Niche argument revisited

If they had been created together, the large carnivorous dinosaur, Tyrannosaurus rex, would have wiped out the Asian elephant, Elephas maximus.

The Fittingness of Evolutionary Creation
Rev. Nicanor Austriaco, O.P
https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.providence.edu/dist/4/182/files/2020/05/Thomistic-Evolution-22.pdf

Let's calculate a bit.

Most dinosaurs died in or after the Flood, 2242 years after creation.*

The ones I suggest could have died after the Flood are the ones that are found in America, with carbon dates (obtained by creationists) usually more recent than 40 000 years, which I take to be the normal carbon age now for a remnant from the Flood year.

There have been found thirty complete skeleta of T. Rex. That would have been thirty at the Flood or perhaps some found are from after the Flood, not sure if Mary Schweitzer's find has any carbon date thanks to Creationists. But she started Mark Armitage on his research, and he did lots of carbon datings, until they started making it impossible by the way the preliminary forms are filled in.

Now, a T. Rex to an elephant, that's a bit like a tiger to a rabbit.

How long would it take for tigers to doom rabbits to extinction? Remember, according to your evolution theory, tigers are supposed to have evolved ...

The tiger–snow leopard lineage dispersed in Southeast Asia during the Miocene.**

The Miocene is the first geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about 23.03 to 5.333 million years ago (Ma).

Now, 5 333 000 / 2592 = 2057*** times, omitting decimals.

The coexistence of tigers and rabbits is 2057 times as much a problem on Evolution theory than coexistence of Tyrannosauruses and Elephants on Creationist views.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. John's Day
27.XII.2021

PS, my bad. Leporidae are supposed to be from late Eocene, 56 to 33.9 ... not my bad after all. Leporids are on evolutionary terms older than tigers./HGL

* Given that the carbon ages that creationists got for dinosaurs are generally what I take to be pre-Babel, extend the existence of Theropoda along with Proboscidea to 2242 + 350 = 2592 years. Babel starts around the death of Noah, 350 after the Flood, and extends to birth of Peleg or close on, 401 after the Flood.

** Citing wiki, links at key-words.

*** Why I divide by 2592 instead of 2242, see first footnote.

What About Pseudo-Genes Starting to Code [?]

What Could Irregular Deletions Do? · What About Pseudo-Genes Starting to Code?

Evolutionists will (at least ReiperX will) present a scenario basically like this:

• a gene doubles (within the chromosome or by addition of new chromosomes, doesn't really matter)
• it gains a new function by mutation.

But moment two here actually is two moments:

• it loses its original function by mutation (easy), while the same original function is upheld by the other example of the gene
• it gains a new function by another mutation?

Now, the thing is, just two mutations will hardly ever turn one gene into something different and also functional. One mutation is sometimes absolutely sufficient to turn a gene into a pseudo-gene with no function.

• it mutates once more, but remains a pseudo-gene
• it mutates several times more, remaining a pseudo-gene
• and one day the one last mutation will turn into a real, coding gene - it can be lethal, or irksome, or useful, or sometimes even turn out to be the new necessity.

Now, there are some who would say there can't be one single mutation that turns a pseudo-gene into a gene. Like, with grains of sand, there is no specific grain that turns the collection of grains into a pile.

But a gene is not a pile. With a pile, you can take away a grain of sand, it remains a pile of sand. With a gene, exactly one mutation may be enough to make it a pseudo-gene. Not all mutations, mind you, some leave the resulting proteine exactly the same. You can mutate AUU to AUC or to AUA, it is still Isoleucine. You can mutate ACU to ACC, ACA or ACG, it is still Threonine. But some will change the resulting amino-acid, and as changing ACU to AUU will replace threonine with isoleucine and make the gene a pseudo-gene, changing AUU back to ACU will replace isoleucine with threonine and make it the old gene again - but not likely it happens, and if it does, it's not relevant here.

So, there is a kind of waiting pending mutations to add up, until one pseudo-gene finally turns into a bad or a good gene.

There is in fact no documentation that ReiperX knew of that this ever happened before the eyes of scientists. It's just that this is how they like to explain how certain genes came into existence.

