Knockout experiments with Trichoplax ought to be able to quickly and cheaply answer the question about whether those genes have any immediate functionality.

But here’s what happened the last someone did that. A 1.5 million base region containing thousands of highly conserved non-coding sequences between mice and men were deleted from the mouse. The GM mice were expected to have all kinds of genetic impairments and thus lead to insight about what the highly conserved non-coding sequences did in the human genome. To everyone’s great surprise the GM mice were indistinguishable in any way from unmodified mice. The researchers shrugged it off by saying there must be some function they overlooked because, you see, conservation of DNA over 180 million years of reproducitive isolation axoimatically means there must be natural selection value. Natural selection can’t be questioned because it’s a “fact”. The researchers didn’t go further. They stated their goal was to find function in highly conserved DNA not non-function in highly conserved DNA. So they abandoned the mouse/man comparison and instead moved farther afield to highly conserved frog/man and fish/man non-coding DNA where the reproductive isolation is considerably longer.

Neo-Darwinian “facts” are immune to falsification. Isn’t that just precious?

I am watching a Teaching Company course on Dark Matter and Dark Energy by Sean Carroll who is a brilliant instructor and a committed atheist. Also apparently nearly all cosmologists are atheists. I find this very interesting. Very, very bright people whose field is the strongest case for ID and they are atheists.

The funny thing is that Carroll more than once talks about the great design, not in those terms, of the universe and matter.

This is not the Sean Carroll who is the evo devo guy even though the name is identical.

As a matter of fact, now that I’m thinking about it, Bill owes me one for unbanning Ted Davis. So I’m going to unban BobOH with same caveat:

BobOH – you’re unbanned but Bill Dembski has the last word so if you can’t keep him happy if he bans you again that’s it.

Try to keep up. Allen MacNeil isn’t banned here. Jack Krebs doesn’t know his ass from his elbow in either biology or theology yet consumed vast quantities of bandwidth expressing his opinions in both. He simply took up too much time and space in correction. BobOH’s banning wasn’t my doing. As I recall he was snarky with Denyse one time too many and Bill Dembski’s chivalrous instinct got the better of him. In my experience Denyse has a thick enough skin to qualify for being “tough as nails” and doesn’t need protection. Snark rolls off her like water off a duck’s back. For the record I regret the loss of BobOH. He’s two faced, snarky, and not very bright but still represents the cream of the crop amongst our critics and I’d welcome him back.

In addition, I am a product of one of those European universities you sneer at.

Sir, I didn’t argue against Universities; I simply observed what is a deterministic fact: almost all the students attending Biology classes have modest (and often very modest) knowledge and capabilities in Mathematics. Obviously, this does not mean at all that there aren’t any students who are brilliant in that subject. I hope that you belong to the second category, but that’s the reality. That’s all.

Thus you won’t be surprised that the arrogance of you guys who don’t even deserve to be called idiots in its original Latin meaning really pisses me off.

Ok; now I’ve understood.
You definitely DON’T belong to the second category

If they actually have some function in Trichoplax, then evolutionary biologists would confidently explain that they were “simply” coopted for more complex functions in higher animals. I think that in order to use this study as ammunition for front loading this scenario needs to be invalidated.

Is this the same thing or something different

http://www.idscience.org/

As the saying goes, the more we know, the more we realize how much there is that we don’t know.

evolutionary biologists are just too stupid–or too dishonest–to draw the obvious conclusions from their own research

William Wallace

the IQ of biologists entering graduate school is lower than the other fields you mention, Granville

kairos (-focus?)

I don’t know directly the situation in USA but in Europe is quite typical that in Universities the students in Biological sciences have pretty low levels of Mathematics knowledge and undetanding

Granville Sewell

Kairos and William Wallace, please note that my comments were directed at “evolutionary biologists”, not “biologists”!

Actually, the last comment of Granville doesn’t make much of a difference. Anyway, after Jack Krebs, Bob O’H and Allen MacNeill had been banned there are not too many biologists left here beside me. In addition, I am a product of one of those European universities you sneer at. Thus you won’t be surprised that the arrogance of you guys who don’t even deserve to be called idiots in its original Latin meaning really pisses me off.

Remember that he saw Charles Lyell as his hero. Both attended the Univ. of Edinburgh, where James Hutton’s geological views prevailed. Hutton saw the earth as “eternally” old, which gives rise to Lyell’s “gradualism”, and, afterwards, Darwin’s “biological gradualism”, which he called evolution: variation + inheritance + lots of time.

Darwin expected that the geological record, when fully examined, would turn up huge amounts of fossils going way back in time. For example, the formation of the eye, per Darwin, could only have come about through eons of gradual evolution, even though it shows up right away in the Cambrian. Darwin fully expected as much of a fossil record before the Cambrian as we see after the Cambrian.

More and more we keep seeing the rise of genetic complexity within an increasingly smaller amount of geologic time—the exact opposite of what Darwin expected. But, of course, this doesn’t slow down the Darwinists one bit (or should I say, one byte?).

Over at PT, I said years ago, that once full genome analysis came about, that this would be the death knell of Darwinism. Well, IMO, we’re seeing that come about little bit by little byte.