply, and I did not consider it. (And, of course, many molecules
change even without mutations.)

IC is disproven. QED.

> The biggest exception in _DBB_ actually strengthens the rule: he talks
> about the bacterial flagellum consisting of four parts, but some of the
> parts are made of many molecules. But Minnich strengthened it by taking
> it down to the level of molecules.

Which shows another problem with IC, but since IC is dead already, there
is no point in bothering with it.

> Spoken like a humanist with no grasp of the scientific realities of the
> situation.

Will you ever learn that your need to belittle everyone at every
opportunity merely shows your own insecurity and immorality?

>> And even if he were dealing with discrete parts, where did he get the
>> idea that the number of indirect routes drops?
>
> You even flunked reading comprehension here.

You flunked reading comprehension and comprehension generally. You get
so focused on individual words that you lose site of what the sentences
and paragraphs mean.

Increased complexity means a greater possibility of indirect routes, not
less. Behe is simply wrong. Again.

[Nick Roberts]

In message <lpdfh95nl4mo0e9cu...@4ax.com>
jillery <69jp...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 5 Mar 2014 10:21:11 -0800 (PST), Angelo brazil
> <audiov...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >Em quarta-feira, 5 de março de 2014 12h15min40s UTC-3, jillery escreveu:
> >> On Wed, 5 Mar 2014 06:17:12 -0800 (PST), Angelo brazil
> >>
> >> <audiov...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> >
> >>
> > > > > What is a species? How does one classify some things as a
> > > > > species and another thing as a variation?
> > >
> > > >
> > >
> > > > Species are a basic unit of biological and taxonomic
> > > > classification.
> > >
> > > >
> > >
> > > > Variation is, when species evolve certain variations upon
> > > > selective pressure based for example on environmental changes.
> > > > The galapagos finches are a example.
> > >
> > > >
> > >
> > > > why these basic questions ?
> > >
> > > >
> > >
> > > > and please, no adhoms.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Except there's nothing fixed about species. Almost all species
> > > that
> > >
> > > ever lived are now extinct. And when different populations vary
> > >
> > > enough, they are no longer the same species, the most obvious
> > > examples
> > >
> > > being ring species. How do these facts fit into a Creationist
> > > model?
> >
> > http://creation.com/birds-of-a-feather-don-t-breed-together
>
>
> Do you read your cites before you post them? Your cite above
> acknowledges that new species arise from older species, so it refutes
> your specific point I challenged.
>
> But let's read on. How does it say that new species arise? It says
> that the Creator gave its original created kinds all of the genes
> they needed. The species we see today are the result of losing
> genes, because evolution "obviously" can't create new genes.
>
> I can think of several flaws to that line of reasoning:
>
> The argument implies there is a progressive loss of genetic
> information from old species to new. In fact, the genome sizes of
> different species show no such correlation.
>
> Even if losing genetic information could account for new species, it
> doesn't explain why new and old species are infertile.
>
> The author assumes new genes can't be created. In fact, new genes
> have been observed and mapped numerous times. A classic example are
> the bacterial genes to digest nylon, a material that didn't exist
> before 1935.

Many years ago on this forum I challenged a creationist with the very
same point. His response was that the bacteria "forgot" that they didn't
know how to digest nylon - I think the meaning was that they had lost
the gene that prevented them from synthesizing nylonase.

Round about this time I started beating my head against the wall.

--
Nick Roberts tigger @ orpheusinternet.co.uk

Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which
can be adequately explained by stupidity.

[jillery]

If you did that every time someone posted something stupid, you would
never stop.