Johnny: "Evolution is not about 'an increase in information.'"

Jefferson

Jefferson

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Johnny: "Evolution is not about 'an increase in information.'"

Tuesday August 15th, 2006. This is show #162.

Summary:
* Media & Liberals Aid Terrorists: Air Force retiree, Michael Payne, recently embedded with our troops in Iraq, identifies the harmful effect liberals and the media has on our troops and our war on terror. And the media praises Al Jazeera even though it has a bureau chief in a Spanish jail for being an agent of Al Qaeda, an employee is being held at Gitmo as a terror suspect, and its first managing director quit after videotape evidence of his support for murderer Saddam Hussein.
* Congressman Apologizes to Marines: To avert a libel lawsuit, MN Rep. John Kline apologized for condemning U.S. Marines for killing Haditha civilians in cold blood. Meanwhile a lawsuit stands against Pennsylvania's John Murtha for similar accusations, and a decision on criminal charges is expected soon.
* Johnny from TOL: disagreeing with Bob and Fred William's Real Science Friday program, claimed that "Evolution is not about 'an increase in information.'" Bob is going to get plenty of mileage out of this one, (unless Johnny retracts his claim)!
* And Morphy on TOL: asks Bob:
“Well, if a red blood cell is malaria resistant what is it if not improvement???”
To which Bob answers:
A dead blood cell is malaria resistant. That’s not an improvement.
A quadriplegic is resistant to tennis elbow. Ditto.
A disease that preempts a worse disease is still a disease.
Today's Resource: Get the BEL Science Pack! For only $99.99, you'll get five fabulous resources, Unlocking the Mystery of Life, The Privileged Planet, In the Beginning, and Bob's Age of the Earth Debate and Genesis: Creation Bible study album! To order, call 800-8Enyart (800 836-9278) and save $33 of the individual item prices!
 
badp

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Well Johnny, I guess that would mean a dead guy is the ultimate "evolved" creature since he's resistant to disease and he can't be killed!
 
Servo

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badp said:
Well Johnny, I guess that would mean a dead guy is the ultimate "evolved" creature since he's resistant to disease and he can't be killed!
Click to expand...

:crackup:
 
B

bob b

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From a talk given by Steve Jones, evolutionist:

Darwin's definition of evolution is 'descent with modification', or as Jones put it, "genetics plus time", a theory so elegantly simple that "it could even be physics". He illustrated the principle with examples from linguistic development and, more lengthily, from the progression of the HIV epidemic. This example proves illustrative when it comes to the other great principle of evolution, natural selection: if you contract the HIV virus, Jones explained, your chance of remaining asymptomatic depends on your possession of a protective gene. Chimpanzees, in whom the virus first appeared, tend to have the protective variant; in Africa it is becoming more common; in Europe it remains rare. However, said Jones, if he were to make on evolutionary prediction, it is that in 1000 years time, every one of us will possess the protective gene, rendering the HIV virus no more harmful than flu.

He stuck with the example of HIV in his concluding examination of the ways in which we as humans are evolving now. While we have as a species evolved very little on a genetic level for many thousands of years, Jones said, there are other ways in which we have, quite clearly, evolved dramatically. Despite our extreme physical susceptibility to HIV, for example, we do, unlike chimps, have the power to contain the epidemic, via education and the development of drugs - cultural and intellectual evolution, in other words. "There are," he concluded, "intelligent designers out there. But they work for the pharmaceutical industry."

There was nothing groundbreaking in Jones's talk; everyone there, no doubt, has heard it all before. But it certainly bears reiterating, and Jones's particular talent lies in his ability to inject colour and flavour into what can be a dry and impenetrable subject. The only problem, in the end, is that Jones was - to use an inappropriately religious metaphor - preaching to the converted this morning. One is left wishing that the 100m American creationists - or the one in three people in the UK who allegedly believe that the universe was designed - could be made to listen to him talk. Surely even they would find it difficult to resist him.

Complete article at:

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sarah_crown/2006/05/why_evolution_is_wrong.html

-------

The title of the talk was "Why Creationism Is Wrong". By some strange quirk (Freudian slip?) the person at the Guardian newspaper in England labeled the URL "why_evolution_is_wrong.htm"
 
Bob Enyart

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The fire burst a water pipe which put out the fire

The fire burst a water pipe which put out the fire

Bob B, that Freudian slip is funny. Coincidentally, the post I made yesterday about a mutation that protects from HIV is undoubtedly the "protective gene" that Steve Jones was talking about. And it's just another example of evolutionists so desperate for evidence for evolution that they have to keep parading degenetive diseases, and fortuitous breakdowns of genes, as examples. Here's how I described it yesterday:

HIV uses CCR5 (Cysteine-cystenie chemokine receptor 5) as a vector, and mutation CCR5-delta32 (deletion of 32 sequential base-pairs) makes CCR5 unavailable to HIV, thus providing immunity to AIDS, etc. But the gene that codes for CCR5 seems to be redundant, so that other genes replace its function, giving another example of a breakdown with a fortuitous consequence (like the house fire which burst a water pipe which put out the fire). Scientists have documented about 10,000 disease-causing mutations, but none involving increased genetic information. And it’s not true that insertions, substitutions, transpositions, etc., that break functionality are an increase in the genome, that’s something you’re just going to have to come to terms with.

