From: Michael Roberts (michael.andrea.r@ukonline.co.uk)
Date: Fri Oct 24 2003 - 18:25:19 EDT
This is the whole point. IDers say that if something can't be explained then
the Intelligent Designer did it. The problem is that when the something is
expalined the gap is closed and God - sorry the Intelligent Designer - is
squeezed out.
In a review of Behe for Science and Christian Beleif I described Behe's view
as God of the Gaps wrapped up in amino acids. It was a bit cruel but apt.
I have had a grim evening as I debated John Mackay in a local village hall.
Boy does he distrot things. He gave a serious distortion of radiometric
age-dating and I was asked to comment . He had come out with so much falsity
so that I all could do was to quote the 9th commandment. That did not go
down well One asked what God would say to me on the day of Judgement so I
replied that we would compare notes and agree with each other! There was
uproar and cries of heretic.
Seriously is it worth debating with such guys, who only want to misrepresent
and cast slurs.
Oh he even used Glenn Morton to contradict me and admitted privately he was
unfair
Still someone's got to do it.
Michael
----- Original Message -----
From: "Terry M. Gray" <grayt@lamar.colostate.edu>
To: <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Friday, October 24, 2003 6:21 PM
Subject: Re: Wells and Molecular Phylogenies
> Josh,
>
> Thanks for the tip. I've argued all along that this would be case
> once more complete data is out. This is the key trouble with the
> Wells, Behe, Nelson, and the DI folks in general. They take a very
> pessimistic look at the data and look at weaknesses based in lack of
> information. This is because the optimistic look at the data goes
> contrary to their strong anti-evolutionary biases. Strickly speaking
> and at the moment and in the particular case, they may be correct.
> But the trend is and always has been there with the molecular data,
> the more we know the more evolutionary explanations make sense.
>
> TG
>
>
>
>
> >I think Wells' critique of molecular phylogenies will be much harder
> >to sustain after papers like this (Nature 425, 798 - 804 (23 October
> >2003):
> >
> >Genome-scale approaches to resolving incongruence in molecular
phylogenies
> >
> >ANTONIS ROKAS*, BARRY L. WILLIAMS*, NICOLE KING & SEAN B. CARROLL
> >
> >Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Laboratory of Molecular Biology, R.
> >M. Bock Laboratories, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1525 Linden
> >Drive, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA
> >* These authors contributed equally to this work
> >
> >Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to
> >S.B.C. (sbcarrol@wisc.edu).
> >
> >One of the most pervasive challenges in molecular phylogenetics is
> >the incongruence between phylogenies obtained using different data
> >sets, such as individual genes. To systematically investigate the
> >degree of incongruence, and potential methods for resolving it, we
> >screened the genome sequences of eight yeast species and selected
> >106 widely distributed orthologous genes for phylogenetic analyses,
> >singly and by concatenation. Our results suggest that data sets
> >consisting of single or a small number of concatenated genes have a
> >significant probability of supporting conflicting topologies. By
> >contrast, analyses of the entire data set of concatenated genes
> >yielded a single, fully resolved species tree with maximum support.
> >Comparable results were obtained with a concatenation of a minimum
> >of 20 genes; substantially more genes than commonly used but a small
> >fraction of any genome. These results have important implications
> >for resolving branches of the tree of life.
> >
> >_________________________________________________________________
> >See when your friends are online with MSN Messenger 6.0. Download it
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>
>
> --
> _________________
> Terry M. Gray, Ph.D., Computer Support Scientist
> Chemistry Department, Colorado State University
> Fort Collins, Colorado 80523
> grayt@lamar.colostate.edu http://www.chm.colostate.edu/~grayt/
> phone: 970-491-7003 fax: 970-491-1801
>
>
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