Below is a link to a 22.5-minute video which is a rehearsed version of a speech (with power point and video and animation) to be delivered before several faculty and deans of various Christian Universities at the Christian Scholar’s Conference at Lipscomb University June 7, 2017.
My talk addresses the design of chromatin and the problem of evil.
PS
You can see me listed in the Lipscomb conference schedule (with my name misspelled as “Cordoba”):
http://www.lipscomb.edu/csc/sessions
Guess who’s going to be listening to my talk?
Jeff McCormack, Dean, College of Natural and Applied Sciences, Oklahoma Christian University, Discussant
Jon Lowrance, Professor, Department of Biology, Lipscomb University, Discussant
The Christian Scholars Conference advertises a registration fee of 195 dollars and lodging fee of 195 dollars for a total of 390 dollars, but you can get to hear me speak free-of charge via youtube! Get your free viewing at youtube while supplies last. 🙂
You always ignore the facts we bring up, unless there’s some small portion you think you can spin into creationist straw. You ignore almost all of the evidence, except to mention some idiotic creationist tripe like “common design.”
No one really cares about your “gotcha” bullshit.
And your “explanations” are laughable fables.
Sure, ignore the vast amount of evidence for evolution across all of life, and hone in on the unexplained. Since you have no explanation, and you hate the evidence-based explanation, what can you do but try to drag evolution as low as your nonsense?
I suppose it’s the interest in facts that you merely deny, like you deny the facts themselves.
Anything other than the truth, yes.
Science by quotes. Sal’s best.
Glen Davidson
So what? You invoked Sanford’s importance to biology as a justification for not writing him off. He has no importance in the area you’re talking about, and so your justification was invalid.
Also, if ENCODE is right, about 10% of the human genome is functional and you’re wrong.
Thanks Salvador for sharing your video. I know that this site is a tough audience. I personally found the information on the “RAM memory” on the chromatin molecule to be most interesting. I’ll be getting to know chromatin much better because of your work.
As a Christian, I found the Christianese just a little bit overdone. For the predominant audience here, it was way overdone. However your primary audience is clearly not secular.
I agree with another poster who suggested that you did not make the case you suggest in your introduction of the “problem of evil”. You make some point about “entropy”, but it is only lightly discussed and not supported by significant data.
In general I found it enjoyable and educational.
For it to be a problem for gradualism, you would have to show that there can’t be a gradual path to chromatin. You haven’t shown that, all you’ve done is pointed to the system as known and then declared that it had to pop up all at once, out of nowhere. But that’s just an assertion. The fact that you personally refuse to even consider how such a system could evolve gradually, doesn’t mean there isn’t a path to such a system from a much simpler one.
Prove it. Remember to factor in natural selection.
You’ve failed this challenge every time. You always end up doing something stupid that has nothing to do with how evolution works, like calculating the odds of producing some specific large protein (or sets of proteins) in a single go, by rolling dice. The tornado in a junkyard calculation has nothing to do with how evolution works. You’re supposed to calculate the odds of evolution, not the literal odds of a tornado in a junkyard. This is the problem with ALL creationist probability calculations, they have NOTHING to do with evolution.
But this is what is so ironic about this whole thing, because YOU are the one who believes this system emerged in an instant. Literally, by divine intervention. Poof! and there it was. Yet you refuse to even put a number on the probability that such a system would be magicked into existence.
You can’t just say that hypothesis A has a low prior probability*, so it must be B, without having any goddamn way of even estimating the prior probability of B.
What are the odds that God would design chromatin? You have no idea, and you don’t even know how to assess the probability of such an event.
That means you should shut up entirely about probabilities.
*(even worse, with flawed reasoning that ignores evolution and only considers a coinflip or dice roll process).
Thank you for demonstrating this textbook case of psychological projection.
This is nothing if not ironic, considering that very accusation has been debunked on this very forum recently.
How is it possible that you can still labor under these misapprehensions when you’ve had them corrected directly for you dusins of times? Every point you’ve made in your post has been addressed before, on this very forum, ten, twenty perhaps even fifty times before. This shit with you go back something like a decade at least. HOw can you STILL be ignorant of the fact that you’ve been personally corrected on literally EVERY point here, consistently, for years?
See, this is another bit of evidence that this whole thing is about your personal psychology. Religion does something to your head on this particular subject. It’s really quite remarkable. It’s not that you don’t really understand it, it’s that you won’t.
