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Neanderthal DNA

Neanderthal DNA

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Originally posted by amannion
What?
That the notion of god makes logical sense and is statistically probable?
What are you smoking?
A supernatural creator makes as much logical sense as fairies in the bottom of the garden, the flying spaghetti monster, or ... muffy!
Don't be a hater. 😳

a
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Originally posted by telerion
Don't be a hater. 😳
No, I'm not really a hater telerion, much as some of my posts might suggest it. I'm a pretty easy going guy.
But put me in front of a computer, log in to a forum, and set my hands free to get typing and I'm unstoppable - you could call me a 'shouter'.

I like a good argument and when I get going I shout a lot ...

w

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Originally posted by amannion
What?
That the notion of god makes logical sense and is statistically probable?
What are you smoking?
A supernatural creator makes as much logical sense as fairies in the bottom of the garden, the flying spaghetti monster, or ... muffy!
What am I smokin? Not the same stuff abiogenesisists are smokin. Here is a web site that talks about the statistical chances of abiogenesis occuring.

http://www.parentcompany.com/creation_essays/essay44.htm

Statistically the chances of abiogenesis occuring are basically zero. Therefore, what alternative is left? There you have it, statistics and logic used to back up the God theory. Now take a puff or two and tell me how wrong I am.

AThousandYoung
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Originally posted by whodey
What am I smokin? Not the same stuff abiogenesisists are smokin. Here is a web site that talks about the statistical chances of abiogenesis occuring.

http://www.parentcompany.com/creation_essay/essay44.htm

Statistically the chances of abiogenesis occuring are basically zero. Therefore, what alternative is left? There you have it, statistics and logic used to back up the God theory. Now take a puff or two and tell me how wrong I am.
Here is a web site that talks about the statistical chances of abiogenesis occuring.

Not true.

t
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Originally posted by whodey
What am I smokin? Not the same stuff abiogenesisists are smokin. Here is a web site that talks about the statistical chances of abiogenesis occuring.

http://www.parentcompany.com/creation_essay/essay44.htm

Statistically the chances of abiogenesis occuring are basically zero. Therefore, what alternative is left? There you have it, statistics and logic used to back up the God theory. Now take a puff or two and tell me how wrong I am.
Damn! I was gonna go to bed, but then you challenge me to one of my favorite geeky pasttimes: debunking creationist statistics. It's a great game because anyone who has had even a good undergraduate stats course can flex their muscle and look really smart.

Unfortunately, you left me unsatisfied, whodey. Your link is dead. I'm really disappointed right now. All I can do is go to bed.

Thanks a lot for nothing, man.

Edit: I even just spent another 20 minutes searching through that stupid parent company website for anything that had a probablistic analysis of abiogenesis. Nothing. You better have that essay for me when I get back on in the daytime, man.

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Originally posted by telerion
Damn! I was gonna go to bed, but then you challenge me to one of my favorite geeky pasttimes: debunking creationist statistics. It's a great game because anyone who has had even a good undergraduate stats course can flex their muscle and look really smart.

Unfortunately, you left me unsatisfied, whodey. Your link is dead. I'm really disappointed ri ...[text shortened]... ogenesis. Nothing. You better have that essay for me when I get back on in the daytime, man.
Try the web site again. I did'nt bype it in right the first time. Sorry, my bad. There is nothing I hate worse than typing in http addresses.

t
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Originally posted by whodey
Try the web site again. I did'nt bype it in right the first time. Sorry, my bad. There is nothing I hate worse than typing in http addresses.
Thank you. I have read it. Now before I respond to it, let me ask you a question. Do you know anything about calculating probabilities or did you just peruse over this, knowing that it argued against abiogenesis, see big numbers, and accept that it must be true?

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Originally posted by whodey
What am I smokin? Not the same stuff abiogenesisists are smokin. Here is a web site that talks about the statistical chances of abiogenesis occuring.

http://www.parentcompany.com/creation_essays/essay44.htm

Statistically the chances of abiogenesis occuring are basically zero. Therefore, what alternative is left? There you have it, statistics and logic used to back up the God theory. Now take a puff or two and tell me how wrong I am.
God of the gaps is it then?
Can't find a satisfactory explanation for something? Must be god then.

