Why do you think

Cognostic · July 6, 2023, 11:47pm

Hey! You have described my friend Bob. Do you know Bob? I never realized that Bob and Jesus have the exact same backgrounds. Wow!

Calilasseia · July 7, 2023, 2:09am

Oh look, it’s that favourite pastime of mythology fanboys, presenting lists purporting to be “evidence” for their imaginary cartoon magic man.

Let’s take a look at this shall we?

Er, no. It was pretty much a foregone conclusion, in Judea at that time, that someone would emerge as a firebrand apocalyptic preacher. Because being a part of this demographic was a cottage industry in Judea at the time.

Merely blindly asserted to be the case by your mythology.

Well whoop de doo, pretty much every human parent, apart from instances thereof affected by mental illness, protects its offspring. You think this is so fucking remarkable?

Again, merely blindly asserted to be the case by your mythology. Which includes in the requisite passages, assertions to the effect that Planet Earth is a flat plane.

Again, do you really think this was remarkable in a primitive agrarian society?

Again, merely blindly asserted to be the case by your mythology. We’ve yet to see something resembling genuine evidence that the “supernatural” is something other than the figment of the imagination of pre-scientific humans.

Pedagogy has been a part of human civilisation long before your mythology existed. Again, if you think this is some remarkably unique aspect of your cartoon magic man, you need to get out more.

Again, merely blindly asserted to be the case by your mythology.

Again, do you really think this is a unique feature of your cartoon magic man? Your straw clutching is as desperate as ever.

Again, merely blindly asserted to be the case by your mythology.

Your apologetics is some of the lamest and most palsied I’ve seen among mythology fanboys, which constitutes some sort of perverse achievement on your part.

Fixed it for you.

WhoAreYou · July 10, 2023, 2:46pm

Ya aware of that

Ya it is but the myth was altered after Christ

WhoAreYou · July 10, 2023, 3:27pm

Point of this being

how can you say evolution is fact when:

“the forces responsible for the origin and maintenance of sexuality remains one of the greatest unsolved problems in biology”?

https://www.nature.com/articles/37108

“Most researchers agree that mutations with phenotypic effects are usually deleterious“

https://www.nature.com/articles/6887270#Sec4

Sheldon · July 10, 2023, 3:27pm

@WhoAreYou, I am still waiting for you to offer any objective evidence for your list of bare unevidenced claims there?

Sheldon · July 10, 2023, 3:36pm

The point of being your bs claim that the human genome evidences a deity, and as we can see you’re very keen to dishonestly evade offering any evidence or one word of explanation to support it?

So I ask again, how does the human genome remotely evidence any deity, as you claimed? If you refuse to answer I shall have to infer you were bullshitting with a lie you thought no one would question.

I am not interested in your false dichotomy fallacy with denials of scientific facts, as it is not a choice between your unevidenced superstition and scientific fact. Even were evolution entirely disproved, it wouldn’t make your claim true, only objective evidence can do that, now what have you got?

CyberLN · July 10, 2023, 3:41pm

Those articles you’ve cited are 26 and 23 years old respectively. Do you suppose any progress has been made in the field of biology since then?

Sheldon · July 10, 2023, 3:44pm

More to the point did he imagine we wouldn’t check and see through his bs yet again, and they don’t remotely answer my question or evidence his claim that the human genome is scientific evidence for a deity at all, he’s now using a false dichotomy fallacy, he is so far out of depth it’s funny, and my patience with his dishonesty has long since been exhausted.

Why are creationists so dumb they think they can disprove an accepted scientific fact in an internet forum, with propaganda lies. Is that really how they imagine the methods of science falsify things? The entire scientific world catches up later in the fantasy world they imagine is real?

Nyarlathotep · July 10, 2023, 3:49pm

because change/time is real?

Nyarlathotep · July 10, 2023, 3:52pm

I can only read the extract of the article you posted and it certainly didn’t say what you suggested. I did read some of the articles in the footnotes and they said more or less opposite of what you said (that the myth of Jesus borrowed heavily from the myth of Hercules). Which of course fits in well with the time line (and doesn’t require a time machine like your version of events).