Oh, wait, a pseudo-gene not being necessary, it can during this period undergo a few cuts that make no difference either.

The problem apart from lack of evidence is, why would the genes that are good remain so during all of the mutations? Meantime, they are likely to mutate too, right?

The real problem for evolution believers, apart from showing a pseudo-gene gained a new function in real-time, not in retrospect from supposed common ancestry with animals lacking the function, and with an ideology stating that new functions must have originated by mutation, is then, explaining how the necessary genes keep reasonably intact while a doubled gene becomes a pseudo-gene, then a different pseudo-gene and then even more different pseudo-genes by mutations, until one of them turns it on as a new and different gene./HGL

What Could Irregular Deletions Do?

What Could Irregular Deletions Do? · What About Pseudo-Genes Starting to Code?

I am here supposing, for argument's sake, that deletions in a gene may come in other quantities than threes, sixes, nines, etc of base pairs and these with the same limits as the triplets of bases there to start with.

I'll start off with a Coding table and a gene of 4 triplets, and then take what such deletions (if they exist) could do.

Help:Protein coding sequences/Codon table
https://parts.igem.org/Help:Protein_coding_sequences/Codon_table

mttc is the start of keratin 16:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/protein/AAD15829.1

m = Methionine, also start
t = Threonine
c = Cysteine

I'm not sure exactly how the gene for keratin 16 (of Homo sapiens) is coded, but I'll give a possible sequence:

AUG ACA ACA UGU

Obviously, deleting three according to where the threes are will only take away one of the coding parts mttc => mtc, mtt, or even ttc, potentially meaning it is not start of a protein strand.

But suppose we get to the interstices, like the threes from 3 to 5 ...

/AUG/ ACA ACA UGU
A/UG A/CA ACA UGU
AU/G AC/A ACA UGU
AUG /ACA/ ACA UGU
AUG A/CA A/CA UGU
AUG AC/A AC/A UGU
AUG ACA /ACA/ UGU
AUG ACA A/CA U/GU
AUG ACA AC/A UG/U
AUG ACA ACA /UGU/

Those between the two identical ones will by the way give simplification to one.

A/UG A/CA ACA UGU
AU/G AC/A ACA UGU
AUG A/CA A/CA UGU
AUG AC/A AC/A UGU
AUG ACA A/CA U/GU
AUG ACA AC/A UG/U

The remaining four would rearrange as:

ACA ACA UGU = ttc (just deleting the m)
AUA ACA UGU = Isoleucine, t, c
AUG ACA AGU = m, t, Serine
AUG ACA ACU = m, t, t (both ACA and ACU = t = Threonine)

That's what one deletion-mutation would do to keratin 16. And note, the first four are so of over 421 base pairs.

But what if the deletion were on top of that irregular in number, like 4 base pairs deleted? The last three begin with mt, as the original proteine. All but the last two end in GU... and the last two in AU... and AC...

/AUG A/CA ACA UGU = CAA CAU GU... Glutamine, Histidine
A/UG AC/A ACA UGU = AAA CAU GU... Lysine, Histidine
AU/G ACA/ ACA UGU = AUA CAU GU... Isoleucine, Histidine
AUG /ACA A/CA UGU = AUG CAU GU... m, Histidine
AUG A/CA AC/A UGU = AUG AAU GU... m, Asparagine
AUG AC/A ACA/ UGU = AUG ACU GU... m, Threonine = mt
AUG ACA /ACA U/GU = AUG ACA GU... mt
AUG ACA A/CA UG/U = AUG ACA AU... mt
AUG ACA AC/A UGU/ = AUG ACA AC... mt

What are the remainder of the first batch after mttc? It's srqfts.

UCU GCU CAA UUU ACU UCU
or
serine alanine glutamine phenylalamine threonine serine

Rearrange for starting two letters earlier:

GUU / AUU / ACU CUG CUC AAU UUA CUU CU...