That's not logic.
If no satisfactory explanation exists, logic would suggest that the correct explanation hasn't been considered or developed.

t
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Okay, well whether or not you know anything about probabilities, I think you can figure out in part what is wrong with the calculations in the article.

Let me present you with a surprising improbability. Let's say you go to a new town on vacation and you choose to go to a church there. You find out that there is a youth group meeting that evening and so you decide to go check it out.

When you arrive that evening's event, you meet 30 people (youths and the youth pastor). Everyone introduces themselves to you and you find to your astonishment that two of these people are named 'Jessica.'

Before the youth pastor starts his sermon, you stand up and yell, "This is a miracle! There are two Jessica's in the room!"
They all look at you, baffled, and you, being well-educated in creation math, explain the odds of meeting two Jessica's out of 30 people:

To playdown the unlikelihood you say that you'll assume that names take on no more than 12 characters (empty spaces included). Including the empty space, there are 27 letters by which to construct each person's name. Now the probability that anyone has the name 'Jessica' is (1/27)^12 = 1/150094635296999121.

Using the binomial forumla, we can calculate the chance of two successes in 30 attempts.

prob(# Jessica's = 2 out of 30) =
(30!/(2!*28!))*((1/150094635296999121)^2)*((150094635296999120/150094635296999121)^28)

approx. =

1.930896*10^-32

or about 1 in 51789424241239491067792956760341 **

Utterly impossible!

That's how absurd it is to think that two people named 'Jessica' could be in that group of 30.

But we meet lots of people named Jessica all the time. So what's wrong with my calculation? More importantly what's wrong with the assumptions behind my calculation? Answer that and you refute the article you posted.

** - (I did this on the Windows scientific calculator so there may be some error in the calculation. Suffice to say the number is definitely enormous.)

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Originally posted by whodey
The same can be said for the existence of God.
That God, too, arose from a pile of salts? Interesting...

twhitehead

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Originally posted by whodey
Statistically the chances of abiogenesis occuring are basically zero.
Anyone who claims to be able to accurately calculate the statistical chance for abiogenesis occuring is lying. Not enough facts are known to do the calculation.

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Originally posted by Nemesio
This poses some interesting ethical and religious questions.
The concept of the soul combined with an acceptance of evolution, of course raises the immediate question of when exactly humans aquired souls. Of course it depends on your particular concept of the soul as to whether this is a problem. For example many people claim that all living things have souls
Ethics suffers from a similar dilema, is another being human and deserving of human ethical consideration only if scientists classify it as such? If chimpanzees were to breed with humans would the resulting offspring be equivalent to humans in terms of human rights etc.
However we already give more intelligent animals more ethical consideration, and many people do not consider humans incapable of thought (embrios or brain dead people for example) to fall in a different ethical category.

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Originally posted by borissa
I would say that from my view of Christianity this poses no problems. Sure, Neanderthal man existed before Homo sapiens. Sure, he was intelligent and social. But, he wasn't human. He didn't, by my beliefs, have a soul, because God only gave humans souls.
Neanderthals had funerary rites, indicating belief in an afterlife of some form. I guess they thought they had souls.

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When aliens arrive with intelect far superiour to ours or computers gain conciousness and intelect superiour to ours I have not doubt that some of them will decide that they have souls and we dont and that we are inferiour to them to the extent that it is not murder for one of them to kill a human being.

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Originally posted by Nemesio
An article in today's NY Times detailed a plan by German scientists
to reconstruct the Neanderthal genome (for reference, please see the
Science section, written by Nicholas Wade).

This poses some interesting ethical and religious questions. First, it
would seem to confront Creationists: if we humans have always existed
in our current form (in God's ...[text shortened]... e extended to a Neanderthal and on what Biblical basis would this
be justified?

Nemesio
Fool!
Neanderthals and dinosaurs have never existed! They are planted by left-wing, commie scientists in a subversive plot to lure us to Satan!!!

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