Evolution is a Natural Process Running Backwards

This video makes a lot of sense.  Additional posts:

Dr. John Sanford "Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome".


....and....

Interview WIth Lynn Margulis - Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn’t create.

 

 

Programming of Life video

Recommended! More good material.  Denying design is most difficult nowadays. 

Thanks to the Programming of Life folks the full video is available online.  Teachers, look it over and ask the tough questions. 
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"Programming of Life  is a 45 minute documentary created to engage our scientific community in order to encourage forward thinking. It looks into scientific theories “scientifically”. It examines the heavy weight theory of origins, the chemical and biological theory of evolution, and asks the extremely difficult questions in order to reveal undirected natural process for what it is – a hindrance to true science.
This video and the book it was inspired by Joe Miano (Programming of Life) is about science and it is our hope that it will be evaluated based on scientific principals and not philosophical beliefs." (courtesy of PofL website)

Epigenetics, Epigenetics and more epigenetics.

For some time I have been claiming that epigenetic inheritance is a problem for evolution.  Here we have Science Daily agreeing.This rapid ability to produce variation is in agreement with IDvolution.


From the article:  "The results suggest that domestication has led to epigenetic changes. For more than 70 % of the genes, domesticated chickens retained a higher degree of methylation. Since methylation is a much faster process than random mutations, and may occur as a result of stress and other experiences, this may explain how variation within a species can increase so dramatically in just a short time."

Inherited Epigenetics Produced Record Fast Evolution

 

Heritable genome-wide variation of gene expression and promoter methylation between wild and domesticated chickens

 

The First Gene

More support for IDvolution! God “breathed” the super language of DNA into the “kinds” in the creative act.


The First Gene: The Birth of Programming, Messaging and Formal Control

“The First Gene: The Birth of Programming, Messaging and Formal Control” is a peer-reviewed anthology of papers that focuses, for the first time, entirely on the following difficult scientific questions:.....

Abstract: Could a composome, chemoton, or RNA vesicular protocell come to life in the absence of formal instructions, controls and regulation? Redundant, low-informational selfordering is not organization. Organization must be programmed. Intertwined circular constraints (e.g. complex hypercylces), even with negative and positive feedback, do not steer physicochemical reactions toward formal function or metabolic success. Complex hypercycles quickly and selfishly exhaust sequence and other phase spaces of potential metabolic resources.

"Chance and necessity are completely inadequate to describe the most important elements of what we repeatedly observe in intra-cellular life, especially. Science must acknowledge the reality and validity not only of a very indirect, post facto natural selection, but of purposeful selection for potential function as a fundamental category of reality. To disallow purposeful selection renders the practice of mathematics and science impossible."


A new technical book, The First Gene, edited by Gene Emergence Project director David L. Abel, ....." Materialists will not like this book because its arguments are 100% scientific, devoid of religious, political, or cultural concerns, and most importantly, compelling.


From reading The First Gene, a number of minimal theoretical and material requirements for life emerge:

*High levels of prescriptive information -
*Programming -
*Symbol systems and language -
*Molecules which can carry this information and programming
*Highly unlikely sequences of functional information -
*Formal function -
*An "agent" capable of making "intentional choices of mind" which can "choose" between various options, select for future function, and instantiate these requirements for life. -



Anti-ID conspiracy theorists love to say that those pesky creationists are always changing their terminology to get around the First Amendment. ID's intellectual pedigree refutes that charge, but The First Gene adds more reasons why that charge should not be taken seriously. The book offers highly technical, strictly scientific arguments about the nature of information, information processing, and biological functionality. Even a cursory read of this book shows that its contributors are just thinking about doing good science. And this science leads them to the conclusion that blind and unguided material causes cannot produce the complexity we observe in life. Some agent capable of making choices is required to produce the first life.

The Origin of Life - Professor John Walton demonstates the odds against a random start

Professor Walton takes us through the chemistry and shows us the RNA world scenario is impossible.  Life was complex at the earliest times. 

