Kerry's 97 % had a precedent, TFP!

Here is first a link:

TFP : Kerry's 97 Percent of What?
Created on Friday, 23 May 2014 09:26 Written by Gary J. Isbell
http://www.tfp.org/tfp-home/news-commentary/kerry-s-97-percent-of-what.html

Next a quote from the link:

Is Kerry honestly implying that 97 percent of all scientists support global warming?

Such an attitude frustrates the very purpose of science. The very role of scientific study is to question; it is to be skeptical of outcome allowing for solid evidence, not politics, to form opinions. It comes as no surprise that Kerry is presenting as fact, the idea that there is a real consensus on global warming, but this is not the case. The 97 percent consensus figure he quotes actually represents the opinion of only a small fraction of one sector of the scientific community.

The very notion of a scientific consensus around this issue was created for ideological and political purposes in order to advance the environmental agenda.

Sure.

BUT, the notion of scientific consensus is older than that.

Heard about Scientific Consensus about Heliocentrism and Evolution?

Are there any agendas to those, perhaps?

Getting God our of the game, perhaps.

With Heliocentrism, the turning of the Universe around Earth, giving us day and night, is supposed to be apparent.

Once you assume it is real, you realise that there must be something or someone very powerful turning it around us.

Once you realise the planets and stars are not just attached to the inner wall of a hollow soccer ball, but have some freedom of movement - more apparent in planets moving around the Zodiak, less apparent in stars moving the up 0.76 arc seconds back and forth yearly (α Centauri) with the sun and up to some more than that against the sun - you also realise that the speeds involved and the absense of "train wreck" on a cosmic level, making train wrecks look like ripples on a pond, you realise it is not something, but Someone who moves the universe around.

We Christians think He was made Man, without ceasing to be God, and I suspect He may have asked His human stepfather St Joseph to build the first dreydel. Unless one can show spinning tops were already around earlier, of course.

But scientific consensus has it, watching Universe move and taking it as that is just getting it backwards, because we were placed ... sorry, because we happened to evolve (next scientific consensus) on a place where getting it backwards is inevitable.

Those scientific consensuses are pretty bleak precedents for the 97% (i e 76 scientists, if you read the link) of Kerry. Bleak and dark and illboding ones. Sorry TFP is not often attacking those!

As to the Global Warming issue, I do have a hunch, not as a specialist.

We do have a warmer climate now than back when Swedish kings could ride over the Ice of Big Belt in Denmark, in the War which earned us Scania (my province, my ancestors on that side were thus Danes). We do also know that back then it was colder than some time in the Middle Ages, when wine could be grown in places that are now too cold. I think we are not yet as warm as the 13th C. And that warmth very certainly was not man made.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Bibliothèque Parmentier
Saturday after Ascension
31 / V / 2014

When not strident, inaccurate - Dawkins, you cannot spell out information to a linguist.

1) Dawkins NOT Strident?, 2) When not strident, inaccurate - Dawkins, you cannot spell out information to a linguist.

It must be admitted that you have, Dawkins, moments when strident utterings as those cited in previous are easy to forget, because you come forth as thoughtful - for the moment. If you really were, you might have answered some of my criticisms in the past. Here I am making a new one, anyway.*

Redundancy is any part of a message that is not informative, either because the recipient already knows it (is not surprised by it) or because it duplicates other parts of the message. In the sentence “Rover is a poodle dog”, the word “dog” is redundant because “poodle” already tells us that Rover is a dog. An economical telegram would omit it, thereby increasing the informative proportion of the message. “Arr JFK Fri pm pls mt BA Cncrd flt” carries the same information as the much longer, but more redundant, “I’ll be arriving at John F Kennedy airport on Friday evening; please meet the British Airways Concorde flight”. Obviously the brief, telegraphic message is cheaper to send (although the recipient may have to work harder to decipher it — redundancy has its virtues if we forget economics). Shannon wanted to find a mathematical way to capture the idea that any message could be broken into the information (which is worth paying for), the redundancy (which can, with economic advantage, be deleted from the message because, in effect, it can be reconstructed by the recipient) and the noise (which is just random rubbish).

Dawkins, information and redundancy are NOT two different things.

I am in many subjects self taught. In Latin that is NOT the case. The Latin professor who gave me a lesson about redundancy was himself an atheist. You can hardly accuse him for praising redundancy out of a bias in favour of Christianity.

Here is your example of non-redundant versus redundant version of same message:


“Arr JFK Fri pm pls mt BA Cncrd flt”

“I’ll be arriving at John F Kennedy airport on Friday evening; please meet the British Airways Concorde flight”.

Let us subject BOTH versions to extremely bad conditions of transmission, first, namely three letters kept, three letters lost, and so on:

“Arr ... Fri ... ls m... Cnc...lt”

“I’ll ...rri...g at ...n F K...edy ...por... Fri... eve...g; ple... mee...e Bri...h Ai...ys C...ord...ight”.

First version would set you asking yourself where Concordes will be landing on Friday. Supposing you even understood it was about the person. And when. Second version, with much more redundancy will let you restitute the missing letters pretty easily. Even more. Supposing the receiver were replaced by a child or a stranger (as in real foreigner) who did not know BA could mean British Airways or Concord be a plane ...?

Now, speaking of Concorde and of Concord, in Latin - to resume my professor's lesson - precisely concord (without an -e as to English version of the word) is a redundancy feature. Does that mean it is useless? No.

French has considerably reduced audible concord by muting final e:s and s:s. And t:s and z:s too. The price is that it is much more often ambiguous to the ear.

There is actually a gliding scale between noise and redundancy even apart of this ambiguous relation between redundancy and essentials. There is also the question of when noise is part of redundancy.

In Swedish, a word like "hvarje" can have its final unaccented syllable pronounced either like French -eu or like French -é, except for the latter carrying the accent in French. I can hear the difference, but to me it is a difference of noise. Not of information.

