Paul, Consensus science is not science. Plenty of data for the Coconino …

Comment on The Basis of Biblical Credibility by Gene Fortner.

Paul,

Consensus science is not science.

Plenty of data for the Coconino sandstone as water born.

The Coconino Sandstone, long claimed to be sand dunes turned to rock, are too fine-grained to be aeolian (wind-blown) sands, and cover too a vast an area (much of the Southwest: 100,000 square miles, with a volume 10,000 cubic miles) for this scenario to be plausible. The crossbedding could have been laid down as sand waves by deep ocean currents. The fossil trackways could have been made in shallow water and would have had to be buried suddenly to be preserved. All other layers in the canyon are indisputably water-deposited. To believe the Coconino was wind-deposited, the entire region would have had to be lifted above sea level without cracking or folding, yet the contact with the water-deposited Hermit Shale below it is flat and smooth. This indicates that deposition of the Coconino in the Grand Canyon began immediately after the Hermit formation, without 10 million years between them.

@pauluc:

Gene Fortner Also Commented

The Basis of Biblical Credibility
Humans and Chimpanzee?

I don’t think so.

A useful lie

10-10-2008 17:12 | Dr Richard Buggs
From 1964 to 2004, it was believed that humans are almost identical to apes at the genetic level. Ten years ago, we thought that the information coded in our DNA is 98.5% the same as that coded in chimpanzee DNA. This led some scientists to claim that humans are simply another species of chimpanzee. They argued that humans did not have a special place in the world, and that chimpanzees should have the same ‘rights’ as humans.

Other scientists took a different view. They said that it is obvious that we are very different from chimpanzees in our appearance and way of life: if we are almost the same as chimpanzees in our DNA sequence, this simply means that DNA sequence is the wrong place to look in trying to understand what makes humans different. By this view, the 98.5% figure does not undermine the special place of humans. Instead it undermines the importance of genetics in thinking about what it means to be a human.
Fortunately (for both the status of human beings and the status of genetics) we now know that the 98.5% figure is very misleading. In 2005 scientists published a draft reading of the complete DNA sequence (genome) of a chimpanzee. When this is compared with the genome of a human, we find major differences.

To compare the two genomes, the first thing we must do is to line up the parts of each genome that are similar. When we do this alignment, we discover that only 2400 million of the human genome’s 3164.7 million ‘letters’ align with the chimpanzee genome – that is, 76% of the human genome. Some scientists have argued that the 24% of the human genome that does not line up with the chimpanzee genome is useless “junk DNA”. However, it now seems that this DNA could contain over 600 protein-coding genes, and also code for functional RNA molecules.

Looking closely at the chimpanzee-like 76% of the human genome, we find that to make an exact alignment, we often have to introduce artificial gaps in either the human or the chimp genome. These gaps give another 3% difference. So now we have a 73% similarity between the two genomes.

In the neatly aligned sequences we now find another form of difference, where a single ‘letter’ is different between the human and chimp genomes. These provide another 1.23% difference between the two genomes. Thus, the percentage difference is now at around 72%.

We also find places where two pieces of human genome align with only one piece of chimp genome, or two pieces of chimp genome align with one piece of human genome. This “copy number variation” causes another 2.7% difference between the two species. Therefore the total similarity of the genomes could be below 70%.

This figure does not take include differences in the organization of the two genomes. At present we cannot fully assess the difference in structure of the two genomes, because the human genome was used as a template (or “scaffold”) when the chimpanzee draft genome was assembled.

Our new knowledge of the human and chimpanzee genomes contradicts the idea that humans are 98% chimpanzee, and undermines the implications that have been drawn from this figure. It suggests that there is a huge amount exciting research still to be done in human genetics.

The author is a research geneticist at the University of Florida.
http://www.refdag.nl/nieuws/chimpanzee_1_282611


The Basis of Biblical Credibility
Paul,

Austin and others based their analysis on data.

> A TEMPORAL STRATIGRAPHIC GAP = MISSING TIME
> Geology is totally preoccupied with time. Time’s passage is recorded by the presence of rock units, but not every geological event is preserved in stone. The absence of a record is of equal importance. Missing time results from rock units that have either eroded away or from periods of time in which no sediment was deposited. Such a gap in the temporal record is called an unconformity, and it’s the geologist’s business (and passion) to decipher what happened during it.
>
> The global rock record contains countless unconformities, most of which are comparatively minor. There are fourteen major unconformities exposed within the Grand Canyon and unenumerable minor ones. In fact, the Canyon’s rock layers are so full of temporal stratigraphic gaps that far more time is absent than is represented. In Annals of the Former World, John McPhee states, “If a gap of five hundred million years were the right five hundred million years, it could erase the Grand Canyon.”
>
> THE GREAT UNCONFORMITY OF THE GRAND CANYON
> Near the bottom of the Grand Canyon, a sandstone formation from the Cambrian called the Tapeats rests upon metamorphosed schist from the Precambrian called the Vishnu. Mysteriously, the rock layers that once existed between the two formations are missing. Perhaps they never even formed. Regardless of the cause, the space of that paper-thin contact represents an enormous amount of time unaccounted for, far greater than all the others, on the order of a billion years. That’s a quarter of the age of the Earth. Missing!
>
> The immensity of this particular time gap has been recognized by geologists that have singled it out as the Great Unconformity written with capital letters. John Wesley Powell, the intrepid explorer, scientist and geologist of the American Southwest, first recognized the time gap in 1869, but failed to appreciate its enormity. The Great Unconformity is not just found within the Grand Canyon but occurs in various locations within the Southwest. In fact, it can be found where ancient Laurentia’s Cambrian shelf is exposed and even globally where continental shores received deposition during the Cambrian. Back in New York State where I’m from, we have a Great Unconformity in the Adirondack lowlands in which the Middle Cambrian Potsdam Sandstone overlies a Middle Proterozoic Grenville gneissic-basement on Laurentia’s eastern shore.
http://written-in-stone-seen-through-my-lens.blogspot.com/2012/01/great-unconformity-of-grand-canyon-part.html


The Basis of Biblical Credibility
Paul,
Wiki is not a reliable source.

