Frank the Hippie Pope

_{Barry Arrington

June 24, 2015

Intelligent Design}

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Further to the more serious critiques of Pope Francis’ recent encyclical, is a more tongue-in-cheek critique of some of his sillier prior pronouncements:

HT: Lutheran Satire

Comments

Mung: You can’t seriously maintain that random assemblies of amino acids into random proteins created genomes for living creatures, can you? No. :) But that's the Darwinian view.Mung_{June 29, 2015
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Mung 8 "The original genomes were randomly assembled. Not sure how much more “junky” you can get than that." You can't seriously maintain that random assemblies of amino acids into random proteins created genomes for living creatures, can you? Building the Space Shuttle was a piece of cake by comparison. If we waited for "random processes" to do it, we'd have a mighty long wait. Longer than the universe has been here, most likely.anthropic_{June 28, 2015
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Does that video represent an ex cathedra statement by a faction of the Lutheran church, or of the management of Uncommon Descent? Or is it equivalent to William Dembski's animated fart?timothya_{June 28, 2015
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anthropic, The original genomes were randomly assembled. Not sure how much more "junky" you can get than that.Mung_{June 26, 2015
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But what if the original genomes were far less junky than today's? If that could be measured, it would certainly count against standard evolutionary theory -- even if unacknowledged by those invested in neo-D.anthropic_{June 26, 2015
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Evolutionary theory tells us that when life first began the genome was mostly junk. How could it has been otherwise? So the question for humans should not be where did the junk come from, but why did it never go away? Regardless of how much junk there is, evolutionary theory has an answer. It's just not testable.Mung_{June 26, 2015
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But complex specified information is not random & non-functional, which is what separates it from non-CSI. So by measuring for CSI, we can still separate out predictions.anthropic_{June 25, 2015
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I'm not sure that I agree with Durston though. Under evolution, the first genomes would have had a high probability of having a lot of random non-functional content due to the fact that at that time everything was just randomly being cobbled together. So one could argue they had very high information content from the start. So no, evolution still can't be falsified. A wet blanket is just the thing when you're on fire!Mung_{June 25, 2015
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Always a spoil-sport. Always a wet blanket, BA77. You can't help yourself, can you?Axel_{June 25, 2015
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OT: Kirk Durston has a new post up Essential Prediction of Darwinian Theory of Macroevolution Falsified by Information Degradation - Kirk Durston - June 24, 2015 (with links to papers on site) Excerpt: In the neo-Darwinian scenario for the origin and diversity of life, the digital functional information for life would have had to begin at zero, increase over time to eventually encode the first simple life form, and continue to increase via natural processes to encode the digital information for the full diversity of life. An essential, falsifiable prediction of Darwinian theory, therefore, is that functional information must, on average, increase over time. Interestingly, a prediction of intelligent design science is quite the opposite; since information always degrades over time for any storage media and replication system, intelligent design science postulates that the digital information of life was initially downloaded into the genomes of life. It predicts that, on average, genetic information is steadily being corrupted by natural processes. The beauty of these two mutually incompatible predictions in science is that the falsification of one entails verification of the other. So which prediction does science falsify and which one does science verify? Ask any computer programmer what effect ongoing random changes in the code would do for the integrity of a program and they will universally agree that it degrades the software. This is precisely the first problem for neo-Darwinian theory. Mutations produce random changes in the digital information of life. It is generally agreed that the rate of deleterious mutations is much greater than the rate of beneficial mutations. My own work with 35 protein families suggests that the rate of destruction is, at minimum, 8 times the rate of neutral or beneficial mutations. Simply put, the digital information of life is being destroyed much faster than it can be repaired or improved. New functions may evolve, but the overall loss of functional information in other areas of the genome will, on average, be significantly greater. The net result is that the digital information of life is running down. The second series of falsifying observations is indicated by actual organisms we have studied most closely. First, the digital information for the bacterial world is degrading due to a net deletional bias in mutations involving insertions and deletions. Second, the fruit fly, also one of the most studied life forms in evolutionary biology, is showing an ongoing, genome-wide loss of DNA across the entire genus. Finally, humans are not exempt and are accumulating harmful mutations (degrading changes in our digital information) at an alarming rate. There are many more examples. In conclusion, the digital information of life appears to be steadily degrading, rather than increasing, falsifying an essential prediction of neo-Darwinian theory and verifying a prediction of intelligent design science. This ought not to be surprising, as every other area of science, except for evolutionary biology, grants that natural processes degrade information, regardless of the storage media and copying process. For neo-Darwinian macroevolution to work, it required something that was in flat-out contradiction to the real world. http://p2c.com/students/blogs/kirk-durston/2015/06/essential-prediction-darwinian-theory-macroevolution-falsifiedbornagain77_{June 25, 2015
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OT: How To Argue With An Atheist: video playlist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHh_wsZgIZk&list=PL0oJPkeuH2AzcNZ911bbT6nTnLO5syb0m actually some pretty good tipsbornagain77_{June 24, 2015
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