In French there are so many words where "eu" or "é" before the tone (thus also unaccented, like in Swedish) is part of the constitution of a word. Not that you would find both "renard" and "rénard", but if meaning vulpes you say "rénard" instead of "renard", you will be marked as a foreigner. Other example why "noise" and "redundance" overlap: the background for Welsh "rhydd". Now, I do not happen to think one can prove there was an Indo-European proto-language. But one can prove with somewhat greater probability word by word there were proto-words. There was one for "rhydd" and "free" probably and "Indo-European" state of it would be reconstructible (and is reconstructed by those believing proto-language) as *prios.

This *prios would give frî in Nordic and Old and Middle High German and frei in Modern High German. For English I presume there was a stage in which *prios was reduced to *priws to give Anglo Saxon freo, of which we get free. That much dialectal variation in pre-Germanic dialects would not have impeded both dialects going through the Germanic sound changes.

Now, for *prios > *priws I presume that there was a stage in which a mere noise - the slight w in *pri^wos - became seen as constitutive.

For Welsh we have a certainty that *prios or later *frios, *rios had another noise, yod in *pri^yos, which became constitutive too. It became the eth sound which Welsh spells with double d in "rhydd". Precisely as *ios ending, like -ius in Latin, for same reason comes out as -edd in Welsh, often enough. In all these cases the original -os part of word or ending is of course lost.

As the word is found only in Germanic and Welsh or perhaps other Celtic as well as far as I know - someone knowing Sanscrit or Hittite may correct me in case I am wrong - we actually do not know if there was ever a stage in which it began with a p. Real indo-european words with real indo-european p, meaning words found in many families and always or usually with a a sound that can be reduced to original p plus preservation or plausible changes thereof do show lack of such consonant in Celtic (rhydd has no consonant previous to rh) but initial f in Germanic (frî, freo, frei ...). But if the word was only there in Celtic and Germanic (which is possible, unless a Sanskritist or expert on Nesili or sth says otherwise, or unless prijateo / przyjaciel as in friend in Croatian, Polish etc is related) we cannot confidently say it had a p. An original f would have been lost in Celtic as an original p was lost via f and h. And in Germanic it would have been preserved, precisely as f from p was preserved.

That is however an aside onto the other question of whether there was an Indo-European proto-language. The thing I wanted to illustrate was that *prios or *frios, if there was such a word, would first get a noise between the vowels - either yod as continuing previous vowel or waw as anticipating the following one would be better than a hacked h - and then the noise would be considered as part of the word and develop to other sounds or sound combinations. In Semitic languages short vowels seem to be sometimes considered as noise in relation to basic word meaning - while carrying a very subsidiary meaning of their own. In most Indo-European ones (not perhaps Sanscrit, totally) they are considered part of the word. This is the distinction between phonetic and phonematic description of a language.

So, a linguist can at once say that it is not an easy task to distinguish noise from meaningful parts of a message. Even more, noise is part of the redundancy and redundancy is part of the message. A kind of safety back up for the information.

And as money does not count for God when He creates us, His use of redundancy or even "apparent noise" in our genome is not quite an argument for information being random. Dawkins has also said himself that genomes are more like recipes than blue prints. This means that there must be markers for "let it take some time, like fifty cell divisions or so, and then ..." as well as markers for "let's make a proteine".

Thoughtful as you were, Dawkins, this time, you were not accurate in your argumentation.

I can give some creds to Royal Truman for linking to Dawkins - though the essay where I discoered him and indirectly the link in another one was a dense and very technical one for someone a linguist rather than a computer scientist - but also great credits for one of his points in it:**

Theorem 2. A CIS can be used to achieve a mental goal.

In the absence of wilful input, the organization of matter can be explained by deterministic laws of nature and statistical principles of randomness. Mental processes, however, are not controlled deterministically or by randomness, and include: making choices; seeking to understand; and developing a strategy.

Suppose you are learning German, and are reflecting on what Unsinn might mean. The intention to translate is surely not deterministic, nor explained by randomness. Perhaps the intention is stored temporarily (physically?) in the brain, with which an immaterial you interacts almost instantly. You know what you wish to do and can easily communicate this to others. This intention is converted somehow into a physical search through the data stored in your neurons. This requires very special mental equipment, since a multitude of kinds of searches are possible: for a discrete telephone number; for how a face looks; for a melody. The list is near endless. In this case we’re searching for a concept which we believe reflects the meaning of Unsinn.

The concept we seek to translate must be encoded in some manner, and the searches directed efficiently. Suitable data must somehow be extracted from the neurons, requiring further mental machinery, and the results must be encoded and transferred somewhere for the mind to evaluate. Another tool then compares a candidate English word, the associations of which get compared with those of Unsinn. It is absurd to argue neurotransmitter concentrations or electrical signals are being ‘compared’ across billions of neurons. The logical processing must involve some kind of compression and high-performance language. Eventually the mind decides whether a potential translation of Unsinn, like nonsense, is correct or not.

All the resources involved in mental processes like these are part of a CIS, and some are not physical. Various resources narrow the range of possibilities, including when the translation is to occur and where.

It is about the same point I have been making of an abacus not understanding itself what the mathematician using it is understanding. I e, the necessity of a substance distinct from matter and mindless energy, which can be conveniently called spirit, in order to explain our experience. This was also brought out by a commenter:

Lachlan W., Australia, 23 May 2014

Congratulations to Royal Truman for his groundbreaking CIS theory. Although I believe the word 'spirit' is not mentioned in these articles, the implication is clearly there that this is where information, and the systems that contain and control information, come from. His breathtakingly simple phrase; "And our world is itself embedded in higher CISs as part of ultimate goals.", was a truly excellent way to sum up why there are any information systems anyway. I hope he will continue to use the Spirit God has given him to bring to light the interaction between the spiritual and physical/material worlds.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Bpi, Georges Pompidou
24 / V / 2014

* Australian Skeptics : The Information Challenge
By Richard Dawkins
http://www.skeptics.com.au/publications/articles/the-information-challenge/

** CMI : Information Theory—part 4: fundamental theorems of Coded Information Systems Theory
by Royal Truman
http://creation.com/cis-4

Dawkins NOT Strident?

1) Dawkins NOT Strident?, 2) When not strident, inaccurate - Dawkins, you cannot spell out information to a linguist.