Sheldon · July 10, 2023, 4:01pm

I am dubious he reads most of the links he posts, or at least understands them, I think he is either parotting arguments he’s heard, or is Googling what he wants, there is after all no shortage of creationists lies and pseudoscience to access on the internet.

I shall ask @WhoAreYou the same question I asked @Quim, why is atheism almost universal among elite biologists, if any of the scientific evidence from that field remotely evidences any deity?

“According to a 1998 survey of members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), nearly 95% of NAS biologists identify themselves as either atheists or agnostics, a percentage of unbelief far higher than in any other scientific discipline.”

Either elite biologists don’t understand the evidence from their own field of discipline, or his claim that the human genome is scientific evidence for a deity is bs.

Anyone placing any money on the first one?

Calilasseia · July 10, 2023, 4:08pm

Oh look, it’s QUOTE MINE TIME!!!

The first paper you quote mined consisted of an experimental test of a particular hypothesis about the evolution of sex.

Indeed, the paper makes this explicit, viz:

Within a population of organisms, an asexually reproducing genotype should have twice the fitness of its sexual counterparts, all else being equal^1,2. Therefore, it is difficult to understand why sexual reproduction is so widespread in nature³. This problem remains unsolved not for want of theories, but rather for lack of compelling data. Among some 20 hypotheses⁵, two postulate that sex is an adaptation for purging deleterious mutations from the genome^4–6. One of these two, Muller’s ratchet^7,8, depends on random genetic drift and thus provides an advantage for sex only in small populations. In contrast, the mutational deterministic hypothesis^4,5 is effective in large populations but requires synergistic epistasis, such that multiple mutations are typically more harmful together than would be expected from their separate effects (Fig. 1). In mathematical form, let

ln W_k = -αk - βk²

where W_k is the average fitness of genotypes with k mutations, α > 0 for deleterious mutations, and β defines the interaction between mutations. The intercept is fixed at zero because fitness values are expressed relative to an unmutated progenitor. If mutations interact synergistically (β > 0), then the equilibrium load of deleterious mutations is lower in a sexual than in an asexual population^9,10, providing an advantage for sex. (This requirement for synergistic epistasis has recently been extended to bacterial transformation, a form of non-mendelian sex¹¹.)

The authors continue with:

So, having found a population that possessed a high level of fitness in its environment, the authors then chose this to experiment with the effect of mutations, viz:

Three mini-Tn10 transposons, each having a different antibiotic-resistance marker, were used to generate insertion mutations21. These transposons had been modified so that the site of insertion was effectively random²¹. We identified mutants under permissive conditions, on a nutritionally rich medium; we then measured their fitness under stringent conditions, in the same minimal medium in which their progenitor evolved. Hence, the sample is unbiased with respect to recovery of mutations, and fitness is expressed in the same environment as the organism’s recent selective history. We constructed 225 genotypes, including 75 each with one, two or three insertion mutations. Each numerical class was balanced with respect to the three resistance markers. For every genotype, we performed at least three competition assays, which typically ran for 40 generations, to measure fitness relative to an unmutated genotype. Relative fitness is simply defined as the ratio of the net growth rates of the mutated and unmutated genotypes during competition for limited resources.

Next, the authors explain their choice of statistical analysis, and the results therefrom, viz:

Figure 2 shows the relationship between mutation number and average fitness. A log-linear regression explains more than 99% of the variation in sample means (F_1;2 = 2.864:6, P = 0.0003, r² = 0.9993). Inclusion of a quadratic term, as postulated by the mutational deterministic hypothesis, does not significantly improve the model’s fit to the data (F_1;1 = 1.4353, P = 0.4428). To maximize statistical power, one would like to perform these regressions using each mutant as an independent observation. In practice, this approach introduces technical difficulties because: (1) several mutants have zero fitness, so that the logarithm is undefined; and (2) the variance in fitness increases with mutation number, which violates an assumption of least-squares regression. [b]To circumvent these problems and achieve statistical power commensurate with a sample of 225 genotypes, we used a robust method called Tukey’s jack-knife²² to obtain 225 quasi-independent estimates of the linear coefficient, α, and the quadratic coefficient, β. The jack-knifed estimate of α is 0.0273 (standard error = 0.0059, t₂₂₄ = 4.6510, P < 0.0001). The corresponding estimate of β is 0.0037, which does not differ significantly from zero (standard error = 0.0070, t₂₂₄ = 0.5247, P = 0.6003). Thus, there is no clear tendency for deleterious mutations to interact synergistically.

