Creation: The Modern View Stepping Backward II
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I will end my post with these final thoughts. You may reply if you wish….
1) Capitalizing evolution was a typo. If you notice it is not capitalized every time so no intent or underlying message was trying to be conveyed
2) If you “studiously do not to engage in any kind of religious debate” then why create a blog that others may reply and that you may then tell where they are wrong. As you yourself said “be honest”
3) You are correct that some of myremarks are “judgemental” and I apologize and retract them. If your belief is in Christ and you follow your belief in the bible then good for you. However I do the same and should be allowed to follow my own slightly different interpretation of the Word. Your desire to say you are right in what you believe has no more credibility then my own desire to say my belief is right. If we were expected to view every phrase of the bible the same then we would not have been given the power to think.
4) Following up on #3 . As you questioned above “is there actually something wrong with my beliefs outside of my faith in Christ?” The answer is NO! My issues from the start of these posts is the “feeling” that you are pushing your own beliefs and agenda and condemning (or insinuating) that my beliefs are wrong. I admit that I am wrong to say that you are wrong in your beliefs so long as you believe in Christ and his teaching. Therefore I return the questions to you…. is there actually something wrong with my beliefs outside of my faith in Christ?
5) You are obviously intelligent so look closely at how often you speak of the things wrong with my belief, questions, or possible salvation, and in the next moment do the same things that you are telling me I am doing wrong. Believe me, I understand… I see myself having done the same things in my posts. But I’m also willing to admit it and end this discussion. I believe in Christ, you believe in Christ hopefully he will love us both enough to get us into his Kingdom. The peripheral interpretations don’t really matter. And that is as Honest as I can be.
You say, “My issues from the start of these posts is the “feeling” that you are pushing your own beliefs and agenda and condemning (or insinuating) that my beliefs are wrong.”
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Actually, that’s what you have done with every comment. I did not seek you out. You came to my house. You came to my “living room” plopped down on the couch and immediately “insinuated” that I am an uninformed ignoramus pushing an “agenda” who does nothing but “condemn” others. You didn’t back up your opinion with anything I actually said in any of my posts. I doubt you read more than one of them. Frankly, I find you judgmental, uncharitable, and — worse — impolite.
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In my opinion, the only difference in our beliefs is I don’t fallaciously cherry-pick what I do and do NOT want to believe from God’s holy word. I believe it ALL and put the word of NO MAN above the holy, infallible, inerrant word of the Living God. If that difference bothers you so much that you have to write all these snarky and judgmental comments to a brother in Christ, perhaps you need to get down on your knees or all the way down on your face before your Creator and ask Him why you want to act like such a Pharisee in public.
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None of my business. Thanks for your comments either way.
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God Bless,
Gregg
….”Actually, that’s what you have done with every comment. I did not seek you out. You came to my house. You came to my “living room” …”
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As the writer of the blog this may feel like a very personal space to you. But by the nature of blogging, to a visitor to your blog, it does not feel that way. It feels more like a booth at a community event like a farmers market, or maybe a garage sale or open home tour, where you have specifically invited the public passers-by to take a look at your ideas.
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At scientific conferences there are poster sessions where participants are given spaces where they can post descriptions of their research. People pass by and read the information. During at least part of the allotted time, one of the authors of the poster stands by it to answer questions or respond to comments and discussion. Some politeness is expected, but for someone to argue against some of the conclusions posted would not be unreasonable. When you post your creation essay it seems to me as if you doing something equivalent: giving your views with the expectation that people will read them and possibly respond, not necessarily in agreement.
This is different from someone walking uninvited into your living room and starting to criticize the decor.
…..Honestly — don’t you think you can get all kinds of different cats without mutation? Don’t you think you can derive all kinds of dogs without mutation? ”
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just to be sure, are you talking about different kinds of house cats and different breeds of domestic dogs?
Or are you talking about lions, tigers, ocelots, cheetahs, house cats, etc? Dogs, wolves, coyotes and jackals? Dogs, wolves, coyotes, jackals and foxes?
