Epigenetics prove original sin!

That would be false.

As would this.

You're not very good at distinguishing headline hyperbole from scientific discussion, are you?

 

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Well

Again, as someone working in the field, that is a nonsense. Debate over the nature of evolution is not a dismissal of the theory - which is, effectively, a law inasmuch as allelic recombination is a mathematical certainty. Secondly, there is abundant evidence that evolution - and it is clear here that your actual target is descent with modification (DMW), which, while also true with some probable saltational variants, is not precisely the same thing. Just a week ago a lab at McGill in Montreal succeeded in activating genes causing a more classical tetrapedal support in fish. There are numerous examples of 'evolution' (DWM) in-lab and in-field. There are, thus, abundant grounds for concluding that evolution/DWM as applied is entirely correct.

Finally, your 'constant stream' article is paid-access only. Is there anything else floating down the stream that you wanted to cite?

Actual Pro Tip: we have a sparse fossil record and have to deduce the spaces we don't have fossils from, without for a moment doubting human evolution, or even frigging paleontology, which is what this article borders on.

The smell of your herrings in the evening is most invigorating. So now, while other creationists decry the gaps in the fossil record - which do exist, BTW - you think we should have it all wrapped up, billions of years all told, via work conducted in the last hundred fifty years in which evolution as a theory has existed. While being fought at every turn out of the prejudice of the religious clique. Well, sure. It's like how the approaching deadline on non-renewable energy has also been solved, and how space has been completely conquered. I can only assume from your demands for instant, complete answers that you must be some kind of television executive. If so, can you make any effort towards getting all those Housewives of shows off the air? Because those bitches are crazy.

I would be fascinated to know how this was so, since you take the Bible as your authoritative text, which is vastly unsubstantiated, while I base my opinions on that which we have actually learned and verified.

Not in the slightest. The few or several generations that epigenetic modifications might persist do not compare even to the dictates of the absurdly tiny number of generations proposed by YEC. New environmental modifications will be encountered - certainly by humans, which inhabit every region of the globe from pole to Tierra del Fuego - which will result in new activations to the same epigenetic switches. It lasts, but not a hundred human generations, not that any such data presently exists - and thus you have not the slightest support for such an idea. In the first case, sin is purely conceptual and hypothetical; there is no naturalistic exam by which it could demonstrated. I suppose you might contact a Dr. Jekyll operating out of offices in London. I understand his work on the practical, physical effects and aspects of the human soul are quite profound.

In the second, speciation - which is, again, not precisely evolution as such - has been demonstrated both in-lab and in-field. The terrifyingly vast array of genetic (sequence) resemblance between morphologically similar species utterly demonstrates this concept also - that i) genetically related species exist which ii) are not capable of interbreeding. Done and done. It is nothing like swallowing anything whole - as, say, one might swallow whole a tale about a man being swallowed whole by a whale without any kind of correlating evidence. Rather, it is like inference from what is possibly the most enormous collection of individual confirming examinations that mankind has ever collected. Add to that the innumerable roster of studies demonstrating the existence of genetic variants conferring morphological, behavioural, physiological and life-history variations within single species, and their partial extrapolations to related species, and there is simply no other conclusion. You might wish to argue saltation vs. macroevolution, but I have no time for such pedants and blithely accept that either is possible at different periods.

I have many questions here.

i) Do you believe in a literal Adam and Eve?
ii) What naturalistic - for epigenesis is a naturalistic concept, and not a theological one - evidence do you have of 'sin'? How shall I test for sin in my population of 10,000 afflicted humans? Can sin be detected in 'lower' animals, such as snails?
iii) What is your proposition about gills related to?
iv) ...

I'm unsure what to write for iv), here. So you feel that there are 'Alien Grays' who 'can easily hide from God'. To be fair, without agreeing or disagreeing with the concept of 'alien grays', why exactly would they be able to hide from a purportedly omniscient being? What evidence do you have of either?