OK, not as strident as PZM back a few years ago, but PZM withdrew the videos.

CMI, on St Robert Bellarmine's normal day of celebration, publishes an article taking into account but refuting Dawkins' claims, like these:

I seem to be perceived as aggressive and strident and I don’t actually think I am strident and aggressive. What I think is that we have all become so accustomed to seeing religion ring-fenced by a wall of special protection that when someone delivers even a mild criticism of religion, it’s heard as aggressive when it isn’t. I like to think I’m more thoughtful and reflective.

CMI : Richard Dawkins upset that public doesn’t like him
God-hater says his attacks on religion are ‘thoughtful and reflective’
by Warren Nunn
Published: 13 May 2014 (GMT+10)
http://creation.com/dawkins-upset

Well, thing is, I have had to deal with some people, one of whom at least is his (Richard's, nnot Warren's) disciple.

HGL's F.B. writings : Attacked on "Evolution of Languages Disproves Tower of Babel" Subject Again
http://hglsfbwritings.blogspot.com/2014/05/attacked-on-evolution-of-languages.html

Whether Cushla Gery who made herself deliberately obtuse to my points or "Kain Karrion" were his disciples directly or not, I do not know. I do however know that Tony "Hackenslash" Murphy was, since he on his blog a few years ago specifically thanked Dawkins and ... PZM ... for the training. I quote that and link to the source.

I would finally like to extend my gratitude to the following:

Richard Dawkins, for bringing us together.
PZ Myers, for his input and clear head. etc.

Reciprocity: When You Fight Yourself
[title of blog as well as of one message]
http://reciprocity-hackenslash.blogspot.com/2010/02/reciprocity-when-you-fight-yourself.html

Now, has Dawkins and has PZM promoted thoughtfulness and reflectiveness in him? Getting back to my debate with him, I nitpick a little:

My point which he adressed

Tower of Babel does NOT deny that French and Spanish both descend from Latin. One can however ask whether "evolved" is a good description of that descent. Has costume "evolved"? Every time you choose clothes you make voluntary choices. Not comparable to mutations.

His first words in adressing it

Since this seems to be the root of your malfunction, perhaps it's worth addressing it, because it's as wrong as a wrong thing on wrong juice.

A bit later on he said

Neither credentials nor any amount of study are remotely relevant when you're talking shit. Language, fashion, the biosphere; all evolve, and with evolution meaning pretty much the same thing in every case.

My reflection when mirroring the debate on the blog

On his profile it says he is chief cook in a kitchen. Some Dunning Kruger effect, perhaps?

Perhaps some Dunning Kruger effect in the sense of incompetence taking its due in thinking itself more competent (the reverse being also a Dunning Kruger effect, for those who consider Dunning and Kruger as experts). BUT I canot help thinking Dawkins has actually made a contributionn in giving him - along with PZM - a pseudo-competence. One in which making a distinction that the evolutionist misses becomes equivalent to malfunction. Just as for Cushla Geary my criticism of standard evolutionist models comes through only as "religious rant". Even if they hardly mention God, only leave God as the one remaining and obvious option of explanation.

To some people the main thing about philology and linguistics is neither reading old texts nor knowing what "sound laws" (perhaps better understood as sound correspondences between known languages than as now considered each and all as sound changes from an unknown reconstructed one) tie together two languages, but to see philology as a parallel to palaeontology and to see sound laws as a parallel to mutations, which I do not.

I am not very subtly but rather rather broadly reminded of the agressive atheism of the Soviet Union.

Martyred in the USSR : WHAT IS MILITANT ATHEISM:
"In total, the number of Christians who were martyred under the militant state atheism of the USSR is around 12 million."
http://martyredintheussr.com/about.html

I have heard other estimates too (ranging from 1 to 90 million). Some of Dawkins and of Krauss is very reminiscent of the Soviet Psychiatry which served militant atheism by declaring mentally ill and forcefully treating people who were simply Christians. There is more to Soviet system that seems to have survived:

Under the Soviet doctrine of separation of Church and state, detailed in the Constitution of the Soviet Union, churches in the Soviet Union were forbidden to give to the poor or carry on educational activities.

Reminds me of certain cities, like Daytona Beach, where Christians feeding the homeless in a park have been fined.

Moreover, not only was religion banned from the school and university system, but pupils were to be indoctrinated with atheism and antireligious teachings. For example, schoolchildren were asked to convert family members to atheism and memorize antireligious rhymes, songs, and catechisms, while university students who declined to propagate atheism lost their scholarships and were expelled from universities. In addition, scientific theories, such as the Big Bang, which implied a creator God, were suppressed in favor of theories which were thought to support atheistic materialism.

Reminds me of Krauss, if "admitting" Big Bang (not much to "admit" except if you have a Newtonian view of astronomy, but most "admitting" it have some problem not seeing it implies God), at least violently defending himself against any theistic implication.

Lawrence Krauss embarrasses William Lane Craig in this debate
Yon Choi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol-A_SU3m5c

Apart from who embarasses whom, it is clear WLC is pushing Big Bang as a Theistic (but anti-Biblical) argument, and LK is defending himself against that with a multiverse theory. Here are my comments, so far, by the way:

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : When an argument is wrong, that should be proven with refutations ...
http://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2014/05/when-argument-is-wrong-that-should-be.html

No, the agressive atheism is still alive. And I cannot say that either Dawkins or Onfray are totally outside it.

To me, that gets very much through as strident.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre University Library
3 days after St Robert Bellarmine
16/V/2014

CMI's Tas Walker Missing a Point

First off, he writes a very good article here:

CMI : The heritage trail at Siccar Point, Scotland
Commemorating an idea that did not work
by Tas Walker
http://creation.com/siccar-point-trail

At least it seems good enough to me on my limited knowledge of Geology.

Then I read the comments too.

james p H. says on top of his comment, among other things:

"However, as the son of a Presbyterian minister, it is unfortunate that Playfair did not connect his Bible with the world around him"

as always: the biggest problem for Christianity are these sold-out, compromised Christians who still insist on calling them-selves that.....

