What Would Newton Do?

First Things ^ | Phil Johnson

[RightWhale]

Einstein caused the photon to be accepted in scientific societies. The idea of the photon had been tossed around a little before that, but it was not generally accepted. But there are still problems with photons, even though we can slow them down, stop them, store them, and generally do some interesting and useful things with them. When the photon finally goes away like any passing fad, Einstein will go with it.

[CyberCowboy777]

LOL - That is the funniest thing I've read today.

[Restorer]

Take a close look at the column stone in the image. That's right, those are two grown men, one sitting on the stone and one standing next to it. The US army corps of engineers and one of its major contractors, Bechtel, have flatly stated that there is no modern technology, much less any ancient technology, which could move one of those stones a single inch. Only a recent attenuation in gravity itself provides any clue.

To say that I'm skeptical of your theory is putting it mildly. You presumably mean that 2,000 years ago, gravity was some tiny fraction of its present amount.

Wouldn't this pretty dramatically mess up the orbits of the planets, among other small side-effects? All present celestial motion which we can observe is consistent with gravity being a constant throughout the observable universe. With obvious exceptions near black holes, etc.

[f.Christian]

Chapter 14

Daniel and the Coming King---Daniel 9

By Dr.Desmond Ford... GNU

"Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest of scientists prior to the modern period, wrote a commentary upon the prohecies of Daniel and Revelations. He described Daniel 9:24-27 as "the foudation-stone of the Christian religion" because centuries in advance it gave the time of appearance of the Messiah and His death, as well as a comprehensive description of His saving work in heaven and earth. The prophecy likewise tells what would be the fate of the Jews consequent upon their rejection of the One whose coming they had long anticpated. The destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, foretold in Daniel 9:24-27, was history's testimony that the offerings and services of the sanctuary had met their fulfillment in the advent of the promised Messiah."

Newton, Isaac. Obsersations Upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalpse of St. John.
London: J. Darby and T. Browne, 1733 (Isaac Newton)

[jennyp]

Exnihilo, I'll gladly retract my characterization of you as soon as you acknowledge the following post from 12/31, which you never responded to but keep trying to claim you did. I'll be gracious & generous & assume you just missed this post altogether, thinking the debate had ended when you made your "Puuhhlease" post:

And pointing to Ken Miller? Puuhhlease.. I'd bet, again, that you haven't looked for critics of Miller's work have you? For shame Jenny. I thought you were better than that.

This is an old debate on FR. It took me a while, but I finally found Miller's (longer) online version of his book chapter, where he goes into detail about the blood clotting cascade.

Here's Behe's critique of Miller's original published description of blood clotting evolution. He complains that Doolittle's model (by way of Miller) doesn't take into account the evolution of regulatory methods, the lack of which in a modern mammal would kill it.

[Note: This is where you ended your part of the debate. This post, which you have yet to acknowledge, pointed out that Miller & Behe had one more exchange which you apparently didn't know about...]

Here's Miller's response to Behe's critique. Here's Miller's original draft of the part of the IC chapter concerning blood clotting. As I suspected, Behe's complaints about lack of regulation destroying the organism before the new clotting steps could get refined are based on what would happen in a modern, high-blood pressure organism like humans, instead of the more realistic low blood pressure organism where the evolution of blood clotting really got started.

IOW, Behe's critique of Miller/Doolittle is an airball. It tries to cut off evolution at the start - in a small ancestor organism 600 million years ago - but does so by judging it according to the conditions of a wholly different organism!

Or as Miller puts it...

Behe asserts that the targeting of a protease, a digestive enzyme, to the bloodstream is a "potentially deadly situation," and tells the readers of his web document that we can tell how deadly this might be by looking at situations "where regulatory proteins are missing from modern organisms." In other words, Behe wants us to look at what happens when the highly-regulated current versions of clotting proteases are missing their regulatory factors. Despite this bluster, however, Behe has no evidence that the mistargeting of an inactive protease to the bloodstream would cause harm. Indeed, the recent discovery that antifreeze protein genes in fish arose from exactly such a mistargeting of proteases into the bloodstream (Chen, L., DeVries, A. L. & Cheng, C.- H. C. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 94, 3811­3816 (1997); and Chen, L., DeVries, A. L. & Cheng, C.-H. C. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 94, 3817­3822 (1997)) suggests that exactly the opposite is true.

