TO AVOID CONFUSION MY WORDS ARE IN BOLD AND REMINE'S ARE NOT.
“Covington writes:
‘Point 2 - ‘The first lifeforms were vastly simpler than any life known today’ - is false’”
I made a mistake in not wording that correctly. What I meant to say was that the first living thing would not have been missing many (if any) biological universals. To justify this assertion, I state:
“The theory of common descent states that all living things are the descendants of one original living thing[7]. To be alive means to be able to replicate and evolve, and have some form of metabolism[8]. Metabolism requires enzymes. Enzymes are always made of protein (or are based on protein)[9]. To make proteins, you need a genetic code to store information about how to build these molecules. So if all organisms are descended from the same original organism, they should have inherited the genetic code of this organism. All organisms should have the same genetic code (with a possibility of a rare variation here and there). Since we know this to be the case, common descent is true.”
And anyway, even if I allow you to stretch the definition of common descent to include non-living replicators, you still have a major problem, as I explained in this article.
“Covington claims the first lifeform would have had ’several of the biologic universals.’ He doesn’t identify which ones (and origin-of-life researchers would likely not agree with him) — and he is already stretching credulity at ’several’. Moreover, ’several’ already falls short of the many biologic universals contained in known lifeforms. In other words, Covington implies that lifeform biochemistry must have changed a lot. But this contradicts his other claim: ‘if all life is descended from one primordial organism then the structures performing these functions could not have changed much’.”
No. I am here only defending the claim that the genetic code is evidence of evolution. I simply don’t know whether other biologic universals can change or not. However, I do know that the genetic code cannot change beyond the minor variations that I mentioned.
“Covington responds by claiming (without evidence) that the unknown lifeforms are ‘more primitive or less efficient forms of life’ than modern lifeforms and could not survive today. But Covington cannot possibly know this about unknown lifeforms, nor can he scientifically test his claim. It is a bald, untestable, unscientific assertion.”
What I was doing was giving a plausible explanation of why other forms of life did not exist. Even if you reject it as unscientific, and if you stick with your definition of evolution which includes the origin of life (which is not the standard) you still have to face the fact that the genetic code provides a way for us to test assertions about which animals are related, and also the fact that common descent is the best explanation for the universaility of the genetic code (As I’ve explained).
“No one — not even Covington himself — claims fish and whales are compatible with separate designers acting independently, because fish and whales already contain plenty of evidence against that claim. So Covington’s point is moot. To communicate that fish and whales had the same designer, it is not necessary for their tails to be identical. ”
So when creatures are different its not evidence against your theory, but when they’re created similarly, its evidence for your theory? Who’s being unscientific now?
“For example, the up-down tail of whales (versus the side-to-side tail of fish) cannot be explained by common descent, nor by Atavism (or genetic throwback),”
Bullshit. I have already explained how whales mover their bodies in a way similar to that of landmammals when they swim. It’s a modification of the same muscles . Do you have a problem reading or something?
“So evolutionists are left with their least plausible explanation: the independent origin and “convergence” upon a similar design solution: a tail for swimming. Message Theory explains why so-called “convergence” patterns are abundant in life (and why Transposition and Atavism patterns are substantially minimal or absent in the fossil-bearing lifeforms). Put simply, if fish tails and whale tails had been identical, then evolutionists could (and likely would) claim it was the easy result of Transposition or Atavism.”
No. Evolutionists would expect that the two tails originated differently, and since we know that there are often many solutions to a problem, we would expect the two lineages to have “hit on” different solutions. I have no clue how transposition plays into this, although I’m fairly certain that atavism could never be an explanation for this: An atavism is the reappearance of an ancestral trait. Amphibians originated over 300 million years ago. Whales, which are mammals descended from reptiles descended from these amphibians, originated only a few tens of millions of years ago. How could the genetic material from the tail of a fish have survived over 200 million years, still in usable form, without having been altered at all? No, covergent evolution is the only thing that explains why the two are different.
