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I was referring to the fact that the unpaired proteine gained a new function.



Ok, this is where I need to start then.

First things first. The targeting mechanism of the protein. It takes effect when free radicals cause inflammation in arteries, and so this A-1 (or its variant, A-1 milano) protein is produced to counter this reaction. Simple as that. A hot spot appears, the protein appears.

The usual amino acid was switched with cysteine which has a sulfhydryl group (its important to note the sulfhydryl part). Here's how the original protein worked. It would be produced in reaction to hot spots, to help clear up bad cholesterol. After the mutation, most of the proteins began to bind together, making them essentially useless. The minority of proteins that could still react to the hot spots (or in other words target hot spots) are unable to produce HDLs in high quantities.

However, since this new amino acid changes the proteins structure to act as an anti-oxidant, you say it has a new ability. The protein isn't producing new anti-oxidants. Its not producing anything, it just happens to act as an anti-oxidant because its in the right place at the right time. But the anti-oxidant 'ability' is just a result of its new structure. It has lost specificity, and therefore this mutation is not a 'building up' of human genes. It may or may not be dispersed into the population, and ignoring our modern ways around this, it may become the only allele available, but its still destructive to the human genome (in a small way). The fact that it has positive side-effects doesn't matter to the genome. It doesn't care.

Furthermore, its specific ability to prevent hardening of arteries doesn't even lie with the mutation. It already could target. It can't produce HDLs, but its new structure mops up free radicals. Mopping up free radicals is hardly as specific as producing HDLs (one involves standing in for other molecules by allowing its own electrons to be stolen by free radicals (the protein itself doesn't do this, physics does this, the protein just has to show up), the other involves the actual creation of a particle, or HDL). Being an anti-oxidant is a passive 'abiility'. Producing HDLs is an active ability. Perhaps if the protein manufactured different particles, that might be one thing. But it doesn't. It just sits there and let's natural chemical reactions take over, while not performing any actual role in any process like it used to.

I'll agree that this is something new, its able to mop up free radicals, which it couldn't before. But it had to do this at a loss of information (it didn't lose the amount of information, just the specificity of the information). This doesn't do anything for evolution.

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After the mutation: paired proteine that produces nothing, plus unpaired proteine that produces HDL plus acts as antioxidant.



Produces HDLs at an extremely dangerously low level.

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One definition of complexity of a system is the number of bits required for describing the system's properties.



The gene didn't even get more complex according to this definition. One amino acid was exchanged for another. Even trade. However, this just goes to show that you can't just throw any old combination of nucleotides/amino acids together and expect it to work. It has to work in the overall picture, which is why the proteins are usually useless (sulfhydryls like to bond together), and why it lost the actual ability to produce HDLs so that its chemical structure can mop up free radicals. Its an even trade of complexity, but a loss of specificity in favor of a different role.

If that's your definition of complexity, then I don't think it has any bearing on genetics in the context of mutations and evolutionary change. You'd be surprised to see which animals are more complex than us (amphibian lizards for instance) and which animals we're more complex than.

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I have the impression that you see everything deviating from God's plan of a species as 'information loss'. This is however a system of belief and not of science.



No. While seeing a mutation that could somehow write more specificity into a genome would be damaging to my argument, it still wouldn't convince me that evolution has happened. Because the entire timeframe and scale allowed for evolution is based on huge assumptions (red shift for instance, but we don't have to jump into that right now if you don't want to). And because I know we were created, so it would just mean that I would have to fit creative mutations into the idea of a young earth creation. Moreover, seeing 1 creative mutation out of thousands and thousands of observed losses of specificity/information, would still be unconvincing.

So creative mutations don't offend my spiritual side. They offend my scientific side.

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A new allele in the gene pool adds a new feature to individuals of a species. That definitely matters for evolution. I fail to see what you mean with 'specific' - what's the difference between a 'specific' allele and a 'not specific' allele?



The way you word it, it does sound pretty ridiculous. However, I hope I cleared it up with my post now, but if you need me to elaborate I can. I don't know how clear I am.