The Origin of Life


Conclusions:

• Statistically, the chance of forming even one “useful” RNA sequence can be shown to be essentially zero in the lifetime of the earth.
• The complexity of the first self-replicating system, and the information needed to build it, imply intelligent design.
• Hope of beating the colossal odds against random formation of replicating RNA is based on ideology rather than science.
• As lab experiments on model replicators become more complex they demonstrate the need for input from intelligent mind(s).
• Acceptance of an early earth atmosphere free of oxygen atoms strains belief beyond breaking point!
• No chemically or geologically plausible routes to nucleotides or RNA strands have been developed.
• Geological field work shows no support for a “prebiotic soup.” It favors little change in the atmosphere over time. Living things have been present since the first crustal rocks.
• After over 50 years of sterile origin of life research it is time to give intelligent design a fair hearing.

Experimentally Confirming the Limits to Darwinian Evolution

Over at Evolution News this article dated 1/11/12 shows empirically that the Darwinian process degrades rather than constructing new functional systems.  The article also states " It seems like some notable workers are converging on the idea that the information for life was all present at the beginning, and life diversifies by losing pieces of that information. That concept is quite compatible with intelligent design. Not so much with Darwinism."

So, we have more support for IDvolution.

Evolution of increased complexity in a molecular machine

"The work of Finnegan et al. (2012) strikes me as quite thorough and elegant. I have no reason to doubt that events could have unfolded that way. However, the implications of the work for unguided evolution appear very different to me than they've been spun in media reports. The most glaringly obvious point is that, like the results of Lenski's work, this is evolution by degradation. All of the functional parts of the system were already in place before random mutation began to degrade them. Thus it is of no help to Darwinists, who require a mechanism that will construct new, functional systems. What's more, unlike Lenski's results, the mutated system of Thornton and colleagues is not even advantageous; it is neutral, according to the authors. Perhaps sensing the disappointment for Darwinism in the results, the title of the paper and news reports emphasize that the "complexity" of the system has increased. But increased complexity by itself is no help to life -- rather, life requires functional complexity. One can say, if one wishes, that a congenitally blind man teaming up with a congenitally legless man to safely move around the environment is an increase in "complexity" over a sighted, ambulatory person. But it certainly is no improvement, nor does it give the slightest clue how vision and locomotion arose."

"Finnegan et al.'s (2012) work intersects with several other concepts. First, their work is a perfect example of Michael Lynch's idea of "subfunctionalization," where a gene with several functions duplicates, and each duplicate loses a separate function of the original. (Force et al., 1999) Again, however, the question of how the multiple functions arose in the first place is begged. Second, it intersects somewhat with the recent paper by Austin Hughes (2011) in which he proposes a non-selective mechanism of evolution abbreviated "PRM" (plasticity-relaxation-mutation), where a "plastic" organism able to survive in many environments settles down in one and loses by degradative mutation and drift the primordial plasticity. But again, where did those primordial functions come from? It seems like some notable workers are converging on the idea that the information for life was all present at the beginning, and life diversifies by losing pieces of that information. That concept is quite compatible with intelligent design. Not so much with Darwinism."

Molecular Animation - from genomic information to protein synthesis

A video on the inner workings of the cell.  See the molecular machinery in action.





The movie "The Central Dogma: From Genomic Information to Protein Synthesis" is made by RIKEN Omics Science Center (RIKEN OSC) for the exhibition titled "Beyond DNA" held at National Science Museum of Japan. We tried to illustrate how molecular machines interact each other in the central dogma by giving "Japanese robot-anime" style representation to the molecules. By using this approach, people (especially kids) can easily distinguish between those molecules and understand how they function in our body.

Science does not believe in faith?

Here we have an article that shows science does have faith.  Interesting is that is shows the same reasoning method that believers have in God.  Believers are often put down for their belief without empirical evidence.  Now we see scientists inductively reasoning the Higgs boson.

