Ken Ham takes the opportunity of Craig Venter’s to misunderstand everything he studied, condemning atheism and making the weird argument that the scientific evidence supports his version of Bible interpretation.
We can skip past the familiar preamble where Ken Ham deplores the fact that Venter was an atheist who will be separated from God for eternity
, and jump ahead to the point where Ham agrees with the science.
1:32 Scientists at the National Institutes of Health recently announced that they had put together a draft of the entire sequence of the human genome and the researchers had unanimously declared there is only one race, the human race. Wow. only one. You know what? They were confirming the Bible’s history. Now, they didn’t say that. Of course, I’m saying that, but that’s what they were really doing. This was observational science. They obtained DNA from people groups all over the world, and they sequenced the human genome.
…
You know what should have happened at that stage? I’ll tell you what should have happened back then. Christian leaders all over the world and Christians should have jumped up and said, “Told you so.” See, if you believe the Bible, if pastors had have taught Genesis as history, Genesis 1:11, we would all know that we all go back to one man, one woman. That’s that’s the biblical history and it’s real history. And so therefore, there’s only one race biologically, which would mean from a perspective of biology, there’s no such thing as interracial marriage and no such thing either as biracial children or anything like that.
It’s very strange that all those Southern Baptists who fervently studied the Bible somehow came to a very different conclusion, that black people were a different and inferior race, and that miscegenation was a terrible evil. I guess the Bible wasn’t as clear as he thinks it is. The Southern Baptists have long lobbied for segregation, and they now tie that belief in the separation of races to their positions on transgender and gay issues. A few years ago, Republicans voted against the Respect for Marriage Act, a bill that would have protected same-sex and interracial marriage. I guess they hadn’t read their Bibles.
I agree that everyone, whether they are Christian or not, should jump up and state their support for the science that shows all humans come from a common ancestor. But they should also realize that this very same science, the science that agrees with their biblical perspective, also says that all life on Earth is descended from a common ancestor — that humans are related to chimpanzees and iguanas and blobfish and insects and bacteria. It’s real history! It was determined by observational science
, his imaginary category, therefore it must be true.
He will never accept that. His version of science is one that only allows confirmation of his prior beliefs, i.e. it isn’t science at all.
Then he launches into some dogmatic garbage straight from the Discovery Institute.
3:11 Here was his team sequencing DNA. And DNA is not just a molecule. It’s not just chemistry. We now know that DNA is the most complex information system, language system in the entire universe. Zillions of bits of information in the DNA of living things on this planet. And DNA has the information to make the code system to read the DNA. DNA is the software of life. There’s no question about it. Codes only come from an intelligence. Information can only come from information from an intelligence. DNA cries out in the beginning, God. But he was an atheist doing good science, observational science, sequencing the human genome, and that’s observational science. They admitted there’s only one race which confirms the Bible’s history.
DNA may be the software of life
, but we have no cause to believe codes only come from an intelligence
. Mice make baby mice without an advanced degree in bioinformatics; biology is a mindless exercise in chemistry and physics. And mice have roughly the same amount of information in their genomes as do human beings. DNA doesn’t cry out anything.
Mice make baby mice without an advanced degree in bioinformatics…
Not necessarily: please review relevant documents from Douglas Adams.
Gene Editing Could Make Cane Toad-Resistant ‘Super Quolls’ Within a Year, Colossal Biosciences Says
It’s too bad the original designer didn’t think of that in the first place.
Ken Ham?
Hey, that astronaut (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Ham) never said ..
Oh wait you mean that other Ken Ham. Again, sigh.
” we all go back to one man, one woman.”
Well, yeah, but not the man and woman you are thinking of. The actual man and woman didn’t even live at the same time.
Larpar @4
It is complicated. Some Denisovans in the east got DNA from older “shadow” archaic humans that got it from erectus. These fragments were then passed on to extant human populations in oceania or Tibet.
As for anatomically modern humans in africa, they also got DNA from “shadow” populations.
The more we learn, the messier it gets. This guarantees no fundamentalist will ever understand what we are talking about.
These quolls look cute. Their GM offspring should take over the continent from the asshole politicians that are running that continent.
.
Problem is, they are more toxic than cane toads, having been fed on Murdoch media all their lives.
Hmm…Yautja predators?
These are assertions without data or facts and may be dismissed without data or facts. He is wrong here.
The claim that information can only come from an intelligence is also empirically wrong. We see information created by natural processes all the time.
That is arguable.