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Humans - if you mean our own species, homo sapiens - exist since 200,000 years and not 3.6 million years. Therefore there can hardly be any human foot prints from millions of years ago. They are from one of our evolutionary predecessors.



My point exactly. This is a human footprint, out of context no one would have argued the point. The proof of that is that it matches to a 'T' the footprints of modern humans. The only proof that it isn't a human's footprint is that it doesn't line up with the modern theory of evolution. That's your evidence and its circular, and flimsy as a sheet of paper. "We know this fossil wasn't made by a human. Humans aren't 3.6 million years old, which we know because they're only 200,000 years old." How do you know they're only 200,000 years old? "We haven't found any fossil evidence of humans that are older." Uh....what?

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You were complaining at the same time that a) those foot prints were labeled "whatever fits the theory" and that b) they don't fit the theory. Obviously, a) and b) contradict each other, so you should make up your mind about which mischief to accuse the evil scientists of.



I was trying to cover as many bases as possible to pre-respond to any responses.

However, here's my position and it comes in two flavors.

1). The dating method is wrong. I don't think this footprint IS 3.6 million years old, so I don't really accuse the evidence of saying humans have existed that long. I know the theory that we've only been around for 200,000 years, too, so I don't need links.

2). I accuse scientists of trying to force the evidence to fit their presupposed theory. If you view the equation 5 + X = Y You'll always get the answer right if you assume an answer for X. You can come up with an infinite set of answers, and every one of them will be right as long as you make an assumption.

What's stupid is that scientists are trying to say 5 + 1 = 90. They're denying that X is 1 because they thought X was 85. There's no telling anyone otherwise, because you can't argue with assumptions.

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I don't know about those foot prints - but I guess it's probably difficult to assign some foot prints to a certain human predecessor species.



Especially when you're looking at modern human footprints. Outside of the dating method, they would have been called human footprints. There's no denying that there is no difference, because the scientists themselves say it. Normally we would assume a human made it, but since we've already made the assumption that humans weren't alive at that time, it has to be something else. No evidence, it just has to fit the assumption. This is most of what evolution is based on.

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If the prints are really millions of years old, they were possibly left by homo habilis, an evolutionary predecessor of humans.



Yeah, it just sucks that H. Habilis wasn't even around when these prints were made. If only several hundreds of thousands of years can produce such a variety of feet, why didn't millions of years do it? This is a huge problem with your theory, and can't be answered. Why would these ape-men be walking around with ape-features, and human feet? It doesn't even begin to make sense.

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If the prints are really millions of years old



Ah! Now you're willing to admit that the dating methods are fallible?

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Creatonists don't like to discuss creationism. They definitely prefer to discuss evolution.



True. But only because it invariable leads into messy arguments about dating methods and red shift, which are hard to argue with someone. Its easier to kick the foundation out of evolution first, because then its easier for people to accept that maybe the earth isn't billions of years old.

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For this reason I still have only a vague idea about a creationist theory, or about whether such a theory exists at all.



Its not that I'm avoiding talking about it. But it would be pointless to talk about it if you still believe evolution explains life. Most of my theory is poo-pooed by modern scientific theories (the ones that are heavily steeped in assumptions).

However, you always make very bold claims about how stars (which are apparently billions of lightyears away) disprove a young earth.

I just have a quick point to bring up about that. Forgetting the shaky argument about how old stars can be explained by time being different depending on where you are, etc.

In a math class, imagine if you were given this question.

You're standing at point A. Two objects (X and Y) are moving away from A. X is travelling 10 feet per second, and Y is travelling 30 feet per second. How far away are X and Y?

What would you do? You would walk up to your math teacher and slap him in the face! Determining distance by speed alone is futile. Unless of course you're allowed to make several assumptions.

If you assume a time that the two objects passed you can get a correct answer. Of course, even if you change this assumption, you'll still get a correct answer. The two answers are 'correct', but the two answers are different. This is because the assumption is a variable, and has no real verifiable proof.

Here's the equation for determining astronomical velocity (or in this case, distance).

