EvC Forum: Exposing the evolution theory. Part 2

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Topic: Exposing the evolution theory. Part 2

Taq

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Message 1126 of 1132 (920280)
09-17-2024 10:49 AM

Reply to: Message 1118 by RenaissanceMan
09-16-2024 10:20 PM

Re: Insuperable Statistics of Naturalistic Polypeptide Synthesis

RenaissanceMan writes:

A simple prokaryote has NOTHING remotely resembling titin muscle protein inside it, much less 20,000 different proteins found in humans.

How is that a problem?

What is inside us is NOT "shared by all the life we see."

Yes, it is. All life uses the same codons and transcription machinery, and many metabolic pathways are shared.

Humans have at least ten different systems, all essential for life, all interdependent, and all had to be present in the first human, but assuredly not the first prokaryote.

How is that a problem?

This message is a reply to:
	Message 1118 by RenaissanceMan, posted 09-16-2024 10:20 PM		RenaissanceMan has not replied

Taq

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Message 1127 of 1132 (920281)
09-17-2024 11:03 AM

Reply to: Message 1116 by RenaissanceMan
09-16-2024 9:43 PM

Re: Insuperable Statistics of Naturalistic Polypeptide Synthesis

RM writes:

Titin is the largest protein in the human body. It consists of 38,138 amino acid residues in a precise sequence.

Where did you show that titin requires a precise sequence? In fact, it is difficult to detect disease causing mutations in titin because of its high variability in the human population.

"However, not all TTN variants detected in cardiomyopathy cohorts can be assumed to be disease-causing. The interpretation of TTN variants remains challenging due to high background population variation."
Exploring TTN variants as genetic insights into cardiomyopathy pathogenesis and potential emerging clues to molecular mechanisms in cardiomyopathies | Scientific Reports

The following page contains a database of over 15,000 known human titin variants:

https://databases.lovd.nl/shared/transcripts/00001778

The first, original synthesis, whether stepwise or in one single, continuous process, consisted of "selecting," in any manner you contemplate, 1 out of the 20 amino acids making up humans, one at a time, 38,138 times in succession.

That's not how evolution works. Recombination can add thousands of amino acids in one fell swoop. Titin itself is known for being the product of recombination. A comparison of titin across different species reveals its evolutionary past:

quote:
The protein titin plays a key role in vertebrate muscle where it acts like a giant molecular spring. Despite its importance and conservation over vertebrate evolution, a lack of high quality annotations in non-model species makes comparative evolutionary studies of titin challenging. The PEVK region of titin—named for its high proportion of Pro-Glu-Val-Lys amino acids—is particularly difficult to annotate due to its abundance of alternatively spliced isoforms and short, highly repetitive exons. To understand PEVK evolution across mammals, we developed a bioinformatics tool, PEVK_Finder, to annotate PEVK exons from genomic sequences of titin and applied it to a diverse set of mammals. PEVK_Finder consistently outperforms standard annotation tools across a broad range of conditions and improves annotations of the PEVK region in non-model mammalian species. We find that the PEVK region can be divided into two subregions (PEVK-N, PEVK-C) with distinct patterns of evolutionary constraint and divergence. The bipartite nature of the PEVK region has implications for titin diversification. In the PEVK-N region, certain exons are conserved and may be essential, but natural selection also acts on particular codons. In the PEVK-C, exons are more homogenous and length variation of the PEVK region may provide the raw material for evolutionary adaptation in titin function. The PEVK-C region can be further divided into a highly repetitive region (PEVK-CA) and one that is more variable (PEVK-CB). Taken together, we find that the very complexity that makes titin a challenge for annotation tools may also promote evolutionary adaptation.
Evolution of the Highly Repetitive PEVK Region of Titin Across Mammals - PMC

Only Levorotary (left-handed) amino acids, not Dextrorotary (right-handed) amino acids are present in human proteins.* So to account for this chirality factor, the first computation of 1 in 10 to the 49,618th power has to be multiplied by 1/2 to the 38,138th power (1 in 10 to the 11,480th power).

