90% of the code on a Microsoft Windows install disc has no apparent active function.
Posted on 11/20/2008 8:42:51 AM PST by GodGunsGuts
Here is a finding that amounts to falsification of Darwinism and confirmation of creationism (limited variation within created kinds), and these authors tiptoed around the bad news with carefully-crafted passive verbs built on the assumption that evolution might explain it somehow, provided you are willing to wait for the vaporware and futureware that is perpetually on back order. “Their functions and origins are often obscure,” we are told. They “emerged” somehow...
(Excerpt) Read more at creationsafaris.com ...
ping!
Isn’t 90% of DNA garbage anyway?...............
This must mean the stork brings babies.
The paper specifically states there is no evidence to suggest mutation is in any way responsible for the orphan genes in the Hydra.
...that we know of, yet.
This does not “prove” anything. In bacteria there are plasmids (extra chromosomal DNA) that are used as a means of adaption and survival. In the presence of an environmental extremity genetic material can be moved in and out of the functional genes to allow for a modification in the phenotype and a chance at developing resistance. This is precisely how MRSA developed.
The “unused” DNA in higher order plants and animals are the same. All it takes is a change in the reading frame of a codon to cause the activation of any of these dormant segments. Those mutations can result from environmental or random changes. They do not disprove evolution since there is no change in speciation expected. They only indicate that the genetic material is available to allow variations within a species to support it’s continued survival.
==Isn’t 90% of DNA garbage anyway?
Actually, Creationist and ID scientists have been predicting that the so-called “junk DNA” would someday prove to be functional. And as it turns out, scientists are finding that more and more of this non-coding DNA is critical to cellular function, organismal development, etc...just as Creationists and IDers predicted.
You are free to believe what you wish.
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This does not “prove” anything. In bacteria there are plasmids (extra chromosomal DNA) that are used as a means of adaption and survival. In the presence of an environmental extremity genetic material can be moved in and out of the functional genes to allow for a modification in the phenotype and a chance at developing resistance. This is precisely how MRSA developed.
The “unused” DNA in higher order plants and animals are the same. All it takes is a change in the reading frame of a codon to cause the activation of any of these dormant segments. Those mutations can result from environmental or random changes. They do not disprove evolution since there is no change in speciation expected. They only indicate that the genetic material is available to allow variations within a species to support it’s continued survival.
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Yeah! What he said!
Seriously though, the presence of these genes doesn’t ‘disprove’ evolution.
Unlike creationists, scientists don’t pretend to have all the answers. Not to be insulting, but the article proves nothing and the quote above explains why.
Aliens from outer space. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
um uuugh.
methinks im devolving.
No, I’m ok now, I just had to exhale all the trapped CO2, You know that poisonous gas we exhale, that plants and all life need, take a breath, and don’t feel guilty.
I’m sharp as a tack now, Don’t step on me!
Seriously we need the debate, we want the debate, there is observational evidence that the universe began. Steveie Hawkins is plying a dead tree. (multiple universes my a$$).
We live in the here and the now, be good!, be brave!, be Yourselves! and remember this: when you try to tune your radio on an AM channel (Most reccommended) and you hear that weired noise, well some of it is the sound of the big bang.
There is no coherent evolutionary explanation for any facet of life. They can’t claim the simple statement that life changes over time, because Creationists have always believed in change over time. Creationists simply assert that there are limits to that change...an assertion that is backed up by the evidence. Whereas, the Temple of Darwin asserts that blind processes fashioned molecules into millions of super sophisticated designs, ultimately leading to man, the crowning achievement of Darwin’s natural selection god. It is far more rational to conclude that intelligence came from intelligence, that sophistication came from sophistication, etc, etc.
Darwinists do pretend to have all the answers. Evolution is still a hypothetical construct. Unlike creationists,
scientists don’t
So now the evos are arguing in favor of environmentally directed mutations? I thought mutations were supposed to be completely random? Could it be that they have been forced into this position because RM + NS is insufficient to explain the complexity of life? BTW, Creationist Scientists have always maintained that the Creator designed his creatures with the ability to adapt to environmental changes.
Haha.
Funny how much your silly statement resembles "God did it".
Thank you...took the words right out of my mouth. Except I would only add, for many (take the Brites for example) Darwinism is a religious construct.
90% of the code on a Microsoft Windows install disc has no apparent active function.