The fossil record cannot be used to prove or disprove suppositions about the supernatural. However, several well-characterised series demonstrate the great likelihood of microevolution (i.e. Equus, fish-amphibian). I recommend looking up such series.

Please accept my condolences for the apparent gaps in the thinking of the unbeliever. Truly, only the Church of _______ can possibly hold the answer to Salvation, whether it be from Sin or Saurians.

 

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And yet you had just prior admitted they couldn’t verify because of ‘gaps in the fossil record’. So your theory is solid – the blame lies with the confounded fossil record…right.

Again to get the quote right: “we have a sparse fossil record and have to deduce the spaces we don’t have fossils from, without for a moment doubting human evolution”. So tell me again how your view isn’t….RELIGIOUS? You obviously don’t have all the evidence in but you’re ready to convict the accused, in this case GOD. If i’m a TV exec, you must be a retired District Attorney known for his speedy convictions (who cares a large % were later exonerated through DNA evidence – the important thing is you never lost an election!).

I don’t doubt that for a second. What did God do when he created Eve? He took some DNA-rich bone marrow from Adam’s rib to build her from. Who’s to say that to build Adam, God didn’t borrow a rib from a Neanderthal? Why build a computer program from scratch if 95% of the backbone code does what it needs to do? Might there be some vestigial genetic code that was simply turned off?…perhaps. Scientists love to say that most of our code is nonsense. They have absolutely no authority to say that but that’s no surprise – but it might be partly true.

How many artists paint over old paintings? Why trash a perfectly good canvas?

How to test for sin…or ‘imperfection’ might be a speedier study albeit a tough one but the answer probably has to do with aglets.

“gills”…..”alien grays”….it’s called levity. Dude, you need to get your head out of the books and live a little…take a vacation, watch some Seinfeld bloopers…something!

 

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Wrong. Gaps in the fossil record do not impact the theory of evolution in any way. Neither did I say anything of the kind. It is not necessary to have a specimen of every single step in DWM/evolution to verify the theory. For the one, there is abundant DNA sequence evidence supporting physiognomically interpreted relationships in the plant and animal Kingdoms so that specimens of each intermediate are not required. For the second, there are a number of very good morphological sequences.

I get that you are committed to your religion. That's not the same as saying you have a firm basis on which to doubt evolutionary science. In fact, you have already stated your commitment to a religious interpretation of natural history: given that the Bible offers no falsifiable hypotheses about evolution, there is little more to say about your perspective here.

Because series are demonstrable in numerous other systems, because DNA sequence similarity posits a web of interspecies relationships that meet expectations based on extant morphology, because genetic mapping and covariance analysis illustrates ample genetic variation for trait variability consistent with an array of extant phenotype on which selection may act -and does, because speciation has been demonstrated both indirectly from the above, and from in-lab experiments and the observation of natural populations, and because none of these things provides any support for the interference of a divine creator.

But other than all that, what 'as Romans 1:20-27 ever done fer us?

What exactly am I convicting God of? Forget the evils of the world, on which one would actually press such a case: what has evolution, exactly, to do with God? Your central claim is presumably that God exists, and specifically here that epigenetics is a potential vehicle for original sin. Leaving aside the enormous question of why a spiritual, metaphysical concept would need physical coding in labile on-off histone switches in DNA, such changes are transient and rarely pass the next round of meiosis. All this suggests to me that you are here as a kind of theistic outreach so as to co-opt scientific thought by co-opting scientific theory: and there is little doubt that my latter accusation is true. So, why? Did you draw some offense from an atheist or evolutionist in some other forum, and then decide to bring that claim here as a kind of petty vengeance? Or do you really believe your claim about the spiritual mechanics of epigenetics? There is no evidence for such a claim, and its mechanics do not appear to be suited to your objective - and it is the placement of objective in your considerations that renders your narrative non-scientific.

