Reply to Shtal (Interesting facts, for believers) - Page 25

When you have people like Shtal ramming his beliefs down everybody's throat, based on HIS beliefs, you have to expect to get a response at some point.  And no matter how benign some religions may seem, they are still about control.  If that control is limited to the group and not espoused as the ultimate truth to all, then it never becomes a problem.  When it presumes that it can control other people on a faith only it holds, it's wrong no matter how you try to slice it.  It's immoral, it's perverse and it's childish.  If you're going to throw your beliefs out there to be examined, don't be insulted by the findings.  If you don't want them examined, keep them to yourself.  It really is that simple.

Look it up yourself BE, that failed in court too.

Forget the courts, the courts are saying 2A is about duck hunting now adays. I'm asking you. Your the one who started this thread.

* "If you're going to throw your beliefs out there to be examined, don't be insulted by the findings.  If you don't want them examined, keep them to yourself.  It really is that simple." *

LOL @ this ^^

This is one of the reasons WHY I always feel stupid leaving this forum !!!!

Food for thought:

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin said:

"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin also said:

" To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. "

DNA is a code!

Claim CB180:

The genetic code is a language in the normal sense of the term, since it assigns meaning to arbitrary symbols. Language is obviously a non-material category of reality; the symbolic information is distinct from matter and energy. Therefore, life is a manifestation of non-material reality.

Source:

Baumgardner, John, 1995. Six problems with evolution: a response to Graham Mark. The Los Alamos Monitor, 31 Mar. http://globalflood.org/letters/baumgardner310395.html
Baumgardner, John, 2001. Highlights of the Los Alamos origins debate. http://globalflood.org/papers/insixdays.html

Response:

1. The genetic code is not a true code; it is more of a cypher. DNA is a sequence of four different bases (denoted A, C, G, and T) along a backbone. When DNA gets translated to protein, triplets of bases (codons) get converted sequentially to the amino acids that make up the protein, with some codons acting as a "stop" marker. The mapping from codon to amino acid is arbitrary (not completely arbitrary, but close enough for purposes of argument). However, that one mapping step -- from 64 possible codons to 20 amino acids and a stop signal -- is the only arbitrariness in the genetic code. The protein itself is a physical object whose function is determined by its physical properties.
   
   Furthermore, DNA gets used for more than making proteins. Much DNA is transcribed directly to functional RNA. Other DNA acts to regulate genetic processes. The physical properties of the DNA and RNA, not any arbitrary meanings, determine how they act.
   
   An essential property of language is that any word can refer to any object. That is not true in genetics. The genetic code which maps codons to proteins could be changed, but doing so would change the meaning of all sequences that code for proteins, and it could not create arbitrary new meanings for all DNA sequences. Genetics is not true language.
    
2. The word frequencies of all natural languages follow a power law (Zipf's Law). DNA does not follow this pattern (Tsonis et al. 1997).
    
3. Language, although symbolic, is still material. For a word to have meaning, the link between the word and its meaning has to be recorded somewhere, usually in people's brains, books, and/or computer memories. Without this material manifestation, language cannot work.

References:

1. Tsonis, A. A., J. B. Elsner and P. A. Tsonis, 1997. Is DNA a language? Journal of Theoretical Biology 184: 25-29.

How to misquote Charles Darwin

How to misquote Darwin

Misquoting Darwin is a cottage industry amongst creationists and, sadly, others use their methods. It's easy to do, just take the first sentence (or part of one as Morgan did) and pretend it's the point he was making. This quote is one of the most famous misquotes of Darwin in this style, as used by many many creationists. They quote the first sentence only: "To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree." This, however, is merely Darwin's rhetorical setup; they have to stop fast before they get to what he was actually saying. From On the Origin of Species, on the subject of the evolution of the eye:

ORGANS OF EXTREME PERFECTION AND COMPLICATION.

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 6th Edition (above from Project Gutenberg)

" then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory" -- lol

So what came first - the ribosome or the cell's genetic instructions?
How did it know it was supposed to create proteins? Does it have intelligence or was it programmed?
Do you expect me to believe it did it by accident?

Just pondering.

.lol I am sorry, but you are starting to post like Shtal.