Actually, that silly statement more matches Dr. Crick's, an evolutionist and prestigious award-winning co-discoverer of DNA, Directed Panspermia hypothesis. Citing many reasons that he believed life could not have "evolved" from the alleged primordial stew of ancient Earth (not enough time, earth's temperature, and so forth), he "theorized" that aliens, via spaceships, seeded planet Earth with life.
Maybe the other poster was making reference to Crick.
It's ironic that creationists would misrepresent the evolution of genes as proof against evolution since it is one the successful predictions of evolutionary biology.
He is their guy.
DNA polymerase has an error rate. Cells have proofreading ezymes and even these have an error rate. Yes, mutations can also occur from environmental factors. Cosmic rays and carcinogens are some. The mutations to produce MRSA are notenvironmental factors. If a mutation occurs hat allows the bacteria to survive the antibiotic treatment, it can reproduce and it’s offspring are now able to survive the antibiotic treatment(survival of the fittest).
These resistance genes are located on plasmids (extrachromosal circles of DNA which the bacteria can also swap among themselves during mating (yes, some bacteria can mate).
Although I can’t verify the pexact percentage, There is a lot of DNA that has no known function. There is uncertainty as to function.
The creos have apparently stumbled on to the fact.
How does a lack of understanding of genetic mutation prove creationism?
I sometimes see faults coming from both sides of the argument. Creationists often tend to avoid giving a fair hearing on evidence favoring evolution, and evolutionists often seem to lack an appreciation for just how stunning and near-impossibly complicated many life processes are, or they fail to have an appreciation that the laws of physics are so finely tuned so as to permit any form of life. In this debate, I’m somewhere in between in that I believe in God, yet I also believe that evolution (if it is indeed true) may be the means by which God has created life. I also believe it is wrong for me to try to limit God (by exluding to possibility of evolution) regarding the means by which he chooses to perform his creation. Scientifically, the strongest case for Intelligent Design that I have seen is found in the highly improbable fine tuning of physical constants to permit a universe where any kind of life is even possible.
What is the limit to that change? And how is it limited?
I went through the paper - twice -- looking for the word mutation, and it's not there.
The fact is that genes mutate, and the paper's use of the term "novel genes" probably refers to mutated genes.
"Mutation is the fuel rather that the engine of biological advance." Steve Jones, "Darwin's Ghost," page 111
That not true but you wouldn’t believe what I was really told!
Thanks for the ping!
To anyone with a truly "open" mind theshalom b'SHEM Yah'shua HaMashiach Adonai
Anthropic principle is extremely compelling.
“Orphan” genes are of interest because the majority of genes have obvious homologs in other species.
Wouldn't Creationism/Incompetent Design assume that ALL genes would be “orphan”? In other words why would the majority of genes be either exactly homologous or an obvious modification of an existing gene?
For example, there are thousands of ways to design a hemoglobin protein, yet all living things with hemoglobin use variations of the same way, and their variation is predictable based upon their similarity or divergence from other species; exactly as if they shared common ancestry at different times in the past.
The world is a pretty complex place and shouldn’t be reduced to soundbites. Since we can’t seem to figure out how to shrinkt he size of government, maybe we should stop pretending we know how mankind came to be.
Whaddaya say?
A little humility, people.
Of course, once we shrink the goverment to .005% of GDP (with capital gains taxes gone, income taxes gone, gun laws abolished and the number of govt workers in Wash DC reduced to 17) then we can start the hard work of examining the origins of humanity.
Let’s focus our priorities on what is in front of us.
The ENCODE project killed this notion. "The human genome is pervasively transcribed, such that the majority of its bases are associated with at least one primary transcript and many transcripts link distal regions to established protein- coding loci." from the Journal Nature
No way to tell. Each creationist has his own theory and none of them are concerned about reconciling their views.
Some creationists don't even believe in genes. It's just more evilutionist trickery.
Somebody, a pair of guys IIRC, got a Nobel Prize for that research that said DNA was mostly junk. Do they have to give it back?..............
Much like the Catholic Priests refused to look through Galileo's telescope showing the moons of Jupiter circling Jupiter (and not the Earth), the high priest of Communist “science” refused to look through the telescope.
But yes, creationism is a ‘grab bag’ of inane nuttery that contradicts itself at every turn, and with no way to resolve the disputes, as they are all based upon Biblical interpretation and not empirical data.
