Guilt by Association
| October 30, 2009 | Posted by William Dembski under Creationism, Intelligent Design |
Nick Matzke and other critics of ID like nothing better than to conflate ID with young-earth creationism (go here for the latest in this vein by Matzke). But as University of Wisconsin science historian Ron Numbers has noted, even though it’s inaccurate to conflate the two, this is “the easiest way to discredit intelligent design” (go here). Matzke, as a loyal Darwinist, is thus simply being true to form.
For the record, just because various non-ID conferences and events are reported here at UD (e.g., creationist, atheist, or theistic evolutionist) does not constitute an endorsement of those events. Nor does the appearance of an ID proponent at such events constitute complicity with the positions of the organizers. I myself have appeared at atheist (World Skeptics Congress), theistic evolutionist (Templeton conferences), and young-earth creationist (local gatherings here in Texas) events. I believe in getting the word out about ID and, frankly, am happy to have the opportunity to address people on the other side of these issues.
ID, per definitionem, is the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the product of intelligence. It rests on two pillars: (1) that the activity of intelligent agents is sometimes detectible and (2) that nature may exhibit evidence of intelligent activity. How anyone gets young-earth creationism from this is a mystery.
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Gorilla-like anatomy on Australopithecus afarensis mandibles suggests Au. afarensis link to robust australopiths
Yoel Rak, Avishag Ginzburg, and Eli Geffen
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, April 17 2007, 104: 6568-6572, doi 10.1073/pnas.0606454104
Abstract: Mandibular ramus morphology on a recently discovered specimen of Australopithecus afarensis closely matches that of gorillas. This finding was unexpected given that chimpanzees are the closest living relatives of humans. Because modern humans, chimpanzees, orangutans, and many other primates share a ramal morphology that differs from that of gorillas, the gorilla anatomy must represent a unique condition, and its appearance in fossil hominins must represent an independently derived morphology. This particular morphology appears also in Australopithecus robustus. The presence of the morphology in both the latter and Au. afarensis and its absence in modern humans cast doubt on the role of Au. afarensis as a modern human ancestor. The ramal anatomy of the earlier Ardipithecus ramidus is virtually that of a chimpanzee, corroborating the proposed phylogenetic scenario.
—-hummus man: “When one wants to understand the ground rules under which scientists worked prior to the 1980’s, the logical place to start is with a scientist that was working during that time. Scientists and science educators who worked during that time have told you that you are wrong.”
Sorry, your attempted arguments from authority are not working. I have already proven my point with plenty of evidence to support my position, and I have plenty more in reserve. You have nothing, as is clear from your posturing. You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble by simply reading the FAQ. This is basic stuff.
StephenB:
Shorter StephenB: What do those darn scientists know about science anyways. Take the word of some guy commenting on a blog.
Gotcha.
—hummus man: “Shorter StephenB: What do those darn scientists know about science anyways. Take the word of some guy commenting on a blog.”
You don’t handle evidence-based refutations very well do you?
bornagain77 (#81)
A few points on cichlids:
1. You are perfectly correct in asserting that cichlids have been around for much longer than human beings, or even hominids for that matter.
Age of Cichlids: New Dates for Ancient Lake Fish Radiations by Martin J. Genner, Ole Seehausen, David H. Lunt, Domino A. Joyce, Paul W. Shaw, Gary R. Carvalho and George F. Turner, in
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msm050.
2. Cichlids constitute a single family, with a very large number of species. According to Wikipedia :
3. Creationist Arthur Jones, whose doctoral thesis in biology was on cichlid fish, has written :
Jones continues :
In other words: here we have a creationist biologist who readily acknowledges that the members of a fish family (Cichlidae) share a common ancestry.
4. According to an article in Science magazine (Vol. 300. no. 5617, pp. 325 – 329, April 11, 2003) entitled Origin of the Superflock of Cichlid Fishes from Lake Victoria, East Africa by Erik Verheyen, Walter Salzburger, Jos Snoeks, Axel Meyer (abstract available online at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/.....0/5617/325 ), 500 species of cichlid fish have evolved in the last 100,000 years in a single lake:
In other words, as far as cichlids are concerned, the last time any intelligent intervention in their origin could have taken place would have been 165-121 million years ago.
