William Lane Craig continues to desperately defend the indefensible.

[robvalue]

If people redirected the time spent misrepresenting science to actually learning about science, we could have a sensible debate by now.

Learn stuff. I don't wish to be mean, but you are just embarressing yourselves.

[Mudhammam]

So much garbage in YG's head but this really made me laugh out loud:

I didn't say "natural selection isn't a mechanism", its not a mechanism which can ADD information. Its a mechanism which SELECTS information. You got "ajojkfeofkok", you can SELECT as many letters as you like, you aren't going to get MORE letters, and you need billions and billions MORE letters to turn a single cell into a human. Why is this concept so difficult for you to understand?

New combinations of information are created every time a genome is made. Most DNA is junk so there is plenty of opportunity for novel results including the addition of information by making more copies due to some particular change in the offspring's genetic code. What the fuck do you think happens in reproduction? I honestly can't believe how uneducated you are and with so much pride. What a laughingstock the educated believers in your church must think you are. Well, if they even exist.

[YGninja]

So much garbage in YG's head but this really made me laugh out loud:

I didn't say "natural selection isn't a mechanism", its not a mechanism which can ADD information. Its a mechanism which SELECTS information. You got "ajojkfeofkok", you can SELECT as many letters as you like, you aren't going to get MORE letters, and you need billions and billions MORE letters to turn a single cell into a human. Why is this concept so difficult for you to understand?

New combinations of information are created every time a genome is made. Most DNA is junk so there is plenty of opportunity for novel results including the addition of information by making more copies due to some particular change in the offspring's genetic code. What the fuck do you think happens in reproduction? I honestly can't believe how uneducated you are and with so much pride. What a laughingstock the educated believers in your church must think you are. Well, if they even exist.

New combinations aren't adding information, theyre changing existing information. Most DNA is NOT junk, this was debunked years ago.

"ENCODE Project Writes Eulogy for Junk DNA
This week, 30 research papers, including six in Nature and additional papers published online by Science, sound the death knell for the idea that our DNA is mostly littered with useless bases. A decade-long project, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE), has found that 80% of the human genome serves some purpose, biochemically speaking. Beyond defining proteins, the DNA bases highlighted by ENCODE specify landing spots for proteins that influence gene activity, strands of RNA with myriad roles, or simply places where chemical modifications serve to silence stretches of our chromosomes."

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6099/1159.summary

Again it is you guys who are ignorant of the science, and its SO ironic because you all behave like you have dominion over it.

[Neo-Scholastic]

So much garbage in YG's head but this really made me laugh out loud:

I didn't say "natural selection isn't a mechanism", its not a mechanism which can ADD information. Its a mechanism which SELECTS information. You got "ajojkfeofkok", you can SELECT as many letters as you like, you aren't going to get MORE letters, and you need billions and billions MORE letters to turn a single cell into a human. Why is this concept so difficult for you to understand?

New combinations of information are created every time a genome is made. ...

There are important differences between data & information and signals & noise. I'm not saying YG is right, just that your critique is simplistic.

[robvalue]

Oh my god.... My head's going to explode.

Hey christians you worship a pumpkin! Why do you do that? A pumpkin? Why? A pumpkin isn't even magical! What's jesus got to do with a pumpkin? Christianity is wrong because you worship a pumpkin!

Oh, I don't understand Christianity? Too bad, I say I do, so my argument stands.

[Faith No More]

There are important differences between data & information and signals & noise. I'm not saying YG is right, just that your critique is simplistic.

Praytell, what exactly is the difference between data and information?

Methinks you need to lay off the thousand year-old philosophies. They're rotting your brain.

[Mudhammam]

New combinations aren't adding information, theyre changing existing information. Most DNA is NOT junk, this was debunked years ago.

Gee, I'm so surprised that you're... wrong again.

Our understanding of dark matter in the genome is much better because we know what its made of (DNA) and we can isolate it and study its properties both directly and indirectly... Most dark matter contains no instructions and is just space-filling "junk" accumulated over the course of evolution. In humans only 2 to 3 percent of our dark matter contains genetic switches that control how genes are used.

- Microbiologist Sean B. Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, p. 112

"ENCODE Project Writes Eulogy for Junk DNA
This week, 30 research papers, including six in Nature and additional papers published online by Science, sound the death knell for the idea that our DNA is mostly littered with useless bases. A decade-long project, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE), has found that 80% of the human genome serves some purpose, biochemically speaking. Beyond defining proteins, the DNA bases highlighted by ENCODE specify landing spots for proteins that influence gene activity, strands of RNA with myriad roles, or simply places where chemical modifications serve to silence stretches of our chromosomes."

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6099/1159.summary

Again it is you guys who are ignorant of the science, and its SO ironic because you all behave like you have dominion over it.

