Coffee House Musings on Creationist Topic Proposals

And those "worms" they saw in the diarrhea that dewormer caused was actually the shredded lining of their intestines.Within the past few years there was a cartoon. A creationist is at the doctor's office with a life-threatening disease and the doctor wants him to choose between two cures: "This one was invented by a scientist using all our scientific knowledge including evolution. And this one was invented by a creationist using only the Bible." Guess which one the creationist would end up choosing. Similarly, when a scientist who is also a creationist does scientific work (yes, strange as it may seem, it has been known to happen), he never makes any use of his creationist beliefs but rather he sticks to the science, even using the established old ages in geology.Similarly, when a creationist petroleum geologist looks for a new oil field, he never uses his creationist beliefs but rather uses standard old-earth non-Flood geology, complete with the geological column and index fossils. Why? Because it works!In contrast, attempts at finding oil through creationist means have failed miserably. I seem to recall the company's name was Zion Oil & Gas. Based in the USA and founded by YECs, it sought to use the Bible to find oil in the Middle East, especially around Israel. They didn't find any oil (or maybe just once out of sheer luck), while other oil companies exploring the area were successful using standard geological practices. They made most of their money getting American creationists to invest in them. Rather similar to the swindlers who sold people "prime Florida real estate" that was nothing but swampland -- I guess that is what they mean by "traditional American values".The bottom line is that science works incredibly well, while creationism always fails miserably. Gee, kind of looks like a pattern there.

Edited by dwise1, : ABE

We defeated this pathetic argument years ago. You have been repeatedly refuted in every argument you've made here. You're too late, we did that ages ago.

You never accepted the verdict.

Tany? Did you not accept the verdict? Could we have been done with this whole discussion, the whole evolution vs creation debate except you didn't accept the verdict?Tsk, tsk.

Hey, we celebrated the Dover Verdict together, remember?

Yeah, I remember that. Are you telling me the Dredge was lying again? That's a 10 commandments violation. His boss is not going to be pleased.

Yep, same ones over and over. You would thinks so, but his boss is fictitious, so it's a paradox.

Yes, you're absolutely right, scientifically we can't prove it. Scientifically we can't prove anything and never have.--Percy

Edited by Percy, : Grammar.

More likely there's a glitch in you.For future reference, failing to provide a citation for a quote is a lesser offense than lying about it. The cover-up is often worse than the original crime. Ask Nixon.

And yet they don't. Actual YEC scientists, doing actual science, are Very few and very far between.Hypothetically, a flat-earther could go to the moon - but he'd have to use the actual science instead of the flat-earth nonsense. Similarly, a YEC could develop vaccines only by using actual science instead of YEC nonsense. Every one.No scientist needs to prove anything.You don't understand what knowledge is.

Insulin from cows and pigs. Why would their insulin work in us if we were not all related?

It means that it's not impossible that you could have inadvertently cut-n-pasted a superscript into the textbox, but there's no doubt that you did cut-n-paste it in. There's no other way it could have gotten there.There's nothing in the software, no glitch, that would do that because the superscript is a unicode character, and there's nothing in the software for representing unicode characters. If you copy unicode characters into a textbox then the software will pass them on when it writes the message to the database, but it can't itself put unicode characters in a textbox. Your superscript "6" takes three bytes to represent, in hex: 0xE2, 0x81, 0xB6. That this is a unicode character is hidden from us by browsers and tools like Micosoft Word. Here's a bunch of unicode characters: --Percy

Not only that, but large groupings of species have the same proteins, but slightly different in their amino acid sequences. I would assume that some proteins are present in some groups, but not in others (eg, proteins for milk production would be found in all mammals, but not in non-mammals).Despite creationist "improbability of producing a complete protein by chance" claims which posit an 80-amino-acid protein with every single locus in the protein chain requiring one-and-only-one specific amino acid "or else the protein won't work", a lot of those loci can accept other amino acids; from Awbrey and Thwaites' two-model creation/evolution class syllabus (not quoting verbatim):

quote

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They give the example of a calcium binding site with 29 amino acid positions: only 2 positions (7%) require specific amino acids, 8 positions (28%) can be filled by any of 5 hydrophobic amino acids, 3 positions (10%) can be filled by any one of 4 other amino acids, 2 positions (7%) can be filled with two different amino acids, and 14 of the positions (48%) can be filled by virtually any of the 20 amino acids.

​

The sequence of the 15 specified positions is:
         L* L*L* L*D D* D*G* I*D* EL* L*L* L*

 Where:
    L* = hydrophobic - Leu, Val, Ilu, Phe, or Met

    D* =  (a) Asp, Glu, Ser, or Asn
         OR (b) theoretically also Gls or Thr

    D = Asp

    E = Glu

    G* = Gly or Asp

    I* = Ilu or Val

    Remaining positions = any of 20

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So while active sites on a protein are restricted in the number of amino acid substitutions they can tolerate without affecting the function of the protein, nearly half of the loci are primarily structural and can take any of 20 amino acids. That means that the same protein can exist and function in many different species despite many amino acids being different.Therefore, protein sequence comparisons between species has been a way to measure how closely related species are. And of course closeness of relatedness implies them sharing a common ancestor.My web page, The Bullfrog Affair, discusses this topic; the title is from Duane Gish's infamous bold-face lie on national TV about a protein that shows humans to be more closely related to a bullfrog than he is to a chimpanzee. Yeah, that one definitely blew up in Gish's face and created a standard response to creationist claims, "BULLFROG!"The thing is that protein comparisons has been a valid scientific tool for measuring relatedness between species and it has been found to closely correlate with phylogenetic trees. There are even a few O'Reilly books on that field, bioinformatics. I even played around with the software tool, BLAST, 30 years ago.While ID tries to poo-poo the fact that every eucaryote's biochemistry is the same and uses the same proteins, it cannot explain the differences we see in the non-active parts of the proteins' sequences, nor why the pattern of those differences line up with how closely or distantly the species appear to be to each other.Only descent from common ancestors can explain that. And extrapolating those common ancestors back to one common ancestral species does certainly appear likely.

That was a miscarriage of justice. It will be overturned one day ... just like Roe v Wade was.The truth cannot be suppressed forever.