So, on that basis, the authors reject a particular hypothesis about the evolution of sex.

The authors continue with further analysis as follows:

The question is then: how large must β be for synergistic epistasis to be important with respect to the hypothetical advantage of sex? There is no easy answer to this question; it depends on other variables, including especially the genomic deleterious mutation rate^4,5 (which can vary greatly even among genotypes of the same species²³). For example, if β is positive and not too much smaller than α (such that β/α = 0:4), then the increase in mean fitness due to sex is only a few per cent when the genomic deleterious mutation rate is 0.1, but the advantage of sex is about twofold when the rate is 2.0 (ref. 24). The genomic deleterious mutation rate in E. coli is < 10^-3 for a genotype with functional DNA repair mechanisms²⁵, and so the benefit of sex is very slight even for the highest value of β consistent with our experiment. However, our primary objective is not to evaluate whether sex would be advantageous for E. coli. Rather, we seek to determine if there is a general tendency for genetic architectures to exhibit synergistic epistasis among deleterious mutations, which does not appear to be true. But given the statistical uncertainty inherent in this negative result, we conservatively summarize the regression analyses by reiterating that precise measurements of the fitness of 225 genotypes, each having from one to three mutations, were insufficient to demonstrate significant synergistic epistasis. Any comparable study that seeks to prove synergistic epistasis must (1) examine many more genotypes, (2) generate a much wider range of numbers of mutations per genome, or (3) show that some other organism has a much greater tendency for synergistic epistasis than does E. coli.

Oh, and this part at the end is insteresting:

In short, it helps a great deal if you know what the scientists are talking about, and what their experimental results are intended to demonstrate. But mythology fanboys engaging in quote mining don’t bother with the essential learning about this.

Meanwhile the second paper you quote mined contains the following later on:

The authors continue with this:

This has been largely overlooked in MA experiments. The BM technique ignores beneficial mutations but minimum distance or ML techniques are versatile enough to incorporate a non-null probability of favourable mutations. Studies that have looked for favourable mutations include the reanalysis of three Drosophila experiments (Garcia-Dorado, 1997) and one C. elegans experiment (Keightley & Caballero, 1997). Of these, one MA experiment fitted a model where 10% of mutations were beneficial (Garcia-Dorado, 1997). The question remains: if 10% of mutations are favourable has the MA method any power to detect them? Although the properties of ML estimators have been explored in detail (Keightley, 1998; Keightley & Bataillon, 2000), the situation where beneficial mutations may be fixed in MA lines has never been studied.

Simulations of MA experiments were performed where a small proportion of beneficial mutations (0%, 1% or 10% of mutations) are fixed in the MA lines, which were then analysed using the constant effect of mutation model or its ML version (see Keightley & Bataillon, 2000, for details of the simulation protocol). First results indicated that line value distributions, and BM or ML estimators traditionally used, are barely affected by the presence of beneficial mutations. Although the analysis is very crude, it indicates that the power of MA, designs to detect such mutations is probably quite low. A full analysis of the behaviour of ML estimators incorporating mutations of variable effects (both positive and negative), although computationally cumbersome, would be interesting in that regard.

Oh look, the authors found that current statistical analyses used in relevant experiments overlook the effects of beneficial mutations.