My answer to that (Ioannes Georgius = Hans Georg since I had overstepped my quota of comments for the year, and I used another email account too so the computer program would not stop it):

Playfair was Presbyterian. Cuvier was Lutheran. Lyell was Anglican. Darwin was Anglican. Hume was Presbyterian. So was pres-hume-ably Hutton.

These men were not compromising away their Christianity with an already existing ideology, they were sacrificing it to their take on what it meant to be a Protestant.

Now, Tas Walker has responded:

Actually they had compromised. They certainly rejected the Bible's history as being true. Just because someone grows up in a church does not mean they are a follower of Christ and accept what He taught. Teillard de Chardin was a Catholic priest but promoted evolution as the great creative force and the truth to which everything should bow. He was clearly not promoting othodox beliefs. Richard Dawkins was confirmed as an Anglican but he rejected that and is now the foremost advocate of atheism.

My point was not that Playfair had not "compromised away" Christianity. But I prefer the word rejected. My point was that, unlike Teilhard de Chardin and Wojtyla and Dawkins, this rejection was not in favour of an already existing Evolutionist Old Age ideology, but that rather, like new heresiarchs, these Protestants (all of them Protestants, none Catholic and none Baptist for that matter) by rejecting more of the Bible than previously were not compromising with Old Age but creating this ideology and its ramification Darwinism.

My other point was that all these creators of the Evolutionist and generally Uniformitarian, Old Age and Antimiraculous ideologies were not only Protestants, but so good Protestants they sacrificed their Christianity to the Protestantism. In other words, they were heresiarchs, more radical than the Reformers, but really in the same direction as the Reformers.

I had expected a challenge on the fact that Cuvier was of a Lutheran family. It is a French name. I underestimated then severely the erudition of Tas Walker. But if anyone of my readers is less knowledgeable than he, I recommend wikipedia. If it be no longer available, I give others the little answer speech I had prepared for Tas.

Cuvier was a French subject. However, he was from Alsatian Lotharingian new provinces of France. Louis XIV has wasted his time exporting Protestants to Holland and England, Scotland and Ireland through the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when it was just to get back other Protestants through conquests at the expense of the Holy Roman Empire. Probably he may have had ancestors named Böttner / Boetnner rather than Cuvier. As I look up "cuvier", disambiguation page, it seems I was wrong, and it should rather be Böttich / Boettich. Or even Bottich. It means a large, open container in either language.

I looked up others mentioned in comments. "Frank (Francis Trevelyan) Buckland was born and brought up in Oxford, where his father was a Canon of Christ Church." And "Jean-André Deluc ... was born in Geneva; his family had come from Lucca, Italy, in the 15th century."

Now, it was put down to Enlightenment, but that only excuses so much, even if R. D. says that was the cause:

Of course, it was not his observations of these rocks which led Dr. Hutton to conclude that the earth (and the entire cosmos) was not made in six days - what led him to conclude this was his deistic mindset which came from the "Enlightenment" which he was a product of. He already disbelieved in the Genesis creation account BEFORE he looked at the rocks.

Joseph Haydn left Freemasonry when it was forbidden, by Emperor Francis (not to be confounded with one Bergoglio character in the Vatican). But he had written Die Schöpfung (The Creation) while still a Freemason and to a libretto by a Freemason, van Swieten. It could be argued that God creating all there is in the beginning (plus parts of the morality) is the only thing certain enlightened Freemasons believed of the Bible. They were known as Deists.

As I just brought up, Deism (which accepts roughly Genesis 1 of all the Bible), Atheism, Liberal Christianity were all parts of an Enlightenment connected to Freemasonry.

And, First Grand Lodge of that treason to Christianity was established 1717, two Centuries after the 95 Theses (and after Zwinglius in Switzerland), two Centuries before the Russian Revolution and the similar Mexican Revolution. And it was established in London, where it was illegal to be at once a Catholic and enjoy one's life.

Freemasonry and thus Enlightenment were products of Protestantism.

The same R. D. mentioned the resistance to Uniformitarianism. Here is his list:

The fact that their geological knowledge was lesser than that which we have today only excuses them so much - as the likes of Kirwan, Young, Fairholme and Penn demonstrate, others saw through this.

The first of these is no doubt Richard Kirwan. He was a former Catholic. He had probably embraced Anglicanism (an act of Apostasy) for wordly reasons. Here is the wikipedian reference:

Richard Kirwan was born at Cloughballymore, Co. Galway, the second son of Marty and Martin Kirwan, thus a descendant of William Ó Ciardhubháin and a member of The Tribes of Galway. Part of his early life was spent abroad, and in 1754 he entered the Jesuit novitiate either at St Omer or at Hesdin, but returned to Ireland in the following year, when he succeeded to the family estates through the death of his brother in a duel. Kirwan married in 1757, but his wife only lived eight more years. The couple had two daughters, Maria Theresa and Eliza.

In 1766, having conformed to the established religion two years previously, Kirwan was called to the Irish bar, but in 1768 abandoned practice in favour of scientific pursuits.

So, though he could get to a religion where the validity of Sacraments was at least highly doubtful from the point of view of the Catholic Theology he abandoned, he would not also on top of that deny the Flood.

I can bet that his Jesuit teachers did not include Pierre Teilhard de Chardin or Georges Lemaître. I can add that the kind of Apostasy that Old Age Uniformitarianism and Evolutionism constitute were of course bound to spread to Catholics once they were common among Protestants. Hence these two other, less ideal, Jesuits. That was what Leo X, St Pius V and Urban VIII as Popes of Rome had tried to avoid when condemning 41 theses in Exsurge, when condemning lots more of Protestantism (Lutheran, Zwinglian, Anabaptist, Socinian, Anglican and Calmvinist heresies) in and with Council of Trent and also when condemning (by confirmation of a verdict the Pope had not been judge in) the Heliocentric theses of Galileo.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre University Library
13 / V / 2014

Number of Alleles Question (on Junior High Genetics Level)

1) Creation vs. Evolution Number of Alleles Question (on Junior High Genetics Level), 2) Correspondence of Hans Georg Lundahl CMI / Carl Wieland on "Genetic Entropy" Theme, 3) Creation vs. Evolution I missed a point in Sanford, 4) A second look at part of the evidence

I am stealing a question from this:

Creation Magazine Live! Do we all come from two people? (Creation Magazine LIVE! 3-15)
http://creation.com/creation-tv?fileID=rU--7LIjKgM

Descended from eight people who got off a really big boat ....

