[PassedOut]

hrothgar, on Jan 15 2009, 12:08 PM, said:

jtfanclub, on Jan 15 2009, 07:04 PM, said:

Well, let's go with chomosone pairs.

We have 23 pairs.  Fish don't.  Frogs don't.  I fail to see how you can 'gradually' go from 23 pairs to 24.  What, the species has for a while 23 1/2 pairs?

While species may be vague, as far as I know the number of chromosones is not.  So name a case where a species with one number of chromosones became a different species with a different number.

http://www.gate.net/..._ape_chrom.html is a good starting point

Good page. Our ancestors had 24 chromosome pairs, but two were fused in humans. The evidence could not be more clear.

Nice site also, for eveyone interested in evolution vs. creationism.

[jtfanclub]

hrothgar, on Jan 15 2009, 12:08 PM, said:

jtfanclub, on Jan 15 2009, 07:04 PM, said:

Well, let's go with chomosone pairs.

We have 23 pairs.  Fish don't.  Frogs don't.  I fail to see how you can 'gradually' go from 23 pairs to 24.  What, the species has for a while 23 1/2 pairs?

While species may be vague, as far as I know the number of chromosones is not.  So name a case where a species with one number of chromosones became a different species with a different number.

http://www.gate.net/..._ape_chrom.html is a good starting point

Interesting, although it doesn't contain enough information for me to judge it.

[hrothgar]

jtfanclub, on Jan 15 2009, 09:00 PM, said:

hrothgar, on Jan 15 2009, 12:08 PM, said:

jtfanclub, on Jan 15 2009, 07:04 PM, said:

Well, let's go with chomosone pairs.

We have 23 pairs.  Fish don't.  Frogs don't.  I fail to see how you can 'gradually' go from 23 pairs to 24.  What, the species has for a while 23 1/2 pairs?

While species may be vague, as far as I know the number of chromosones is not.  So name a case where a species with one number of chromosones became a different species with a different number.

http://www.gate.net/..._ape_chrom.html is a good starting point

Interesting, although it doesn't contain enough information for me to judge it.

That's one interpretation...

[jdonn]

hrothgar, on Jan 15 2009, 01:30 PM, said:

jtfanclub, on Jan 15 2009, 09:00 PM, said:

hrothgar, on Jan 15 2009, 12:08 PM, said:

jtfanclub, on Jan 15 2009, 07:04 PM, said:

Well, let's go with chomosone pairs.

We have 23 pairs.  Fish don't.  Frogs don't.  I fail to see how you can 'gradually' go from 23 pairs to 24.  What, the species has for a while 23 1/2 pairs?

While species may be vague, as far as I know the number of chromosones is not.  So name a case where a species with one number of chromosones became a different species with a different number.

http://www.gate.net/..._ape_chrom.html is a good starting point

Interesting, although it doesn't contain enough information for me to judge it.

That's one interpretation...

Denial is a terrible thing.

[mikeh]

jtfanclub, on Jan 15 2009, 01:00 PM, said:

hrothgar, on Jan 15 2009, 12:08 PM, said:

jtfanclub, on Jan 15 2009, 07:04 PM, said:

Well, let's go with chomosone pairs.

We have 23 pairs.  Fish don't.  Frogs don't.  I fail to see how you can 'gradually' go from 23 pairs to 24.  What, the species has for a while 23 1/2 pairs?

While species may be vague, as far as I know the number of chromosones is not.  So name a case where a species with one number of chromosones became a different species with a different number.

http://www.gate.net/..._ape_chrom.html is a good starting point

Interesting, although it doesn't contain enough information for me to judge it.

Are you serious? Or illiterate? If you accept that the authors of that article are telling the truth as they have found it to be, and that the scientists upon whose work they depend also told the truth, then how on earth can you reject the fusion explanation? I read the article and found it to be a model of lucidity.

But then, I didn't have to read it through a veil of wilful ignorance created by belief in superstition

[helene_t]

jtfanclub, on Jan 15 2009, 05:04 PM, said:

Well, let's go with chomosone pairs.

We have 23 pairs. Fish don't. Frogs don't. I fail to see how you can 'gradually' go from 23 pairs to 24. What, the species has for a while 23 1/2 pairs?

While species may be vague, as far as I know the number of chromosones is not. So name a case where a species with one number of chromosones became a different species with a different number.

Sometimes an individual gets four copies instead of two of a particular chromosome, and the two identical pairs then drift apart in subsequent generations.

[Fluffy]

mikeh, on Jan 15 2009, 10:35 PM, said:

But then, I didn't have to read it through a veil of wilful ignorance created by belief in superstition

I find some paralelism with scientifics reading new testament . But I didn't read the article (nor new testament for that matter).

