After the interview (unfortunately not on the MP3) one caller asked you how dinosaurs fitted in. You asked her where she was coming from – she said she had trouble explaining dinosaurs as a Christian. You then answered indirectly about how some people believed in a recent creation while you believed in long periods of preparation of this wonderful world and how important humans were.

As I see it, the direct implication of your answer is that you, as a Christian, don’t actually believe what the Bible unequivocally states as fact in Genesis. It also seemed to me that you would rather not have answered the question, possibly because you realise that admitting you don’t believe clear historical statements in the Bible is damaging to your credibility as a logical thinker, not to mention the credibility of Christianity. So please correct me if I am wrong – I rang the talkback number many times but could not get through.

I think that many atheists humour Christians who believe in millions of years of evolution; because they know that if the Bible is wrong in Genesis then Christianity is baseless and illogical. Yet atheists, who are happy to humour old-earth creationist ideas such as you seem to hold, can be apoplectic with biblical creationists who logically base Christianity on the historical reliability of Genesis.

Incidentally, when I became a Christian as a new graduate I believed in billions of years of evolution but am now convinced that Genesis as real history makes far more logical and scientific sense than the mythology of evolution with god mixed in.

Peter Newland

To say that evolution is “non-random” is to say only that the process is not governed by chance. Some outcomes are demonstrably more likely than others: this is the consequence of natural selection.

Then you agree with me, James, that within the philosophical materialist framework there is no “meaning” or “purpose”.

Consequently, “natural selection” cannot be invested with any meaning, since it is a descriptive label applied to events occurring within a meaningless framework.

And within that materialist framework, our discussion, our thinking, your use of the term “natural selection” to imply some form of ‘guiding hand’ to a collection of meaningless processes, is likewise meaningless.

You seem to define ‘natural selection’ as “that non-random process which guides all other processes”.

However
a) it can only be inferred after the event (that is, when you use it as a descriptive label) but

b) somehow it must be acting in advance to influence the results of processes non-randomly (when you use it as a ‘guiding hand’).

Thus, it is at the same time a non-random process acting within the material universe, and the inferred result of other processes, which I believe is logically impossible.

It’s an imputed form of intelligence, derived from outside the system. A substitute for God, in fact – almost deus ex machina .

John Angelico

Yes, there are only 20 amino acids that DNA codes for (there are a few organisms that have a 21st or 22nd). But the information lies in the sequence. Your hard drive has only 1s and 0s, but it would be folly to claim that a copy of a program is new information.

And just because Preston can’t think of a function for alleged junk DNA, it doesn’t follow that none exists. Much of it has been shown to have a function after all, especially in gene regulation. Dr John Mattick of QLD Uni thinks that it could be part of a sophisticated operating system, and said:

the failure to recognise the implications of the non-coding DNA will go down as the biggest mistake in the history of molecular biology.

Jonathan Sarfati, Brisbane

You say there is no teleological end – but you have thereby stuck yourself without a purpose for the entire process, and no logical reason for vetting. What we have then is events without meaning. Brutally ruthless, yes, possibly inexorable (but unknowably so), but still utterly meaningless.

Meaning is in the eye of the beholder. I do not understand by what mechanism any entity or process could be said to possess inherent, objective meaning, so I wouldn’t have thought that there would be anything controversial about suggesting that the evolutionary process – and all other processes, for that matter – lack teleological direction. If you want to argue otherwise then the burden of proof is upon you to demonstrate the origin and function of said “meaning”.

So you will have great difficulty making any sense of concepts like “non-random” and “non-accidental”, won’t you?

To say that evolution is “non-random” is to say only that the process is not governed by chance. Some outcomes are demonstrably more likely than others: this is the consequence of natural selection.

Jonathon:

So gene duplication doesn’t double the information any more than handing two copies of an assignment will double your grade.

You need to define “information” for me here, otherwise we’re going to keep talking past each other.

It should also be stating the obvious that a wingless beetle has suffered a loss of information compared to a winged one. This sort of change doesn’t explain how the wings arose in the first place.

Again, I’m not too sure what “information” is meant to mean in this context. You say that winglessness corresponds to a loss of genetic information, as though it is somehow reasonable to presume that it takes less genes to produce a wingless beetle than it does a winged one!

Using the example of a ladybird:

Inheritance of winglessness was first reported by breeding lines from a wingless individual found at The Uithof, Utrecht in The Netherlands in 1990 (Marples et al, 1993). They found that winglessness is controlled by an allele with a major phenotypic effect that is recessive to the normal winged one.

