Yes- those are all great examples, and they all illustrate perfectly the point of pseudogenes demonstrating 'beyond a reasonable doubt' that humans descended from an animal ancestor and were not created 'de novo.' Explaining the whole 'clean room' development process (how and why it is done) is also a needed story to help illustrate the point. The 'clean room' design process is needed to prove 'de novo' creation for a product, and you can bet the resulting design definitely is different after it emerges from the clean room.
I think those who are engineer-trained see this point clearly, but it needs to be articulated well for non-engineers.
...Bernie
________________________________
From: Rich Blinne [mailto:rich.blinne@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 18, 2009 12:46 PM
To: Murray Hogg; Dehler, Bernie
Cc: ASA
Subject: Re: [asa] RE: Analogies for pseudogenes... a tipping point for the ASA? ([asa] Re: On the Barr-West exchange and ID/TE)
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 9:56 AM, Murray Hogg <muzhogg@netspace.net.au<mailto:muzhogg@netspace.net.au>> wrote:
Hi Bernie,
Sorry to report, but your microcode analogy isn't quite on the money. Remember we're not talking about God A copying the work of God B - but rather the one God engaging in two creative acts.
So a better analogy would be Code A from company A, vs Code B from company A - in which instance we'd probably expect shared code when the two programs are seeking to do the same thing.
I think I might have some better examples. Avanti Corporation was founded by Taiwanese ex-pat Gerry Hsu. They did place and route software. Many of the employees were former employees of Cadence Corporation. Cadence got suspicious that Avanti was copying Cadence software but couldn't prove it. That was until they got a breakthrough from Philips who was a customer of both Cadence and Avanti. When they did a "strings" command on the respective executables they found that the English messages were identical including the grammatical errors which were a result of the engineers being Taiwanese. A number of the engineers ended up in jail while Mr. Hsu skipped the country. Synopsys ended up buying the company, hired a bunch of high-priced lawyers and made it all go away.
IBM thought that Hitachi was stealing their microcode on their mainframes in the 1980s. So they put deliberate errors in the test tape (this is the program that blesses the instruction set) which they believed Hitachi was stealing. It was enough for the FBI to get involved. Hitachi and 11 of its employees were indicted on charges of stealing confidential design secrets from IBM in 1982. When I talked with the IBM manager involved he was beaming. "They didn't even copy the latest version!"
A similar case can be made with the Book of Mormon. There are extended passages that are word for word copies of the KJV including the translation errors.
Net net. If you see the same pattern including errors it's evidence of some kind of copying process and not some de novo creation. This is the case even if there is only one party. In the Avanti example above the engineers were copying their own code. One of the ways that the lawsuit went away was future versions of the P&R software were done in clean rooms where the engineers never ever saw the old code. So, if you can show that living things cannot copy themselves -- *cough* reproduction *cough* -- then you are going to have a hard time denying macroevolution.
Rich Blinne
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Received on Thu Nov 19 11:16:53 2009
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