V = H D

If you have two of the three values, of course, you can determine the third value.

V is velocity, H is hubble's constant and D is the distance.

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In 1929, Hubble estimated the value of the expansion factor, now called the Hubble constant, to be about 500 km/sec/Mpc. Today the value is still rather uncertain, but is generally believed to be in the range of 45-90 km/sec/Mpc.



http://astrosun2.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses//astro201/hubbles_law.htm

Note the word estimate. In other words, your completely accurate distances are based on an estimation of even more assumptions. In fact, notice also that this estimation has been allowed to change from 500 km/sec/Mpc to 45-90. Its obviously not based on extremely accurate findings, otherwise the value wouldn't change so much. Sure, a lot of constants change (speed of light, pi), but they always remain relatively similar. Even early man had pi at about 3. But a change of that proportion (seen in the differences of Hubble's constant) is an indicator of the inaccuracy of the estimation.

Furthermore, the main reason that this value was dropped so low is because they were starting to find stars that were older than the universe! So you can change 'constants', so long as it helps fit your assumptions, once again. In that case I can just change the concept to fit my young earth theory, and we've suddenly the stars aren't so far away. The problem with this smaller value of H is that it puts the origin of stars on the spot with the origin of the universe, which isn't possible with the Big Bang because stars had to 'evolve'. So who knows, maybe the constant will be lowered again if it helps prove the theory.

We think we can determine the true color of a star (even if its red shifted) based on stars that we use as references, which is unverified (possibly unverifiable). We determine the distances to these stars without knowing the true effects on the light. Another assumption.

With so many assumptions, how can you ever not find the evidence you're looking for? I'm sure if Creationists made our own assumptions, we would come up with completely different answers.

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The Universe Shows Its Age

A cosmic embarrassment is fading. By some new measure, the oldest stars no longer appear to be older than the universe as a whole.

Four years ago, a nagging problem in cosmology looked set to erupt into a full-scale crisis. A team of astronomers led by Wendy Freedman of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, published a long-awaited measurement of the universe's expansion rate, determined by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of pulsating stars in a far-off cluster of galaxies. The result unnerved astronomers. The measured expansion rate was so fast that it implied that the universe has been slowing down for a mere 8 billion years since the big bang. Some earlier measurements of cosmic expansion had already pointed to worrisome young ages for the universe, but this made it billions of years younger than its oldest stars appeared to be.
The crisis intensified the next year, when Craig Hogan of the University of Washington, Seattle, and Michael Bolte of the Lick Observatory in Santa Cruz, California, published a careful study of old stars called globular clusters, which reconfirmed earlier age estimates of about 16 billion years. The universe, it seemed, was just half the age of its oldest inhabitants. Something appeared to be drastically wrong with the observations, or with cosmologists' basic picture of the universe.



Science, 13 February 1998, "The Universe Shows Its Age", page 981

Look at the diction in this article. It goes to show how scared you people get when the evidence doesn't line up with your assumptions. I wonder what that kind of internal crisis might prompt someone to do. Like say, use inconclusive evidence (its not a human if we assume it isn't), or not let people know that their supposedly accurate measurements are based on assumptions. Its not lying if you're just not telling the whole truth, right?

Certain variables in the equation have to be adjusted when the equation doesn't line up with the current theory.

So 100 different methods or not, they're based on fallible assumptions. I don't think the stars we see in the sky are really as far away as we thought.

The Big Bang still has a Big Problem. We haven't found all of the matter the theory has predicted (hardly even part of it). So if the theory that is the basis of these distances is questionable, so are the distances.

Dark matter/dark energy is another example of a magical miracle your god of naturalism has produced. Or in other words, widely accepted nonsense that is convenient because it fills in the gaping wounds of your theory. There's no evidence for either of these 'things' except that they must exist until a better answer is found.

This is the crank science that's passing for 'enlightenment' nowadays.

I'm done, now.

I'll wait for a response to elaborate on that. I don't want to force things.

Last edited by Irish_Farmer; 05/06/06 08:07.
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