A Creation Website For Children

Wheely. As in millstone? (Matt 18:6, Mark 9:42, Luke 17:2) How appropriate!So those vids are by your "friend". And does your "friend" have a name? Or better yet, why did you not tell us your "friend's" name? Do you have any reason why you'd want to conceal that information from us?His name is Ian Juby. Not that I could get that from the tapes which did not name him, but rather from one of the YouTube suggested links. Inspired by Carl Baugh, who is discredited even among many creationists, and contributed to displays to convicted fraud Kent Hovind's theme park. Nice crowd he runs around with.As soon as he tried that old nonsense of "evolutionists say that this formation was laid down in x years, so that works out to this fraction of a millimeter per year", I knew exactly what I was looking at. As WC Fields said, "There comes a time in the affairs of men where you have to grab the bull by the tail and face the situation." He's just offering the same old crap that they've been hawking for decades. Sure, the smart ones try to dress it up differently -- Hovind just stole Gish's old jokes wholesale -- , make it seem individual and unique, but it's still the same old false crap.OK, how long have you been feeding on that swill? You're in university, so you're a kid between 18 and 22. Hopefully on the low end, because right now you're in the right place to actually learn something -- more on that later. You've only been getting this stuff for maybe a few years -- unless you're unfortunate enough to have been raised on it -- , so it all seems so new and wonderful. I've been following creationism for about 28 years, so I can tell you for a fact that it's neither. Those false claims of theirs have literally be around for decades and have been refuted over and over again -- we call them PRATTs (I keep getting the details wrong: "points refuted a thousand times") and believe you me we have seen them repeatedly for years. You present the truth about that PRATT, but the creationist doesn't want to see it. Well, usually. Most creationists can only remain deluded for so long, but they eventually have to grab that bull by the tail and face the situation. What keeps those PRATTs going -- and the creationists like Ian Juby in business -- is the PT Barnum Effect: there's a sucker born every minute and right now you're it!OK, what you need to do is to seek the truth! And being at university, you're in the ideal place for it. What's your major? What minors could you go for? Mind you, I'm assuming that the system up there is similar to ours in the US. You'll have certain general education requirements, including in the sciences. Juby makes claims about geology, so learn something about geology. He claims to tell you what "evolutionists" say, so go and find that out for yourself, see if he's telling you right. Same with paleaontology, astronomy, biology. Physical anthropology for learning hominid fossil evidence and evolution -- in the US, too often the biology classes don't teach evolution, but you should still take biology anyway.Even if you don't take the classes, you still have the library there so you can do the research. When a creationist makes a claim, check it out. They quote a scientific source, look that source up, see if they represented it correctly. For example, Henry Morris publically claimed that a NASA document from 1976, "well into the space age", showed from direct measurements that there should have been hundreds of feet of meteoric dust on the moon. His book, "Scientific Creationism", made that same claim. When I pulled that NASA document off the library shelf, I immediately knew that Morris was either lying or had never ever seen that document: it was a 1967 printing of papers from a 1965 conference. His actual source was a claim made by Harold Slusher who ignored what his source actually said in order to inflate his calculations for the moon by 10,000 -- actually, I've come to suspect that even Slusher had never actually seen that document himself; they both said it was Volume II when it was actually Volume 11 and there was no way you could mistake that 11 for a II. Get the message? Verify, verify, verify!BTW, your protein probability claim is completely wrong. More on that later.PS
Take English! Spell checkers will not help you at all because you just plain use the wrong words! You accept something, not "except" it. Using "to" where you needed to use "too".One thing that might help would be to take a foreign language. When I was at university in North Dakota, we were told that a graduation requirement in Canadian universities was being bilingual English/French (though rumor had it that that only applied to native English speakers; according to that rumor les Québécois didn't need to know English). So French might help to clue you in on what word to use (eg, accept/except -- I had never before seen anyone confuse those two!). At the very least, foreign language study should help you learn that grammar is the key to using a language and that words actually mean something and that you're not just stringing together disassociated sounds.Edited by dwise1, : PSEdited by dwise1, : No reason given.Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.

Your "Math vs Myth" at No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.creationkid.org/pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%20NOT%20ENOUGH%20TIME%20TO%20EVOLVE%20NUMBER.pdf is just plain wrong. Furthermore, we've known it to be wrong for at least 28 years (since that's about how old the class notes are from Thwaite and Awbrey's two-model creation/evolution class in San Diego). Here's an email from 12 years ago where I responded to a local creationist who had made the same claim you are.Oh, while I'm thinking of it: what's your source for that claim? If you learn nothing more in university, always cite your sources. Yes, I do realize that the hallmark of creationist "research" is sloppy scholarship. We're lucky if a creationist provides a bibliography and really lucky when that bibliography isn't just filled with other creationists (though that was handy when I was trying to trace back which creationists had contributed what to the bogus "leap second" claim).OK, here it is:

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> I know you know too much about protein to honestly think that teh
> materilaistic arguments of their origin are stronger than the argumet
> they are the result of design, plan and purpose.

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At least I know enough about proteins to see the errors in your presentation of standard creation science doctrine concerning proteins. It's a pity that your "open and testing mind" never scrutinizes creation science claims.

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From AOLCREAT.TXT:

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"Life requires many things. Long amino acids chains make proteins...chains in the proper order and shape. Miller's experiment did NOT produce any chains. Life also requires DNA, RNA and never has any experiment produced DNA or RNA from base materials. Never have chains of DNA or RNA been produced. A cell membrane has never been produced.

