Discussing Romans 1:20 scientifically

Scientific evidence for God's existence
yst 4:14 PM
@Matthew what do you mean? For example, the average human has ~5 million differences when compared to the reference human genome. And no, of course not by single mutations! That would be impossible! This is a cumulative process. And as I said, each of us already has ~5M such variants, never mind what goes on as we go down the generations.
yst 4:11 PM
I thought you meant mainstream biology
yst 4:11 PM
Oh no, hang on. What's BB/CD/Uniformitarianism?
yst 4:10 PM
@Matthew Honestly? They don't. Those of YEC do, however, consistently. come on, we've been through this before you and I.
yst 3:48 PM
@terdon I edited that: I had mistakenly written "small changes that can explain say the variation between species" were I meant within the same species.
yst 3:44 PM
@lupe I think (with my apologies to Matthew if I am misrepresenting his views) the YEC answer to that is that they accept that evolution can give rise to small changes that can explain say the variation within species (I believe this is what they call "microevolution"), but they do not accept that the accumulation of these small changes can ever reach the threshold of a speciation event to "create" a new species (which they refer to as "macroevolution").
yst 3:39 PM
I am arguing that that would be a bad design, and a good one is one that changes and adapts so it is "perfect" for each fleeting "now".
yst 3:38 PM
@Wyrsa That's attempting to adapt our environment to fit us, not the other way around. I mean, as far as I am concerned, of course we adapt, that's kind of the whole point of natural selection, but you said that a good design "must be the best one for the entirety of our mortal existence."
yst 3:36 PM
@Wyrsa why? I mean why would a good design need to be stable across the ages? Wouldn't the better design be the one that adapts and changes based on its environment?
yst 3:28 PM
Also, why females? We all have open holes: ears, eyes, mouth, anus, the canal used to excrete urine.
yst 3:27 PM
@Wyrsa Of course not. Marsupials have it and it's always open, why would having a door that only appears when gestation is finished be worse?
yst 3:14 PM
Excellent training.
yst 3:11 PM
I've been in industry for the past 8 to 9 years and look at the code I wrote during my post doc, code I was immensely proud of even, and I want to run away and hide :)
yst 3:11 PM
Believe me, I know.
yst 3:07 PM
@lupe indeed.
yst 3:06 PM
@lupe Oh wow. As a former researcher turned software dev, turned manager, you have my sincere condoleces. Researchers tend to write seriously obscure, crappy code. I certainly used to.
yst 3:05 PM
@Wyrsa compared to a microwave, say. Have a little door that opens once gestation is complete. Don't require the mother to push the baby down a u-bend.
yst 1:42 PM
After having been present in the room watching a woman give birth, any residual idealism about "perfect design" I may have had went straight out the window. That is one badly designed system.
yst 1:36 PM
this
yst 1:31 PM
(and sorry for the multi-ping :( )
yst 1:31 PM
@lupe I think some of the confusion comes because a lot of ID literature makes a big deal about this idea of "novel" and how all evolution can do is shuffle existing things. I don't really understand the argument well, and I'm sure Matthew or Peter can explain it better, but it's something long the lines of "this cannot be novel because you are shuffling existing things and we need something completely new". For some reason, a novel configuration of the 4 bases doesn't qualify as new.
yst 1:10 PM
@PeterRankin it always can, yes.
yst 1:00 PM
But no, I am not suggesting we should use the silly argument from authority and that you should trust the "experts". Not at all. I am saying that if you really want to understand a complex scientific theory, then you should study it and not rely on what you were taught in school.
yst 12:56 PM
@PeterRankin I honestly don't think there are any at all, actually, but then we would need to define a "good" biologist and that's a whole separate kettle of fish.
yst 12:56 PM
@PeterRankin Not at all. I mean, to me it makes perfect sense at the intuitive level. To you it doesn't, which is fair enough, but then you need to delve into the nitty gritty details.
yst 12:55 PM
@PeterRankin I do indeed :) I mean, everything is presented in a very simplified form to school students, fair enough.
yst 12:39 PM
I mean seriously, they got their data by enlarging a screenshot of a paper!
yst 12:39 PM
But when they do bad science, that's just bad science.
yst 12:39 PM
And this has been my constant experience. Each and every time I have delved into the scientific work presented by such folks, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Now, if they stop trying to use scientific methods to prove a non-scientific (i.e. not testable) hypothesis (that of an invisible and undetectable god), then I have no quarrel with them whatsoever. I can no more conclusively prove the non-existence of god than they can prove the existence of one.
yst 12:37 PM
in Discussion between Dcleve and Matthew, 20 hours ago, by terdon
> We extracted the father-son SNV differences from the Figure 4c Y chromosome tree of Maretty et al. (2017) as follows: First, a screenshot was taken from the published pdf containing Figure 4c, and the screenshot included the associated scale bar of “50 mutations” (see Supplemental fig. 1). (The raw sequence data for the Y chromosomes is restricted access.) After electronically expanding the screenshot to a large size (while keeping the proportions constant), we located the 17 pairs with the shortest distances between them, to identify the 17 father-son pairs.
