swanny

Trof, on 31 August 2012 - 03:44 AM, said:

Trof, put yourself into the shoes (or sandals?) of the ancient people for a second. How would you try to describe how people came to be? You only have four elements to work with: earth, air, water and fire. Well, it's pretty clear we're not air or fire, so maybe we come from modified earth. And we're clearly not made of stone, because we're soft, so perhaps we were made from earth mixed with water (because we excrete wet sloppy stuff, and we need to drink), so "logically" we were made from clay. That seems to make sense, given how little they knew about anything...

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I guess it also matters what part of the Bible you are talking about. The Bible was written down over a couple of thousand years, so there is a huge historical factor to consider. The first part was, in all probability, based on oral tradition (which is more accurate than we moderns think, as it was the only way ANY knowledge was passed on), plus there is history, poetry, prophecy, law, theology. Some parts are clearly not meant to be taken literally, others definitely are literal. Some parts are similar to other ancient writings, but lots of it are totally different. It has very human figures who are clearly reognisable even today (I think everyone knows of brothers who fight to get the best share- Jacob and Esau, or men who tell half-truths to avoid conflict-Abraham, or women who have falsely accused a man who has spurned them -Potiphar's wife and Joseph, otherwise good men who get themselves into all kinds of marital trouble because they weren't where they were meant to be - King David and Bathsheba). And that's jsut the old testament, the Jewish bible.

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Clearly, the Bible doesn't have the monopoly, and I don't think any serious Christian would say that no other book has any meaningful moral material.

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Wow. big call! I would recommend a bit of caution, here. Not only is that incredibly offensive to Christians and Muslims, Jesus is widely acknowledged as one of the world's greatest moral teachers...

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Actually, that argument has been well and truly discredited, as we have found more and more ancient papyri and codices (the forerunnbooks).  

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Actually, the Bible is unique. It is the foundation of three of the world's great religions, and the three major monotheist religions. It has been more deeply examined, criticised, pulled apart, translated and spread than any other document, and its teachings are the highest moral code in terms of how we should live together in a society. And if it has been massively advertised, it's because of Christianity's ability to spread through the world to all people (no matter what you may think of the message...)

So I won't go completely overboard with the other things you have written about, and turn this into a full-scale apologetic (sorry, I do have a tendancy to over-respond...), can I just say that while I see your point, I have a pile of reasons for not agreeing with it. Maybe it will have to wait until I write a book... :-)

leelee, on 30 August 2012 - 09:35 PM, said:

Actually that is what a dead religion is all about. Unfortunately, that probably means many religions are dead, relying on unthinking compliance to what you are told... I guess I've been fortunate to never go to church where that attitude rules.

I'm not sure that the text has to be consistent with what we understand about the universe. It was, after all, the jewish people's understanding of how everything has come t obe as it is. And how would you write the account to make it consistent with 16S data? God first made a bacteia (something invisible until the microscope was invented), then He changed it again and again and again, making bigger and bigger and more different creatures, turning some into fish, some into birds, sone into... Kinda clunky, don't you think?

leelee, on 30 August 2012 - 08:17 PM, said:

But any piece of writing has to mean something to the people of that time, or else it would not be written. Have you ever heard of a piece of writing from the past that was predicated in modern-day concepts? By that I mean concepts that have only come about recently.  No, all writings have to make sense to the people to whom it was written. So, straight back at you, it doesn't matter that God already knew all of the nuances of RNA and DNA, they weren't included in the narrative because the people he addressed had no concept of them.

As to the Bible being God's word, it describes itself as being written by men (and therefore meaningful to their own contemporaries) as they were carried along by God's spirit. That is not to say they were in some kind of trance state when they wrote, but their thoughts were directed or guided to communicate God's words. I suppose some might then protest about how we know that they didn't just write down anything and call it "the word of God". Well, that is where you need to consider how a letter or a book fits into the rest of what God has said. In the 3rd century, several councils met to discuss what should, and should not be included in the Christian Bible, and I believe a similar thing happened centuries before with the Jewish Bible. But even before that, during the late 1st and early 2nd centuries, the various church leaders wrote to each other frequently, discussing what was God's revelation, and what wasn't, and it wasn't just a matter of tossing a coin... Documents were compared very carefully, and those documents that were rejected were rejected for a number of reasons.

If you really want an example of God's word, though, you need go no further than his own "logos" (whence we get "logic" and the suffix "-ology"), Jesus. Like I said, you have to do the research for yourself, you can't just rely on other people's filtering of what they have read about what others have thought about what they have read.