Now it's instead:

valine / isoleucine / threonine leucine leucine asparagine leucine leucine (+ further displacements)

So, let's spell out the fourth version of the deletions, we replace

methionine threonine threonine cysteine serine arginine glutamine phenylalanine threonine serine (orthodox beginning of keratine 16)
with
methionine histidine valine leucine leucine asparagine leucine leucine

Somehow, I don't just think this would be dysfunctional as keratine, but it would be dysfunctional anywhere else in the body. But let those who know about such stuff comment on it.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Deusdedit of Brixen
10.XII.2021

PS, I am relieved this wording was "dysfunctional as keratine" and not "dysfunctional as muscles" - I had mixed up the Greek words for "horn" (keras, etymology for keratine which is found in horns, hooves, nails and, as I recall, hairs as well) and "flesh" (krear, etymology for the widely different proteine called kreatine, which is found in muscles). So, the question is, if there was a deletion in the gene for nail or hair matter (or one of parallel ones), would the resulting widely different proteine be useful anywhere at all? I am off to quora to have a look, requested answers yesterday./HGL

Theological Consequences

Theological Consequences · Jimmy Akin on Patristic and Scientific Expertise. · Child Adam? · Archaic Actual Humans or Apes in Human Shapes? · What If Adam Became a Man - When he Became a Man? · Tolkien's Elves Are Not the Key to Cain's Wife or Adam's Growth

As previously mentioned ... An Ambiguous Term, "Language Development" · Is Gradualism Really That Impossible? · Was Jean Aitchison Calling Bird-Song Doubly Articulated? ... gradual evolution from animal communications to human language is impossible.

This being so, we are now able to answer the debate question (that somehow became presented as a general permission) from Humani Generis 1950.

Let's take two positions taken at some times in the lives of the two main Inklings. I hope for their eternities, that they took a more traditional one later on, before dying.

Clive Staples Lewis, 1940, The Problem of Pain

It's just ten years since this author converted to Christianity from Atheism, and he believes the exact terms of the Genesis 1 to 3 scenario are out of the question. At least as to matters of fact. His solution : Adam and Eve are symbols of a collective. There was a tribe of hominids, and God suddenly gave them His image, with reason, morality, speech. They came to know and love God, completely trusting Him, but at some point wanted to take matters in their own hands ... the fall.

God is not cruel in converting a herd of animals, all of them together, into rational creatures. No one gets left behind. The ones that are already dead are already no more missed, when this happens. All in that tribe can continue enjoying the company of the others, and none of them needs to either feel he doesn't fit in or the others are weird and don't understand things, when he alone becomes a man.

B u t ... with such a collective humanisation, we have no individual Adam and Eve, no First Adam to which Jesus is Second Adam, no one man responsible by one sin of the fall ... and St. Paul is (factually) wrong and so is the Council of Trent Session V, which says Adam immediately lost holiness on one single sin.

And if we have no regards for the Bible, who's to say there even was one time of primeval justice, that man ever was created for eternal bliss? Babylonians thought - also - that man was created as a collective, and that this collective was created to work, on earth, for the gods.

In other words, while the rest of The Problem of Pain is excellent, this chapter or passage undermines the rest. Inacceptable.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, 1950, in a letter published posthumously in Letters.

He is so grateful for having the papacy. You see, while Protestants are in a jumble over how to take Adam with or without Evolution, we Catholics have the papacy, which has clarified things ...

At least his parish priest told his parish so.

... and if we can believe Adam's body descends from animals, we must believe Adam's soul was a unique and unprecedented creation by God.

I underline "believe" because, unlike what Tolkien heard from his parish priest, the document never actually gave such a general permission. A bit like the document by "Paul VI" later on with hand communion. So many got to hear everyone could take communion in the hand, while the document actually said that laymen could be given permissions in certain cases from their bishops to do so - but the permissions came out as general orders for hand communion in many dioceses. Now, this exact discrepancy between document and encouraged reception is what happened in 1950, between what Humani Generis said and what Tolkien heard from his parish priest.