I'm sorry if this seems harsh, but you are taking concepts out of their intent here and denigrating a great deal of work that biological science has performed and well satisfied against all attempts at falsification. Let us speak frankly here: you are Christian, Jewish or Muslim and you wish to express your belief and confidence in your deity. You see, as your comments show, an epistemological threat in the existence of evolutionary science. So: why? Properly thinking scientists, at least, have nothing at all to say about the actual existence of the supernatural as codified in Judeo-Christian monotheism. We have no evidence of God. We seek no evidence of God. Our work has nothing to do with God. Or how shall I test for God? Does He act on a quantitative scale, or a binomial, or shall I expect ordinal outcomes? Which distribution shall I test His acts against? Is he more of a Chi-square sort of phenomenon? What assumptions may I make in such a model? Can I suppose that these outcomes will be normally distributed, or, considering that I am dealing with the penultimate of supernatural beings, would an unrooted multivariate non-parametric test be best? Can you attest? Science has nothing to do with God, and only to do with naturalistic phenomena. That is all. If you find threat in that, then I must ask: where your faith? Is it not written Put not your God to the test? Are you so shaken of belief that you need naturalistic verification of your supernatural conviction?

They have every bit the authority to say exactly that. I work with non-coding marker DNA: repetitive junk that retrocodes not the RNA, nor probably even hairpins the strands so as to make the genes just beyond the touch of common enzymes. Are you the custodian of our collective genome? God's sequence representative, perhaps? The majority of our genome is untranscribed filler. If you want to call it the scaffolding that holds together the rest of it, please do. I have made the same deduction in other places and at other times. But it is nonsense: it codes for nothing. Is it that that bothers you, as some kind of Saint of the Falsified Hope? Does it bother you to wonder - if just for a moment - what God's plan was, in these redundant structure, the blind leads in the internal organs, the mostly silent, empty genome drifting in salt and water? Why? Why do you need to put your God to the test? And in what sense are you, the mortal, equipped to reveal and understand such works? Is faith not enough?

At risk of my sanity I wonder how that would be true, or why, or what evidence there might be of it other than a borrowed concept, unsupported by facts at either end of the new bridge you wish to make.

In the context, it made a very curious joke.

 

What I'm getting from all of this is that god is an alien gray, who created Adam from a Neanderthal rib. Am I right?

 

More likely than this interpretation, zgmc. Probably with the help of the Daliks and only due to a temporary malfunction in the TARDIS, which the next incarnation of the Doctor will hopefully rectify.

That doesn't erase the first sentence in the Bible which translates as "In the beginning the pantheon of gods from Ugarit created the Heavens and the Earth." Interesting you reference the language of the Council of Nicea which is not the same language as the unknown author called Saul/Paul or whatever his name actually was, if in fact it was one person (even after we remove the known forgeries).

Nevertheless you are citing an unknown author who claims to be Tarsian and would have no direct access to the Hebrew tradition, but rather his own culture, which was following other myths unknown to Hebrew people. No wonder then, that there is no genetic memory of a certain "Jesus the Nazarene" who worked any miracles or was executed for apostasy/heresy, in any of the Talmud, nor in any other extant Hebrew source material.

That's not what it says. It says the "pagan" gods, the Elohim, created the heavens and the Earth. The Elohim of Gen 1 are not the same as YHWH of Gen 2. YHWH was invented later, probably from a legend told by a traveler from an enclave named YH. Gen 2 tells you that the Creation Myth was reinvented when Yahwism overtook Elohism, marking the shift from animism and polytheism to the anthropomorphic God and monotheism.

Yeah but all of that was imported from Persia. The word "archangel" was nor part of the Hebrew lexicon until the Greeks and Persians began stampeding across the Levant, infusing Hebrew tradition with Persian Heaven, Hell, and the archetypes of angels and demons. And by that time Hebrew became a dead language, replaced by Greek and Aramaic. So you see, worshiping the icons of Christianity is tantamount to worshiping bits and fragments of foreign, "pagan" and enemy religions.