Without wanting to get things started on the wrong foot, but I just can't help myself here , ascacioc, isn't your attitude a bit closed minded? ("...how can you be a scientist if you are not open minded? (I cannot see how somebody who believes in God is open-minded)."). Not saying anything, just saying...

I think both curtis and ascacioc are forgetting a very significant factor: the hardline creationists who hold to a literal 7-day creation are not the major voice in Christianity.I am convinced that they are misusing the text as an argument "for" just as much as hardline evolutionists misuse the text as an argument "against". Remember how I said that the text was written 3500 years ago, before the modern understandig of the world? Clearly, that means evolutionists cannot use the text as a proof text by comparing what was written with what we now know (For myself, I can't see how an old earth with the evolution of species can be wrong). It also means that creationists are mistaken when they try to make the document (which was written as Hebrew poetry)  into a modern historical summation of how things have come to be as they are.

Seriously, this is a total red herring when it comes to reasonable discussions about religion. No religion at all is centred on its creation narrative, but on the teachings of its leaders. As I said before, Christianity is not a philosophical position: anyone who tries to argue through it or against it (or for it) as though it is a philosophical position is going to come to false conclusions. The only way to get to know what Christianity (or Judaism, or Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or even Flying Spaghetti Monsterism!) is about is to actually do the research yourself and read the book, in your native language. As you say, ball's in your court...

ascacioc, it is a great ptiy that you were told such a simplistic statement about an atheist being someone who believes in evolution. Even more than that, your fellow PhD student gave a very poor response to you. I am most glad though that you were not involved in my PhD, nor that of people like Lennox and Collins... And I will lob the ball straight back : when God created life, he introduced differences in the 16S RNA as a means to separate the different species. (That last point was made tongue in cheek...)

Hey curtis! Interesting question, but you need to look at the context of the original writings. A totally pre-scientific time, when everyone "knew" the earth was the centre of everything, and was flat to boot. Male semen actually contained tiny, tiny fully-formed people that just grew inside a woman. Blood was a complete mystery, but the blood of animals contained the essence of that animal (drinking it would give you the characteristsics of that animal: lion's blood, anyone?).

Remember that the creation account in Genesis was written down over 3500 years ago, and the scientific method has only been around for 500 years or so, and I think I am being generous there. Considering the fact that even in the early-middle 20th century science still thought that proteins, rather than nucleic acid, constituted the hereditary material, you might want to cut other people a bit of slack...

Speaking as an committed Christian, all I can say is that Christianity should not be thought of as a philosophy or a way of thinking, but as the response to historical events (I would also guess that Jews and Muslims would say the same thing). And as for your comments about religious people not really being scientists, I think that Michael Faraday, John Lennox (who has destroyed Dawkins' arguments on a number of occasions) and Francis Collins (who led the public Human Genmoe effort, and who now runs the NIH), just to name three, may dispute your statement...

The problem I have encountered is that, after I point out the massive doses given to cattle, someone will come back and say "Ah, but what do they know about long-term, very low level doses?" , which is crazy talk to my mind . High-level doses do not have an acute toxicity, nor a long-term cancer-risk factor, so the body can handle EtBr. How do they think that the body can't process ultra-low levels? I mean, what route of entry do these people envisage? The BP of ethidium is over 200C, so there won't be any in the steam that can be generated, thus no aerosol problem. You could drink it or inject it, I suppose, but that's what they did to the cattle, and as has already been pointed out, neither the cattle, nor their offspring, nor the herdsmen who lived with and on the cattle developed cancers. What we need is an epidemiological study of cancer rates across 30 to 40 years in molecular biologists vs scientists who do not use EtBr. Any volunteers?

Sometimes I think I work in a sheltered workshop for intellectually gifted people...

fortunate, on Sep 4 2009, 02:08 AM, said:

As far as I can tell from the protocol, the 55-72 ramp is for a multiplex assay using their primer sets. In your case, where there are only 2 sets of primers to consider, you could use a narrower range, if you like. I think you need to be able to make the temperature change, rather than just have a single temp.

As for  the 5 minute extension, my first guess would that the enzyme is not very fast at the lower temperatures (anything below 65, as memory serves), so for the first couple of minutes your DNA polymerase is crawling along the template. Then as the temperature rises above 65, the reaction rate increases. If your primers have similar Tms, you might be able to shorten the extension time, and also reduce the temperature range.

What extension times and temp do you use for single primer sets? You should use the longer extension time, and lower temperature as your first parameters.