“I challenge you to find any leading origin-of-life researcher who even remotely agrees with your assertion.”
Life is defined as being able to reproduce, evolve, and have metabolism. Therefore it must have had some of the biological universals.
“There are potent objections to your argument. First, you (and Francis Crick, and others) already identified a means whereby the genetic code can drift without limit, and therefore evolutionists have no scientific reason why, for example, yeast and elephants should share the same genetic code. ”
No. The scenario I presented requires that a codon be rendered very rare (or nonexistent) in an organism’s genome and then be reassigned to code for another amino acid. A codon being rendered rare or nonexistent in the genome is not something that would happen in many lineages, nor would such a thing happen very often. So the code cannot change without limit.
“Second, evolutionists discovered that our genetic code itself shows substantial design, and is not a randomly “frozen accident” of happenstance as had previously been thought. From these evolutionists’ point of view, it is highly improbable the first genetic code on Earth was much like ours. Instead, these evolutionists suggest many genetic codes existed, and evolved, on this planet. Once again, evolutionary theory does not make your prediction.”
The fact that all life on earth has the same genetic code is explained by postulating a common ancestor which possessed that code.
“Yes, I reject your explanation as untestable, and therefore unscientific (under the same criteria evolutionists use in all their court cases). Walter ReMine claims evolutionary theory is a structureless smorgasbord of storytelling and able to “explain” virtually anything and its opposite — macro-evolutionary theory is untestable, and therefore unscientific.”
Fine. I don’t owe you any explanation as to why any other lifeforms went extinct, nor is that relevant to the subject.
“That is misleading. If each of the animal phyla had a different genetic code, then evolutionary theory could effortlessly accommodate that observation. “These genetic changes,” evolutionists would say, “happened way back before the Cambrian Explosion, lost in the mists of time” and blah, blah, blah, you can figure the rest. Evolutionists could explain it as many separate origins of life, for example. Evolutionary theory never predicted a unified genetic code. You are wrong to pretend it does.”
And yet you ignore my fourth reference, which quotes an article published in 1963 predicting the universality of the genetic code.
Now, you bring up an interesting point, but one that ultimately means very little. At the very least, if Darwin did not predict that all animals had a common ancestor, then he did predict that humans and apes have a common ancestor, and that the former share a common ancestor with all mammals, share a common ancestor with all reptiles, etc. We can test this by showing that they have the same genetic code.
“In Stephen Jay Gould’s book, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes, the ‘Hen’s Teeth’ from the title was allegedly an example of an Atavism (genetic throwback) from 80 million years ago. Evolutionists “explained” its maintenance in the genome as the result of pleiotropy and selection. This demonstrates that modern evolutionists are quite willing to invoke Atavisms crossing long periods of time. Darwin and the early Darwinists’ invoked Atavism, and so do modern evolutionists.”
I don’t own a copy of Gould’s book, so I can’t comment on it. However, the instance with the tail of the fish is different: For one thing, you would think that the genes controlling its development would not have simply been shutoff, like the bird’s teeth, but transformed into something else.
“For example, had the whale-tail and fish-tail been identical, then the ancient Greeks, and the early Darwinians, (as well as modern evolutionists too), would have had little restraint in claiming it was due to Atavism or Transposition. Life’s-designer wisely resisted those explanations by omitting Atavism and Transposition patterns. Evolutionists are left with their least plausible explanation: The independent origin and “convergence” of complex designs that cannot be explained by common descent. This pattern is abundant in nature, as predicted by Message Theory.”
You have not demonstrated your claim that convergent evolution is implausible.
“In every respect, that statement is false or misleading. Evolutionists, from the ancient Greeks, to the early Darwinians, to modern evolutionists, invoked Atavism-Transposition explanations, therefore it is false to claim evolutionary theory “expects” those to be absent. There is one, and only one, over-riding reason why these explanations are seldom given: These patterns are substantially absent. And that is predicted by Message Theory.”
What exactly do you mean by ‘transposition’? Also, the tail is probably not an atavistic trait for the reason given. Moreover, ‘message theory’ does not predict the difference. If living things had a designer who intended to leave all his creations with his imprint, why would he design the two tails differently? Be sure and give a testable explanation, since that is what you have been demanding of me.
“Again you focus on “explanation”, as though that were scientifically sufficient. Your whale-tail convergence explanation cannot remotely be demonstrated experimentally, nor is it testable; therefore it is unscientific. It is an unscientific story, given with religious fervor.”
I beg to differ. We know that there are often many solutions to the same problem, so when some adaptation has arisen in independent evolutionary lineages, we will often expect to see that they have “hit on” different solutions. This is evident in my example and in the examples of the wings of the bird, bat, and insect, and many others.
“You are being reckless. You are already aware (from Walter ReMine’s essay) that the existence of even one natural living being, sufficiently different or dis-united from our system of life, would falsify Message Theory. Message Theory makes testable scientific predictions about the things we should see, and should not see.”
The examples I’ve given above show different “designs” for similar purposes. If the designer wanted to design things as similarly as possible, as you suggest, why didn’t he design the above examples the same way?
“You are being needlessly (without legitimate purpose) evasive over the definition of ‘evolution’. In the origins debate, ‘evolution’ (and evolutionary theory) refers to naturalistic transformation all the way from rocks (if not before) to people, and anything less is creation. This point is neither controversial, nor unfair. As Walter ReMine points out, the evolutionists’ insistence on keeping the origin-of-life as a ’separate issue’ had the effect of concealing/obscuring the evolutionists’ self-contradictions — for example, the contradictions between Dobzhansky and the origin-of-life theorists.”
No, I addressed the point head on, by allowing the definition of common descent to be bent to include possible progeny of self-replicating molecules. Read the article a little more carefully, Mr. ReMine.
“The evolutionary relationship between whale-tail and fish-tail (which is the issue you raised) is not explained by common descent, but instead by independent origin and so-called “convergence”. But you knew that already …so why are you making stink?”
It is explained by the theory of common descent, although the explanation for the development of the two tails is not that their design stems from a common ancestor. As I said before:
We know that there are often many solutions to the same problem, so when some adaptation has arisen in independent evolutionary lineages, we will often expect to see that they have “hit on” different solutions. This is evident in my example and in the examples of the wings of the bird, bat, and insect, and many others.
Read my essay a little more carefully next time, ReMine.