Higgs boson: the particle of faith

There are parallels between the search for the ‘God particle’ and the search for God Himself, writes Alister McGrath. 

....And maybe it’s not such a bad nickname after all. Lederman invented the name the "God particle” because it was “so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive.” Nobody had seen it back in 1994. And they’re still not sure whether they’ve really seen it today. Yet this isn’t seen as a massive problem. The idea seemed to make so much sense of things that the existence of the “God particle” has come to be taken for granted. It has become, I would say, a “particle of faith”. The observations themselves didn’t prove the existence of the Higgs boson. Rather, the idea of the Higgs boson explained observations so well that those in the know came to believe it really existed. One day, technology might be good enough to allow it to be actually observed. But we don’t need to wait until then before we start believing in it.

....There’s an obvious and important parallel with the way religious believers think about God. While some demand proof that God exists, most see this as unrealistic. Believers argue that the existence of God gives the best framework for making sense of the world. God is like a lens, which brings things into clearer focus. As the Harvard psychologist William James pointed out years ago, religious faith is about inferring “the existence of an unseen order” in which the “riddles of the natural order” can be explained.

...There’s more to God than making sense of things. But for religious believers, it’s a great start. 

Dr. John Sanford "Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome"

Below is additional support for IDvolution.

Some quotes from Dr John Sanford on genetic entropy. Very consistent with IDvolution and Scripture.  To get the full effect take the time to view the videos.  Listen carefully where he states it is "kind of a trade secret of population geneticists."  The design of the genome is astonishing and shows intelligence, design and purpose.  

"We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is a thought of God."Pope Benedict XVI  

---------------------------------------------------------------------- 

"a vastly superior operating system"

"a galaxy of design and complexity"

"over 90% of the genome is actively transcribed"

"the genome has multiple overlapping messages"

"data compression on the most sophisticated level"

"more and more the genome looks like a super super set of programs"

"more and more it looks like top down design"

"the reality is everybody is mutant"

"the selection process really has nothing to grab hold of"

"so it's kind of a trade secret amongst population geneticists,any well informed population geneticist understands man is degenerating"

"so in deep geological time we should have been extinct a long time ago"

"the human race is degenerating at 1-5% per generation"

"so personal and so immediate, because there is no circle of life where things where things stay the same, and it's not an upward spiral of evolution, things keep getting better and better, it is a downward spiral exactly as described in Scripture"

"I realized it had major implications for evolution, but I had no... I couldn't have guessed how profound the biblical implications are, how profoundly the evidence supports the biblical perspective of a dying universe and a dying world, we are dying because of the fall"

"and our only hope is Christ"

Dr. John Sanford "Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome"1/2

Dr. John Sanford "Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome" 2/2 

 

Here is St Augustine on prime matter:

IDvolution posits that God “breathed” the super language of DNA into the “kinds” in the creative act.  

This accounts for the diversity of life we see. The core makeup shared by all living things have the necessary complex information built in that facilitates rapid and responsive adaptation of features and variation while being able to preserve the “kind” that they began as. Life has been created with the creativity built in ready to respond to triggering events.

Since it has been demonstrated that all living organisms on Earth have the same core, it is virtually certain that living organisms have been thought of AT ONCE by the One and the same Creator endowed with the super language we know as DNA that switched on the formation of the various kinds, the cattle, the swimming creatures, the flying creatures, etc.. in a pristine harmonious state and superb adaptability and responsiveness to their environment for the purpose of populating the earth that became subject to the ravages of corruption by the sin of one man (deleterious mutations).

 


Here is St Augustine on prime matter:

AUGUSTINE AND EVOLUTION - A STUDY IN THE SAINT’S DE GENESI AD LITTERAM AND DE TRINITATE BY HENRY WOODS, S. J.