This why Genesis never tells you Yahweh created Heaven, Hell, Satan and the Angels. It's a later addition to the religion. One of many upgrades to the Hebrewism 1.0, which followed the gods of Ugarit and Sumeria. Also note that although Yahweh is supposed to be the one and only god, the goddess Asherah appears in the Bible, also an import from neighboring religions, and is regarded as the bride of Yahweh.

No. Epigenetics accounts for certain mutations which can contribute to the modification of the genotype. It has nothing to do with acculturation to taboos, nnor religious myths, and esp. not the Creation Myth. Besides, Genesis contradicts you: God goes on to destroy them, and leaves the gene in the alleged progenitors of the human race (sons of Noah and their wives). This conflicts with the claim that God is omniscient. Worse, it makes the destruction of the human race futile, pointless and therefore a defective tactic. Noah's drunken nakedness after the flood proves YHWH botched this cleansing operation. Of course the whole basis of the flood myth was imported from Babylonian, where the gods they Hebrews considered nothing more than "pagan" idols (hence impotent) were actually the ones who caused the "flood".

But of course no one in their right mind, with the most basic information readily available today, would ever regard myth, legend and fable as historical narrative.

Biology and scholarly exegesis make perfect sense to me. The defects in your posts are not correctly cast as incomprehensible. They're just wrong. Check the use of the word "Elohim" and its relation to the pantheons of Ugarit and Sumeria. And of course read any exegesis of Genesis from a scholarly source.

BTW are you a sock puppet of the other users posting from an extreme position in Messianic Judaism ?? There have been several lately. And I supposed some of the anti-science sock puppets are the same person, too, since all of them are intent on "blighting the board" as Arne once confessed. (Where's Arne?) Arne is the only Catholic I've encountered who comes across as a Messianic Jew.

It must be hard to switch proxies back and forth, and to keep track of the difference language styles and attitudes of each persona you create. Just asking, since I recall you pretended to be someone else when I first encountered you here. Remember that by any chance, or were you expecting readers to forget?

 

Well done sir.:bravo:

 

There is no such thing as sin. Thing. Sin. Hmmm. The Hebrew word sin means to miss the mark. For example, throwers of stone or spears, archers . . . when missing their target, the word sin was used to express this. To sin, therefore, against another, means to miss the mark set by the other. For example, the boss says show up at 9:00 A.M. and you show up at 9:07 A.M. - that, science boy - is sin. You missed the mark. Perhaps I should suggest to you the, uh, science of language. You know . . . the shit you guys dig for in sand and clay?

Ring a bell. Test sin in your lab.

 

If you're very selective about it...
That particular meaning happens to be the one least used in the Bible, but, meh, you had to come up with some point I suppose.

 

Really? Strongs? Given that most of the typography is subjective do you want to go through each of them like you had something on me?! 'Cause, damn. We could do that. Otherwise, this is a non response. You know like, uh, Creationism. You don't know what you are talking about, minus one quick search of questionable jocular sort of euphemism.

 

Unless you have a source that specifically refutes mine then my "non-response" is at minimum[sup]1[/sup] as valid as your original claim.

1 In fact mine is "better" in that I have at least given a source to support my position: all you did was make an unsupported claim based on, so far as can be told, your interpretation of "subjective typography".

 

Yes, “potential” is right…i haven’t been dogmatic about the notion but it seems to provide a reasonable place to start if one must have some biological reasons behind matters of faith such as this one. Do i? Not necessarily. I’m just curious and do tend to look at matters of faith in a practical way. As James noted, “The wisdom from above is reasonable”…so it’s well within our rights to exercise our power of reason and challenge what we are told.

It strikes me how often i’ve been assaulted with the accusation that i must NOT have faith if i present plausible science to back up the bible, “you’re supposed to walk by faith and not by sight so if you proved that heaven existed you would be a heretic!”…such the fright some must feel that science could accidentally stumble on Heaven (twisted logic).