"have between them a maximum of 16 genetic alleles for each genetic locus ... That means if the creationists are correct that most mutations are deleterious and that no new genetic information can arise through mutation, there cannot be any genetic alleles with more than 16 alleles, since that is the maximum that could have gotten off the Big Boat."

One can note, and here CMI was meritorious that all the eight on the boat descending from only two and Even being nearly a clone of Adam, genetically (excepting the sex, as was Jesus of Mary), there would for arising of the 16 alleles be at least a similar problem pre-flood. And there the generations are counted. Noah was tenth from Adam going by father of father of father only, and I have a hard time imagining his wife could have been 20 from Eve going by mother of mother of mother only, though that is possible.

Indeed, I am not sure any line preflood reached beyond 20 or 30 generations from Adam and Eve, but could be wrong.

"Today we find genetic loci (such as hemoglobin or HLA complex) that have well over *400* different alleles (indeed some have over *700* different alleles)."

Same problem as previously, but now with post-Flood data available to us, rather than guesses as to how many different alleles Noah, his wife, their three daughters in law, maximum 10, but maybe less per locus, provided post-flood humanity with.

"since 400 is more than 16 that means that somehow the GENETIC INFORMATION INCREASED from the time they got off the Big Boat until now."

I wonder if his logic is as good as his arithmetic.

400 variations on same basic recipe is not the same thing as coming up with it in the first place. What a creationist means with new information coming up is not a new variation on existing recipe, rather a radically new recipe for a radically new function. 400 new alleles (minus original ten) for hemoglobin does not count. Creating a new function, comparable to hemoglobin and HLA complex or to the genes for speech (like the one gene were only one allele - or, possibly a second, considering a slight variation in Neanderthals, if I recall correctly - functions in man, other alleles totally, but recognisible where the base pair differs, being found in brute beasts), one that did not exist in the other men, would count. That would be increase in information.

Then there is a question whether any single locus for hemoglobin or HLA complex (sounds complex to me, even without looking up what it means) really has that number of alleles, or whether it may rather be a multiplication of existing alleles for different loci concerned with hemoglobin, different loci concerned with HLA complex that make the 400 or in some cases 700.

"if genetic mutations always produce a LOSS in information ... then how did we go from 16 alleles to over 400 alleles ...?"

Already answered, since already asked or nearly so. New variation on existing info does not equal new info. Adding sponge cake with lemon to the other sponge cake recipes does not equal inventing the sponge cake. It is THAT which we mean by adding information.

"if these new alleles did not appear through mutations, then how did they get there?"

Probably through mutations. Adding alleles to an existing function, whereas adding a new function, no, those are two different things.

"according to their, uh, 'theory', all of these mutations must have appeared in the space of just *4000* years ..."

Kent Hovind who is a Protestant and trusts Ussher and Masoretic text for chronology says it was 4400 years ago. I trust St Jerome who used the LXX (pronounce Septuagint) for chronological questions, and Roman Martyrology for December 25 says Christ is born "Anno a creatione mundi, quando in principio Deus creavit caelum et terram, quinquies millesimo centesimo nonagesimo nono; a diluvio autem, anno bis millesimo nongentesimo quinquagesimo septimo ..." In the year from the creation of the world, when in the beginning God created Heaven and Earth, five thousandth one hundredth and ninetyninth, but from the Flood, the two thousandth nine hundredth fiftyseventh year. So the Flood will soon be five thousand years old - if the world and time get old enough for that memorial date to occur. But that was just a little red herring, let us get to the real problem of the questioner:

"That gives a rate of BENEFICIAL MUTATIONS, which add NEW GENETIC INFORMATION, of one every ten years or roughly two every generation...."

I begin to sense a really awfully red little inedible herring here! Not the one about new alleles equalling necessarily beneficial mutations as opposed to merely not hurtful ones, and these could arrive through loss of useful but not strictly necessary infirmation, that has already been answered, but about the rate of mutations.

400 alleles are over all of the human population of six to seven times the cube of a thousand (some say billions, and some say milliards for a number of that order). NOT within each man taken singly. NOT within each genealogical line, known or unknown, back to Noah.

Shall we see if the questioner really intends to make this blunder?

"one every ten years or roughly two every generation-a much higher rate of beneficial mutations than have ever been recorded anywhere in nature. Nowhere today do we see such a rate anywhere so high."

O ... K ... all over a world wide population is not "anywhere", it is not a local population to be studied. It is a sum total. 400 mutations for 5000 years is indeed one in every 12.5 years, but spread out over all men. It should not be compared to a medical study, which deals with very few men, easy to observe, but rather with the medium population of the world taken all over the time. 8 people were obviously less than the medium. Six or Seven times the cube of a thousand may very well be above that medium. We do not know how big it was really. But spread that 12.5 years between preserved mutations out over say a million or two or maybe ten or hundred or five hundred (we really do not know how quickly population has increased after the Flood and before 1800). You start getting realistic rates, even if you multiply this with all the "loci" here are over 400 alleles for, and perhaps you should deduct from that some functions with over 400 alleles, but which are in more than one locus. Where 400 "alleles" for the function are really meta-alleles, rescrambling in different combinations the ten alleles possibly present at the Arc. FOR EACH REAL locus making up the function.

"So not only would I like to know what produced this extraordinarily high rate of non-deletrious mutations, but what stopped it (indeed what stopped it conveniently right before the very time when we first developed the technological means to study it)."

Your illusion of it stopping, if considered that way, is exactly very conventiently in the transit you make yourself from summing up projections backwards dealing with all humanity which has a very large population to attending to those studies of very small populations.

"Since less than 1% of observed mutations are beneficial (the vast majority of mutations are indeed deleterious or neutral and have no effect), that means that for every beneficient mutation which added a new allele ..."