You know Mustela, I’ve been reflecting on your objection to my 14th point on post 32
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ent-338458
Now I find it interesting that you are not contesting none of the other 13 failed postulations of materialism, Such as a transcendent origin of the “material” universe. Or that time is not constant everywhere, or the fact the photosynthetic cell appeared on earth as soon as water appeared on earth, or the fact that the “simplest life’ is more complex than any man made machine or even the Cambrian explosion or the general pattern of sudden appeareance of distinct kinds in the fossil record since the Cambrian,,,No all this seems to have slipped your attention and you pretend as if it has absolutely no bearing on point 14 (you accuse it of being a red herring, when in fact they are just 13 cold hard facts that bear directly on the matter of point 14),,,but instead of giving fair hearing to all this, you want to pick on what is a fairly modest observation that Humans as a “kind” are the last distinct kind to appear in the fossil record,,, But in reflection, I think it is not to bold at all on my part to make the claim, for even in the evolutionists in their very own own fossil graphs,,,, the graphs with the infamous dotted lines that we all love so well, those dotted lines that connect all the “current” tree (or is that bush) of hominids,,,, even in those graphs, Man is always the last to appear on the graph,,,, Now if a new type of ape were to have appeared since man arrived on the scene I am pretty sure evolutionists would have triple highlighted that on their graphs and I am also fairly certain it probably would have garnered National Geographic healines for at least a year! But No this is not the case,,,there Man sits all alone on all the graphs as the last distinct type to appear in the fossil record,,, connected with nothing but our beloved dotted line,,, and as Erst Mayr, a leading expert in “human evolution” has stated:
“Man is indeed as unique, as different from all other animals, as had been traditionally claimed by theologians and philosophers.” – Evolutionist Ernst Mayr
or Ian Tattersall:
“Something extraordinary, if totally fortuitous, happened with the birth of our species….Homo sapiens is as distinctive an entity as exists on the face of the Earth, and should be dignified as such instead of being adulterated with every reasonably large-brained hominid fossil that happened to come along.” Anthropologist Ian Tattersall (curator at the American Museum of Natural History)
I just don’t know what it is your missing Mustela,,,It is hard for me to believe that someone could either be so blind to the evidence or so deceptive but that is all that is left for me to think.
—————
By the way Mustela with ENCODE finding virtually 100% poly-functional complexity, the true genome similarity between Man and Chimps is this:
Chimpanzee?
10-10-2008 – Dr Richard Buggs – research geneticist at the University of Florida
…Therefore the total similarity of the genomes could be below 70%.
http://www.refdag.nl/artikel/1.....anzee.html
Nice post vjtorley,,,I gonna borrow some of those quotes if you don’t mind,,
bornagain77 (#81):
As far as the human line is concerned, my position is as follows:
1. I would agree with Professor Michael Behe that a very strong case can be made for the common ancestry of all living organisms. That includes human beings.
2. I find it very interesting that none of Behe’s scientific critics have been able to dent his thesis that there is an edge of evolution, as far as blind, undirected processes are concerned. Behe identifies this with the taxonomic level of either the genus or family.
3. The article by S. Huang which I linked to above in #80 provided evidence that human beings belong to a separate family – hominids – which appeared approximately 17.3 million years ago.
4. Nevertheless, a hominid is not necessarily a human being. If we’re talking about the genus Homo, then the evidence indicates that this genus appeared suddenly, about 2 million years ago.
Two paleoanthropologists have admitted in Nature in 2005 that we don’t know the direct ancestor of our genus Homo:
A 2009 article (Texas Hold ’Em Part III: Calling Ronald Wetherington’s Bluffs About Human Evolution in His January Texas State Board of Education Testimony) by Casey Luskin at http://www.evolutionnews.org/2......html#fn59 certainly gives the lie to claims that human evolution contains no gaps and no lack of transitional fossils, and that the origins of our species represents a gradualistic evolutionary change.
To be fair, however, it has been suggested that the Dmanisi remains in Georgia represent a transition between Homo ergaster and earlier forms. See this link:
http://books.google.com/books?.....38;f=false
5. My own position is that the human brain is the most exquisitely complex organ known to exist in nature, so I am highly skeptical of claims that it evolved gradualistically. Some kind of intelligent guidance must have been required to explain its origin.
6. However, the human mind is not reducible to the brain, as I have argued elsewhere. The brain is a necessary but not sufficient condition for human thought to occur. Thus I would also expect to find evidence of another quantum leap in the archeological record, either 600,000 or 200,000 years ago, as I argued above.
7. As far as I know, no families have appeared in the last two million years, and certainly none since the dawn of true human beings.
Well I agree with everything you stated save for point one,,, common ancestry? shoot evolutionists can’t even connect the two oldest “ancestors:
For though life shares a optimal DNA code, which is a “miracle in and of itself, There simply is no smooth “gradual transition” to be found between these most ancient of life forms, bacteria and archaea, as even this following “evolution friendly” article clearly points out:
Was our oldest ancestor a proton-powered rock?