And, the authors offer a solution to this problem, viz:

An alternative design, potentially useful for the detection of beneficial mutations, would be to practise directional selection in an initially homogenous population. Such designs have traditionally been used as a way to estimate mutational variance for quantitative traits (Hill & Caballero, 1992). Here selection should be practised on fitness-related traits as those typically eroded in MA experiments. Replicating such selection experiments with widely varying population sizes, would provide some information on the distribution of favourable mutations. In such a design, population size should sieve beneficial/deleterious mutations as a function of their selective effect. Monitoring the evolution of the distribution of fitness should provide some information on the relative rates and sizes of effects of beneficial vs. deleterious mutations.

Here’s a lesson for you: don’t quote mine papers before an audience familiar with the contents thereof.

Calilasseia · July 10, 2023, 4:53pm

By the way, if I may be indulged a tangential diversion, it looks like prebiotic chemistry research is again delivering actual hard empirical results, as opposed to “Magic Man did it”.

I’ve just been pointed at this page covering a recent advance in the possibility of sugar chemistry taking place in the interstellar medium. The scientific paper in question is this one:

Gas-Phase Sugar Formation Using Hydroxymethylene As The Reactive Formaldehyde Isomer by André K. Eckhardt, Michael M. Linden, Raffael C. Wende, Bastian Bernhardt & Peter R. Schreiner, Nature Chemistry, 10:, 1141-1147 (10th September 2018) (Paper source is here)

Carbohydrates (CH₂O)_n are the formal adducts of carbon (atoms) to water with a repeating unit that structurally resembles H–C̈–OH (hydroxymethylene). Although hydroxymethylene has been suggested as a building block for sugar formation, it is a reactive species that had escaped detection until recently. Here we demonstrate that formaldehyde reacts with its isomer hydroxymethylene to give glycolaldehyde in a nearly barrierless reaction. This carbonyl–ene-type transformation operates in the absence of base and solvent at cryogenic temperatures similar to those found in extraterrestrial environments or interstellar clouds. Hydroxymethylene acts as a building block for an iterative sugar synthesis, as we demonstrate through the formation of the triose glyceraldehyde. The thermodynamically preferred ketose dihydroxyacetone does not form, and the formation of further branched sugars in the iterative synthesis presented here is unlikely. The results therefore provide a link between the well-known formose (Butlerow) reaction and sugar formation under non-aqueous conditions.

The authors continue (at length) as follows:

The simplest sugar, glycolaldehyde (1a , 2-hydroxyacetaldehyde), is considered to be the first entry in the famous formose¹ (Butlerow²) sugar-forming reaction in basic aqueous formaldehyde (H₂CO, 2a ) solutions, but the detailed mechanism for the initial dimerization of two molecules of 2a —formally electrophiles— to 1a and further on to higher sugars remains a puzzle. While 1a has long been assumed simply to be the slowly forming formaldehyde dimerization product, such a direct and uncatalysed dimerization has been deemed chemically impossible¹, as only disproportionation of 2a into methanol and formic acid (Cannizzaro reaction) takes place³ in aqueous solutions of 2a in the absence of 1a . The notion of ‘glycolaldehyde autocatalysis’⁴ in the formose reaction does not reveal the details of the underlying chemical reaction mechanism⁵, and typically requires the presence of liquid water, a strong base, high reactant concentrations and ambient temperatures⁶. Moreover, the sugars formed in the formose reaction show very limited long-term stability⁷ and any stereochemical purity⁸ (not addressed in the formose reaction per se) would be lost because of the multiple base-catalysed propagation and equilibration steps. In other words, the aqueous formose reaction is fascinating in its own right but it suffers from very severe limitations that make it probably less relevant for questions concerning sugar formation in a prebiotic and extraterrestrial context.

A variety of sugar-related compounds, including the ketose dihydroxyacetone (5b), were found in the Murchison and Murray meteorites^9,10 and it was concluded ‘that polyols were present on the early Earth and therefore at least available for incorporation into the first forms of life’⁹. This implies that aqueous and ambient conditions are not necessarily needed for carbohydrate/polyol production¹¹. Although 1a was only shown to exist in outer space in 2000^12,13, this finding was an important indication that the processes leading to biologically relevant molecules are also taking place in non-Earthlike environments. This was interpreted as evidence for a gas-phase formose reaction by a hitherto unknown mechanism¹³.

