Darwin, Another flatulent atheist god bites the dust!

Creationist claptrap.

 

nah thats good ole fashioned data proving darwin is another atheist flatulent flaptrap fraud gassing the world.

 

Claims by the Discovery Institute have been repeatedly examined and dismissed.
Despite Wells credentials he promotes deceptive interpretations of evidences for evolution.

 

Thanks for sharing your 'opinion'.

 

What I shared is a fact.

 

nope dont see no facts, sorry

 

If your sourcing the Discovery Institute then you're not looking for any.

 

nope dont see no facts, sorry

 

Of course not; it's the Discovery Institute.

 

Oh brother! This guy was disproved LONG ago.


Jonathan Wells gets everything wrong, again
By PZ Myers
October 16, 2009 11:03 MST

I was just catching up on a few blogs, and noticed all this stuff I missed about Jonathan Wells' visit to Oklahoma. And then I read Wells' version of the event, and just about choked on my sweet mint tea.

The next person--apparently a professor of developmental biology--objected that the film ignored facts showing the unity of life, especially the universality of the genetic code, the remarkable similarity of about 500 housekeeping genes in all living things, the role of HOX genes in building animal body plans, and the similarity of HOX genes in all animal phyla, including sponges. 1Steve began by pointing out that the genetic code is not universal, but the questioner loudly complained that 2he was not answering her questions. I stepped up and pointed out that housekeeping genes are similar in all living things because without them life is not possible. I acknowledged that HOX gene mutations can be quite dramatic (causing a fly to sprout legs from its head in place of antennae, for example), but 3HOX genes become active midway through development, 4long after the body plan is already established. 5They are also remarkably non-specific; for example, if a fly lacks a particular HOX gene and a comparable mouse HOX gene is inserted in its place, the fly develops normal fly parts, not mouse parts. Furthermore, 6the similarity of HOX genes in so many animal phyla is actually a problem for neo-Darwinism: 7If evolutionary changes in body plans are due to changes in genes, and flies have HOX genes similar to those in a horse, why is a fly not a horse? Finally, 8the presence of HOX genes in sponges (which, everyone agrees, appeared in the pre-Cambrian) still leaves unanswered the question of how such complex specified genes evolved in the first place.

The questioner became agitated and shouted out something to the effect that HOX gene duplication explained the increase in information needed for the diversification of animal body plans. 9I replied that duplicating a gene doesn't increase information content any more than photocopying a paper increases its information content. She obviously wanted to continue the argument, but the moderator took the microphone to someone else.

It blows my mind, man, it blows my freakin' mind. How can this guy really be this stupid? He has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in developmental biology, and he either really doesn't understand basic ideas in the field, or he's maliciously misrepresenting them…he's lying to the audience. He's describing how he so adroitly fielded questions from the audience, including this one from a professor of developmental biology, who was no doubt agitated by the fact that Wells was feeding the audience steaming balls of rancid horsepuckey. I can't blame her. That was an awesomely dishonest/ignorant performance, and Wells is proud of himself. People should be angry at that fraud.

I've just pulled out this small, two-paragraph fragment from his longer post, because it's about all I can bear. I've flagged a few things that I'll explain — the Meyer/Wells tag team really is a pair of smug incompetents.

1The genetic code is universal, and is one of the pieces of evidence for common descent. There are a few variants in the natural world, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule: they are slightly modified versions of the original code that are derived by evolutionary processes. For instance, we can find examples of stop codons in mitochondria that have acquired an amino acid translation. You can read more about natural variation in the genetic code here.

2That's right, he wasn't answering her questions. Meyer was apparently bidding for time until the big fat liar next to him could get up a good head of steam.

3This implication that Hox gene expression is irrelevant because it is "late" was a staple of Wells' book, Icons of Evolution and the Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. It's a sham. The phylotypic stage, when the Hox genes are exhibiting their standard patterns of expression, of humans is at 4-5 weeks (out of 40 weeks), and in zebrafish it's at 18-24 hours. These are relatively early events. The major landmarks before this period are gastrulation, when major tissue layers are established, and neurulation, when the neural tube forms. Embryos are like elongate slugs with the beginnings of a few tissues before this time.