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"The faith that even one protein arose by chance is tremendous. Lets look at statistics. Proteins are made up of chains of amino acids, just like a train is made up of box cars. A chain of box cars makes up a train. A chain of amino acids makes up a protein. Humans have 20 different types of amino acids that make up our proteins, and the average human protein is 400 amino acids long. Remember, the arrangement of these amino acids is crucial to the function of the protein. If it is the proper arrangement it does its job, if the order is mixed up, it is worthless chemical junk.

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"Imagine many box cars at a train station, and these box cars are made up of twenty different colors. The owner of the station tells you he wants a train to be 400 box cars long, and you are to pick the combination of colored box cars, but if it is not the order he has in mind (and he didn't tell you it) he will fire you.

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"What are the odds you will get the box cars in the right order? They are the same odds the amino acids will align themselves by chance to make one protein in you. The odds are 20 to the 400th power! This is the same as 10 to the 520th power, that is a 1 followed by 520 zeros! You have better odds of winning California Super Lotto every week for 11 years than the odds of one protein in your body having the amino acids being properly aligned by chance. The odds are really much worse because the amino acids must be left handed, they must form a chain "in series," no parallel branching, their shape (proteins are wound up like a ball of yarn) is crucial, you need an oxygen free environment, etc etc. And remember, this is for just one protein. Your body has countless trillions of proteins.

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"The model that a brilliant designer made proteins requires much less faith than to trust random chance and natural processes."

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First, we both know (now that you have read some actual protein sequences in my HUMAN.CMP file) that your assumption that every single amino acid in a protein is specified so that any change in the specific sequence would destroy the protein's functionality ("Remember, the arrangement of these amino acids is crucial to the function of the protein. If it is the proper arrangement it does its job, if the order is mixed up, it is worthless chemical junk."). For many amino acid positions it is the class of amino acid (eg, hydrophyllic, hydrophobic, charged, uncharged) and not the amino acid itself that is important.

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In reality, only some positions on a protein require a specific amino acid, others require any of a few different amino acids, and many will accept practically any amino acid. Indeed, it is precisely this fact that allows us to compare the differences in the same FUNCTIONAL protein in different species and find that the degree of difference between more closely related species to be less than between less closely related species.

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Creation science is well aware of the fact that the same FUNCTIONAL protein can have different sequences (at the same time that they claim that any change in that specific amino acid sequence would destroy a protein's functionality; honestly, would a little consistency be too much to expect of creation science?) and of what the patterns of relatedness that those differences show. Which is why there are so many false creation science claims of distantly related species having more similar proteins than more closely related ones. Like Walter Brown's blatantly deceptive rattlesnake protein claim. And Duane Gish's infamous bullfrog protein (which claim he made on national TV, then refused to produce his source, except to let slip at one point that it was based on a joke he had heard, and which thereafter caused similarly outrageous creation science claims to be met with the cry of "Bullfrog!" -- I have a file which tells the entire story, if you'd like to read it).

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Rather than brandying about a hypothetical protein, let's look at a specific case. In the class notes of Frank Awbrey & William Thwaites' creation/evolution class at SDSU (the Institute for Creation Research conducted half the lectures and Awbrey & Thwaites the other half), they give the example of a calcium binding site with 29 amino acid positions: only 2 positions (7%) require specific amino acids, 8 positions (28%) can be filled by any of 5 hydrophobic amino acids, 3 positions (10%) can be filled by any one of 4 other amino acids, 2 positions (7%) can be filled with two different amino acids, and 14 of the positions (48%) can be filled by virtually any of the 20 amino acids.

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The sequence of the 15 specified positions is:
L* L*L* L*D D* D*G* I*D* EL* L*L* L*

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Where:
L* = hydrophobic - Leu, Val, Ilu, Phe, or Met
Prob = (5/20)^8

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D* = (a) Asp, Glu, Ser, or Asn
Prob = (4/20)^3
OR (b) theoretically also Gls or Thr
Prob = (6/20)^3

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D = Asp
Prob = (1/20)

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E = Glu
Prob = (1/20)

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G* = Gly or Asp
Prob = (2/20)

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I* = Ilu or Val
Prob = (2/20)

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Remaining positions = any of 20
Prob = (20/20)^14 = 1^14 = 1

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Total Prob = Prob(L*) * Prob(D*) * Prob(D) * Prob(E) * Prob(G*) * Prob(I*)
= (a) 3.05 x 10^(-12)
OR (b) 10.2 x 10^(-12)

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Your own calculation of the probability of a functional order coming up (ie, the standard creation science method) would be: (1/20)^29 = 1.86 x 10^(-38).

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Comparing the lower probability to yours shows it to be 1.64 x 10^26 times greater.

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This invalidates your colored-box-car analogy as it stands (to correct it, you would need to allow for a variety of different combinations) and it invalidates your probability calculations.

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The second problem lies the assumptions of your protein model, exemplified in your statement: "[The odds for success in the box car analogy] are the same odds the amino acids will align themselves by chance to make one protein in you." Whatever is that supposed to have to do with evolution? What your model describes is CREATION EX NIHILO, not evolution.

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Do you believe that proteins are formed by "aligning themselves by chance"? That is not how life works. I will not patronize you by describing how cells produce proteins based on DNA base sequences transcribed onto RNA; you should know about that already and doubtless do.

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An evolutionary accounting for modern proteins would be that they had EVOLVED through their "descent with modification" (the basic definition for the "fact of evolution") from ancestral proteins; ie, that the genes for modern proteins were inherited from a long line of ancestors and had undergone changes along the way. The evolutionary account does not depend upon modern proteins being created ex nihilo, whereas the creationist account does. Hence your probability arguments apply to creationism and not to evolution, which uses an entirely different model to which different probabilities apply, as examined in my MONKEY program (attached).

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Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.