The human brain is usually claimed to be the most complex system in the universe. It is the most complex system on planet earth anyway.
We know very little about the details of any information systems besides the ones on planet earth. There could be millions of such systems, some of which are more complex than ours.
Didn’t Ken Ham used to bring the stupid at Townhall on the regular? I remember that he gave Hugh Hewitt and Glenn Reynolds a run for their money in the stupid department.
Ken, yes, DNA is just a molecule, and it’s not even a very complicated molecule. And yes, what DNA “does”, and what it “is”, is just chemistry. As a matter of fact, everything that anything “does” or “is”, in the sense that you mean, is just chemistry.
And no, as raven @7 says, DNA is not a complex information system, or any kind of “information” system, and it does not require intelligence to form or to work. It not a code, it has nothing in common with software, and it doesn’t “cry out” any damn thing except the ordinary workings of chemistry.
PZ has already found out, Ken, that you can’t read, so it’s useless to tell you, please get a gen chem and an organic chem textbook and learn something. But, even if you could read, you’ve proved over and over that you’re not willing to learn anything, so, never mind.
But then, no whining when you make such stupid and ignorant statements and are told the chemical facts. Observational, BTW.
Another of his claims is readily falsifiable:
This is wrong in so many ways; here are a few:
• How about the RNA in all those viruses? Not to mention the various forms of RNA found in cells, and we’re just not going to get into the relationship among mRNA, tRNA, DNA, and… oh, wait, that might require understanding of undergraduate-level biochemistry so it’s not fair.
• Every human-created language is more complex than DNA. DNA expresses meaning only by denotation; it takes human-created languages to reach connotation, let alone imagery and other implications.
• Neglecting the communication fault that “zillions” is an undefined quantity — probably similar to Humpty Dumpty’s invocation of “glory” as meaning “a good knock-down battle,” just as with so much of Ham’s other writings in which he redefines terms to mean what he thinks will advance his various prejudices — he rather fails to account for the duplication problem. No matter how “zillions” is defined, the actual amount of information is substantially smaller than the number of molecules out there because of duplication, both chromosome-to-chromosome in individual cells and throughout any multicellular organism.
• All of which illustrates one of the problems in responding to the “argument from ignorance” couched in theological terms: It takes a lot more verbiage to explain even the fallacies, without diving into the evidence. Worse, while one is busy refuting the fallacies those speakers are usually busy spewing forth even more of them.
@9– DNA is an information system. DNA forms a code, transcribed to RNA (another code), then converted to an amino acid sequence.
Ham is wrong because (a) information, even complex information, is not by itself proof of design by intelligence, and (b) the DNA/RNA information system is not the most complex in the universe—as Jaws says, every human language is vastly more complex. Ham is just prattling out the same hoary old errors and fallacies for a proudly ignorant audience. SOP.
chrislawson, linguistically sloppy, suggests design.
Humans can model the sequence as discrete data, but physically speaking, DNA operates as a complex macromolecule governed by thermodynamics, electromagnetism, and chemical affinity. Adenine binds to thymine not because it obeys a ‘code,’ but because hydrogen bonding patterns and molecular geometry make that configuration energetically favorable.
No less analog than digital.
@birgerjohansson #5, larpar was surely specifically referring to so-called Mitochondrial Eve, which follows just the evolution of our mitochondria (inherited from the mother’s egg but not even part of human DNA) back to our most recent matrilineal common ancestor. Following any other bit of inherited information (such as our Y-chromosome) back in time would lead to a different common ancestor at a different time. The full ancestry of all our inheritance is indeed quite messy and complicated and shadowy.
I wonder how Ken would explain the fact that we share more than four alleles at a couple of HLA loci with other primates. Adam and Eve and Steve and Lilith too?
Ken Ham in a nutshell: “I’m too intentionally ignorant to understand the questions, but I know the answer is always ‘God’.”
Moarscienceplz @15, do you perhaps mean questions like “Who is responsible for telling religious bigots to knock it off?” Well, obviously, it must be {insert name of/referent to relevant, usually self-anointed, deity here}.
It’s interesting that Ham is still pretending to believe in universalism, most of his fellow travelers have just shed their false faces and are openly proud of their bible supported racism, misogyny, etc. It’s like Ham hasnt kept up over the past 10 years, Shapiro coyld tell him the faux liberal pieties and dog whistles are t enough anymore. He isnt gonna have good luck grifting his hogs unless he starts throwing them the good good bloody meat.