Now, we have said farewell to Babylon and to collective humanisation. I am now assessing what Tolkien, at least momentarily accepted in 1950. No longer citing. Adam is certainly one ... but somehow, this would mean there was suffering before he sinned. Let's take the cases that are possible if Adam was born of two "near human" beasts. Adam was created rational from conception - or he was recreated rational later on. Adam as already rational met - or didn't meet - the relatives that were still irrational. This gives us the alternatives :

Adam was born rational and met irrational progenitors while growing up - Adam was not born rational, but separated himself from them on becoming rational - Adam was not born rational and lost his own before God remade him into a rational being.

1) Adam was born rational and met irrational progenitors while growing up

This would make Adam a feral child. His language capacity was hurt while he grew up among beings with no language.

There is, for man a period that is made for acquiring a first language, and if you miss it, you cannot do so later.

Obviously, God could have healed Adam when he grew up, or could have talked to him beside the surroundings that could not talk. Neither is satisfactory.

2) Adam was not born rational, but separated himself from them on becoming rational

Such an estrangement would also have been a suffering he had experienced before sinning.

3) Adam was not born rational and lost his own before God remade him into a rational being

Even for an irrational animal, losing all one's surroundings is a suffering, and this also would have been before Adam sinned.

Biblical history from Genesis 2 could still continue as given in the Bible - but the God who had inflicted this on Adam with no demerit of his own would not have been a good God.

But wait ... before Adam was rational, his sufferings or those of his ancestry, don't matter, you might say. Not so. Brute beasts suffer now, with no demerit of their own, to remind man, who has been given dominion over them, that man is fallen. We are punished in their sufferings. Since we are more important than they, God can justly sacrifice them to our needs - not just of food, but of understanding too. But before Adam and Eve were given dominion, there was only one who was lording over animals, and that one is God himself ... and it is said Proverbs 12:10, here:

The just regardeth the lives of his beasts: but the bowels of the wicked are cruel.*

Before Adam was given dominion, all beasts were God's. Therefore, none would have suffered, unless Adam had sinned. And especially not a line of beasts leading up to Adam - but that means, since a line of beasts leading up to Adam involves suffering, that a line of beasts could not lead up to Adam.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Ivry
St. Nicolas of Myra
6.XII.2021

* In the LXX, directly, "has pity", here: 10 A righteous man has pity for the lives of his cattle; but the bowels of the ungodly are unmerciful. / 10 δίκαιος οἰκτείρει ψυχὰς κτηνῶν αὐτοῦ, τὰ δὲ σπλάγχνα τῶν ἀσεβῶν ἀνελεήμονα.

Was Jean Aitchison Calling Bird-Song Doubly Articulated?

An Ambiguous Term, "Language Development" · Is Gradualism Really That Impossible? · Was Jean Aitchison Calling Bird-Song Doubly Articulated?

I suppose she knew better, but from this paragraph*, some of her readers might not know better:

In birdsong, each individual note is meaningless: the sequence of notes is all-important. Similarily, in humans, a single segment of sound, such as b or l does not normally have a meaning. The output makes sense only if sounds are strung together. So this double-layering - known as duality or double articulation - is a further parallel. And in both birds and humans, sound segments are fitted into an overall rhythm or intonation pattern.

Human language is triple-layered, thanks to double articulation. Birdsong is - if at all - double-layered, thanks to one articulation, which is not double.

It might make sense to not consider individual notes as sound segments comparable to phonemes. The interval (with its rhythm and being itself an intonation) would be comparable to the phoneme. There are phonemes that include more than one sound in pure phonetics (which is not the same as phonematics). For instance the phoneme [ts] in some languages includes the sounds [t] and [s] or very close, but is itself a third phoneme beside [t] and [s], not a sequence of them. If we make this observation, I'm not sure there is even one articulation in the sense we talk about, I'm not sure there are even two layers, in bird song. It's just that bird beaks have so little room for differentiating vocalic sounds (owls perhaps excepted, with ooee and eeyoo) and nearly none for consonants, except as cutting off the individual note, that the tones need to take over, and as birds don't have more absolute ear than man, this means the "speech sound" is the interval.

But, apart from this observation, bird-song is at most double-layered, one articulation, notes set in a pattern that is meaningful.