[Fluffy]

jdonn, on Jan 15 2009, 07:50 PM, said:

Denial is a terrible thing.

You mean like Denying that God's son came to earth 2000 years ago and changed the known world? .

[hrothgar]

Fluffy, on Jan 16 2009, 11:06 AM, said:

jdonn, on Jan 15 2009, 07:50 PM, said:

Denial is a terrible thing.

You mean like Denying that God's son came to earth 2000 years ago and changed the known world? .

More like denying that John XXIII opened Vatican II...

[jdonn]

Fluffy, on Jan 16 2009, 03:06 AM, said:

jdonn, on Jan 15 2009, 07:50 PM, said:

Denial is a terrible thing.

You mean like Denying that God's son came to earth 2000 years ago and changed the known world? .

I think the language barrier is causing you to lose the relevance of the implication.

[mikeh]

Fluffy, on Jan 16 2009, 03:04 AM, said:

mikeh, on Jan 15 2009, 10:35 PM, said:

But then, I didn't have to read it through a veil of wilful ignorance created by belief in superstition

I find some paralelism with scientifics reading new testament . But I didn't read the article (nor new testament for that matter).

One obvious difference between you and me is that I have read both.. now my reading of the new testament was many years ago.. but I did read it..

My rejection of the new testament, and all other religious tracts, is based on a lot of thinking, and a lot of reading, from a wide range of sources.

I appreciate that you are young, and that you have been subject to religious conditioning that dulls the ability to think critically about religion.. that is not a criticism of you personally... you have no responsibility for what your family made you learn.. but consider: you express strong pro-religious beliefs while proudly admitting ignorance about the issues. Do you in fact appreciate that there is a difference between believing something and knowing something?

If you allow yourself to contemplate that MAYBE religion is misguided, and actually LOOK at the counter-arguments, you may find your faith has been misplaced.

[helene_t]

I think you are unfair to Gonzalo, Mike.

Gonzalo says he has thought a lot about the existence of God and came to the conclusion that he believes in God. He writes stuff that is critical of atheism as well as stuff that is critical of (Christian) fundamentalism. Nowhere do I see that he doesn't respect different views.

As you know I agree with most of your views on this matter but I am not sure if it is necessarily harmful or even stupid to believe in God as long as the belief is kept from interfering with science. You say that Ocam's razor implies that one should not believe in God since God adds unnecessary complexity to one's worldview. But isn't it somewhat subjective? Suppose some perceives a theist worldview as simpler or at least more sattisfactory/graspable than an atheist worldview, isn't it a valid reason to believe in God? I am not sure since I don't quite understand what the word "God" is supposed to mean, but I suppose to some it could be a valid reason.

[Codo]

Mike, You "blame" (sorry, this sounds too harsh, but I do not know a better expression)Gonzalo for:

Quote

you express strong pro-religious beliefs while proudly admitting ignorance about the issues.

I guess you make the same mistake over and over again:

Religion is about beliving. You cannot prove the God exists. Nor can you prove that he does not exist. Better man then me tried it. See Thomas of Aquin f.e. see many great writers who followed him. Some thought they had been able to proofe his existence. But they all failed. Same is true about the opposite: Do you have a prove, just one that he is non-existent? Read Nitsche, he does not believe and he is very strong in his statement. But where is his prove? He is beliving in non-beliving. Like you.

So it really does not matter whether you are ignorant or whether you have written or read a lot about this theme. It does not matter whether or not you make some experiments yourself.

You cannot try to "solve" religions in a scientifical way. Sorry, this will not work.

You have no prove that there is no God out there and you will never have one. Even when we can prove that there was a big bang, does that not disprove the possibility of a superior being. How could it.

And since Heysenberg we know already that we will never know everything about anything at any time. So there will always be a part of luck, surprise, chaos in our world. Maybe this is given by God? Maybe the laws of physics, evolution, and all the rest of our wisdom is given by him? How can you claim the opposite?
Well you can. You can claim it. But you cannot test it.

So, you may come to the conclusion that God left you- or that you left God.
You come to the belive that he does not exists for you. You won't lose any sleep at night about this. But I find it too hard to claim that belivers do belive because they are ignorant or because we have

Quote

been subject to religious conditioning that dulls the ability to think critically about religion..

.
I do belive and I am not ignorant. I am not as young as Gonzalo and I took my time to understand religions. (I did not succeed in understanding them, but I found my way in one of them.)
And don't lets start again a discussion what went wrong and right with or without religion. We had been there before. Not all members of the church are holy. But all are human.