4What? Patterned Hox gene expression is associated with the establishment of the body plan. Prior to this time, all the embryonic chordate has of a body plan is a couple of specified axes, a notochord, and a dorsal nerve tube. The pharyngula stage/phylotypic stage is the time when Hox gene expression is ordered and active, when organogenesis is ongoing, and when the hallmarks of chordate embryology, like segmental myotomes, a tailbud, and branchial arches are forming.

5Hox genes are not non-specific. They have very specific patterning roles; you can't substitute abdominal-B for labial, for instance. They can be artificially swapped between individuals of different phyla and still function, which ought, to a rational person, be regarded as evidence of common origin, but they definitely do instigate the assembly of different structures in different species, which is not at all surprising. When you put a mouse gene in a fly, you are transplanting one gene out of the many hundreds of developmental genes needed to build an eye; the eye that is assembled is built of 99% fly genes and 1% (and a very early, general 1%) mouse genes. If it did build a mouse eye in a fly, we'd have to throw out a lot of our understanding of molecular genetics and become Intelligent Design creationists.

Hox genes are initiators or selectors; they are not the embryonic structure itself. Think of it this way: the Hox genes just mark a region of the embryo and tell other genes to get to work. It's as if you are contracting out the building of a house, and you stand before your subcontractors and tell them to build a wall at some particular place. If you've got a team of carpenters, they'll build one kind of wall; masons will build a different kind.

6No, the similarity of Hox genes is not a problem. It's an indicator of common descent. It's evidence for evolution.

7Good god.

Why is a fly not a horse? Because Hox genes are not the blueprint, they are not the totality of developmental events that lead to the development of an organism. You might as well complain that the people building a tarpaper shack down by the railroad tracks are using hammers and nails, while the people building a MacMansion on the lakefront are also using hammers and nails, so shouldn't their buildings come out the same? Somebody who said that would be universally regarded as a clueless moron. Ditto for a supposed developmental biologist who thinks horses and flies should come out the same because they both have Hox genes.

8You can find homeobox-containing genes in plants. All that sequence is is a common motif that has the property of binding DNA at particular nucleotide sequences. What makes for a Hox gene, specifically, is its organization into a regulated cluster. How such genes and gene clusters could arise is simply trivial in principle, although working out the specific historical details of how it happened is more complex and interesting.

The case of sponges is enlightening, because they show us an early step in the formation of the Hox cluster. Current thinking is that sponges don't actually have a Hox cluster (the first true Hox genes evolved in cnidarians), they have a Hox-like cluster of what are called NK genes. Apparently, grouping a set of transcription factors into a complex isn't that uncommon in evolution.

9If you photocopy a paper, the paper doesn't acquire more information. But if you've got two identical twins, A who is holding one copy of the paper, and B who is holding two copies of the same paper, B has somewhat more information. Wells' analogy is a patent red herring.

The ancestral cnidarian proto-Hox cluster is thought to have contained four Hox genes. Humans have 39 Hox genes organized into four clusters. Which taxon contains more information in its Hox clusters? This is a trick question for Wells; people with normal intelligence, like most of you readers, would have no problem recognizing that 39 is a bigger number than 4. Jonathan Wells seems to have missed that day in his first grade arithmetic class.

It's appalling, but this is the Discovery Institute's style: to trot out a couple of crackpots with nice degrees, who then proceed to make crap up while pretending to be all sincere and informed and authoritative. It's an annoying trick, and I can understand entirely why a few intelligent people with actual knowledge in the audience might find the performance infuriating. I do, too.

 

Link to the original thread please.