Man has three layers : phonemes, that are meaningless each in itself, usually, are strung together (one articulation) into morphemes, that have some notional or sometimes meta-notional meaning. But morphemes themselves make only incomplete meaning, telling only what notion is evoked, not why it is so, and so there is a second stringing together of morphemes (with meta-morphemes) to form a phrase or sentence having complete meaning. The layers are therefore phrase, morpheme, phoneme, and the levels are kept apart by two different articulations.

But obviously, Jean Aitchison may have meant that in men, the triple layering is known as double articulation. Only, she didn't say it./HGL

* See link in previous PS.

To French Fans of San Antonio

French Catholics Usually NOT Young Earth Creationist - Why? · Are Normal French People Allowed to Look? · To French Fans of San Antonio · Are Some Catholics Being Taught That Young Earth Creationism Involves the Heresy "Sola Scriptura" [?] · Dear Dr. Sarfati, what does Scripture and Tradition Actually Mean?

I'll start way off the topic of this blog. I am glad that, in my youth, I spent more time with Lord of the Rings and less time with either San Antonio or James Bond than you. Why? In Sérénade pour une souris défunte the hero, a French policeman, kisses one (while dressed as a priest) and towses two other girls, married to none of them. In Lord of the Rings you have three couples in the beginning (Farmer Maggott and his wife, Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, Galadriel and Celeborn) and you get three more couples at the end : Faramir, the most sensitive of the male heroes, gets married to Eowyn, Aragorn, the most competent, to Arwen (plus an appendix just on the background to their love story) and finally Sam Gamgee, the most crucial one, gets married to Rosie Cotton.

Also, what San Antonio does to a black man on a ship is more brutal than what heroes do even to Orcs in LotR.

But what was the connection to the theme of this blog, again?

San Antonio doesn't know English, and his English interlocutors who know some French don't know the argot of Belleville or most other finer shades of French diction. He complains that the English take everything literally. Example : a serious girl is not a girl who doesn't have her legs spread wide, it's a girl who makes no jokes. In fact, both uses exist. In a class, if you contrast "the serious girl" with "the funny girl" the former obviously doesn't joke. When a man is looking for "a serious girl" what he means is a girl who prefers family life to party life - and obviously to escapades with other guys as well.

There is no language on earth where all the speakers always take everything literally. It's just that the metaphors in common usage don't always match up between languages.

So, if you are a Frenchman, and you think "that Hans Georg has a totally English outlook, he takes everything literally, as San Antonio observed about the English," I invite you, as politely as possible, to think again. And, if on top of that you think "we French Catholics have always taken the account of the Old Testament - notably Genesis - as metaphoric rather than literal," you have a problem with your own history.

Father George Leo Haydock wrote a Bible comment, which compiled earlier commentators, both patristic and more recent. The French Dom Augustin Calmet - one of those he cites - is as literal an exponent of Old Testament Scripture as Kent Hovind. And before you think Fr. Teilhard de Chardin or his fellow Jesuit Émile Mancenot show otherwise, these two men are about a generation (or two) before the crisis of criminal abuse of minors by priests, in France. Other nation much hit by that, US, is the one that mistranslated the new Christmas proclamation from the 90's to "unknown ages" (from creation) "several thousand years" (from the Flood) when the Latin actually has "unknown centuries" and "many centuries" for the two (more compatible with traditional understanding of Biblical chronology, which obviously was traditional also in France and in the US).

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Bibiana of Rome
2.XII.2021

PS, if this should happen to be the reason behind my finding the above mentioned work on San Antonio ... such a way would have some gentle connexion to the observation made here:

This tactic has been adopted more and more by evolutionists in creation/evolution debates. Rather than risk losing more of these debates on scientific grounds, evolutionists have increasingly resorted to rattling off a stream of derisive comments against creationists, trusting there won’t be time in the debate for the creationist to show that the criticisms are invalid and still have time to detail the many flaws in the theory of evolution.

Ridicule: the lowest form of evolution
Editorial by Robert Doolan | Creation 17(2):4, March 1995
https://creation.com/ridicule-the-lowest-form-of-evolution

Same obviously applies to the arguably non-French and much less polite Shane Wilson./HGL