[jtfanclub]

mikeh, on Jan 15 2009, 05:35 PM, said:

Are you serious? Or illiterate? If you accept that the authors of that article are telling the truth as they have found it to be, and that the scientists upon whose work they depend also told the truth, then how on earth can you reject the fusion explanation? I read the article and found it to be a model of lucidity.

But then, I didn't have to read it through a veil of wilful ignorance created by belief in superstition

OK, so when a horse and a 'wild' horse mate, how many chromosones do they have? And when this then mates with a regular horse, how many chromosones do they have? And if a 'wild' horse cannot mate with the child of a 'wild' horse and regular horse, how did regular horses evolve from wild horses?

Is there anything whatsoever in the article that explains how, if fusion was random and sporadic, how new species could occur? If you have a wild horse that gets genetically altered to a modern horse, it will end up mating with wild horses and the result will either be nothing or wild horse.

If through some magical carrier an entire family of wild horses were changed to modern horses within a generation of each other, then sure, you can explain what happened and they'd have fertile children. But that can't happen through random shifts. Something else must be happening.

[blackshoe]

I agree that it is impossible to prove or disprove the existence of God (whatever that word means) given the evidence we have available now. That doesn't mean that we will never have such proof.

Humans are fundamentally emotional rather than rational beings. As such, we have many questions about the universe and our existence in it that cannot (at least at this time) be answered rationally. Yet we hunger for answers. Religion provides them, for some. For others, it does not. So be it.

[mikeh]

My post was in response to two by Gonzalo.

it may be that I misunderstand him, in which case I truly apologize. However, I have understood his posts to suggest that he is a christian with a strong belief in the teachings of at least one of the christian sects.

He also proudly, it seems to me, combines a rejection of atheism with an admission that he has not read any of the material to which atheists point in support of their position AND at the same time admits that he has not even read the texts underlying his faith.

How one can make these admissions and still legitimately claim to have 'thought' about his faith is beyond me. His faith is based on a combination of literal and metaphorical or allegorical interpretations of the Old and New testaments.. with different sects advancing different interpretations.. and all sects carefully ignoring blatant inconsistencies and contradictions. And he believes one version or the other... without ever reading the book?

That is not thinking... not any form of thinking with which I am familiar.. it is 'believing'.. and the entire world has daily reminders of the consequences of belief disconnected from critical analysis.... from the small scale of suicide bombers secure in their belief that they go to heaven, to the catastrophic failings of George W Bush.

As for arguing that Occam's razor can be satisfied by a belief in God as the simple ultimate cause... I don't get it... doesn't that very notion beg for the question of what god is? That's why I argue that this approach either pushes the questions out another layer (which is the opposite of the process suggested by occam) or requires that one shut off one's thinking at the blank wall or black box we label god. And occam's razor is to be used in THINKING, not as an excuse to STOP thinking. Or have I misunderstood? Didn't occam advise against the entertaining of unnecessary hypotheses?

Helene, I respect your posts on these issues as much as or more than I respect those of anyone else posting here.. and while I have never met Gonzalo, I suspect that I would like him if I did (whether the converse is true, I can't speculate). I do not for a moment think that Gonzalo does not respect differing views.

Personally, I respect those who think that some form of god entity is a plausible explanation underlying the origins of the universe. That does not require belief that the god entity is the christian god or indeed any god worshipped by humans. It does not require belief in the day-to-day involvement of god in the world.. nor the concept of sin, nor the concept of heaven etc. After all, we do not understand what existed 'before' the universe nor even if that concept makes sense. So filling in our 'unknown' and potentially unknowable areas with a 'god' makes some sense.

And that sort of belief is conditional... it may be logical to entertain it until and unless our understanding penetrates into that unknown area and sheds light on it.

But much light has been shed on matters that various religious sects have proclaimed to be revealed truths, and with each shedding of light, religious leaders have twisted their dogmas to accommodate the new reality, oblivious to the fact that previous leaders, equally infallible, had been convinced of the former dogma.

Anthropology has revealed HOW religion works, and why it is so powerful...and one of those mechanisms is a form of inoculation against self-examination. Gonzalo has been inoculated (it seems to me).. to the point that he can claim to have thought about issues, yet hasn't done even the most basic of reading! he can dismiss a scientific paper that explains why we have 23 chromosomes while related species have 24... without reading it!

It is more or less a free world, and everyone is entitled to an opinion. However, in my view, people who express opinions on readily accessible topics without even a modicum of effort to become informed should not expect to be listened to very often. And should expect some criticism.

[jdonn]

helene_t, on Jan 16 2009, 11:48 AM, said:

I think you are unfair to Gonzalo, Mike.

Gonzalo says he has thought a lot about the existence of God and came to the conclusion that he believes in God. He writes stuff that is critical of atheism as well as stuff that is critical of (Christian) fundamentalism. Nowhere do I see that he doesn't respect different views.

