Home > Science Group > Discussion Board

cont...

To say that all the evidence of common descent doesn't actually prove common descent goes against the 'Occam's Razor' assumption that the least complicated explanation for the facts should be considered more trustworthy than extended explanations.

Yes, it is possible that a god created all of Earth's life-forms separately and included faux-evidence of common descent in the DNA and fossil record for unknown reasons. But is it probable?  No, it is not. The evidence for common descent fits the theory for common descent and vice-versa.

A quick glance at your post history shows that you are clearly well-informed about science issues, but I suspect you have allowed some wishful thinking in your post. You said it is 'possible that a creator made template organisms'. This is generally an argument put forward in order to keep humans distinctly separate from other animals (and therefore divine). It is only possible to believe this if you disregard the evidence I'm afriaid. It is not supported by scientific evidence. It is your right to believe it, but it is not science.

The evidence for life on Earth sharing a common ancestor is extremely compelling. There is no scientific evidence to posit a credible alternative theory. All attempts to dent common ancestry appear to me to be Christians fighting a 'rear-guard defence' rather than the opinion of scientists doing credible research.

I understand all these arguments quite well, but I'm still not convinced that DNA can actually prove evolution.  For instance, a chimpanzee has 98% the same DNA material as a human.  But that doesn't mean humans are chimpanzees with two percent more DNA.  The chimpanzee has two percent of its DNA that is different from a human's, and vice versa. But that two percent is quite significantly different, and all of the DNA of both is put together very differently.  That 98% is the same DNA proteins, but the 98% is not "the same" as one another's.  Frizzyperm's analogy of a tree is very good, but simplistic and somewhat misleading.  The differences are more important than the similarities in DNA- human DNA indicates we may be primates, but it also proves we are not apes.  All life may be related in some way, but that still does not prove the actual "theory of evolution" as it exists today or back to Darwin, or before him back to the Vedas.  We all do understand that evolution is a religious concept from Vedanta, or Hinduism, right? Or have we not researched where Darwin got these ideas originally?  From Mary Wallstonecraft Shelley's father, who got it from studying the Vedas.

Yes, species change over time, yes species change form, natural selection is the driving force of that change and we know so many facts about genetics and mutation that it's coming out of our ears.  But that does not prove "evolution," it proves CHANGE.  Evolution is not simply change, it involves specific types of change which science in general has proven unlikely or impossible.  Out of all the DNA evidence and fossil evidence we have come up with there has been nothing that shows it is possible for one species to change into another one, and that is the crux of the theory of evolution.  Everything we have learned about biology, genetics, mutation, etc. tell us that one species cannot change into another, and if that does not occur than evolution as we define it today cannot be true.  Unless, of course, the laws of nature changed at some point, and things evolved for possibly millions of years and that those laws of nature have now changed and evolution is not any longer occuring, and is now impossible.  I find that unlikely.

Except for right-wing bozos and anti-religionists (as distinct from atheists) religion has nothing to do with this issue.  I never questioned evolution until 1986 when I read a book by the head paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, who claimed it had taken him 30 years to admit to himself that paleontology had proven evolution did not occur.  I had never heard such a thing, except from the "uneducated", so I did some serious research.  I have continued all these years, and I've become convinced that there's something to the theory of evolution, but that it's not actually the answer we thought.  It is a point to begin from, and we've learned a lot from it, but it turns out to be not quite correct.  We refine the theory, or we discard it and find another, but it is simply unscientific and possibly foolish to persist in arguing about something we obviously need to change.  And the passion and vitriol those arguments often descend into is not needed at all in social intercourse or science.

We all do understand that evolution is a religious concept from Vedanta, or Hinduism, right? Or have we not researched where Darwin got these ideas originally?  From Mary Wallstonecraft Shelley's father, who got it from studying the Vedas.