I meant to link http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/jonathan-wells-and-homology, still found on the front page of threads on this forum, where John Harshman debunks the PRATT that homologies (aka inferred phylogenies) are somehow arrived at through circular reasoning.
Greetings. Have we met here before?
First off thank you for watching the video and your editorial suggestions.
FWIW, I was given less than 25 minutes to make my presentation.
The theme of the conference was “Memory, Tradition, and the Future of Faith.” and I was commissioned to somehow tie this theme also to the theme “Genetics, Genomics, and Information Systems.”
I was also advised to tone down my usual anti-evolution themes. Even in Christian universities, ID and creationism are either unwelcome or de-emphasized.
So a lot of what I was commissioned to talk about was decided by committee!!! I was merely the mouth piece and writer.
I did what I could to serve my brothers and sisters who requested such a strange hodgepodge of themes for me to tie together! They chose me because I had the most familiarity with the most up-to-date information on the NIH work on Chromatin as I’m down there almost every week.
I appreciate your interest in chromatin and other issues. I hope to have more offerings for a variety of venues some theological and some purely technical. I’m presently deciding the venues to publish my videos. The first sets may be for the Christian Apologetics classes I teach at Trinity Seminary. I’m thinking I may supplement it with some purely technical bio/biochemistry on-line stuff. The way I taught chromatin in the video is representative of my teaching style of technical material to lay audiences.
If you want a purely technical video pro-ID video, that may be in the works as well.
God bless you.
Oh, and it doesn’t hurt to add some promo in my talk for my sponsor, John Sanford! 🙂
I debunk your claim that he has debunked it!
Your claim that he has debunked anything is completely circular.
Oddly enough, Sal has never commented in that thread. Perhaps he didn’t see it, and now that you have reminded him he will present his reasoned disagreement.
When is the talk? Let us know how it goes. Any TSZers attending?
That’s the same YEC John Sanford who tried to support his silly “genetic entropy” claims by offering the ages of the Biblical patriarchs as evidence the human genome was degrading and life spans were decreasing.
All science so far! 😀
My presentation is Wednesday, June 7, 2013 at 2:45 at Swang Center, Lipscomb University.
I’ve gotten some valuable editorial corrections (I have a several typos in my power points) that will get cleaned up thanks to input from the net (not just here at TSZ).
Me showing up at TSZ and other places saved me from showcasing my typos, and I got to save the readers the $390 admission price. So it seems there was mutual benefit to me releasing my rehearsal recordings.
I’m obviously only one of many presenters at Libscomb, and each of us is limited to only 30 minutes! You can see the rest of the topics at the conference here:
http://www.lipscomb.edu/csc/sessions
(note: they mis-spelled my last as “Cordoba”)
I probably will show up in the audience for the distance learning segment since I feel for students paying so much for school, and I want to have a chance to teach basic online courses for very low prices in basic math, chemistry, physics and biology. The technical portion of my presentation on chromatin ( not the theological stuff) is a small sample of how I might teach biology. I’m a very visually oriented instructor.
Since I still don’t have the stomach to watch the video, it has only now occurred to me that the point of the image staring at me now is “hey, chromatin kinda looks like an abacus”. Now I’m even more speechless.
Not speechless enough!
I gave my talk yesterday before the bio faculty, deans and officers of several universities affiliated with the Church of Christ (like Lipscomb). I found out Francis Collins a few years ago spoke at this annual event as well!
My talk as supposed to be before the engineering faculty, and it was the biologists who showed up!!!!
Regarding the abacus, I pointed out the resemblance was purely superficial, something more of and amusement rather than anything to make an inference on.
One really hostile (anti-YEC) faculty member did finally conceded he thought evolution of chromatin from a simpler system looked like a miracle, and he accepted it as such.
That’s the way I feel. Even if I were not a Christian, Chromation evolution by slow gradual incremental steps doesn’t seem mechanically sensible at all because the Chromatin accessibility is built on the histones having the right marks through reading and writing machines and then chromatin remodelers moving the histones to create space for initiation complexes, etc. The chicken and egg paradoxes abound.
To paraphrase Crick: “”An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the evolution of chromatin appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. “
Cool story bro.
My presentation didn’t cause as much of a scandal as Nathaniel’s Jeason’s from that YEC outfit called Answers in Genesis!
I mean, the existence of chromatin isn’t controversial, it’s just a lot of engineers aren’t familiar with it, and my talk was supposed to be for engineers and business faculty who didn’t show up. It was the biologists and theologians who showed up, many of them chilly to ID! So my talk was rather uninformative to biologists….