…”Honestly — don’t you think you can get all kinds of different cats without mutation? Don’t you think you can derive all kinds of dogs without mutation? Or corn? Or pine trees? Or peas? Or geraniums? Or anything that can sexually reproduce and thus hybridize absent mutation?…”
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Honestly… I think some variations between, for instance, dog breeds could have come from alleles in the original wolf population but I think some other characteristics probably came from mutations. I don’t see it as a big issue one way or another.
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If you’re talking about, for example, cat ‘kinds’, I read that some types of felines have different numbers of chromosomes, yet they still have produced hybrids. (Now I have to go back and see which ones, but ocelots had a different number from mountain lions. I forget which species the ocelots were able to hybridize with.) If all feline species (lions, tigers, ocelots, house cats etc.) came from an original ‘cat kind’ pair, then there was clearly a mutation at some point to cause a difference in chromosome numbers. Alternatively you could say that there were two different types of ‘cat kind’ on the ark with the two differing sets of chromosomes. But then you have to deal with the fact that they could produce offspring. (I can’t remember if those offspring were fertile; I went on vacation in the midst of thinking about this question).
But I am not clear on whether this is an example that relates to your question. It’s not clear to me that that chromosomal mutation changed the physical characteristics of the cat species, their phenotypes.
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I gave you an example of spontaneous mutations observed in mouse strains that changed their coats. So it is possible for a mutation to happen which results in an observable coat difference, and coat differences are part of dog and cat breeds. Since most of the breeds were established in the 1800s before genetics information, it might be impossible to show that a particular genetic condition happened in a mutation in a particular dog line.
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There is a rare Norwegian breed of dog called the Lundehund which has extra toes. Maybe you could imagine a situation where the genetic information for the extra toes was passed down through generations and generations of dog kind ancestors and disappeared except in that one breed in Norway. But it seems more likely to me that it was the result of a spontaneous mutation. There are also some cats that have extra toes, for instance some of the Maine Coon cats. The single base pair genetic variation in some cats with extra toes in the USA is close to in genetic location but different from the mutation which caused some cases of extra-toed cats in the UK. In this case, I don’t think extra toes is a definite breed characteristic of Maine Coon cats but I think it is a common trait in that breed.
I’ll try to think of other approaches to this question.
…Don’t you think you can derive all kinds of dogs without mutation? Or corn?”
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Corn is where Barbara McClintock discovered ‘jumping genes’: transposable elements. This is a kind of mutation.
Here’s an article about locating a mutation responsible for the short-legged phenotype in breeds like dachshunds and pekinese. Their conclusion was that it was a single mutation event that happened before the various current breeds were developed. (The genotype sequence related to the mutation was not found in the dogs they looked at but was found in some wolves. Maybe that means it could have occurred in wolves before dogs became domesticated. It seems unlikely to me that a wolf offspring with that mutation would have survived, and I’d guess it happened after domestication.)
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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2748762/?tool=pubmed
Abstract: Retrotransposition of processed mRNAs is a frequent source of novel sequence acquired during the evolution of genomes. The vast majority of retroposed gene copies are inactive pseudogenes that rapidly acquire mutations that disrupt the reading frame, while precious few are conserved to become new genes. Utilizing a multi-breed association analysis in the domestic dog, we demonstrate that a recently acquired fgf4 retrogene causes chondrodysplasia, a short-legged phenotype that defines several common dog breeds including the dachshund, corgi and basset hound. The discovery that a single evolutionary event underlies a breed-defining phenotype for 19 diverse dog breeds demonstrates the importance of unique mutational events in constraining and directing phenotypic diversity in the domestic dog.”
“It feels more like a booth at a community event like a farmers market, or maybe a garage sale or open home tour, where you have specifically invited the public passers-by to take a look at your ideas.”
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Imagine walking up to the folks at the farmers market booth and calling them ignorant and then casting all kinds of judgements on their lifestyle or “agenda.”
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Or a garage sale.
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Or anywhere at all.
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Sorry. I don’t buy it. It’s just rude.