Regarding the field of epigenetics, you come off like the science is a known quantity but that is faaaaar from the case. In actuality, it’s still in it’s infancy. Scientists repeatedly put forth the facade that they’ve got all the bases covered while hiding behind scientific lingo that puts off most people from challenging you, not unlike lawyer-speak. As we know with lawyer-speak it’s created to hide the truth…not unlike the religious hierarchy of the Catholic Church keeping the bible in a dead language only they could understand (Latin) for fear the populace would figure out how far away from the scriptures the Church had fallen.

One thing i remember my biology professor in college (my strongest class – yes, i had to pass tests regarding evolution) saying was that we would come to discover that the more we learn, the more we will realize what we don’t know and the more we would learn about less and less (specialization). But is that not the inherent limitation of man? And yet, there is no end to the dogmatic assertions by scientists that they’ve effectively ruled out God through their calculations.

Science has only recently discovered Dark Matter & Energy…akin as some put it to only recently discovering the oceans of the earth all the while thinking it only consisted of dry land. This mysterious quantity (95% of all matter) we know absolutely NOTHING about except that it’s there. But of course, that this might be where Heaven hides would be extreme foolishness to such a wise person as you, right?

Honestly if you consider where the science of man stands right now, me arguing with you is not very far off from say if i was arguing with Aristotle, who though being a very intelligent man steadfastly believed the earth was the center of the universe.

I’m talking in the big scheme of things…obviously science has come a long way but in geologic terms has it really? If only recently the human race has thought the 5% we knew about was the entire universe, they’re not much different from a fish in a fishbowl thinking the entire universe was a boy’s bedroom with an occasional portal opening up into another dimension (the hallway).
Or say Galileo, who brilliant though he was to deduce that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe, thought it pop-cockery to think the Moon could have any affect on the earth (tides).

The point is that no matter the pursuit, man is inevitably myopic (think blind men examining the elephant), so i’d suggest caution in your negative assertions regarding YOUR Creator. “He chose the foolish things of the world to put the wise men to shame”.

 

Original sin is connected to symbolism of eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Knowledge of good and evil is implicit of social value judgements and law. The power of sin is the law, while sin is not imputed when there is no law. It was not a sin to eat of that tree, until a law was created, that said it was a sin. Original sin is connected to laws of good and evil taught by each generation, setting a potential; might induce epigenetic change.

For example, the affordable care act for healthcare has laws that require you buy health care insurance or else. Last year there was no sin if you did not have insurance. As soon as the law is enforced, a new sin appears, almost like magic. The power of sin is the law, since the sin only appears after the law says it is a sin.

The bible has Eve eating first and Adam following; accepting the laws. The bible attributes law more to the females. Liberalism likes to make more laws, rules and regulations, and this is more feminized as expected by traditions. The conservatives are more masculine and prefer smaller government with less laws and therefore fewer defined sins. If you did away with the health care mandate, that sin is also gone, since that sin is no longer imputed if there is no law to give sin power.

Original sin is the urge in humans to oppose freedom from sin, in favor of a yoke of law and sin. If you suggested getting rid of law so there is no sin is being imputed, the fear of chaos will appear, thereby giving certain humans the irrational urge to bring back the power of sin with law, as the solution to the perceived chaos. Original sin is the paradox of poison appearing to be the medicine.

The way Jesus dealt with the urge of original sin; children of the bondwomen, was he said if something is unclean to you, than only to you is it unclean. In other words, those who want law and sin can have it, but leave the others alone. But what tends to happen is the self righteous will often break moral laws, enforcing civil laws 9witch burning), calling that good; double down on sin due to original sin. With the health care mandate, sinning agains the new law allows the government to steal money; fines, with stealing a moral sin; law doubles down on sin.

 

No.
Sin is a religious concept.
It has nothing to do with legality. Or vice verse.

Edit:
I also like the way you manage to plumb the depths of the stupidity (without getting anywhere near the bottom) of this particular "god".
"Original sin is connected to symbolism of eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil."
So, according to this, it's a sin to know if what you're doing is right or wrong, but not to actually do wrong.
In other words it's okay to be gluttonous, lustful, murderous, etc. so long as you don't it's wrong.
Way to go "god".