Having made unsupported claims about the "danger" of such a mutation, Behe says that it would be difficult to see what "advantage" this would present to the organism. The answer, of course, is that it would provide a slight improvement in the organism's ability to clot blood - and that's the point. The clotting system doesn't have to work full-blast right away. In a primitive vertebrate with a low-pressure circulatory system, a very slight improvement in clotting would be advantageous, and would be favored by natural selection.

Behe then wonders how the circulating protease could become localized at the site of a clot, as if this were an insurmountable difficulty. It's not. As I suggested in my original draft on the evolution of clotting, a well-understood process called exon shuffling could have placed an "EGF domain" onto the protease sequence, and the "problem" that Behe puzzles over is solved in a flash.

Finally, Behe emphasizes that the real problem is not to generate a clot - it is to "regulate" that clot by means of an inhibitor of the protease so that it doesn't become destructive. But that's not a problem for evolution, either. As usual, Behe envisions a clotting protease that is just as powerful as the fully-evolved proteases in modern vertebrates. However, remember that this is the same guy who fretted a moment or two ago that the protease would not be strong enough to clot effectively. He wants to have it both ways. The answer to his objection is just what I wrote in the draft:

" ... a primitive clotting system, adequate for an animal with low blood pressure and minimal blood flow, doesn't have the clotting capacity to present this kind of a threat. But just as soon as the occasional clot becomes large enough to present health risks, natural selection would favor the evolution of systems to keep clot formation in check. And where would these systems come from? From pre-existing proteins, of course, duplicated and modified. The tissues of the body produce a protein known as alpha-1-antitrypsin which binds to the active site of serine proteases found in tissues and keeps them in check. So, just as soon as clotting systems became strong enough, gene duplication would have presented natural selection with a working protease inhibitor that could then evolve into antithrombin, a similar inhibitor that today blocks the action of the primary fibrinogen-cleaving protease, thrombin."

In short, none of the points raised by Behe are adequate to explain why the vertebrate clotting system could not have evolved. Furthermore, as Doolittle's work has shown clearly, the hypothesis of evolution makes testable predictions with respect to the DNA sequences of clotting proteins, and these predictions have turned out to be correct time and time again.

Why has Behe's "Biochemical Challenge to Evolution" met with so little support within the scientific community? I would suggest that the reason is simple. His hypothesis is wrong. The complex biochemical systems of living organisms, including the vertebrate clotting cascade, are fully understandable in terms of Darwinian evolution.

Here's the total response Behe had to say about that...

Kenneth Miller, Brown University Professor of Biology and author of Finding Darwin's God, has posted a response to my essays: http://biocrs.biomed.brown.edu/Darwin/DI/Design.html Overall I'm satisfied with his reply because, although he continues to defend his position, from the substance of his writing I think it should be plain to most open-minded readers that he is struggling to fend off examples that weigh heavily against Darwinism. So, for the most part, I am content to let the exchange end here. I simply urge all who are interested to read my essays as well as his response and come to their own conclusions.

Behe did respond to other points Miller has made, but I haven't followed those so I don't know if he scored points or not. But as for the blood clotting cascade, Behe clearly has pleaded no contest.

That is where the debate stands re: Miller vs. Behe. Now, we can agree to disagree & move on, but you can't get away with claiming the debate re: blood clotting was settled in Behe's favor.

[Exnihilo]

Go away jenny. Everybody here knows where to find the debate. Everyone who's followed it knows Behe has responded in full. I am not Behe, and I am not going to argue for him. Go troll someone else. I don't debate liars.

[Exnihilo]

I'm feeling generous tonight, so I'll give you a chance to explain, in detail, where I attempted to debate blood clotting. When you are unable to do so (because I never have), I hope you'll put an end to this pathetic thread. You seem to want to debate something that is totally off the subject of the thread. Again, for any honest person, they can click the link you gave where you prattle on about Behe, click the "to" link to jump back, and follow the discussion back. It will quickly become evident to anyone and everyone that you completely changed the subject from what I had been talking about, to Ken Miller and Behe's argument. Jenny, you're pathetic, and debating you makes me feel really sorry for you. Just give it a rest, because I don't think anyone here really cares.

[Ronaldus Magnus]

The only shared belief that all the scientists and philosophers throughout history have held in common is that each one was on the verge of explaining all the mysteries of the universe. The only difference today is the height of our arrogance. As a Christian, my personal view is that the complexity of the university is as limitless as the infinite wisdom of God. Our inability to fully explain the world around us is a reminder of our own smallness when in the midst of God.