LinkCan we know for sure that this is how blood clotting (or any other biochemical system) evolved? The strict answer, of course, is we cannot. The best we can hope from our vertebrate ancestors are fossils that preserve bits and pieces of their form and structure, and it might seem that their biochemistry would be lost forever. But that's not quite true. Today's organisms are the descendents of that biological (and biochemical) past, and they provide a perfect opportunity to test these ideas.
Even a general scheme, like the one I've just presented, leads to a number of very specific predictions, each of which can be tested. First, the scheme itself is based on the use of well-known biochemical clues. For example, most of the enzymes involved in clotting are serine proteases, protein-cutting enzymes so-named because of the presence of a highly reactive serine in their active sites, the business ends of the protein. Now, what organ produces lots of serine proteases? The pancreas, of course, which releases serine proteases to help digest food. The pancreas, as it turns out, shares a common embryonic origin with another organ: the liver. And, not surprisingly, all of the clotting proteases are made in the liver. So, to “get” a masked protease into the serum all we'd need is a gene duplication that is turned on in the pancreas’ “sister” organ. Simple, reasonable, and supported by the evidence.
Next, if the clotting cascade really evolved the way I have suggested, the the clotting enzymes would have to be near-duplicates of a pancreatic enzyme and of each other. As it turns out, they are. Not only is thrombin homologous to trypsin, a pancreatic serine protease, but the 5 clotting proteases (prothrombin and Factors X, IX, XI, and VII) share extensive homology as well. This is consistent, of course, with the notion that they were formed by gene duplication, just as suggested. But there is more to it than that. We could take one organism, humans for example, and construct a branching “tree” based on the relative degrees of similarity and difference between each of the five clotting proteases. Now, if the gene duplications that produced the clotting cascade occurred long ago in an ancestral vertebrate, we should be able to take any other vertebrate and construct a similar tree in which the relationships between the five clotting proteases match the relationships between the human proteases. This is a powerful test for our little scheme because it requires that sequences still undiscovered should match a particular pattern. And, as anyone knows who has followed the work in Doolittle's lab over the years, it is also a test that evolution passes in one organism after another.
There are many other tests and predictions that can be imposed on the scheme as well, but one of the boldest was made by Doolittle himself more than a decade ago. If the modern fibrinogen gene really was recruited from a duplicated ancestral gene, one that had nothing to do with blood clotting, then we ought to be able to find a fibrinogen-like gene in an animal that does not possess the vertebrate clotting pathway. In other words, we ought to be able to find a non-clotting fibrinogen protein in an invertebrate. That's a mighty bold prediction, because if it could not be found, it would cast Doolittle's whole evolutionary scheme into doubt.
Not to worry. In 1990, Xun Yu and Doolittle won their own bet, finding a fibrinogen-like sequence in the sea cucumber, an echinoderm. The vertebrate fibrinogen gene, just like genes for the other proteins of the clotting sequence, was formed by the duplication and modification of pre-existing genes.
Moreover the reason that some non-genetic DNA (i.e. it doesn't code for a protein) was found to be functional, or PRESUMED to be functional, was the fact that it showed evolutionary conservation between species.
So the only way this “functionality” was found, or presumed, was the fact that it showed evolutionary conservation between species. Hardly a stinging rebuke of evolutionary theory, it in fact is further confirmation of its utility in explaining and predicting data.
First of all, no, because what they said is still partially correct, the DNA->RNA->protein sequence still holds true, even if the DNA->RNA phase is a lot more complex than a straight sequence somewhere in DNA creating one RNA, as had been thought before a few years ago. Recent research has shown that regulatory RNA is a much greater part than expected. In fact, the current notion is that DNA is a "network" of genes spread throughout both sides of the double-helix.
The main problem is that "junk" is so fluid that it could mean many things. The original idea that "junk" meant long stretches of DNA that are never transcribed has been shot down. The idea that the transcribed but non-translated RNA is nonfunctional has also been shot down through the discovery of miRNA, which regulates the transcription of other genes. Still, some biologists hold to the "it's all junk" notion that if we haven't found the function of a transcription, then it doesn't have one. Unfortunately, with the discovery of aRNA, crRNA, piRNA, siRNA, tasiRNA, rasiRNA, scnRNA, and the above mentioned miRNA, they are having less space to stand on.