Creationists don’t deny mutations. We don’t deny genetic recombinations, insertions, deletions, transpositions, substitutions, etc. We don’t deny that when such mutations occur, they can CHANGE the phenotype ([sickle cell] tires to crescents). We argue evolution requires billions of instances of genetic information INCREASE and IMPROVEMENT and we crack up when evolutionists endlessly parade examples of mutation-caused disease as excellent examples of evolution.​
And badp, this is funny: "I guess that would mean a dead guy is the ultimate 'evolved' creature since he's resistant to disease and he can't be killed!"

-Bob Enyart
 
aharvey

aharvey

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Bob Enyart said:
Bob B, that Freudian slip is funny. Coincidentally, the post I made yesterday about a mutation that protects from HIV is undoubtedly the "protective gene" that Steve Jones was talking about. And it's just another example of evolutionists so desperate for evidence for evolution that they have to keep parading degenetive diseases, and fortuitous breakdowns of genes, as examples. Here's how I described it yesterday:
Click to expand...
Someday I'd like to visit this place where the "evolutionists" are at all "desperate for evidence for evolution," but at present I'm constrained to our solar system. We are further constrained by the fact that the things you would be willing to accept as evidence of evolution (you know, like being in the room when a dog gives birth to a cat) would actually pretty much falsify evolutionary theory. And then there's that thing where you 'mistake' examples of how natural selection operates to be considered the best available support for the idea that the diversity of life resulted from evolutionary processes.

Perhaps you've been confusing desperation with aggravation?

Bob Enyart said:
HIV uses CCR5 (Cysteine-cystenie chemokine receptor 5) as a vector, and mutation CCR5-delta32 (deletion of 32 sequential base-pairs) makes CCR5 unavailable to HIV, thus providing immunity to AIDS, etc. But the gene that codes for CCR5 seems to be redundant, so that other genes replace its function, giving another example of a breakdown with a fortuitous consequence (like the house fire which burst a water pipe which put out the fire). Scientists have documented about 10,000 disease-causing mutations, but none involving increased genetic information. And it’s not true that insertions, substitutions, transpositions, etc., that break functionality are an increase in the genome, that’s something you’re just going to have to come to terms with.

Creationists don’t deny mutations. We don’t deny genetic recombinations, insertions, deletions, transpositions, substitutions, etc. We don’t deny that when such mutations occur, they can CHANGE the phenotype ([sickle cell] tires to crescents).​
Click to expand...

Glad to hear that you're not completely delusional! Now that we know that you do not deny the existence of these phenomena, can you explain their 'role' in your evolution-free biological framework? That is, are they trivial, are they the physical manifestation of the Curse, what are their biological relevance?

Bob Enyart said:
We argue evolution requires billions of instances of genetic information INCREASE and IMPROVEMENT and we crack up when evolutionists endlessly parade examples of mutation-caused disease as excellent examples of evolution.
Click to expand...
Billions, eh? Sure sounds like a big, impossible number. I wonder how you arrived at this general value? I wonder what you mean by it? Billions of instances sometime throughout the entire history of life, spread across all individual organisms? I wonder how many organisms have ever lived? I wonder how many copies of genomes have ever been produced? I wonder how many copies of base pairs have ever been generated? In six thousand years, well, that's kind of irrelevant, because the only folks who think the world is six thousand years old also reject the idea that life evolves. So how many copies of base pairs would have been generated in all the genomes of all the organisms that have ever lived anywhere on the planet Earth in the last, what, few billion years?

I'm guessing that that's a really, really, really big number. In fact, if you did the math, even ignoring major genomic changes (which are probably responsible for at least some major evolutionary changes), assuming low mutation rates (say, one in a million base pair error rate), and assuming that only one out of a million of those mutations were beneficial, I'm guessing you'd have your billions of beneficial changes. But don't take my word for it. Try it out for yourself.

Playing with numbers like this doesn't even qualify as modeling the process. It merely shows that impressive-sounding big values (like the hilarious-seeming "billions of beneficial mutations"), even when they're not totally fabricated like yours, may not be so impressive when they're put into their proper context. As George Wald pointed out a few decades ago, humans tend to have much trouble gauging things that range far outside their own limited frame of reference (e.g., time, space, and other quantities).

Bob Enyart said:
And badp, this is funny: "I guess that would mean a dead guy is the ultimate 'evolved' creature since he's resistant to disease and he can't be killed!"
Click to expand...
Glad to see y'all are following the argument so well!
 
Stratnerd

Stratnerd

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AH,

We argue evolution requires billions of instances of genetic information INCREASE and IMPROVEMENT and we crack up when evolutionists endlessly parade examples of mutation-caused disease as excellent examples of evolution.
Click to expand...
Better luck getting a response. I asked this August 15th but since he's on vacation.....
 
Bob Enyart

Bob Enyart

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Jefferson said:
Yeah, we're missing the shows from the 10th through the 15th of that month. Sometimes they have technical difficulties.
Click to expand...
Thanks Johnny for asking. Jefferson and I will make sure to put these shows in our archives if anyone in the audience happens to have made a contemporaneous copy of them as their streamed at the time.

Anyone?

Thanks guys,
-Bob Enyart

p.s. Five years later, our science shows are going well and when I google: science friday, I get our program as #14, and a radio syndicator has queried about picking up the program. So, we'll see. And of course, if we hit page one on Google, the guys at NPR will take a coniption fit :)
 
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