Apparently, you don't understand how RNA transcription and protein translation work. Perhaps you could start there. Ribosomes make proteins in cells. Proteins don't form from random connection of individual amino acids. Only L-amino acids are charged on transfer RNA's, so that isn't an issue.

Translation: DNA to mRNA to Protein | Learn Science at Scitable

Finally, "selection," that magic word Darwin so popularized, demands that at each successive naturalistic step, there must be some advantage conferred to the organism,

Apparently you aren't aware of neutral theory either. The vast majority of variation in the human genome is due to neutral drift, not natural selection.

Also, are you saying that none of the DNA differences between humans and chimps are beneficial in humans? If so, could you please explain?

Edited by Taq, .

This message is a reply to:
	Message 1116 by RenaissanceMan, posted 09-16-2024 9:43 PM		RenaissanceMan has not replied

dwise1

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Message 1128 of 1132 (920287)
09-17-2024 1:04 PM

Reply to: Message 1120 by Tangle
09-17-2024 3:01 AM

Re: Insuperable Statistics of Naturalistic Polypeptide Synthesis

Adding RenaissanceMan's preceding sentence which you are obviously replying to yet neglected to include:

RenaissanceMan writes in Message 1116:

Nor have I so much as mentioned Young Earth Creationism. To pretend that Theistic Evolution is a viable compromise seems to me very wishy-washy

How old is the earth?

Too many times I've seen it happen that a creationist vehemently denies to be a creationist and especially not a YEC, only to fiercely argue young-earth claims a few posts later.

IOW, creationists lie out of their asses all the time about everything and anything. Their primary objective is to deceive everybody, most especially themselves, and they will use with a complete lack of scruples any dishonest ruse they can lay their hands on.

Young-eartherism is not a distinguishing characteristic of creationists, just a very common characteristic, especially in the initial infestation. The movement has evolved from there, especially once they learned that their young-earth claims are the weakest and most easily refuted part of their movement. That is why even the most died-in-the-wool YEC will go to great lengths to hide their young-eartherism even to the point of vehemently denying it (even denying it three times before the cock crows -- NT Bible reference).

Rather, it is their unreasoning opposition to evolution and their willingness to lie, cheat, and deceive in that endeavor that is their distinguishing characteristic. One could reject evolution without being a creationist if they do not employ lying and deceiving; it's the combination of using lies and deception to oppose evolution and related sciences that makes one a creationist. A creationist doesn't even need to be a biblical literalist or even religious; the "intelligent design" camp explicitly separates itself from religion and includes some who identify as atheists (eg, David Berlinski as I seem to recall). Indeed, the foundational deliberate lie of "creation science" from the mid-1970's was "we oppose evolution for purely scientific reasons; nothing religious about it." Despite their transparent disavowals, they are still creationists.

So RenaissanceMan is a creationist because he opposes evolution and related science through lies and deception and dishonesty and would still be a creationist even if he turns out to not be a young-earther. And of course he will deny being a young-earther, even if he actually is one.

Bottom line: we cannot believe anything a creationist says.

This message is a reply to:
	Message 1120 by Tangle, posted 09-17-2024 3:01 AM		Tangle has not replied

dwise1

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Message 1129 of 1132 (920288)
09-17-2024 4:06 PM

Reply to: Message 1112 by Phat
09-16-2024 8:25 AM

Re: Insuperable Statistics of Naturalistic Polypeptide Synthesis

You just saw in his Message 1116 "reply to you" how RenaissanceMan dumped a huge steaming pile of too-technical bullshit intended to be way over your head and hence to bully you with huge numbers you cannot understand. That is a common creationist tactic that turns out to be ironic since the creationists using it also do not understand it -- that is one reason why most creationists refuse to discuss or defend their own claims, because they don't understand their own claims which they are just regurgitating from what they've been told. And frankly, I doubt very much that RenaissanceMan had come up with this protein claim on his own, but rather had gotten it from a creationist source -- so he's most likely also a victim intent on creating more victims, much as generational abuse works.