This year is the 150th anniversary of Darwin's On The Origin of Species (By Means of Natural Selection). To celebrate this, the BBC made several excellent series on Darwin and his theory. They were high-brow, erudite and well recieved. They looked at the history of 18th and 19th century views on how life started. The main series was made by Andrew Marr, one of the BBC's most respected intellectuals and political journalists. They had extensive interviews with Oxbridge Professors of Biology, Theology, Politics, History of Science, Sociology etc etc etc etc.

http://www.open2.net/darwin/dangerousidea/index.html

I watched them all avidly. They were fantastically well reasearched and explorered the concepts, controversies and background thoroughly. They also made a different, equally serious-minded programme that looked at Darwin's life with two, one-hour programmes. 

Nobody mentioned Evolution being rooted in Hinduism in either of them, Nor any influence from the Vedas via Mary Wallstonecraft Shelley's father. As far as the profs at Oxford were concerned, Darwin's influences were from his father and Lamarck and other conteporary biologists.

1 Corinthians 3:19

For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, "He catches the wise in their own craftiness." Translation: EVOLUTION WHICH IS OF THIS WORLD IS FOOLISHNESS!!!!

Contrary to many people's ideas, Mary Wollstonecraft, feminist and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, was not the author of Frankenstein.  That was her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, whose father was William Godwin, author, philosopher and one of the founders of the anarchist movement.  Godwin's influence on scientific and political contemporaries have been obfuscated somewhat because of the later problems with segments of that movement.  I think if you'll research the published (originally private) letters and papers of Darwin you'll find he was very influenced by Godwin, who combined the sort of evolutionary ideas of Vedanta with what was then modern science.  Godwin's writings were quite influential at the time on scientists, including Lamarck, Haeckel, etc.  Although Darwin considered Jean-Baptiste Lamarck as a forerunner of his theories, Lamarck's ideas and theories have been discredited long ago.  Charles Darwin's father, Erasmus, had arrived at nearly the same concepts as Lamarck, and the majority of his work has also fallen by the wayside (There's nothing wrong with that- the scientific method is a means of learning through failure in a controlled environment, and almost all theories fall by the wayside sooner or later after we learn enough from them).  He, too, was influenced by Godwin.  Charles Darwin, late in his life, also considered much of the work of such scientists, including some of his own, to have been mistaken, another point television and academia tend to overlook.  Kind of like Carl Jung repudiating most of his early work, but psychology today still enshrining it.  And although "religion" is irrelevant to the issue under discussion, those who like to cite Darwin as an anti-religious figure also ignore his return to Christianity late in life.

When we're talking about DNA we're talking about an alphabet of only four letters.  There are only so many ways you can combine them to make "words", and some of those combinations will not work.  So nature strings them into long "sentences", but since it has only four proteins to work with everything with DNA is going to inevitably have similarities.  But a "new" species does not have the "same" DNA as the "preceding" species plus a little more strung on the end to make up the difference, it just doesn't work like that.  All live things (or those which were once alive) have DNA, and this proves they are or were alive.  But that is all it actually proves.  The presence of DNA and the similarities caused by the limitations of workable DNA protein combinations does not "prove" interrelationships among the species.

We tend to think of DNA "evidence" as infallible and omniscient, but it's not.  For instance, we can prove that Sally Hemmings was involved with some member of Thomas Jefferson's family, because the present-day Hemmings family members' (of direct descent from Sally) DNA proves descent from some close relative of Thomas Jefferson, either himself or his brother or some other very close relative.  But it has to be a very close relative, not a second cousin or third cousin once removed, etc., and in a direct line.  We can tell a lot lengthwise through time down a line of direct descent, but not broadly across the population.  We can prove remains are those of a human, but not that the human is the fourth cousin of a sister of say, George Washington.  So to expect to use contemporary DNA research to prove relationship between species is not realistic.  We can prove a frog is related to another frog, but we cannot prove it is related to a salamander or a fish.

