Comment by daemonk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by daemonk | Hacker News Reader

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I am a bioinformatician with a background in genetics.

The argument against evolution in the article, mainly the piltdown man hoax and new sequencing data on neanderthal is extremely weak.

I don't think a single example of scientific fraud is enough to discredit the entire community. I actually think the fact that the fraud was found out as a hoax shows that evidence is constantly being scrutinized and re-examined; which is exactly what science should be all about.

The point about sequence similarity/dis-similarity being not the ultimate evidence for common ancestry is actually an insightful point; however, I doubt the author of the article realized the insight. He was probably just parroting a statement he read in another article. I don't think you can make a strong statement about homology between genomes using only 65,000 bases of sequence from potentially heavily degraded sample. I think it is just an interesting starting point for further analysis with more data.

The rest of the article dealt with interpreting biblical statements to fit with current undeniable understanding of the universe. IE. Man is made from dust is consistent with humans being consisted of elements found in dust (crust) of the earth. I am sure it sounds nice to people who believe in the bible. But it makes me wonder what these interpretations will look like in a hundred years. Are these interpretations going to change with new understandings of the universe? Is the bible just full of vague statements that can constantly adapt to new understanding of the world? What good is that really?

I've always wondered what a creationist view of biology would look like. There are plenty of attacks against evolution, but never any clear explanation of how their belief system is in accordance with current data. Do new species suddenly pop into existence from nothing by god? Do god specifically implant new species into the womb of a surrogate specie? Why does god invent bunch of new species in the first place? Why not modify the environment to suit the species rather than modify species to suit the environment? I think creationism hides behind a wall of hand-wavy and foggy ideas that breaks down when explicitly examined.

I sympathize with your problem. But the problem is, you have confused creationists with theistic evolutionists! They are the ones that say that evolution occurred, but God guided it. He didn't. He created EX NIHILO, from scratch, in the beginning (that's pure creationist thinking; theistic evolution is merely a compromise position by those who have departed from their Bible). For a view of what creationist biology might actually look like, I suggest you start here. I believe you will find it quite interesting:

http://creation.com/what-biology-textbooks-never-told-you-ab...

God bless.

"The rest of the article dealt with interpreting biblical statements to fit the current undeniable understanding of the universe.", (How do i correctly put a quote here in the replies?)

In Isaiah 40:22 It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth…

This is written before any scientist can confirm it. Thats not interpretation, its a clearly stated fact, "circle". And he points out if other religion gets it wrong.

> This is written before any scientist can confirm it. Thats not interpretation, its a clearly stated fact, "circle". And he points out if other religion gets it wrong.

The Earth was considered to be a flat disc, so there's nothing of value there. Please do some research before coming here with your bullshit.

Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell says the flat-earth error flourished most between 1870 and 1920, and had to do with the ideological setting created by struggles over evolution. Russell claims "with extraordinary [sic] few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth

The Earth is a sphere, not a circle. That's not a nitpick either. They thought the Earth was a flat disk back then.

Regardless. Even if you were dumbly granted that the Earth was a flat disk, how would that have any barring on the rest of the Bible's arguments?

Plato was right about a lot of things, but does that mean he was also right about the elemental nature of the universe? (Everything being created from the base elements of fire, earth, wind and water)

Your argument is bad even if it were correct.

> The Earth is a sphere, not a circle.

The earth is an oblate spheroid, not a sphere.

> The earth is an oblate spheroid

To a first order approximation, such as would be suitable for a discussion on an Internet forum, the earth is basically a sphere...

> They thought the Earth was a flat disk back then.

What "they" are you talking about? Europeans haven't thought the earth was flat since the beginning of recorded history. It seems reasonably safe to extend that viewpoint to Mediterraneans.

>They thought the Earth was a flat disk back then. //

Evidence?

FWIW the word here used for "circle" (in the ancient Hebrew, chuwg, [1]) is that used for the arch or vault [a bi-concave ceiling] of the skies; they'd need to also consider the skies to be a disc for it to make sense that it should be interpreted as disc in the Isaiah 40:22 [2] reference. I think the most obstructive interpretation would still need to be something like "dome" - definitely not flat.

So, why not a flat circle? Well there are other words used for that exact thing, as in 2 Chronicles 4 / or 1 Kings 7:23 [3]:

>Now [Solomon] made the sea of cast metal [of the altar] ten cubits from brim to brim, circular in form, and its height was five cubits, and thirty cubits in circumference. //

This is the word for the plane shape "circle" ('agol) that matches the brim of a cup (or giant bowl-shaped altar!).

Note that the figures leaves the brim at 5 - 30/2pi ~= a hands breadth under some interpretations, just as Kings 7:26 suggests. But that verse 7:26 also says that the brim was like that of a lily, not a hands-breadth at the brim but fine and dainty ... and here in lies a very interesting piece of gematria [use of letters for numbers] associated with the Kings passage [4] which in short form encodes in a variant word form qava (=111) for qav (=106) in the oldest Hebrew version of the passage [that in Kings] is the ratio 111/106; the implication being that the true figures should be 30/10 x 111/106 which gives an excellent approximation to pi.

[1] http://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?Stro...

[2] http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isa+40%3A22&vers...

[3] http://biblehub.com/niv/2_chronicles/4.htm or http://biblehub.com/1_kings/7-23.htm

[4] http://www.mathteacherctk.com/blog/2011/08/biblical-and-gema...

Yes, you can interpret circle as spherical if you wanted to. You can also interpret circle as a circular disk. Was it against all conventional wisdom at the time of this writing to hold a circular view of the world? Were there no other culture that thought the world was circular? I am no anthropologist so I can't comment on that last question.

This is just another example of vague statements.

> before any scientist can confirm it

Well, Isaiah was kicking about the Middle East in or around 650 BC. And somewhere in Greece at about this time, Pythagoras was one of a line of philosophers and astronomers who knew the earth was round. Eratosthenes comes along a couple of hundred years later, and he actually measured the circumference of the earth; pretty accurately too, considering the highly technical equipment (a well) he used!

In general, the ancients knew the earth was not flat, and had a pretty good idea of its shape and size a lot earlier than most people realise.

I just want to add that there are several references in the bible to there being an under the earth, and if we look at the latin where this is more clear, it doesn't mean inside, but below. The old testament is not scientifically accurate.

Believe whatever mythology you want, I will fully defend your right to do so. But do not try to force your agenda on those that don't follow or share your doctrine though made up fiction masquerading as science. Evolution through natural selection exists, it's demonstrable, and the only piece we do not have a precision view of is speciation. But not unlike the Higgs, when we have all the other pieces, we can extrapolate, and we have some pretty solid theories on how this happens, and evidence that through husbandry, we as humans have caused it to happen through human selection.

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