Excerpt: In particular, the detailed mechanics of DNA replication would have been quite different. It looks as if DNA replication evolved independently in bacteria and archaea,… Even more baffling, says Martin, neither the cell membranes nor the cell walls have any details in common (between the bacteria and the archaea). http://www.newscientist.com/ar.....tml?page=1
About the only thing common in the ancestry that I can hold on to, especially considering the explosive appearance of radically new body plans in the Cambrian, would be the “commonality of descent” that God implements his plan with,,,
StephenB:
If you are asking me whether I believe the statements of real working scientists, Christians among them, that have told me (and you, BTW) that you are wrong instead of some guy on the internet who refuses to say whether he has any experience or training in science other than sniping at scientists from the safety of a tightly moderated blog? Well, what can I say, ya got me there.
vjtorley,
The reason why I can be so bold as to claim Man as a unique kind is that I find, from the evidence I have been able to look at, that man is as unique genetically as can be from chimps with the refutation of the “genetic similarity” argument:
First off Dr. John Sanford, who is by no means a slouch when it comes to genetics (he invented the “gene gun” and pathogen derived resistance) states:
Dr. Sanford calculates it would take 12 million years to “fix” a single base pair mutation into a population. He further calculates that to create a gene with 1000 base pairs, it would take 12 million x 1000 or 12 billion years. This is obviously too slow to support the creation of the human genome containing 3 billion base pairs. http://www.detectingtruth.com/?p=66
Second is that when we remove the biased methodology that materialists have imposed on the “similarity evidence” we find some very interesting things:
The 98.8% similarity derived from the DNA code, to the body plans of chimps and man, is purely imaginary, since it is clearly shown that the overriding “architectural plan” of the body is not even encoded in the DNA in the first place. Of more clarity though, this “98.8% similarity evidence” is derived by materialists from a very biased methodology of presuming that the 1.5% of the genome, which directly codes for proteins, has complete precedence of consideration over the other remaining 98.5% of the genome which does not directly code for proteins. Yet even when considering just this 1.5% of the genome that codes for proteins, we find that the proteins, which are directly coded by that 1.5% of the genome, are shown to differ by a huge 80% difference between chimps and man.
Chimps are not like humans – May 2004
Excerpt: the International Chimpanzee Chromosome 22 Consortium reports that 83% of chimpanzee chromosome 22 proteins are different from their human counterparts,,, The results reported this week showed that “83% of the genes have changed between the human and the chimpanzee—only 17% are identical—so that means that the impression that comes from the 1.2% [sequence] difference is [misleading]. In the case of protein structures, it has a big effect,” Sakaki said. http://cmbi.bjmu.edu.cn/news/0405/119.htm
Eighty percent of proteins are different between humans and chimpanzees; Gene; Volume 346, 14 February 2005:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15716009
Eighty percent of proteins are different between humans and chimpanzees; Gene; Volume 346, 14 February 2005:
The early genome comparison by DNA hybridization techniques suggested a nucleotide difference of 1-2%. Recently, direct nucleotide sequencing confirmed this estimate. These findings generated the common belief that the human is extremely close to the chimpanzee at the genetic level. However, if one looks at proteins, which are mainly responsible for phenotypic differences, the picture is quite different, and about 80% of proteins are different between the two species. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15716009
How in the world did the proteins change by +80% while the genes, which supposedly coded for those proteins during evolutionary history, remain virtually unchanged? Why is this huge +80% anomaly ignored by materialists and only the biased genetic similarity stressed in the media?
On top of this huge +80% difference in proteins, the oft quoted 98.8% DNA similarity is not even rigorously true in the first place. Just considering this 1.5% of the genome that directly codes for proteins, other recent comparisons of the protein coding genes, between chimps and man, have yielded a similarity of only 96%. Whereas, the December 2006 issue of PLoS ONE reported that human and chimpanzee gene copy numbers differ by 6.4%, which gives a similarity of only 93.6% (Hahn). Even more realistically, to how we actually should be looking at the genomes from a investigative starting point, Dr. Hugh Ross states the similarity is closer to 85% to 90% when taking into account the chimp genome is about 12% larger than the human genome. A recent, more accurate, human/chimp genome comparison study, by Richard Buggs in 2008, has found when he rigorously compared the recently completed sequences in the genomes of chimpanzees to the genomes of humans side by side, the true genome similarity between chimps and man fell to slightly below 70%! Why is this study ignored since the ENCODE study has now implicated 100% high level functionality across the entire human genome? Finding compelling evidence that implicates 100% high level functionality across the entire genome clearly shows the similarity is not to be limited to the very biased “only 1.5% of the genome” studies of materialists.
Chimpanzee?