One good YouTuber is Professor Dave whose section is Professor Dave Explains, where his intent is to teach viewers enough of the science that creationists misrepresent and lie about so that the viewers themselves can judge what the creationists are saying. This is given in his introductory video when you follow that link to his section. His current project is a 5-part series, The Definitive Guide to Debunking Creationists, with each covering a particular area of creationist misrepresentations. Part 4 is Genetics/Molecular Biology which I have embedded below.
I will point out particular sections which are pertinent to the current discussion.

Here's the breakdown for topics, though you can learn a lot by watching it through:

In the first minute (literally, 0:00 to 1:00), Professor Dave points out that most creationists don't understand DNA and genetics even on a high school level, but many non-creationists also lack that understanding, rendering it esoteric for most audiences. That is why "intelligent design" proponents concentrate on these areas because they can enjoy more success by lying with confidence to audiences who don't understand what they are talking about. The graphic shows the speaker throwing out a huge number which wows the uncomprehending audience. Examples abound.

For example, there's Kent Hovind's claim about the rate at which the sun is losing mass due to fusion in which he throws literally astronomical numbers at his audience and jumps to the conclusion that the ancient sun had to have so huge and have gravity so great as to have "sucked the earth in", whereas if you did the math in reality that ancient sun would have been about the same size and had only a few hundredths of one percent greater gravity that would have "sucked the earth in" by about 60,000 miles (earth's orbit, being eccentric, means our distance from the sun varies about 3 million miles over the year every year). Not only does Hovind use huge numbers to deceive his audience, but now he forbids his audience from doing the math or listening to anyone who has done the math.

A non-creationist example would be the huge mistake made by the screenwriter of The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951, so it's as old as I am). In it, Klaatu says that he had traveled 200 million miles to reach Earth, but that would have placed his point of origin well within our inner solar system (at its closest to Earth, Jupiter is about 450 million miles away and Mars only 56 million miles away, so Klaatu was from the asteroid belt?). The closest extra-solar star system, Alpha Centauri, is about 4 light-years distant or about 23.5 trillion (10¹², a trillion in the USA but a billion in Continental Europe) miles away. What Hollywood in 1951 thought was an unimaginable distance away was just the next county over, that's how mind-boggling astronomical scales can be.

And of course, RenaissanceMan's huge probability numbers are intended to deceive you as well as to bully us into submission. Don't let him succeed!

0:55-3:55 -- Instruction in DNA and protein synthesis.

3:55-8:00 -- Mutations. Note that only genetic mutations are interesting and only genetic mutations in a germ cell (sperm or egg) is of interest in evolution since only those mutations are heritable.

8:00-9:30 -- Genetics and its role in evolution.

9:30-11:45 -- Why creationists harp on Darwin for no good reason and how they misrepresent so many aspects of evolution.

11:45-14:30 -- Creationist probability arguments and their "devious numbers game". Very pertinent for what RenaissanceMan is trying to do.
Includes the fact that many different amino acid sequences will perform the same function, contrary to RenaissanceMan's lie (already address in several replies to him) about one very specific sequence being required.

14:30-16:30 -- Responding to creationist objections. Basically, if they don't know how anything works, then how could they possibly know what can and cannot happen? Use this as an opportunity to educate them (to use my father's favorite Texasism: Explain to them how the cow ate the cabbage -- my son couldn't understand that one either).

16:30-18:45 -- Anatomical development stuff.

18:45-22:15 -- The truth about Haeckel and his drawings. What he got right and what he got wrong ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny")

22:15-27:40 -- Addressing other creationist stuff; eg, "waiting time", "irreducible complexity".
At 26:40 mentions that creationists simply ignore the mountains of primary literature on these topics knowing that their targets will never have read it either (another reason why they avoid talking with scientists since scientists would be familiar with the literature)

27:40-28:25 -- The need to ask "intelligent design" proponents for a rigorous model, something they cannot do and are unwilling to even attempt.
In reality, "intelligent design" is just a fancied-up version of the old "God of the Gaps" ("Ooh! That's too complex for me to explain, so goddidit!")

28:25-32:10 -- The "issue" of "junk DNA".