The key question therefore is how the first molecules of 1a could form from 2a as the starting material in the absence of a base and aqueous solution, and at very low temperatures. Such conditions would render 1a and subsequently formed higher sugars much more long-lived, as required by hypotheses that deem sugars essential to the origin of life^14,15. As 2a is ubiquitously found in space¹⁶ it has been suggested to play a major role in the abiological carbon cycle¹⁷.

The photoreaction^3,18 of [b]2a[b] apparently leads to 1a in cryogenic argon matrices¹⁹, as does the irradiation of methanol–carbon monoxide ices in the laboratory^20,21. Many such reactions suggest carbenes²², especially hydroxymethylene (H–C̈–OH, 3a ), to be the key intermediate; this was, however, only characterized spectroscopically in 2008²³, although the mass spectrum was published in 1987²⁴. This parent molecule of the new hydroxycarbene family^25,26 was also suggested to form in the reactions of excited-state atomic carbon atoms with water^27,28. We have shown recently that hydroxycarbenes (3) (R= H, CH>sub>3, CF₃, Ph, tBu, OH and cyclopropyl) can readily be prepared through the thermal decomposition of the corresponding α -ketocarboxylic acids (4)^25,26. For instance, the formaldehyde isomer H–C̈–OH (3a , R= H) results from pyrolysis of glyoxylic acid (4a)²³, while H₃C–C̈–OH (3b , R= CH₃), that is, isomeric acetaldehyde (2b), forms from pyruvic acid (4b)²⁹. We now demonstrate that 3a serves as an iterative building block for the formation of simple sugars (Fig. 1). This has been suggested from computational studies³⁰ and on the basis of the product distributions in the reactions of excited carbon atoms with water³¹. Of course, 3a would have to be formed in other ways in space than in the laboratory, but there are plenty of options within the realm of C, H, O chemistry, including the photoreaction of CO or CO₂ with water^32–34; this issue is not addressed here. Note that this makes a remote connection to Fischer–Tropsch chemistry, which utilizes the same constituents and 3a as the key intermediate^35,36, in the production of hydrocarbon fuels from CO and H₂ on catalyst surfaces.

Proposed intermediates 3 had escaped detection because they undergo tunnelling reactions to their aldehyde isomers with half-lives of typically several hours under cryogenic matrix isolation conditions^25,26; these tunnelling reactions are also detectable at much higher temperatures in the gas phase (320–350 K) where they are, as expected, much faster³⁷. This reactivity, however, does not play a role in the reactions presented here as they are extremely facile owing to very low activation barriers. In the context of initiation of formose-type reactions, the key feature of 3 is that it formally turns electrophile 2 into a nucleophile, so that reaction of 2 with 1 may occur smoothly. The adducts of 3 with the thiazolin-2-ylidene moiety of vitamin B1 are the famous ‘Breslow intermediates’³⁸ in the catalysed Umpolung^39,40 of aldehydes to give acyloins⁴¹.

After that exposition, the authors open their discussion with:

and conclude with:

Once again, testable natural processes win the day.

WhoAreYou · July 11, 2023, 1:03pm

" The Christian influence appears even more indisputable in the case of Julian the Apostate. There is hardly a doubt that here transposition and

plagiarism were deliberate. In his eyes, Hercules was the model both of a wise man and of a sovereign. T o the traditional feats which Hercules was credited with by mythology, Julian added others: Hercules crossed the sea dry-shod, an obvious transposition of the episode in the Gospel when Jesus walks on the waters. His interpretation of Hercules’ character was directly inspired by Christianity. It is in order to make him the saviour of the universe that Jupiter begot his son; which he did through the agency of Athene Pronoia,1 who played a part very closely comparable to—and described in the same terms as—that which the Christian symbols of faith attribute to the Holy Ghost. So that the divine triad thus sketched out closely resembles a Trinity.