10-10-2008 – Dr Richard Buggs – research geneticist at the University of Florida
…Therefore the total similarity of the genomes could be below 70%.
http://www.refdag.nl/artikel/1.....anzee.html
as well, we are still early in this line of investigation ,,,yet even from this early starting point things are not looking good for the materialists in the least:
Kangaroo genes close to humans
Excerpt: Australia’s kangaroos are genetically similar to humans,,, “There are a few differences, we have a few more of this, a few less of that, but they are the same genes and a lot of them are in the same order,” ,,,”We thought they’d be completely scrambled, but they’re not. There is great chunks of the human genome which is sitting right there in the kangaroo genome,”
http://www.reuters.com/article.....P020081118
As well, it is now shown that over one thousand protein coding genes are completely unique between human and chimps:
The Evolution of Mammalian Gene Families – Jeffery P. Demuth
Excerpt: Our results imply that humans and chimpanzees differ by at least 6% (1,418 of 22,000 genes) in their complement of genes, which stands in stark contrast to the oft-cited 1.5% difference between orthologous nucleotide sequences.
But if we to actually try to account for just one gene occuring by accident, much less several hundred orginating in a “poly-functional interweaved” way we find” the problem quickly outstrips the probabilistic resources of the universe (1 in 10^236 for genes: 1 in 10^77 for specific functional proteins)
And on top of all this, the 80% of different proteins are not nearly as passive as materialists have led us to believe:
Researchers Uncover New Kink In Gene Control: – Oct. 2009
Excerpt: a collaborative effort,, has uncovered more than 300 proteins that appear to control genes, a newly discovered function for all of these proteins previously known to play other roles in cells.,,,The team suspects that many more proteins encoded by the human genome might also be moonlighting to control genes,,,
But the top off killer in all this, that clearly sets man apart as a distinct kind from the rest of the animals is that the genome is found to be severely poly-constrained to random mutations with ENCODE:
Poly-Functional Complexity equals Poly-Constrained Complexity
http://docs.google.com/Doc?doc.....Zmd2emZncQ
Encyclopedia Of DNA: New Findings Challenge Established Views On Human Genome:
The ENCODE consortium’s major findings include the discovery that the majority of DNA in the human genome is transcribed into functional molecules, called RNA, and that these transcripts extensively overlap one another. This broad pattern of transcription challenges the long-standing view that the human genome consists of a relatively small set of discrete genes, along with a vast amount of so-called junk DNA that is not biologically active. The new data indicate the genome contains very little unused sequences and, in fact, is a complex, interwoven network. In this network, genes are just one of many types of DNA sequences that have a functional impact.
etc..etc…etc…
The overall point being vjtorley, is that though the evolutionists may have “a” suggestive piece of evidence in the fossil record (which is by far not the continuous transition of fossils they need to establish just a first level order plausibility), the conclusive evidence they need to prove the evolution in the genome simply does not exist, all evidence that has been put forth by evolutionists for genetic similarity literally falls apart with the slightest breeze of scrutiny is applied:
Frankly vjtorley I did not feel the need to defend my last point 14 in post 32 as rigorously as Mustela seems to think I should have since, in my eyes at least, the evolutionists frankly don’t even have a empirical leg to stand on in the first place as far as the actual evidence is concerned:
vjtorley,
Here is a gem:
CHROMOSOME STUDY STUNS EVOLUTIONISTS
Excerpt: To their great surprise, Dorit and his associates found no nucleotide differences at all in the non-recombinant part of the Y chromosomes of the 38 men. This non-variation suggests no evolution has occurred in male ancestry. The researchers, apparently committed to Darwinism, back-pedaled by doing statistical analysis on the evolutionary possibilities if the 38 men sampled somehow inaccurately represented the population at large. Based on this analysis, they concluded that men’s forefather – a single individual, not a group – lived no more than 270,00 years ago.
The challenge this study presents to Darwinism is profound. The study of women offered a shred of support for micro-evolution. The Y chromosome research lends no support for micro-evolution. As for macro-evolution, the results of both studies rule out homo erectus (0.5 to 1.5 million years ago) as a possible progenitor of modern humans.4
http://www.reasons.org/interpr.....lutionists
—hummus man: “If you are asking me whether I believe the statements of real working scientists, Christians among them, that have told me (and you, BTW) that you are wrong instead of some guy on the internet who refuses to say whether he has any experience or training in science other than sniping at scientists from the safety of a tightly moderated blog? Well, what can I say, ya got me there.”
It’s not a question about who you believe. It is a question about whether you can make reasoned judgments based on evidence. Clearly, the answer is no.
StephenB, you said: “The central point is the Darwinist proclivity to insist that science be defined SOLELY as the study of natural causes–that it must be EXCLUSIVELY rather than PRIMARILY about natural causes. That is a new developoment calculated to discredit the design inference.”
and also: “Methodological naturalism is an arbitrary rule that never existed previously to 1980.”
If I understand you correctly, you claim that until recently science could legitimately consider non-natural causes for observed phenomena – perhaps not as primary but at least as secondary causes.
Can you please give us some examples where science has in the past invoked non-natural causes (even if only secondary) for observed natural phenomena? Were these explanations successful at the time? If so, how and why have they since been superceded by modern natural explanations?
Thanks,
fG