Cats are felines and dogs are canids.
A mutation that mutates corn into corn.
Cats mutating into cats, mice mutating into mice — no objections. That’s observable science. Cats mutating into mice or vice versa would be more consistent with the evolutionary hypothesis.
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As Mendel demonstrated nearly a century ago, there are genetic boundaries that all life forms cannot exceed, surpass, or overcome. This is as true for sweat peas as for sapiens. Corn mutating into corn is not evolution in the Darwinian sense. Corn mutating into tomatoes would be.
Dogs mutating into dogs.
…Honestly — don’t you think you can get all kinds of different cats without mutation? Don’t you think you can derive all kinds of dogs without mutation? Or corn?”
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Whoa, wait a minute. I thought you WERE talking about dogs mutating into different kinds of dogs etc, from the quote above. So those the examples I looked for.
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….Cats are felines and dogs are canids.”
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So does that mean that in your original sentence quoted above, you didn’t mean dog breeds particularly, but you also meant wolves, jackals, coyotes?
And for cats, not just house cat breeds but lions, ocelots, mountain lions, bobcats, house cats etc?
ALL THAT READING, WASTED!
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(That’s a joke, not really wasted; it was interesting and fun.)
No one can ever seem to give a clear answer for what a species is. A kind is a type of animal that can successfully reproduce or “bring forth each to its own kind” as it says in Genesis. I have no issue with certain individuals within a kind displaying a mutation. No argument. My argument is that such mutations can add information (since mutations are always reductive or static) sufficient to transform say fish into amphibians, or amphibians into lizards, or lizards into mammals. Fish are always fish. Amphibians are always amphibians. Reptiles are always reptiles. Mammals are always mammals. No matter how much “mutation” you throw at a given “kind” it remains an example of that kind.
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You will never irradiate fruit flies until they become lizards or mammals or plants. They will never even be anything but seriously screwed up fruit flies. They won’t even be able to become some other kind of insect.
But a white dog and a black dog are going to make little white dogs, little black dogs, and little black and white dogs all without mutation. Dogs make dogs. Adding mutation doesn’t change that fact. Dogs will always make dogs whether they have a high or low mutational genetic load.
…”But a white dog and a black dog are going to make little white dogs, little black dogs, and little black and white dogs all without mutation. Dogs make dogs. Adding mutation doesn’t change that fact. ”
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Well, whether you get little white and black spotted dogs depends on genes for color spotting. And whether you get white puppies and black puppies probably depends on the particular genes involved, whether the parents are homozygous or heterozygous for each gene, and if a parent is heterozygous, which chromosome the pup gets.
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Of course if the dogs were not purebred you might get some other color if for instance each parent were heterozygous for some recessive gene and some puppy inherited two recessive genes.
But also if there happened to be a mutation in the germ cell of one parent for some color gene, you might get pups of some other color.
So you might not get only black and white pups.
But I understand what you mean. And one way or another, you still get dogs… in one generation anyway. (Give it millions of years and many generations, and I think you might get something different.)
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.….”Cats are felines and dogs are canids.”
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Oh, I get it now. I think you meant that when you said cats you meant all feline species etc. Okay.
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…”As Mendel demonstrated nearly a century ago, there are genetic boundaries that all life forms cannot exceed, surpass, or overcome.”
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No, Mendel did not demonstrate that, nor was he able to demonstrate that.
“(Give it millions of years and many generations, and I think [e.g.: believe] you might get something different.)”
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This is a philosophical statement based on a religious belief.
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It cannot be observed and therefore has nothing in common with operational science.
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It has never been observed and therefore has nothing in common with operational science.
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It cannot be tested and therefore is utterly and forever separate from the scientific process itself.
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With all of the authority of operational science, I can say that it has never been observed, can never be observed, cannot be tested, and therefore is not a scientific statement.
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When you remove science from philosophical beliefs, you enter into the realms of magic. Example: Give it millions of years and many generations, and magically dogs will transform into cats or bats or lizards despite all scientific evidence to the contrary.