A mutation need not be beneficial to add a new allele. It would need to be beneficial to oust the older alleles from all over a population. And this of course only on the view of the "survival of the fittest". If we look realistically at existence, survival has much more to do with chances - or as we Christians would say, with acts of God - than with fitness or unfitness of a genome part. Persons and beasts and plants survive and reproduce in concrete situations. Sometimes a new gene or rather a new allele to a locus is involved. In those few cases it is more likely to be involved in someone not surviving than in someone surviving.

But just to add a new allele to the gene pool, it is sufficient that it is not too immediately deleterious.

If we go to another part of genetics, chromosome numbers, adding a third chromosome to one of the larger ones (say 1 or 3) will, if affecting all cells of a foetus, kill it before birth. Only survivals are from mozaical foeti, with just two chromosomes in some of their cells. That would be an exteme but very clear case of genetic change playing a direct role for survival - negatively. Indeed this is so clear, that if we discard, as we should, P Z Myers' scenario for centromere fission, we must also note that neither can chromosome numbers in mammals grow by making pairs grow into trisomies that grow into tetrasomies that split into two pairs: a tetrasomy is a worse genetic condition than a trisomy. If a trisomy 21 is a case of Down's syndrome, a tetrasomy 21 is an extremely grave case of Down's syndrome. Not likely in brute nature to grow and produce offspring.

So, if one could imagine a new allele being as deleterious immediately as a trisomy 1 non-mozaical or as a tetrasomy 21, that would indeed eliminate itself from the gene pool very quickly. Even if karyotypal and other genetic diseases are not the same thing.

But for a new allele to simply stay one of the available options in the human gene pool - and that is what we talk about with the 400 alleles for hemoglobin - it is sufficient it is not too deleterious, it need not be positively beneficient.

Therefore, the 400 number of alleles need not at all represent the 1% beneficient mutations, it will include results of the neutral ones. And adding a new allele is obviously not the same thing as adding new information, as I already said.

"... that means that for every beneficient mutation which added a new allele, there should have been roughly 99 others which did not."

Every mutation adds a new allele. Some stay in the gene pool, others do not.

But if one were to credit the questioner with some logic, one might presume he meant that every new allele which stays corresponds to 99 which are eliminated. Even if that is erroneous too.

"So to give us roughly 400 beneficial mutations would require somewhere around 40,000 total mutations, a rate of roughly 100 mutations in each locus EVERY YEAR or 2,000 mutations per locus for EACH GENERATION. Do you know what we call people who experience mutation rates that high? We call them 'cancer victims' ..."

In cancer victims we are dealing with 100 mutations per locus within the scope of one person. In the cells affected. With deleterious ones remaining until the victim of the cancer dies of these mutations.

In the human population we are dealing with a far less drastic mutation rate, since it is the mutation rate within humanity as a whole. We are also dealing with the fact that most mutations are either tolerable or weeded out, naturally. Without any human acts of eugenicism, thank you! Either by early death or by non-mating and non-reproduction.

If I were copy pasting, I might copy for you the last comment in the letter just for fun - it is visible if you stop the video at 4:29 and read it to the bottom and resume the play of the video - but since I cannot copy-paste a text rolling on the video, I refer you to it.

I find it pretty faulty of the Creationist Geneticist to have said that genetics are dooming us. No, since most mutations are neutral and since those who aren't but are fatal are very easily weeded out by their own fatality. What he is indirectly doing is encouraging a kind of eugenic hysteria. Sorry, but that is about the upshot.

It is true that things like sickle cell anaemia is increasing, but also that it is not being favoured in selection if for instance bad cases are too tired (naturally) for being good flirts and for being good breadwinners - two things a girl looks at before getting a man. A scrambled version of the genome is still functional if it is occurring. And sufficiently so, if it is getting reproduced, at least for civilised people.

Some Barbarians in Prussia and - where is it Margaret Sanger came from in the States - have less than 100 years ago spread a pretty similar hysteria to the one voiced by the guest star.

Maybe that is what comes from giving exposure not just to a decent Calvinist (for a Calvinist) like Zuiddam, but to a very non-decent possible Jew and certain holder of some diploma in Academic pseudo-discipline Economics like Ben Stein. While shunning a Catholic like me, when it comes to linking outside their site.

CMI has its good sides, but at some occasion the Protestantism is bound to show for the worse. Even when avoiding subjects they correctly identify as clearly divisive like Predestination or - usually - Sacraments.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Holy Thursday
17-IV-2014

Update on Thursday in Paschal Week: their expert whom I complained of is Dr Robert W. Carter - in Nanterre University Library I have no headphones, so I could not hear him being introduced, only read the text of the question. Now he is identified, I will of course contact him about this./HGL

Ken Ham and CMI refuted about Geocentric Question by The Principle

At least Daily Beast says so.

I posted the link under one of theirs which is good, according to the following line of comments:

Creation Ministries International (status on their FB page)

It seems the only time Christianity makes the news is when there is a discovery which might change the way early Christianity is viewed. A few years ago, the lead codices made headlines, with breathless exclamations that these may be the earliest Christian documents. When a fragment of an alleged fourth-century Coptic text was announced that put the words “My wife … ” in the mouth of Jesus, it took only days for it to be named “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife”. [13]

Archive - September 2012
Did Jesus have a wife?
by Lita Cosner
Published: 26 September 2012 (GMT+10)
http://creation.com/gospel-jesus-wife

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Well, sometimes otherwise too:

‘The Principle’: Geocentrism is What Real Biblical Literalism Looks Like
Karl W. Giberson, 04.10.14 (10-IV-2014)
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/10/the-principle-geocentrism-is-what-real-biblical-literalism-looks-like.html

Creation Ministries International

Hans-Georg: Per our rules, we don't allow links outside of creation.com (post hidden) [8]

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Ah, you have at least seen the comment.

You seem also to have hidden my comments on the video on tracing the nations back to the Tower of Babel. Less clear why, since either most or all of them were in fact without exterior links.