32:10-33:10 -- "Soft tissue in dinosaur bones."

33:10-36:06 -- Summary and conclusions. How this ties in to phylogenetic trees, etc.

Share and enjoy!

Now you can more clearly see the intimidation bullshit that RenaissanceMan is trying to pull and that you do not need to fall for it.

RenaissanceMan writes in Message 1108:

Go ahead. You claim *science* is on your side. Show me some.

I'll get my popcorn and cherry coke and wait.

He's bluffing. He knows that he has nothing, so he's trying to intimidate us to scare us off. It's a very typical creationist trick that I've called "unanswerable questions", saddling us with an extremely non-trivial (nay, herculean) task solely for the purpose of avoiding our simple direct questions like "What are you talking about?" or "What do you think evolution is and how it works?" In order to avoid a question which they very well should be able to answer, they just throw those questions at you. And when you answer the first one, they throw a second one at you, then a third, and a fourth. I have been put through that stupid bullshit, which is one reason why I have no patience left for stupid lying creationists.

RenaissanceMan is just one more of a long line of stupid lying creationists.

This message is a reply to:
	Message 1112 by Phat, posted 09-16-2024 8:25 AM		Phat has not replied

Replies to this message:
	Message 1130 by Taq, posted 09-17-2024 4:43 PM		dwise1 has replied

Taq

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Message 1130 of 1132 (920289)
09-17-2024 4:43 PM

Reply to: Message 1129 by dwise1
09-17-2024 4:06 PM

Re: Insuperable Statistics of Naturalistic Polypeptide Synthesis

dwise1 writes:

You just saw in his Message 1116 "reply to you" how RenaissanceMan dumped a huge steaming pile of too-technical bullshit intended to be way over your head and hence to bully you with huge numbers you cannot understand. That is a common creationist tactic that turns out to be ironic since the creationists using it also do not understand it -- that is one reason why most creationists refuse to discuss or defend their own claims, because they don't understand their own claims which they are just regurgitating from what they've been told.

If I went onto a religious discussion forum and told everyone that none of the 7 gospels can be true since Jesus could not have been resurrected 95 days after being hanged I would not expect anyone to take me seriously.

Creationists consistently describe biology in a similar wrong way. It is obvious they don't have a working knowledge of how biology works, and that is not a knock against them because they know about as much about biology as any random non-scientist. The problem is that they don't think their ignorance of biology in any way hampers their ability to tell all of the biologists they are wrong. I'm sure car mechanics have to put up with the same type of people all of the time.

In this thread we have someone who thinks new proteins have to evolve by random amino acids joining up and creating a new protein. No DNA involved at all. They don't even seem to know that proteins are translated from RNA which is transcribed from DNA. Does that stop them from telling all biologists they are wrong? Nope.

I don't fault ID/creationist internet warrior for lacking this knowledge. The problem is that they lack the humility and self awareness to understand why they need this knowledge in order to challenge the science.

This message is a reply to:
	Message 1129 by dwise1, posted 09-17-2024 4:06 PM		dwise1 has replied

Replies to this message:
	Message 1131 by dwise1, posted 10-03-2024 8:59 PM		Taq has replied

dwise1

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Message 1131 of 1132 (920385)
10-03-2024 8:59 PM

Reply to: Message 1130 by Taq
09-17-2024 4:43 PM

Re: Insuperable Statistics of Naturalistic Polypeptide Synthesis

As I've quoted Clint of Clint's Reptiles on YouTube a few times (eg, see my Message 3811):

quote:
If I can't explain someone else's position so accurately that they could sign off that I had it right, then why would they have any interest in my criticism of their position? I don't even know what it is.

Not to mention the fact that I might end up agreeing with them if I understood their position correctly.

It's another thing to disagree with positions that you assume they hold but that aren't their actual positions.

So if you are debating someone and you want to have any chance of actually persuading them that they are wrong, correctly articulating their position is basically an essential place to start.

I would love it if more creationists would attempt this, but it is also essential to be open to the possibility that you don't have it right. That is unless you just love strawman arguments.