One problem with academic science is that it is nearly always a minimum of ten to 20 years behind the current state of science.  We've gone in 150 years from going to a university to learn the leading edge of science to going to a university to get a degree so we can get a job where we might, with great effort and over a period of years, begin to catch up to the leading edge of science.  As for television, I enjoy PBS specials about history and the History Channel, etc., but I notice that these are frequently mistaken.  TV, Wikipedia and semi-discredited scientists are not great things to hang an argument on.

We tend to think of DNA "evidence" as infallible and omniscient, but it's not.  For instance, we can prove that Sally Hemmings was involved with some member of Thomas Jefferson's family, because the present-day Hemmings family members' (of direct descent from Sally) DNA proves descent from some close relative of Thomas Jefferson, either himself or his brother or some other very close relative.  But it has to be a very close relative, not a second cousin or third cousin once removed, etc., and in a direct line.  We can tell a lot lengthwise through time down a line of direct descent, but not broadly across the population... We can prove a frog is related to another frog, but we cannot prove it is related to a salamander or a fish.Hi1954

Your example refers to members of one particular species and highlights the difficulties when comparing unique, personal genetic data of two members of the same species. You then take this internal example and say it proves the difficulties when you compare the general genomes of different species.  

I very strongly (but still politely) disagree with your model. It contains a large, insurmountable false-assumption.

Cool, please tell me what my false assumption is.  If you spot a hole in my logic I would be grateful.  I suppose I could have been more clear.  My point was that if DNA research (at least at this time) cannot track across a species very far, how can it track across species lines, or across phylla?  I am not, personally, a DNA researcher, so it's very possible for me to not be up-to-the-minute.  If you can show me something that can be done to do this sort of DNA tracking I'd be thrilled.

Your false assumption is that you claim the comparative study of the genotypes of single members of a the same species to discover how they are related to each other illustrates the methods of comparing different species genomes.

They do not. Which means your conclusion...

"We can prove a frog is related to another frog, but we cannot prove it is related to a salamander or a fish."Hi1954

is unsupported.

BTW... talking of not being able to prove frogs are related to slalmanders... did you read about the Frogmander fossil discovered recently? (see link below) Another 'hole below the waterline' for those pesky creationists to flatly deny I guess. When they are sitting on the bottom of the ocean with an eel up their nose, they will still claim their argument is watertight ;-)

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/05/080521-frog-fossil.html

Frogmander, eh? Sounds very interesting, but I'd like to know an awful lot more about it than a tiny blurb before making any big decisions. I have a first cousin who's been a staff writer at National Geographic since the '70s, and she says the editorial standards have really fallen. I was a voting member since 1964, but I dropped my membership recently over stuff like the Archaeoraptor fraud. Can you please post some actual information on this DNA tracking method you're referring to? I'm really very interested, and you keep mentioning it. Can you recommend an article or book about what exactly you are speaking about, or post a link?

Can you please post some actual information on this DNA tracking method you're referring to? Can you recommend an article or book about what exactly you are speaking about, or post a link?

No, Hi1954, that's not how it works. You see, Science is happy to believe their DNA work and there are 1000s of research projects which include the comaprative use of various species' DNA. As a light-hearted example, those glow-in-the-dark mice with flourescent squid molecules spliced into their DNA.

Now you say all their work is flawed. It is you coming from left-field with a large, unpopular claim. It is for you to provide the evidence. The scientific community is not especially interested in your doubts. So you will have to make them sit up and notice with brilliant evidence, if you can. But most likely, if you presented your arguments to the best experts, they would quickly dissect your objections and show you why you are wrong to believe that intra-species study does not equate to inter-species study. But if you want to challenge their functioning and practical model/methods, go to it.

Mainstream science does not have to defend itself to every doubting Thomas. It is the challenger who bears the burden of proof. Evolution/DNA/Genetics etc has already made the journey from 'left field' to become a near-universally accepted and respected field of science.

They have already proved themselves. To be blunt, you haven't. Sorry.