re: #848 palarson

With regard to:

1.) The reason Watson and Crick developed their insights into DNA I would remind you that America was discovered because Columbus went looking for India.

Which has exactly what to do with Darwin and Mendel being Watson & Crick’s intellectual impetus? They discovered precisely what they were looking for, and they were looking for it due to the influence of Darwin’s and Mendel’s ideas.

2.) That confusing evolution theory with gene theory is odd.

WTF? Genes are the physical substrate by means of which traits are passed between generations, and their mutation, combined with a differentially selecting environment, is what evolution IS.

3.) I wouldn’t argue with the idea that Richard Lenski can demonstrate an instance where genetic mutation did something useful or neat but would point out that his is likely to be a highly engineered process.

Nope. He established a dozen different lots of e. coli, fed them, watched them cycle through tens of thousands of generations, and froze some of them from each lot every several generations for purposes of repetition. The mutation in question spontaneously occurred in only one of these twelve lots.

4.) “The existence of thousands of identical artifactual retro viral DNA sequences demonstrating evolution”. The subject is new to me so I can’t comment on the merits but the odds back an assertion that something’s going to be found well wrong with it soon enough. Any complex analysis that has only its own foregone conclusion as its end undoubtedly harbors many core errors.
Cheers,

Phil

Umm…they didn’t go LOOKING for these artifactual retroviral DNA sequences, they just FOUND them. And they aren’t going anywhere; they constitute fully 8% of the human genome, and can be checked and re-checked at will.

And I find it exceedingly hard to believe that the subject is new to you, since it has been posted and commented upon eleventy-twelve times onlist before in threads in which you have participated, and even been made the topic of its own thread, but if you really ARE that oblivious, here’s the link, yet again:

newyorker.com