...Such prime matter, nevertheless, can exist only under some form. “We must not think of God as first creating matter,” the Saint admonishes, “and after an interval of time giving form to what He had created without form; but as creating it simultaneously with the world. As spoken words are produced by the speaker, not by giving form afterwards to a voice previously without form, but by uttering his voice fully formed, so we must understand that God did indeed create the world from unformed matter, yet concreated this matter simultaneously with the world. Still not uselessly do we tell, first that from which something is made, and afterwards what is made from it; because, though both can be made simultaneously, they can not be narrated simultaneously.”23 This we find again in the treatise we are especially discussing. “When we say matter and form, we understand both simultaneously, though we cannot pronounce them simultaneously. As in the brief space of speaking we pronounce one before the other, so in the longer time of narration we discuss one before the other. Still God created both simultaneously, while we in our speech take up first in time what is first in origin only.”24

Prime matter can be called not only what it actually was under some elementary form, but also what it was to become by future formation. This most important principle St. Augustine lays down in explaining against the Manicheans the text: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” He says: “Unformed matter is here called heaven and earth, not because it was this, but because it was able to become this; for heaven, it is written, was made afterwards. For if, considering a seed, we say that roots and wood and branches and fruit and leaves are there, not because they are there now, but because they are to be from it, in the same way it is said, ‘In the beginning God made heaven and earth,’ as if he made the seed of heaven and earth, when the matter of heaven and earth was still confused. But, because heaven and earth were certainly to be from it, matter itself is already called heaven and earth. Our Lord Himself uses this manner of speech when He says: ‘I will not now call you servants, because the servant knows not what his master does. But I have called you friends, because all things whatsoever I have heard from the Father, I have made known to you.’25 Not that he had actually done so as yet, but because the manifestation was certainly to take place.”26

and....

27 In the beginning, therefore, God created prime matter with its potency positively determined to all things that were to be, so that these things may be said literally, not figuratively, to have been created simultaneously with it. 

Craig Venter denies the tree of life

Around the 9 minute mark listen as Craig denies the tree of life. The tree of life has fallen and is a bush.

The Great Debate - What is Life?

Journey Inside the Cell - Where does the information come from?

Journey Inside the Cell


This is the cell animation video referenced on page 120 of Signature in the Cell. The animation is stunning to say the least. It was all done by the same animators who worked on Expelled. It is titled “Journey Inside The Cell” and is about three and a half minutes long. It dramatically illustrates the evidence for intelligent design within DNA, as described in the book and reveals in intricate detail how the digital information in DNA directs protein synthesis inside the cell, revealing a world of molecular machines and nano-processors communicating digital information. Steve Meyer narrates the piece.

The third axis: Information - the "breath" of God, Creative Reason.

The third axis: Information - the "breath" of God, Creative Reason.

. More support for IDvolution.



Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics

Review

"This is the anthology we have been waiting for ... seminal papers deal with matter through the history of Greek thought, seventeenth-century materialism and twentieth-century dematerialism, the need for a new scientific world view in the light of the quantum nature of the universe, and the storage and transmission of information in biological systems with the new knowledge of their genomes and development ... Philosophers, theologians and scientists all have their say, wrestling with the theme of God as the ultimate informational and structuring principle in the universe."
Professor Sir Brian Heap, St Edmund's College, President, European Academies Science Advisory Board, German Academy of Sciences

Product Description

Many scientists regard mass and energy as the primary currency of nature. In recent years, however, the concept of information has gained importance. Why? In this book, eminent scientists, philosophers and theologians chart various aspects of information, from quantum information to biological and digital information, in order to understand how nature works. Beginning with a historical treatment of the topic, the book also examines physical and biological approaches to information, and its philosophical, theological and ethical implications.

Dr. Thomas Seiler of Germany discusses the problems with evolution and discusses IDvolution

Clarification - When Hugh describes IDvolution to Dr Seiler it should be the "language of DNA".  IDvolution is discussed briefly at the 33 minute mark.

Hugh Miller interviews Dr. Thomas Seiler.

Metamorphosis: The Beauty & Design of Butterflies

A beautiful movie showing the design of the butterfly.

Metamorphosis: The Beauty & Design of Butterflies