Hey shithead, do you read? You say something "was debunked years ago" but then provide an article from 2012? That was three years ago, not exactly the decades you implied. And of course, your selective reading kicks in again. Why don't you try a little harder. It took 2 minutes for me to find this:

...the suggestion by ENCODE that over 80% of the human genome is biochemically functional has been sharply criticized by other scientists,[5] who argue that neither accessibility of segments of the genome to transcription factors nor their transcription guarantees that those segments have biochemical function and that their transcription is selectively advantageous.[6][29][35] In a 2014 paper the leaders of the ENCODE project tried to address "the question of whether nonconserved but biochemically active regions are truly functional". They acknowledged that "the larger proportion of genome with reproducible but low biochemical signal strength and less evolutionary conservation [e.g. 70% of the documented transcribed coverage] is challenging to parse between specific functions and biological noise", that the essay resolution often is much broader than the underlying functional sites, and that therefore some of the reproducibly “biochemically active but selectively neutral” sequences are unlikely to serve critical functions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noncoding_DNA

---

There are important differences between data & information and signals & noise. I'm not saying YG is right, just that your critique is simplistic.

If you want to give your fellow Christian idiot an in-depth lesson on evolution, please be my guest.

[Esquilax]

The problem here is that we're allowing these guys to argue from vague, ill-defined analogies, rather than anything real. "Information" is a conceptual label placed upon predictable patterns, not an objective feature existing within DNA. When YGNinja scoffs and says we've never observed an increase in information, all he's really saying is that something he imagines- and doesn't really know much about, let's be honest- hasn't increased because in his self-serving, circuitous little mind, something isn't new if it's a copy of something pre-existing that has been altered to contain features not present in the original.

The issue, as I've pointed out before, is the arbitrary way "new information" is being defined, so that it doesn't mean new information unless it literally pops into existence from nowhere. If it's in any way based on previous genetics- which is the way mutation actually works- then he's just going to assert that it's not new information, even if it's a whole genetic sequence that didn't exist in one organism, but does in its descendant.

If we were actually discussing something tangible, like whether new genetic material can be produced through the standard means- which is the conversation we should actually be having, as it's the thing under discussion- then we've already won. But theists don't like limiting their discussions to things that are real: that precludes god entirely.

[dyresand]

The problem here is that we're allowing these guys to argue from vague, ill-defined analogies, rather than anything real. "Information" is a conceptual label placed upon predictable patterns, not an objective feature existing within DNA. When YGNinja scoffs and says we've never observed an increase in information, all he's really saying is that something he imagines- and doesn't really know much about, let's be honest- hasn't increased because in his self-serving, circuitous little mind, something isn't new if it's a copy of something pre-existing that has been altered to contain features not present in the original.

The issue, as I've pointed out before, is the arbitrary way "new information" is being defined, so that it doesn't mean new information unless it literally pops into existence from nowhere. If it's in any way based on previous genetics- which is the way mutation actually works- then he's just going to assert that it's not new information, even if it's a whole genetic sequence that didn't exist in one organism, but does in its descendant.

If we were actually discussing something tangible, like whether new genetic material can be produced through the standard means- which is the conversation we should actually be having, as it's the thing under discussion- then we've already won. But theists don't like limiting their discussions to things that are real: that precludes god entirely.

Thing is Esquilax if there was some sort of infomation outside of the bible whether it be from other text to confirm or from artifact and even then we would be like okay lets go further. But seeing as there really isn't much to confirm the bible to be 100% accurate people should take it with a grain of salt and move on and stop trying to verify as some universal truth when reality most of the bible and i have proved this already is stolen other mythologies. I.E. hell the lake of fire origins the Egyptian book of the dead.

[Thumpalumpacus]

So much garbage in YG's head but this really made me laugh out loud:

New combinations of information are created every time a genome is made. Most DNA is junk so there is plenty of opportunity for novel results including the addition of information by making more copies due to some particular change in the offspring's genetic code. What the fuck do you think happens in reproduction? I honestly can't believe how uneducated you are and with so much pride. What a laughingstock the educated believers in your church must think you are. Well, if they even exist.

New combinations aren't adding information, theyre changing existing information. Most DNA is NOT junk, this was debunked years ago.

"ENCODE Project Writes Eulogy for Junk DNA
This week, 30 research papers, including six in Nature and additional papers published online by Science, sound the death knell for the idea that our DNA is mostly littered with useless bases. A decade-long project, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE), has found that 80% of the human genome serves some purpose, biochemically speaking. Beyond defining proteins, the DNA bases highlighted by ENCODE specify landing spots for proteins that influence gene activity, strands of RNA with myriad roles, or simply places where chemical modifications serve to silence stretches of our chromosomes."

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6099/1159.summary

Again it is you guys who are ignorant of the science, and its SO ironic because you all behave like you have dominion over it.

So, 20% of 20,000 - 25,000 coding pairs -- which is anywhere from four to five thousand base pairs -- are available for mutation. Got it, thanks.

That's an awful lot of coding pairs, when you remember that mutations aren't just happening in one person, but millions at a time.