[Dumb_Ox]

There has never been a fossil that cannot fit in a variation of the evolutionary hypothesis.

Precisely why the Torah Code comparison is so apropos. If one is already committed to fitting something into one's overriding schema, one will find a way. The name "Aaron" will show up somewhere. But for somebody who has no such commitments, the efforts appear to be a bit of a stretch.

Thanks for the gill slit information. My father never quite believed the variants on recapitulation theory, despite (because of?) his postgraduate anatomical studies. I share his skepticism about certain schools of comparative embryology, but at least I now know its advocates aren't relying on 120 year-old drawings anymore.

[medved]

To say that I'm skeptical of your theory is putting it mildly. You presumably mean that 2,000 years ago, gravity was some tiny fraction of its present amount?

The stone in question is probably more like 4000 - 10,000 years old and Julius Caesar probably weighed about the same then as now but, yeah, that's the basic idea. Give you another example: in today's world, the biggest birds which can take off and land are albatrosses at around 30 lbs. and they can barely take off and land. Their takeoffs in fact are so problematical that sailors generally refer to them as "gooney birds". In all larger birds, the wings have become vestigial, and the birds no longer think of flying. In some recent past age however, the Argentinian teratorn flew; his wings were for sure not vestigial and nothing with wings like that could live other than by flying:

The teratorn, as you can see, was about 200 lbs, with a 25' wingspan; nothing like that could fly in our present world. The 8 - 25 million year thing which the article mentions is based mainly on uniformitarian assumptions.

[medved]

The only shared belief that all the scientists and philosophers throughout history have held in common is that each one was on the verge of explaining all the mysteries of the universe. The only difference today is the height of our arrogance. As a Christian, my personal view is that the complexity of the university is as limitless as the infinite wisdom of God.

One nice thing about Christianity is that you don't have to spend a whole lot of time worrying about it becoming outmoded. Christ's message was universal and correct and appears to have withstood the test of time.

Chuck Darwin, on the other hand, is clearly a different story:

[mrsmith]

Just as for Newton, theologies and sciences are judged by their results.

What works, in either sphere, is worthy of proper consideration.

Enjoyed the Newton part!

[jennyp]

I'm feeling generous tonight, so I'll give you a chance to explain, in detail, where I attempted to debate blood clotting. When you are unable to do so (because I never have), I hope you'll put an end to this pathetic thread.

You really want it in detail? OK, here goes...

You had claimed that mutation & natural selection could not generate an increase in information. I pointed to peptide & RNA growth on mineral surfaces, which you ridiculed, and then I backed up with a cite, which you ignored.

Fine. Ignoring the other person in a debate is standard face-saving procedure when you're losing an argument. But the pattern continued in the same post, when I also cited Miller's description of Doolittle's proof that vertebrate blood clotting evolved from simpler forms via gene duplication & other mutations. Which you likewise riduculed, along with claiming I didn't know what I was talking about, which prodded me into showing you in excruciating detail that you had no appreciation for how badly Behe actually performed in his debate with Miller. Which you also ignored.

Your complete arsenal in that exchange consisted of ad-hominems against Kenneth Miller & myself. My arsenal consisted of peer-reviewed studies, books, & web-published papers. I guess you're right, we never did actually debate blood clotting, as there never was an actual exchange of ideas. Point conceded.

You seem to want to debate something that is totally off the subject of the thread. Again, for any honest person, they can click the link you gave where you prattle on about Behe, click the "to" link to jump back, and follow the discussion back. It will quickly become evident to anyone and everyone that you completely changed the subject from what I had been talking about, to Ken Miller and Behe's argument. Jenny, you're pathetic, and debating you makes me feel really sorry for you. Just give it a rest, because I don't think anyone here really cares.

LOL! OK, OK, I'll let it be! But my point in bringing the whole thing up is to try to get you to defend your threads instead of simply flitting over to post several brand new ones. You want to change people's minds on FR? Then engage those who critique the articles you post! I know I've put you on the spot, & you're obviously in a very defensive mood, so I'll just suggest that you consider that & stick around next time you post some article that you think is going to shame the other side into submission. We've all had to defend the articles we post. Sometimes we even fail. But defending the articles you post builds character. Nobody here respects a hit-&-run thread poster.