By pontificating out of such massive crass ignorance, creationists cannot hope to convince anyone who does not share their ignorance. Those who share their ignorance are not so safe and could be deceived by their lies.

Part of assessing what they are doing is to establish their mens rea, consciousness of guilt (AKA possessing the self-awareness that their claims are not true). For example, the evidence included in Jack Smith's brief detailing the evidence in the Jan.6 case strongly supports the case for Trump having been fully aware that his concerted actions were illegal.

Are creationists aware that they are lying or are they simply too ignorant to know better? Well, it's both. Most of them obviously don't understand anything about their claims except how their handlers had played them up ("This will just blow you evolutionists away!"). Even most of their handlers share their ignorance and don't know any better.

But the creators of those claims as well as many high-ranking creationists do know better and are aware of what they are doing. Some are trained scientists and so must know better and could not possibly be unaware of the lies in their own field. An example is Dr. Steve Austin holds a legitimate PhD Geology from a real university geology department. Indeed, the ICR had hired him to earn a real PhD Geology so that they could have an actual geologist on their staff. While working on his degree, he wrote several creationist geology articles under the pseudonym, Stuart Nevins. I read some of those Nevins articles (Creation Research Society Quarterly) in which he made false statements about geology that any lower-division undergraduate geology would know to not say. And as a ICR geologist he has used his knowledge to rig radiometric testing to give bad dates among other lies.

And even those creationists above the rabble and below the architects of deception learn which claims to use and which ones to avoid. For example, I had a two-decade email correspondence with a local creationist who proclaims himself to be a young-earther and to have converted because of young earth claims. During that correspondence I would ask him to present his favorite young earth claims so that we could discuss them and he absolutely refused to do so. Despite believing in young earth claims, he had obviously learned through bitter experience how flimsy they are, even though his own faith is based on them.

So if you could not possible convince us, then they concentrate on keeping themselves convinced (as I've presented before where proselytizers' implicit intent is to turn their "potential converts" against them so that they can retreat into their community to share "how much those people hate God"). And if they can deceive some new converts, then that's a bonus.

It's in the way that they do it. As Professor Dave (see the video I embedded in Message 1129) pointed out at one point, creationist speakers stand before an audience spouting technobabble that members of that audience cannot understand, let alone see that it's nonsense, but they speak with such confidence and conviction that their audience is fooled -- of course it helps that they're normally preaching to the choir.

We've seen creationists try that here, more recently RenaissanceMan -- knowing that they are unable to blind us with their brilliance they go straight to Plan B and bury us in bullshit. They turn their firehose of biology technobabble on us in an attempt to "shout us down" without having to raise their voice; in general many of call that a "Gish Gallop". I recently watched a video where presuppositionalists call in to the show (¿Planet Peterson?) and insisted on talking over him with a rapid-fire spewing of philosophy technobabble while refusing to answer his direct questions. In MAGA's heyday after the 2016 election every time a MAGAt was interviewed they would vomit forth a firehose of MAGAt lies; eg, whenever Kelly Anne Conway appeared on Bill Maher.

So it's not just ignorance, but rather their tactics.

This message is a reply to:
	Message 1130 by Taq, posted 09-17-2024 4:43 PM		Taq has replied

Replies to this message:
	Message 1132 by Taq, posted 10-04-2024 10:55 AM		dwise1 has not replied

Taq

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Posts: 10255

Joined: 03-06-2009

Member Rating: 7.5

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Message 1132 of 1132 (920386)
10-04-2024 10:55 AM

Reply to: Message 1131 by dwise1
10-03-2024 8:59 PM

Re: Insuperable Statistics of Naturalistic Polypeptide Synthesis

dwise1 writes:

It's pigeon chess.

"Debating creationists on the topic of evolution is rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon — it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory."--Scott D. Weitzenhoffer

Creationists are there to look like they went up against the meany atheists. They aren't interested in actually understanding biology or furthering our knowledge.

This message is a reply to:
	Message 1131 by dwise1, posted 10-03-2024 8:59 PM		dwise1 has not replied

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