As you know I agree with most of your views on this matter but I am not sure if it is necessarily harmful or even stupid to believe in God as long as the belief is kept from interfering with science. You say that Ocam's razor implies that one should not believe in God since God adds unnecessary complexity to one's worldview. But isn't it somewhat subjective? Suppose some perceives a theist worldview as simpler or at least more sattisfactory/graspable than an atheist worldview, isn't it a valid reason to believe in God? I am not sure since I don't quite understand what the word "God" is supposed to mean, but I suppose to some it could be a valid reason.

Two comments.

One is that I am fairly certain Gonzalo is on record as admitting he has not extensively studied the scientific viewpoint, and that he is ignorrant about it. That is his own admission, so I don't think saying so is being unfair.

The other is that it's possible to not believe in Occam's razor too.

[jdonn]

jtfanclub, on Jan 16 2009, 12:16 PM, said:

OK, so when a horse and a 'wild' horse mate, how many chromosones do they have? And when this then mates with a regular horse, how many chromosones do they have? And if a 'wild' horse cannot mate with the child of a 'wild' horse and regular horse, how did regular horses evolve from wild horses?

Is there anything whatsoever in the article that explains how, if fusion was random and sporadic, how new species could occur? If you have a wild horse that gets genetically altered to a modern horse, it will end up mating with wild horses and the result will either be nothing or wild horse.

If through some magical carrier an entire family of wild horses were changed to modern horses within a generation of each other, then sure, you can explain what happened and they'd have fertile children. But that can't happen through random shifts. Something else must be happening.

This post is completely equivalent to foo's posts about bridge, except without all the hilarious formatting.

[mikeh]

jtfanclub, on Jan 16 2009, 12:16 PM, said:

mikeh, on Jan 15 2009, 05:35 PM, said:

Are you serious? Or illiterate? If you accept that the authors of that article are telling the truth as they have found it to be, and that the scientists upon whose work they depend also told the truth, then how on earth can you reject the fusion explanation? I read the article and found it to be a model of lucidity.

But then, I didn't have to read it through a veil of wilful ignorance created by belief in superstition

OK, so when a horse and a 'wild' horse mate, how many chromosones do they have? And when this then mates with a regular horse, how many chromosones do they have? And if a 'wild' horse cannot mate with the child of a 'wild' horse and regular horse, how did regular horses evolve from wild horses?

Is there anything whatsoever in the article that explains how, if fusion was random and sporadic, how new species could occur? If you have a wild horse that gets genetically altered to a modern horse, it will end up mating with wild horses and the result will either be nothing or wild horse.

If through some magical carrier an entire family of wild horses were changed to modern horses within a generation of each other, then sure, you can explain what happened and they'd have fertile children. But that can't happen through random shifts. Something else must be happening.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry

The authors of the paper in question did not intend to address the broad topics you raise... and yet your rejection of what they did address is based on that perceived failure!

They addressed, as I read the paper, one specific issue.. the fact that while we are closely related, on a genetic level, to other primates, we have 23 chromosomes while the other 3 species discussed have 24.

They suggested that this question might be arguably have arisen either as a design decision made by a creator or by evolutionary processes, and they proceeded to examine the evidence... at a level and by means unavailable and indeed inconceivable to the founders of all of our mainstream religions.

That examination revealed that one particular chromosome looked exactly as it should if in some ancestral primate two chromosomes had fused.. with the presence, in the middle (more or less) of the 'fused' chromosome of patterns that are usually found only at the end of chromosomes.. and patterns on both sides of the supposed point of fusion.

of course, one could argue that the creator deliberately created these patterns so as to conceal his handiwork... and no doubt some cretins will beleive that.

As to the larger questions that the authors were NOT addressing, there is ample literature out in the world about HOW mutations propagate and how speciation is understood to occur. You might try reading some of it. A lot of it is accessible to lay readers... I don't for a moment profess to have any training in genetics or evolution but your local bookstore (not the Christian one) will have a large section of well-written, easy to comprehend books on the topic, designed for lay readers.

[helene_t]

jtfanclub, on Jan 16 2009, 06:16 PM, said:

OK, so when a horse and a 'wild' horse mate, how many chromosones do they have? And when this then mates with a regular horse, how many chromosones do they have? And if a 'wild' horse cannot mate with the child of a 'wild' horse and regular horse, how did regular horses evolve from wild horses?

Is there anything whatsoever in the article that explains how, if fusion was random and sporadic, how new species could occur?

If you check the references provided in the article, you will get answers to most of your questions I think. Ref 9 answers your questions about the hybrid horses.