The key is that such changes never produce anything but bacteria and are always detrimental to the genome.
-
This is a new section being rolled out to attract people interested in exploring the origins of the universe and the earth from a biblical perspective. Debate is encouraged and opposing viewpoints are welcome to post but certain rules must be followed. 1. No abusive tagging - if abusive tags are found - they will be deleted and disabled by the Admin team 2. No calling the biblical accounts a fable - fairy tale ect. This is a Christian site, so members that participate here must be respectful in their disagreement.
Bacterial resistance to antibiotics- what is the Creationist explanation?
- Thread starter chair
- Start date
The key is that such changes never produce anything but bacteria and are always detrimental to the genome.
In what way are they "detrimental"?
Well you see the difficulty, I'm sure, of claiming that all the variation in a population of one type of animal comes sort of pre-loaded, ready for adaptation to environmental changes. It might not be testable, in which case it could be right or wrong but we can't know. I don't know how you can know this is true.
My other question to JudgeRightly is about how the environmental change causes the effect of adaptation, because his claim is that mutation is part of it, but that can't be what you mean because if the information is already present then random mutation would be extremely unlikely to help. The two of you must be talking about different things.
The chicken teeth are 'in the genes' but they have only been switched on by the artificial intervention of biologists. In your understanding of this, is it that an environmental change might give 'bird kind' a need to eat something requiring teeth, or a new need for a sharp defense, and so the teeth are pre-loaded 'in the genes'? If so, then how would the chickens turn on their teeth genes, or how would anything turn on or off its genes to match a changing environment?
Stuart
In a way it is testable: We can check the genes of (for example) the common form of the bacteria, and of the antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and see what changed. Often a specific mutation can be identified. If someone to argue that the 'mutated' gene was somehow pre-loaded, I'd like them to explain what this "pre-loading" looks like. Where is it hiding?
Right Divider
Body part
Please QUOTE me opposing that fact.
Right Divider
Body part
We can SEE this genetic potential in all sorts of plant and animal breeding. This can be seen today. One thing that cannot be seen or tested is a "single common ancestor" of all living things.
Wow... talking about multiple things.
Evolutionists just need to stop pushing mutations as improvement. Mutations are damage; plain and simple.
Evolutionists often use man-made, intentional changes (intelligent design) as if this somehow proves that random errors can have total creative power to turn chemicals into men (and women).
The "why" of the cause of the change is not known and is irrelevant to the fact that the information is already there in the genes.
I will repeat. There is no "better" or "worse" in living things. There is only "better adapted to the environment"
Chair
Right Divider
Body part
I will repeat. Mutations are damage; plain and simple.
I will also note: Adapting to the environment does not require mutations.
Most are, some aren't. This has been shown many times.
So what exactly is the mechanism by which organisms adapt?
How is it that identical populations of bacteria under identical conditions develop characteristics over time?
Right Divider
Body part
Repeating your "theory" does not make it magically become true.
Mutations always "mess with" something that already existed. They are not a creative force that can turn chemicals into a man (or a woman).
https://answersingenesis.org/genetics/mutations/mutations-yes-evolution-no/
Well bacteria are an interesting example because, while you can see an easy 'out' for a creationist to claim that what we might in the past have called junk DNA is where you find the varieties hiding, actually bacterial genomes are generally over 90% coding so there's not much room for anything extra to hide.
So I agree it is very testable in bacteria. But there is still no testable claim in this thread because bacteria 'kinds' have not been defined so we don't know what the preloaded variation is presumed to cover and there are mechanisms such as genome sharing which could give rise to a creationist trick of claiming that the variation is shared collectively within a very large, varied population and that unused genes are lost easily because of that well-characterised genome-modifying mechanism they call the fall.
There is no limit to the mendacity...
Stuart
I would like to see you acknowledge my post #206 and consider whether you think the sickle cell anaemia allele is advantageous or deleterious.
Stuart
Right Divider
Body part
The poor atheist materialist must cling for dear life to the ideas of evolution turning chemicals into men and women.
There is nothing "temporary" in a mutation that helps a population survive for many generations. "long term survival" of individuals has nothing to do with evolution- only success at reproduction matters.
Right Divider
Body part
Well I did ask your opinion, and you did give an opinion in response. Does AiG speak for you on all such matters?
As an aside, I am amused that you appear to have quote-mined creationist literature. That's usually what creationists do to real science literature!
The first point I made in #206 was about probability: the probability of a large mutation being beneficial is very low, but the smaller the mutation the closer to 50% chance it has of being beneficial. Do you/does AiG have an opinion about that?
Stuart
So you observe variation in dog breeds, for example. Either the variation results from recombination of alleles through sexual reproduction and mutation, and the breeders choose the puppies that are the most like the dogs they want, and they use those to breed the next generation, or else all of the breeds of dogs are already hidden in every dog, or some earlier dog, and they do...er what?
If that second one was true, and you knew how it worked, you could have saved dog breeders a great deal of work over the past 15,000 years. What would you tell a dog breeder who thinks he has been choosing from random variations all this time? Do you know a better way to expose the hidden variations? Do you believe that there is a limited number of dog breeds possible because they all exist already, but are somehow hidden? Is this knowledge you have actually useful for anything?
Can I ask how you know this can't be tested?
Off the top of your head, can you give an example of a damaging mutation?
The chicken teeth thing is not about everything you list, it is specifically about the presence of suppressed genes that can be reactivated to make a feature that birds don't normally have.
This is not an example of Intelligent Design, because that is a claim about irreducible complexity, which is very specifically to do with adaptive features not having precursors, a claim that has been proved wrong for every example I've heard of.
In another thread, we established that there is no scientific theory of chemicals becoming a living cell, not because it's impossible in principles of biochemistry, but because of a lack of evidence from the specific event.
You appear to be criticising the aspect of this which requires intelligent intervention by scientists. That's very much like the intelligent intervention that would seem to be needed in the creationist model of variation within kinds. How are preloaded genes turned off and on?
You will appreciate that without an answer to the question of how, the idea that a 'kind' already contains it's variation 'in the genes' loses out to evolution by natural selection of variation caused by mutation. That is a complete explanation. It is contradicted by no evidence. And there seems to be no room in the bacterial genome for extra, unused information kept in case the environment changes.
I have another related question for you: if the purpose of the stored variation within a kind is to help its survival in a changing environment and it was put there by an all-knowing intelligence, why then have over 99.9% of all species that ever lived gone extinct?
Stuart
It's called entropy. Random changes are always bad for information.