I was not advocating there were sources of present day mankind besides the sons of Noah. I was saying your acceptance of a Byzantine Historian from 10th or 11th C AD cannot qualify in itself as an independent evidence for nations starting out around Tower of Babel or birth of Peleg, since he like us was a Bible believer.

I was also not advocating that people having memories of previous lives or having sighted ETs should be encouraged to take this as truth on face value. I was saying they had a test which someone unaware of the demon could take for a valid one, and they could be deluded by demon without being in any way pathological. Which is another story. Not for Raelianism, but against Psychiatry.

And as obviously, I did not post the link to discredit literalism as such, but the take that Geocentrism does not belong to it, but to Paganism.

However, if anyone thinks a Flat Earth belongs to it, I have two answers.

1) Pope St Zachary was not condemning Ferghil from Ireland - Bishop of Salzburg - for Global Form of Earth as such, but for a supposed belief in people walking against us who were supposedly according to his reasoning about the eventuality not descending from Adam. All men are from Adam was his point, not a flat Earth. And I say "he was condemning" because he never actually did it.

Catholic Encyclopedia > A > Antipodes
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01581a.htm

2) The Flat Earth map which is round does not have four corners.

On a Globe, the Old World has roughly four corners, with England and Australia as two cut off corners and the other diagonal being from Cape of Good Hope to Sachalin/Japan. The rest would include antipodes, but the people coming from Adam and Noah and from our part of the world, and it would also include most countries they walk on as being a kind of Island World, an Earthsea if you like, but not with Ursula Le Guin's Metaphysics. Exorcising a demon is not done by baptising it with one's name. That scene was Freudian more than metaphysical. You can ask Gabriele Amorth for details about real exorcism.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bpi
St Leo I
11-IV-2014

Two Points on Asher’s Book – and a Third One

1) Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Does Steven Dutch Know History?, 2) Creation vs. Evolution : Two Points on Asher’s Book – and a Third One

The first point is from CMI’s review of the book Evolution and Belief. I am even repeating an argument from John Woodmorappe, only adding myself that Dawkins has actually given an observation supporting it. The other one is from reading the excerpts on Cambridge University Press site. Or two actually.

Several recent studies show that enamel-encoding genes in toothed animals exist as pseudogenes in toothless mammals. Asher blows the trumpet of evolutionistic triumphalism, and then pontificates that God would not make it that way (pp. 137–138). Apart from its theological presumption, Asher makes some other tacit assumptions. He supposes that, since they cannot encode for enamelin, the pseudogenes are therefore useless. Actually, there is evidence, from a more recent work,11 that at least one of the parent genes, MMP20, has multiple functions, and therefore possibly its pseudogene ortholog has at least one. If so, this ‘absolves’ God of creating non-functioning genes.

Second, the enamelin gene is just as incapable of producing enamelin if partly omitted during Creation as it is incapable of producing enamelin if omitted entirely during Creation.

Asher presumes that a de novo design is always the most intelligent solution. It may actually make more sense to create, for a toothless mammal, the same genome as for a toothed one, except for built-in intentionally inactivated enamelin genes, than to design quite different genomes for toothless and toothed mammals.

Woodmorappe gives even more details, I will leave the reader to his review:

CMI : A theistic paleontologist with dubious theology and little-better science
A review of Evolution and Belief: Confessions of a Religious Paleontologist by Robert J. Asher
Cambridge University Press, New York, 2012
by John Woodmorappe
http://creation.com/review-evolution-and-belief

However, as I promised, I will give you a Dawkinsian support for this:

Creation vs. Evolution : On Reading The Greatest Show by Dawkins - Parts of it! : Not blueprint but recipe.
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.fr/2012/10/on-reading-greatest-show-by-dawkins.html#nbbr

Quoting myself from my summaries of the chapters I had read (since I do not have Dawkins' book at hand):

Saying as Dawkins does that our genes do not give a blueprint but a recipe for our bodies, one that is followed step by step during pregnancy, does not dispense of a wisdom ordering the process.

Here my point is not about the wisdom, but about the fact it is a recipe rather than a blueprint. Since Dawkins knows this, he would not have written that in the book if he hadn’t, I suppose he is able to refute for himself the argument from pseudogenes.

Now, to the distinction that Asher makes:
Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-19383-2 - Evolution and Belief: Confessions of a Religious Paleontologist
Robert J. Asher
Excerpt
http://assets.cambridge.org/97805211/93832/excerpt/9780521193832_excerpt.pdf

Please note that this process explains how biological change occurs. It does so in the same way that you might explain how a steam engine works, or the process by which its action is caused: water heated to 100 °C boils into steam, which rises and powers the rotation of a turbine, which then generates electricity at the local power plant, and spins the wheels of your nineteenth-century train, Mississippi riverboat, etc. As an analogy this is a bit dated, but the point should be clear: both explanations are about natural processes responsible for something we observe. It is equally valid to note that Thomas Savery designed the first steam engine, or that James Watt (among others) later improved it. However, the latter is an explanation of a different sort: it is one of agency, not cause. Riverboat passengers at some point may have expressed great admiration for Savery and Watt, the “creators” of their momentum. How does the engine work? Savery did it, helped by Watt. Such an interpretation is true in the sense that Savery and Watt deserve credit as the agency behind the steam engine. However, it says nothing about how the steam engine actually works. There is a materialist, or naturalistic, cause behind the function of their steam-propelled craft which is not changed by recognizing the agency of Savery and Watt in the development of its engine. This kind of natural causation is what I meant earlier when I referred to the “materialist orientation” of science.

Indeed, Asher has a kind of religion. One in which God is to the actual working of the Universe as Watt is to the actual working of a steam engine. I am not sure of his confession, Catholic or Protestant, but I am sure he is not a Catholic and would not be recognised as such by St Pius X or by St Thomas Aquinas. If he is nominally Catholic, he is so on the same heterodox terms as Miller. He may not have another Confession – at least this is true of Miller – than Roman Catholicism available, but that is only like for a certain time Martin Luther had for a certain time no other Confession than Roman Catholicism available.