School officials unite in banning Wikipedia

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/living/2004025648_wikipedia21.html

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/07/08/opinion/main4241293.shtml

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/02/wikipedia_and_t055991.html

@pauluc:


Recent Comments by Gene Fortner

The Creative Potential of Randomness and Chaos?
Bill,

A scientist starts with data, the proposes a hypothesis to explain that data. A creation scientists uses the scientific method to test the validity of the Bible.

So far the Bible is way ahead of secular scientist attempts to explain the universe.

Neo-Darwinism is dead.

Here are some of the attemps to replace it.

They too will fail

In Search of “Evolution 3.0”
There are eight contenders for the next incarnation of the theory of evolution.
I have heard and read that the theory of evolution is a “theory in crisis.” But the research path I’ve been on has led me to flip-flop on that notion depending on what I was reading at the time. However, very recently, I think I have come to settle on the “theory in crisis” side of the fence. It has always been my contention that, by far, the best refutations against the theory come from evolutionists themselves. By “best” I mean ones likely to be taken seriously by those who adhere to the tenets of evolutionary theory. This is because no matter how scientifically sound an argument is, if it comes from a source with the slightest religious or Intelligent Design affiliation, it is automatically discredited on that basis.
That being said, the ongoing search for the theory’s replacement, in my opinion, offers some of the most powerful evidence against the theory. It appears that the recent developments in microbiology and genetics have been at work silently in the background (i.e. with limited public exposure). I’ve just read through Stephen Meyer’s refutation of evolution in Darwin’s Doubt. It is very compelling scientific evidence. The result of this silent work is now manifesting itself in a search for a replacement for neo-Darwinian evolution.
The surfacing theories that I am currently aware of are:
1. Context-driven Actualization of Potential (CAP)
2. Self-organization
3. Natural Genetic Engineering
4. Neo-Lamarckism
5. Symbiogenesis
6. Evolutionary Developmental Biology
7. Neutral Evolution
8. Facilitated Variation
The fact that all of these new theories are surfacing

http://scienceagainstevolution.info/v17i11f.htm

http://scienceagainstevolution.info/v17i12f.htm

.

@Bill Sorensen:


“Blindingly Obvious Artifacts” of Intelligent Design
Sean,

True but some try to use snowflakes as the appearance of design.

The ability to detect design is God given.

Send a couple of 10 year olds through a field looking for artifacts, they will come back with arrowheads, broken pieces of pottery, nails, ……


Louie Bishop Testifies, Again, about His Experience at La Sierra University
@Professor Kent: Prof,
The 2nd law applies to the universe, including open and closed systems.
Notice how sunlight (UV) degrades paint/skin/…


The Creative Potential of Randomness and Chaos?
@Pauluc:

Paul,

What you need to do to refute Dominic Stratham’s hypothesis is to come up with a hypothesis that matches the data better than his.

His hypothesis matches the data much better than current just so stories and it makes sense.

Your attempt to refute his hypothesis was a lazy man’s attempt at an apopeal to authority.

FYI,

Engineers are much harder to fool because they design things.

Academia only has to come up with a story that matches the current dogma’s premise.

PS: A few hundred years ago, the consensus was against Galileo.


Science, Methodological Naturalism, and Faith
@pauluc: Bacteria did have the digestive function before nylon was invented. The fact that they could not digest nylon before nylon was invented is simply because there wasn’t any nylon to digest.
New evidence shows that the ability was due to plasmids [e.g. K. Kato, et al., ‘A plasmid encoding enzymes for nylon oligomer degradation: Nucleotide sequence analysis of pOAD2’, Microbiology (Reading) 141(10):2585–2590, 1995.] In fact, more than one species of bacteria have the ability, residing on plasmids. This suggests that the information probably already existed, and was just passed between different types of bacteria.
All that would be needed to enable an enzyme to digest nylon is a mutation causing loss of specificity in a proteolytic (protein-degrading) enzyme. This may seem surprising—how would a loss of information create a new ability? Answer: enzymes are usually tuned very precisely to only one type of molecule (the substrate). Loss of information would reduce the effectiveness of its primary function, but would enable it to degrade other substrates, too. Since both nylon and proteins are broken down by breaking amide linkages, a change in a proteolytic enzyme could also allow it to work on nylon. If this process were continued, the result would be a general enzyme with a weakly catalytic effect on the hydrolysis of too many chemicals to be useful where much selectivity is required. To put it into perspective, acids and alkalis also catalyze many hydrolysis reactions, but they also lack specificity. Indeed, an inhibitor of a protein degrading enzyme also inhibits the action of the nylon degrading enzyme.