yst 12:37 PM
in Discussion between Dcleve and Matthew, 20 hours ago, by terdon
This also shows they simply do not understand how sequencing works and how coverage is calculated. Which renders the entire analysis pointless. Even if we ignore the fact that they (literally) tried to extrapolate values by taking a screenshot of a figure and analyzing that:
yst 12:37 PM
in Discussion between Dcleve and Matthew, 20 hours ago, by terdon
That is nonsense! You cannot divide the average coverage of the entire genome in two and assume that this is the average coverage of a specific region. Never mind that this also ignores the pseudoautosomal regions of chrY, the whole premise is deeply flawed.
yst 12:37 PM
in Discussion between Dcleve and Matthew, 20 hours ago, by terdon
> Because of the pairing of the Y chromosome with the X chromosome, the Y chromosome exists in an effectively haploid state. Consequently, to calculate sequence coverage for the Y chromosome, we took the reported whole-genome sequencing coverage and divided it by 2.
yst 12:36 PM
in Discussion between Dcleve and Matthew, 20 hours ago, by terdon
For what it's worth, I had a look at the Jeansen Testing the Predictions of the Young-Earth Y Chromosome paper, which cites a previous work by the same author. I admit I stopped reading when I read the following paragraph which shows the authors simply do not understand what they are doing:
yst 12:36 PM
For a recent example:
yst 12:36 PM
Creationism and ID are not taken seriously by any practicing scientists outside the creationist or ID communities and that isn't because of bias, but because the arguments just don't add up. Every time I have looked into the work of ID scientists, it is clear that they don't really understand what they are doing.
yst 12:35 PM
Note how people like Matthew keep insisting that biologists have some sort of agenda to disprove God when the truth is that most of us don't really care one way or another, and certainly don't set up to disprove what, to many of us, is just (again, sorry, but this is a very common position) a quaint and outdated superstition with no relevance to their lives.
yst 12:35 PM
Which is essentially why the only people who doubt this theory are a small, mostly US-based group of coreligionists with a vested interest in disproving it because they feel it contradicts their faith.
yst 12:32 PM
For some reason, people seem to feel that laypeople are qualified to have well founded opinions on one of the most complex and (sorry) evolving scientific theories we have. Nobody thinks it is reasonable to opine on quantum mechanics without understanding the underlying mathematics, but everyone seems to think they understand what is really an equally complex theory because they had some lessons in school a few decades ago.
yst 12:32 PM
@PeterRankin The problem is that we cannot really use metaphorical language. This is a complex theory that is usually attacked by people who do not have a clear understanding of it. Hell, I've been working in the field for more than 20 years and I don't have a clear understanding of it.
yst 10:31 AM
Mutations occur and then they may or may not affect the chances of reproduction. If they do, then over the generations, that effect can affect the relative frequency of that mutation in the population. If a mutation does not affect the chances of reproduction, it isn't selected for or against. None of this requires any kind of active process.
yst 10:30 AM
@PeterRankin This is part of the confusion, I think. There is no effort, NS isn't a process that has a finite amount of energy that it applies towards "fixing good" or "removing bad". That's like saying that a rock placed in a stream is exerting power to choose whether to redirect this molecule of water toward the left or the right hand side.
yst 9:39 AM
@lupe Oh sure, I imagine not very often, but I was curious as to which mechanism could allow it to happen at all. I actually now remember a friend of mine who works on the effect of the relative abundance of the various synonymous codons and how it varies across different species and he had told me something about the rate of translation being affected. I had no idea it could also affect folding though. Neat!
yst 9:30 AM
@lupe oooh! That's cool, thanks!
yst 9:15 AM
@lupe Could you point me to a paper on that, please? Are you saying that the same amino acid can alter protein folding depending on which synonymous codon was used to code for that amino acid?
Mon 6:23 PM
And now I really need to go
Mon 6:21 PM
@PeterRankin Oh. No, not at all! It does not operate by death, it operates by reproduction. Sure, extremely deleterious mutations can be lethal but that usually means the individual is never born (or hatched or even formed as a fertilized embryo). But the main question is whether or not an individual/group/species reproduces. Death is but one of many ways one might not reproduce.
Mon 6:15 PM
Ah crap. Gotta run but I'll try and come back later or tomorrow
 
yst 3:26 PM
And even the most benevolent idea can be warped and applied to justify horrible acts.
yst 3:25 PM
@Matthew that people calling themselves Christian have committed some of the worst atrocities in history, often using their interpretation of that faith to justify said atrocities isn't really debatable, it is a simple historical fact. That doesn't mean that Christians, let alone Christianity, is inherently evil. Every single creed in history has blood on its hands.