[Ronaldus Magnus]

Thanks for the link!

[Exnihilo]

Jenny, I told you I wasn't going to bother with you any more. You proved my point. You didn't (because you couldn't) cite an instance of me arguing about blood clotting. That was your previous claim, which you've now shifted slightly, although you were incredibly long winded about it. Please Jenny, for the love of Darwin, go bother someone else. I don't care about convincing you of anything. It is apparent to everyone who has read this what is going on. You continue to change the subject, and avoid pointed questions.

The reason I ridiculed your claim:

"Amino acids & nucleic acids spontaneously link & form longer & longer chains on the surfaces of minerals, even up to lengths where functional proteins & RNA start to be found.

is because it makes so starkly clear what I've been saying all along. You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about! You don't understand specified complexity, and you obviously don't see the major building block of your 'example': the mineral surface. Go do a little more reading, learn why the mineral surface is involved, why what occurs does in fact occur, then come back to me and try to defend your claim of original information generation. Jenny, every single time you respond you make yourself look more and more foolish. You seem to think that if you supply me with an overly scientistic response full of big words and phrases, I'll simply be over whelmed. It isn't going to happen. The fact that you cite people like Miller who have been critiqued more times than every ID'er combined is further proof that your bias blinds your intellect to grasping anything that conflicts with what you want to believe. So, what next Jenny? I'm getting a kick out of this myself. Every few hours I come over to the computer to find yet another one of your ill-informed rants. I'll be waiting for the next one. Until then, all the best.

[jennyp]

Again, no facts at all, just more ad hominems. Pity.

CYA 'round.

[Exnihilo]

ROFL! Okay Jenny! :) Another thing I've noticed, since we're whining about supposed past offenses in the art of debate, you have committed the same transgression that I was supposedly guilty of, and after I pointed it out to you in this thread (see the link 'here' above), you still have failed to support your assertion.

Your problem is that you believe you can steer the thread off topic onto subjects you believe you have an edge on. It drives you crazy when I won't be drawn into your twisted little plot. Sadly, even the subjects you believe to have an edge on, it quickly becomes apparent that you have only a superficial understanding of those subjects as well. And you call yourself 'sophisticated'! Sha, as if! I'll see you on the next crevo thread Jenny. If I were you, I'd try reading a book or two instead of clipping snippets out of web pages. It might help you from stumbling into some of these predicaments next time. Good luck!

[Restorer]

The stone in question is probably more like 4000 - 10,000 years old and Julius Caesar probably weighed about the same then as now but, yeah, that's the basic idea.

Since you posted the reference to Baalbek, I assumed you were somewhat familiar with its history. To quote from the Catholic Encyclopedia:

Among the monuments of Baalbek were three temples: the Great Temple of Jupiter, the Temple of the Sun, and the Circular Temple of Venus; all of them date from the second century A. D.

I suppose it is faintly possible that the giant stones you refer to were already standing and the rest of the temple was built around them, but that seems fairly unlikely.

BTW, do you know how these stones compare in weight to the obelisks which were routinely moved and raised by the Eguptians?

[medved]

I suppose it is faintly possible that the giant stones you refer to were already standing and the rest of the temple was built around them, but that seems fairly unlikely.

Assuming the temple actually dates from AD times, that's about the ONLY explaination

BTW, do you know how these stones compare in weight to the obelisks which were routinely moved and raised by the Eguptians?

Not even close.

[ThinkPlease]

Precisely why the Torah Code comparison is so apropos. If one is already committed to fitting something into one's overriding schema, one will find a way. The name "Aaron" will show up somewhere. But for somebody who has no such commitments, the efforts appear to be a bit of a stretch.

That could be, I suppose. I remember noting some years back that Phil Johnson used to study law, and I've always wondered how the concept of "proof" in a law sense colors how he judges proofs in a scientific context. In science, proof is much like proof in a civil trial. A theory needs to explain a preponderance of evidence above and beyond what the next best theory explains. It doesn't have to explain everything, though subsequent applications of the scientific method will either make the theory better or discard it, right? So far there has not been a competing theory that has been able to do so, hence the survivablility of the theory. There is nothing that says a theory cannot be flexible. All that it takes to destroy evolution is to find a mammal skeleton buried in Precambrian shale, or some such find that would be ludicrous under evolutionary theory.