What St Thomas Aquinas means by First Cause is NOT a parallel to Watt or Savery. What St Thomas Aquinas means by First Mover is ultimately to the steam precisely as the steam is to the navigation of the steamboat or as heat is to making water steam. That is something for which Asher no longer uses the word Cause or Mover, but the Neologism Agency.

St Thomas does not mean that God is inventor of a Universe working without him, as if secondary causes were secondary only insofar as once set moving by their inventor, but some of them actually primary in the analysis of each moment. He does not compare God’s making the Universe to an Architect making a House. He compares the work of the Six Days to the making of an instrument, and the work of Providence mainly after the Six Days to the same person playing on the instrument. The one he chooses is “harp” according to a very refined musical taste of those times. It is not quite the same thing as a bagpipe or an electrical guitar. But the point is, the Universe on this view is NOT made to be working on its own, it is meant to work as a tool for its Creator who also remains its Master. And to Universe as instrument being played God is not just Maker, but also actual Agency. That is the whole point of Theology between Trads and Evolution compromisers.

Actually Woodmorappe misses an occasion for a fine shade in another part of his review:

The fact that God operates providentially (operations science: Thomas Aquinas’ cited example of God providing heat through a fire) itself tells us nothing about how He had acted when He created the universe (origins science).

Now, it is not just that, but on Asher’s view, presumably, God provides us with fire when we need heat, through the fact of having created the parametres of natural laws such that fire would be at hand at certain times and not at other ones and perhaps (with very much determinism) intentionally made each item of a man finding a fireplace, dry firewood, sparks, to necessary results of conditions at Big Bang via necessities (including social ones) binding the acencies.

On St Thomas Aquinas’ view, God is not only at each point free to provide fire miraculously, but also every place there is fire results ultimately from a Divine Decision, including Decisions to respect Human ones, and a Divine Decision about that particular place, that particular time.

If Asher likes, God is “in the process”, as much as He is in Psalm 146. But He is not “in” the process so as to be subsumed by it or like the genius of Watt and Savery are in each steam engine. He is in the process as a free agency. Not as the only free agency, but as the highest and freest of them. Omnipotent does not mean everyone else is a puppet, but it means Creation cannot successfully rebel or stymie its Creator. It also means that even if others than God decide, God decides everything, including the fact of now or then giving the effective decision to this or the other created will.

Now, that is about the points most directly relevant for Creation vs Evolution. But Asher makes another one, and Woodmorappe is a bit unsuspecting when he brushes off points related to that one as “offensive” (and untrue) but ultimately irrelevant. Asher puts it in the first paragraph of the text, page 1:

A lot of disagreements between people are due to honest emphasis on mutually exclusive propositions, both of which have clear value. Examples include social responsibility versus personal liberty, or freedom of speech versus the protection of minorities. In other cases, one party to a debate is just plain wrong, misinformed, or invested in error for extraneous and/or personal reasons. This includes the “divine right of kings” and “separate but equal” racial segregation. Society makes its way along the centuries by recognizing, and dispensing with, the erroneous (e.g., divine right) while building up institutions that can justly scrutinize the real debates, hopefully reaching the right decision more often than not.

OK, “divine right of kings” is supposed to be erroneous. The “separate but equal” segregation between skin colours is erroneous. How does Asher know this? Because Society with a capital S along the centuries has recognised them as such. Because its Institutions (capital I, even if he did not do so himself) can be counted on as mostly reaching the right decision.

Asher is a deeply religious man, but he is not a Christian. He is off from adoring God, since God is not an Agency, neither in Creating the Universe any way He wanted to nor in making Providence as a free Agency. He is just a “cause” same way as Watt and Savery are “causes”. Not in a sense of the word that Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas would have recognised, but in a way “a cause”. He is giving Divine Honour, not indeed to Kings, which are a personal Institution, but to a non-defined or ill-defined set of Collective Institutions, since working over the Centuries.

He belongs to the University of Cambridge. Over the last Century the University of Cambridge has settled, collectively speaking, for Evolution being true and Creation in Six Days 7200 years ago false. He hopes that mostly the Institutions cut off from their roots in Christian Orthodoxy will nevertheless mostly produce the right decisions. ERGO accepting Evolution is the most probably right decision. That is not science, that is treating Human Institutions as living Idols, much as Mahayana Buddhists deal with the living idol called Dalai Lama (always forgetting the name but not face of the present bearer of the title, but he is a living idol).

Woodmorappe is wrong when saying:

He repeats hoary antibiblical myths, such as the one about it teaching that stars hang from a solid firmament (p. 22). He derides certain Christian social teachings, and makes an implied equation of the Islamic terrorists of 911 with Christian fundamentalists (p. 130). Apart from being false and offensive, they are irrelevant to the theme of his work, and only detract from it.

They are NOT irrelevant to the theme of his work , they are the theme of his work and the defense of Evolution as well as its compatibility with “religion” are just glosses on this theme. Very elaborate glosses, but nevertheless glosses. The ultimate reason of Asher is not “God is working within His Creation, not outside it” but “people who believe God is working as a Free Agency with His Creation are a menace to society, and Institutions that have decided that the Agencies usually at work in the Universe are not God are the hope for a better society in the future.”

I hope I have more tranquil reasons, but in a similar vein to that one, mine is that Institutions denying the God of the Bible have a very terrible track record, and are still engaged in doing great harm. And I put more things in that category than perhaps Asher would expect from Woodmorappe.

I also note that if enforced equal but distinct segregation is a mistake, so is affirmative action. And I have less faith in the Divine Right of Parliaments than in that of Kings. But is Asher even free enough to debate that? Or have his living Idols decided for him, as he up to now allowed them to?

Hans-Georg Lundahl
From Nanterre University Library*
Sts Priscus, Malchus and Alexander
Martyrs in Palestine under Valerian
28-III-2014

Indeed, the Emperor Cult also was an idolisation of living idols, who were also counted on as usually reaching the right decision. Well, from Nero or even Tiberius to Constantine there were quite a few years, 280 in fact, during which on one precise point, they consistently reached the wrong one. Valerian being no exception.

* Was added in Georges Pompidou library after I took the train ... (without paying).