Not just Crick. From:
www.utdallas.edu/~cirillo/nats/day18.htm Lecture 18, Origin of Life on Earth,
“Svante Arrhenius in 1908 proposed the “panspermia theory” -that life originated on Earth with the arrival of spores that had drifted through space from some other planetary or solar system. Among those who favor this hypothesis, Francis Crick argues that the overwhelming biochemical and molecular evidence suggests that the last common ancestor was already on earth 3.5 to 3.6 billion years ago when the history of life began on earth.
Is the Panspermia idea a viable one? The possibility that life once existed on Mars made much news last year. The evidence is questionable but still a possibility. Is it likely that microbial life came to earth from Mars or some more distant extraterrestrial source? “Deinococcus radiodurans, a bacterium highly resistant to radiation, would be a good vector for panspermia, said Dr. [Kenneth W.] Minton [of the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in Bethesda, MD]. While drifting through interstellar space for many thousands of years, it might acquire a shell of interstellar crud that could protect it [from the intense heat generated] when it entered some planet’s atmosphere space”.
Like we needed the caveat, but a more honest appraisal of what scientists “know” of life’s origin is here in part:
Interview conducted on May 3, 2004, by Joe McMaster, producer of “Origins: How Life Began,” and edited by Peter Tyson, editor in chief of NOVA online,
” “NOVA: In a nutshell, what is the process? How does life form?”
“Knoll: The short answer is we don’t really know how life originated on this planet. There have been a variety of experiments that tell us some possible roads, but we remain in substantial ignorance. That said, I think what we’re looking for is some kind of molecule that is simple enough that it can be made by physical processes on the young Earth, yet complicated enough that it can take charge of making more of itself. That, I think, is the moment when we cross that great divide and start moving toward something that most people would recognize as living.” “
And further,
“The particulars of the jump from nonliving to living that occurred sometime in our planet’s early history is a profound enigma and will likely remain that way for some time to come”, says Harvard’s Andy Knoll.
(www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/origins/knoll.html -)
Despite all the conjecture and theory and leaps of imagination, it comes down to, “we don’t really know” and “profound enigma”.
I think the best explanation is that creationists believe in genetic diversity and natural selection and even mutation, but no beneficial (adds a novel function) mutations. This can even hold for the slam-dunk bacterial antibiotic resistance--just hold that there is some small part of the existing genome that is already resistant to the antibiotics, then natural selection takes care of everything without the need of a beneficial mutation.
So the limits in this case are easy. It all has to be either pre-existant within the genome, or a negative mutation. Anything outside of this is off-limits, but any evidence that can be explained by the above is not evidence against creation.
I have always maintained that evolution could be a part of the intelligent design of God in the first place. Just as the big bang theory, if true, could also have been the work of intelligent design. These arguments are ones that will continue in perpetuity as there is no way to ever determine the truth by either side.
Steve Jones, in his book “Darwin’s Ghost” (pages 284 and 285), writes …
“About a thousand genes are shared by every organism, however simple or complicated. Although their common ancestor must have lived more that a billion years ago, their shared structure can still be glimpsed. It shows how the grand plan of life has been modified through the course of evolution. ”
“One set of genes is found everywhere. It translates the information coded in the DNA and allows it to make proteins. The job is so essential that such structures changed little over millions of years.
So a single positive mutation would disprove creationism?
OK, now explain what that has to do with the current topic. I think we already knew that there were means within DNA for adaptation and survival among species.
Unlike creationists, scientists don’t pretend to have all the answers.
Oh, that’s rich. No, scientists only pretend that they know what CAN’T be the answer, and that they’ll soon have the real answers (which they guarantee won’t have anything to do with intelligent design), while discounting all scientific evidence that disputes their pet theories.
ID is the modern heresy.
“How does a lack of understanding of genetic mutation prove creationism?”
Well, that’s an odd question. It’s more than simply a lack of understanding of genetic mutation, it’s a furtherance of our understanding that mutation cannot account for these discrete “orphan” genes, which, it turns out, actually have a vital function found only in the named organism.
Get it?
It wasn’t some virus, causing random changes, that was shown to cause an organism to evolve accidentally, it was instead a gene that had been within the organism since the very beginning, and was found only in that organism.
Disproving Darwinism doesn’t a priori prove creationism. It simply disproves Darwinism. A pretty good step, I’d say.
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