In other words, winglessness in an individual beetle doesn’t mean that the gene for wings has suddenly dropped out of its genome, it just means that a competing recessive allele (which in this case is a gene that codes for winglessness) becomes active in its place. Again, by what definition of “information” could the genome of the ladybird be said to be losing “information” here?

James Preston conflates information with the amount of information-carrying material. However, a book with 5 copies of p. 10 doesn’t have extra information even though it has extra pages. And these extra pages can even be a disadvantage, putting the book into a higher weight bracket for posting.

Genes can only code for a finite number of amino acids (20) and generally a single-point mutation on the nucleotide will change the amino acid that is produced. In other words, the duplication of a gene which eventually undergoes a single-point mutation, will code for a new amino acid and therefore serve a different function from the original gene (which is still active an serving its original function). Again, I’m not sure how you can define “information” so that it precludes this process from being said to produce new information.

Also, genomic parsimony does not appear to be subject to selection pressures, hence the radical differences in the size of genomes even amongst closely related species (see the first link in my previous post). The majority of DNA in the human genome, for instance, is so-called “junk DNA” – DNA that serves no apparent function. In fact, there are more exogenous viruses in human DNA (8% of the genome) than there are active genes (i.e. the genes necessary to create a human being)! I’d like to see the ID explanation for that!

Okay, need to run now. More to come later.

James Preston

Similarly, the extra chromosome of Down’s Syndrome results in an extra copy of the superoxide dismutase gene which breaks down the very reactive superoxide ion (O2–). Its product is peroxide (O22–), which is normally broken down by the next enzyme. But in this case, with the extra production, there is too much to cope with.

Gene duplication is the same sort of fallacy. The evolutioniry just-so story is that an existing gene may be doubled, and one copy does its normal work while the other copy is redundant and non-expressed. Therefore, it is free to mutate free of selection pressure (to get rid of it). However, such ‘neutral’ mutations are powerless to produce new genuine information. Dawkins and others point out that natural selection is the only possible naturalistic explanation for the immense design in nature (not a good one, as Spetner and others have shown). Dawkins and others propose that random changes produce a new function, then this redundant gene becomes expressed somehow and is fine-tuned under the natural selective process.

This ‘idea’ is just a lot of hand-waving. It relies on a chance copying event, genes somehow being switched off, randomly mutating to something approximating a new function, then being switched on again so natural selection can tune it.

A wingless beetle certainly does have less information, but this can be an advantage in some cases. But changes of this type do not explain how wings occurred in the first place! And while you can quibble all you please, this sort of change will never turn a bacterium into a biologist, no matter how many you add up (see The evolution train’s a-comin’ (Sorry, a-goin’—in the wrong direction).

Jonathan Sarfati, Brisbane

Judging by this, you believe that the events which are now occurring in time and space will occur in exactly the same manner and sequence again and again. Intriguing if not horrifying thought. The same child who was recently beheaded and roasted in Iraq for being a Christian is doomed to be repeatedly murdered in such a fashion ad infinitum. Now that’s my idea of hell.

I agree that time is an illusion, but that’s all that most people can conceive of.

Your last paragraph reads like poetry and it’s a shame with a mind like yours that you have so limited yourself to the finite understanding that is known scientifically to humankind and may yet be changed.

Dee Graf

Most people would realise that Down’s syndrome is informationally downhill because of the chromosomal duplication. As I’ve explained elsewhere:

Most people have 22 pairs of ordinary chromosomes plus the pair of sex chromosomes (XX or XY). Down’s Syndrome people have instead of a pair at 21, a triple, hence the term trisomy 21. But there is no new information, any more than two copies of an encyclopedia contain twice as much information.

Here this results in an imbalance. Note that many reactions in the body require a precise sequence of enzymes — Down’s Syndrome people have an extra copy of the superoxide dismutase gene which breaks down the very reactive superoxide ion (O2–). Its product is peroxide (O22–), which is normally broken down by the next enzyme. But in this case, with the extra production, there is too much to cope with.

It should also be stating the obvious that a wingless beetle has suffered a loss of information compared to a winged one. This sort of change doesn’t explain how the wings arose in the first place.

Quibble all you like, but add up all these types of information-losing changes you like, and you will never turn bacteria into biologists.

Jonathan Sarfati, Brisbane

James, aren’t you unwittingly playing with words here? A vetting process reads like an orderly evaluation against some set of criteria.

You say there is no teleological end – but you have thereby stuck yourself without a purpose for the entire process, and no logical reason for vetting. What we have then is events without meaning. Brutally ruthless, yes, possibly inexorable (but unknowably so), but still utterly meaningless.

So you will have great difficulty making any sense of concepts like “non-random” and “non-accidental”, won’t you?

John Angelico