 

What exactly is meant to be proven or discussed? The article you quote (as a rule, please give the source when quoting) is quite vague on what evidence it refers to and which "debunking" it supports. It's not much of an opportunity to argue about "major features of the fossil record" if you or Wells won't detail which ones they are. What are we going to say, "nuh-huh"? I'm also not sure of whose understanding of Darwinism's predictions we're looking at here. Certainly there are common ideas of how for instance non-coding DNA works, but it is not clear to me that Darwinism as a concept sinks or swims together with those ideas.

I'm not precisely sure where this is going, but sure, Darwin was wrong about a lot of stuff. His position in the history of science is not that he was right about everything, but that he wrote down one pretty decent idea (arguably, he didn't come up with it either, or at least not in a vacuum, he was just one of the first to collate it, write it down and publish it). Darwin had a very primitive understanding of what have now become known as Darwinism (well, to some, Darwinism seems to refer to the theory of evolution as Darwin knew it, which had many flaws, and to others, it seems to refer to evolution as it is know today, which also probably has flaws in it, but is certainly an improvement on 1800s ideas).

 

you don't seem to understand what a mythical God is...

unless you think Darwin was a Christian and disproved his own God

which seems to be the case.....

https://christiananswers.net/q-aig/darwin.html

"Charles Darwin's thinking and writing on the subject of evolution and natural selection caused him to reject the evidence for God in nature and ultimately to renounce the Bible, God, and the Christian faith.."

 

Simplistic views of a "Creator" do not necessarily oblige said to be so simplistic.

 

the best thing to do before the place gets stunk up with beer farts and belches is to finish reading the whole sentence.

early development in vertebrate embryos is more consistent with separate origins than with common ancestry; that non-coding DNA is fully functional, contrary to neo-Darwinian predictions

 

TMI

 

You didn't explain why non-coding DNA being functional is a problem for Darwinism. There are many examples of natural selection and mutations putting existing functionality to new use. You also didn't explain how verbebrate embryos are more consistent with separate origins. Its like you copy and pasted a quote and never looked into it.

 

And never will.

I feel like this doesn't get talked about enough, and it is one of the biggest pieces of evidence for natural selection over intelligent direction. Under deliberate design, form follows function. In natural evolution, we see the opposite: forms put to new functions.

From physics denial to biology denial to Holocaust denial (yes, really, he goes there too), this is his MO.

 

Geez. This load again?

Riddle me this. If we are created by "God," why the penis? Why the vagina? Why "create" a birthing process that will produce a predictable number of defective offspring?

WHY SEX AT ALL?

With "God" why would there be a need for sex? I mean, according to official history, "God" stuck a baby in Mary without sex. Why just the one time? Why not make it an ongoing thing?

I don't know if there is or is not a "God." For all we know "creation" was some kid's high school science experiment and this universe has been sitting on a shelf in "God-Mom's" basement for the last 14 billion years. I do know that if there ever was a "God" then whatever he did 14 Billion years ago he's long gone and off doing other stuff.

Leaving us, his "creation" to make do with that nasty old science instead of "His" miracles.

 

you first need to present a counter argument, na na neener neener is not a counter argument.

on a roll, Lie, Lie and another Lie, wanna go for 4?

 

You made the argument about the embyos, its up to you to explain your argument in detail with evidence. If you don't, then its just a faith statement on your part.

I refuted your argument about functional non-coding DNA. Natural selection and mutations will put DNA to use. This is a very established part of the theory of evolution. Both evolution and creationism equally explain functional non-coding DNA.

 

you posted no evidence for your claim, therefore its just a faith statement on your part.

 

You made the claims about evidence against evolution. I'm just curious what evidence you have. Now I hear you don't have any evidence and you are relying on me for the evidence. Ok.....?

 

I have already given you the evidence, if you believe its insufficient then make your case instead of dancing around in circles.

 

And I refuted it in post #46. Basically you claimed that functional non-coding DNA is a problem for evolution, and embryos are a problem too. But you don't provide any evidence to back up these. So I don't know where we can take our little conversation if you don't have any evidence. Maybe science isn't your thing and you should stick to arguing about the definition of atheism.