The career of Hercules reached its zenith at that time. But it was an unstable triumph. For with Julian, as with all late representatives of pagan- ism, he could not succed in compelling recognition decisively and exclusively. He met mightly rivals on his way, and especially Helios, whom Julian himself set at the very heart of his theology and his worship and who, though unsuccessfully, tended to absorb the other divine figures, including Hercules, who were thus interpreted as emanations, personified attributes or symbols of a single god."

Sheldon · July 11, 2023, 1:47pm

@WhoAreYou, how is the human genome evidence for a deity, as you claimed?

WhoAreYou · July 11, 2023, 4:01pm

Except that it is true that there is limited experimental support most explanations are just theoretical. Where is the objective evidence vs the subjective theories?

WhoAreYou · July 11, 2023, 4:11pm

Sheldon:

I am dubious he reads most of the links he posts, or at least understands them, I think he is either parotting arguments he’s heard, or is Googling what he wants, there is after all no shortage of creationists lies and pseudoscience to access on the internet.

I shall ask @WhoAreYou the same question I asked @Quim, why is atheism almost universal among elite biologists, if any of the scientific evidence from that field remotely evidences any deity?

“According to a 1998 survey of members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), nearly 95% of NAS biologists identify themselves as either atheists or agnostics, a percentage of unbelief far higher than in any other scientific discipline.”

Either elite biologists don’t understand the evidence from their own field of discipline, or his claim that the human genome is scientific evidence for a deity is bs.

Anyone placing any money on the first one?

argumentum ad popslum fallacy?

Sheldon · July 11, 2023, 4:30pm

Nope, an argumentum ad populum (not popslum (sic) ) fallacy is a claim something is true based on a bare appeal to numbers, the claim was yours (that the human genome was evidence for a deity), the evidence that in the NAS’s the elite experts in the related field are almost universally atheists, is objective evidence they do not agree with your claim, so either you know better than all those elite scientific experts in biology about what the scientific evidence indicates, or your claim was lying bs. In case I am being too subtle it’s the last one, and I have given you weeks to offer one word of explanation to justify your claim, and we have nada.

Again I wasn’t the one making a claim (atheism is not a belief or a claim, nor was I claiming anything about atheism per se), I was refuting your claim that the human genome was scientific evidence for a deity, and again this was not a bare appeal to numbers. It’s encouraging you’re trying to be rational, but disappointing that you are so nakedly dishonest about it, by ignoring your relentless use of known logical fallacies, that you’ve failed to address even once, but then falsely accuse me of using one here.

Now would you care to honestly answer my question, or did you think we wouldn’t notice you ignored it yet again?

If as you claimed the human genome is evidence for a deity, then explain why? Then you can explain why if this were true, atheism is almost universal among the elite biologists in the NAS’s? Do they not understand their own field of expertise?

FYI, atheism isn’t a belief, if you could grasp that simple fact, then this latest error in reasoning would have leaped out at you as well.

Quim · July 11, 2023, 4:42pm

To be completely honest, I believe that evolution is a perfectly natural process. Although it is true that its current formulation, which involves random changes and natural selection alone, may not be sufficient to produce what many biologists claim, there are alternative natural explanations that I have actually tested and found to be effective in generating complexity.

From my perspective, it seems that there is no issue in finding natural explanations for reality while simultaneously believing in God. In fact, from a religious standpoint, understanding the natural world and its processes can be seen as a way to comprehend the mind of God.

Quim · July 11, 2023, 4:54pm

Let me tell you something: while I fully endorse a naturalistic approach to evolution, our current understanding of evolution, based on random changes plus natural selection (RN), cannot produce complex organized structures.

The problem is that RN alone does not predict what we assume it does, and this became apparent only when simulations were conducted. There are missing mechanisms required to produce complex structures.

In fact, I have been grappling with this problem for years, and it was only after conducting numerous tests that I discovered a fully natural explanation that differs significantly from the simplistic statement made by RN.

What is interesting here is that 99% of biologists believe that RN can produce complex structures, when in reality, it is simply false. They hold this belief because they assume that a seemingly coherent process should work without ever testing it.

This is a prime example of scientists considering themselves rational while embracing a myth.