Jeanson argued speciation happens mostly through neutral means and reproductive isolation of pre-existing heterozygous pools.
Jeanson is a Harvard trained PhD in stem cell biology who decided to dedicate his life to promoting YEC. He could have had a good career as a stem cell biologist.
I told Nathaniel I tried to read his works, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. We sat down for a couple of hours and he made it clearer.
I asked Nathaniel about mictochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam.
Jeanson and Rob Carter (a genetic engineer who left secular employment to dedicate himself to promoting YEC), did a LOT of review of literature on Y-chromosomal Adam and mtEve.
Carter’s stuff on the migration of slaves from Africa and the calibration of the Y-clocks is amazing. Carter wasn’t there, but maybe when I see Joe Deweese (the professor of biochemistry who invited me to speak), I’ll suggest a creationist genetics and bioinformatics conference happen annually with the dream team of Jeanson, Sanford, Carter, and others show up. I’m not a geneticist or molecular biologist, I’m just a trouble maker, but if they hold that conference, I may show up just for the theater that will likely ensue. 🙂
That’s a good word for it. Theater. You guys play your characters well.
Should have gone with a quipu.
Sal’s “Big Daddy?” moment.
stcordova,
Sal, I notice you are never actually willing to discuss YEC, or separate creation at all. Whenever I or anyone else starts a thread about it, you fail to show up. All you ever post is “God of the gaps” stuff about molecular biology. Why is that?
I don’t talk about baraminolgy, I find it insufferably boring. God of the gaps molecular biology is more compelling. I’ve talked about YEC good and bad regarding distant starlight, C14, amino acid dating, erosion dating.
I’m not versant in mtEve, Y-chromosomal Adam.
I was tasked to report on NIH developments in chromatin, epigenome, epitranscriptome, not YEC stuff.
I’m writing on nylonase evolution and Ohno’s 1984 paper. What often shows up a TSZ of late is stuff where editorial review is helpful.
I’ve said many times, YEC has evidential problems, what more do you want me to say? I still personally find it believable and await future scientific discoveries to vindicate it.
The gaps in molecular evolution (like origin of chromatin) are real. I’ve argued the gaps are not of knowledge but gaps of mechanical principle, same for evolution things like Okazaki fragment processing and neuron axons, etc.
FWIW, now that Patrick is no longer moderator, I think I’d like to participate more at TSZ, but really not about stuff that is contentious about ID. The nylonase discussion I started here I felt was a productive discussion for all parties involved. That’s more to my liking, otherwise this place will be more of a shouting match that does no one much good.
I want you to say why you find it believable, and how you deal with the scientific discoveries we already have that show it to be incredible (in the original sense of the word).
Sal: “It was the biologists and theologians who showed up, many of them chilly to ID!”
So the Christians who would love ID to be true and who have the expertise to accurately judge the truth of ID don’t seem to believe it. That’s damning!
Sal: “FWIW, now that Patrick is no longer moderator, I think I’d like to participate more at TSZ, but really not about stuff that is contentious about ID.”
Make Patrick moderator for life!
P.S. What about ID isn’t contentious?
stcordova,
Sal, you’re drifting into moderation issues.
Alan,
I made the comment about Patrick in moderation issues which davemullinex quoted. You should have issued the complaint to dave, not me for bringing that up here.
stcordova,
OK, my mistake. Could newer or less frequent commenters bear in mind that discussion of moderation issues takes place only in the moderation issues thread (see link on menu bar).
ETA Sal, you commented in this thread (see 24 above). Moderation issues – moderation issues thread!
Alan Fox,
Off topic:
I’ve submitted a new post. How long does it usually take to review it? One of my posts was waiting for 2 weeks to be posted….
Alan,
My mistake. Apologies.
Sal
J-Mac,
I already wrote this comment for you. Please let an admin know when you have something for publication, either by a comment in the moderation issues thread or by the messaging system. The two currently active admins are myself and Neil Rickert. I’m sending you a PM so you can see how they work.
Now, please note, moderation issues should be raised in the appropriate thread, handily titled moderation issues.
Long time no see. Hope you are well.
Detection of man-made ID isn’t supposed to be contentious.
Life is not man made. (Yet)
What about ID isn’t contentious.
That was probably my bad. Sal raised the possibility of something that would make him go away and i jumped on it.