 

Actually, I left that in there as a trap. Your title was that epigenetics "proves" original sin. You changed your goalposts, which is not ethical, scientifically. As I said earlier, I think you're here for reasons of proselytisation.

Well, science hasn't stumbled on it. Why does the Bible need scientific backing? "We believe", does one not?

That's sort of a bullshit accusation. If you don't know the lingo, learn it instead of using your ignorance as a crutch to hold yourself up under examination.

We know nothing of the kind. You infer that, or claim to infer it, since as presented science does not support your preconceptions. Tell me: do you think that it is worth breaking a thing to make it fit your requirements?

Instead of committing to a group character assassination, why don't you isolate those individuals which have made such claims? I am a scientist. I am an evolutionary scientist. I have not ruled out God through my calculations; God does not enter into them. Do you, conversely, which to inject God into my calculations as some kind of infinitely expansive residual, taking up all the space of analysis that the model cannot contain? That would be foolishness. Is it not written unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and God what is God's?

Go and look there for Heaven if you must; I could as easily suppose that it was the abode of unicorns, or the resting place of Valhalla, or the spaces between the stars where the great wolf Fenris runs, mouth agog of fire and blood. That mysterious quantity could be anything at all. If you wish to believe that it is Heaven, do so. But don't call it scientific, and don't ask to borrow our tools to wreck our house, please.

As colourful insults go, this is a new one: to be compared to one of the progenitors of Western thought and be called foolish. Why not give up the charade and just, say, take up with Incoherent of the Philosophers? As I understand it, that work, too, belittles the machinations of the natural world in favour of a fickle deity.

I don't know that God is my creator or not - or even which god hath done so. I think it is God, perhaps, maybe. But you have misunderstood this in the greatest of ways: I have made no negative assertions. I simply make no such assertions. If I did not think that you had misunderstood, I would say that you were deliberately making this false position as a way to lever God into evolutionary science - which will not happen, period. If we are wise, surely it is because your God wished it so. Why delude the wise man? Should we not exercise the benefit of our minds? Should we hide our lights under bushel baskets? There is much and more to learn of genetics and epigenetics both but we have done exceedingly well and no evidence thus far points to your Creator, far from being "proof" of same. If you find that your assumptions are constantly being punctured, perhaps it is because you set up too many goalposts, one after the other, like turtles on turtles' backs.

 

So, I was driving down the road one day when I noticed that the car was getting kinda close to the edge. Maybe the car was veering to one side or maybe it was the road that was turning. Either way, I said, "Hmm...." and then I altered my course.

The greatest strength of science is that it can correct its errors. It doesn't matter whether the errors were caused by lack of information or human stupidity or even actual "changes in reality". What matters is that science can change its conclusions and stay on course. And you think that's a bad thing?

 

The thing is that " science " can take decades to " change " , which of course leaves us , Humanity , further behind than where we should be

 

Let's get this out of the way first so it doesn't detract from the discussion. I do not believe this thread is the time or the place to get to know each other, but since you asked, The Head has this to say to you in order to explain himself:

There is nothing more to say. The Head will not talk with you, or entertain any more questions. It is not necessary and will detract from the main discussion:

..so you’re telling me there’s a chance!? NICE! I’ll take what i can get.

Elohim can be singular or plural. You’re grafting way too much subtext to the word. It’s a title denoting much respect, not a personal name like Yahweh. Could it reflect the language in use at the time? Of course.
Jehovah revealed Himself in greater degree as time went on. Exodus 6:3 for instance:

“Then God said to Moses: “I am Jehovah. And I used to appear to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God Almighty, but with regard to my name Jehovah I did not make myself known to them.”

This only reflects the progressive nature of God’s relationship with men of faith, not some cultural norm at the time and certainly nothing pagan about it.