A brief note to a regular reader.
The Darwinian “tree of life” is not an actual tree. It is a diagram of relationships. Therefore it can survive without having established its “roots”.
It could be granted that the origin of life was artificial, or even supernatural, and the theory of evolution would still be applicable within its domain.
This is not the first time the error in the essay challenge has been pointed out, but it costs us little to hope that a sincere individual, in no way guilty of peddling a religiopolitical agenda, would acknowledge the mistake.
I have asked, multiple times, for an ID version indicating where the breaks in the ‘Darwinian’ tree occur. The most responsive answer was that it was too difficult an undertaking. So I suggested scoping the problem to something manageable; chordata, mammalia or even carnivora … and that’s as far as ‘my’ challenge got.
ID scientists would need to develop methods to identify the bits within the genome that are IC (or whatever the abbreviation de jour may be). Logically, shouldn’t this be a top priority?
But surely it must be necessary to know how language originated in order to know that languages evolved.
Or, you could be able to think.
Glen Davidson
Yes, it really is a remarkably silly argument. It’s like saying that it is impossible to explore your bodily growth and development through childhood and puberty without knowing all the details about your parents having sex.
Truly idiotic. No, we don’t need to know how life originated to be able to explore how it subsequently evolved and diversified over the next >3.5 billion years.
OK, a tree with no roots, and a tree with no trunk, and a tree with no branches, and a tree with no twigs, and a tree with no leaves.
Not much of a tree. But it’s your tree, and it’s your metaphor.
Or did that fact somehow escape your attention?
Mung,
So every entry on the ‘tree’ is disconnected from every other: no macro-evolution and no micro-evolution for every single entry is a de novo creation by the Intelligent Designer(s)?
Is that your personal opinion or do you think that is the premise of Intelligent Design theory?
It’s your tree. Own it.
Mung,
It’s a diagram that looks similar to a tree, without actually being a tree. And from what I’ve read of Intelligent Design theory and comments by ID scientists, more of ‘tree’ than not is true for micro-evolutionary relationships are indeed real. Thus ID theory would likely use the very same diagram, but update it with breaks indicative of intervention by the Intelligent Designer(s).
I would be very interested if you have proof otherwise, say an actual ID diagram of life’s relationships that is unlike a ‘tree’. Please do share. I mean that sincerely.
[FYI gone for the weekend, so I won’t be able to respond until Monday at the earliest]
http://ncse.com/files/images/NeoCreo_Orchard.img_assist_custom.jpg
http://www.soulcare.org/images/baraminology_orchard_evo-tree470.gif
Half in jest;
Whatever became of evolutionary lawns?
🙂
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/11/46
There you go, deal with it. (my emphasis in bold)
Notice, Mung, that the above STOL was compiled from single-celled organismal lineages. Bacteria and archaea, which we know have much, much higher rates of HGT than between large multicellular eukaryotes like plants and animals.
If we were to construct a similar STOL just for animals for example, the tree would be even clearer than it is for prokaryotes and archaea, to an extremely high degree.
A devastating critique as usual Mung, Bravo my dear fellow, Bravo!
I’m glad you can recognize metaphor when you see it Mung. I see at Uncommon, the reason of Liz is up against the piercing wit of Gregory; he writes ‘Elizabeth’ as ‘Elisabeth’, what a wonderfully trenchant mind that man/boy posesses.
Recently on a BBC Panorama documentary (sorry forget which) we were shown a tree of human evolution. The trunk was a huge African diverse genetic base, with spindly Asian, European, and Middle Eastern branches; we lost genetic diversity the further we drifted from our collective roots.
Tree
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_(graph_theory)
Thank you!
It’s one reason I am not a Biblical literalist.
But surely it’s the proponents of Darwin who are most in danger of reifying the tree metaphor?
Ah.”Surely”. There can be no answer to “surely”. You win Mung.
Mung, were you able to find an actual ID diagram of life’s relationships?
I linked in a baramin chart. It was a bit short on details.
davehooke,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A5t5_O8hdA
petrushka,
Yes I saw that, but it’s clearly a Creationist diagram. I’m giving ID theory the benefit of producing one of their own and/or to disassociate itself from the Creationist work.
Mung,
You’re not a biblical literalist? So you don’t make the bible real, you don’t reify it? Well done, reification of the bible is a true dead end for science, a killer to curiosity I think you could agree. Pass the anti-reification message on, your lot are slow on the uptake.
Seconded. I too would like to see Mung or any other ID-Creationist provide an actual ID diagram of life’s relationships, including timelines.
This is especially true after Meyer just dropped his Darwin’s Doubt Cambrian turd smack in the middle of the IDC punchbowl.
The great Irony of Meyer’s screed is that phylogenomics and comparative morphology/anatomy is apparently great for determining that there WAS a cambrian explosion “virtually overnight” and that all the major body plans of vertebrates were established there, but when it comes to determining relationships and timings, it’s suddenly not up to the task at all. How’s that for consistent logic?
Rumraket,
Have you read the book? No? Now that would be true irony. “Skepticism” based upon willful ignorance.
It’s your “tree.” Own it. Just try to not reify it.
Mung,
I did just that. So did others. The tree is a tool, it has been revised in the past and will certainly be revised many more times as new fossils are discovered and genetic evidence accumulates. None the less, the overall structure resembles a tree.
I hope you are equally skeptical and demonstrative of the “trees” (or “orchard”) implied by Intelligent Design and promoted by Creationism.
rhampton:
Fantastic! Just don’t reify it. It’s just a metaphor.
Who’s reifying it? The OP is a request that the ‘tree’ metaphor not be taken over-literally. You concur – that’s fab. Yet you act as if others here are guilty of the error the OP argues against.
I have read publicly available pieces of it. Considering how many errors I found in those pieces, and how crucial it is for his case to get those things right, I am perfectly justified in writing what I do, because the errors he makes have implications for his core thesis. It becomes untenable with those mistakes. He attempts to build a case on cherry picking, wilful ignorance (the very thing you accuse ME of) and
outright deception. And yes, we know it’s malicious intent and not just honest mistakes, because Meyer has been corrected on these mistakes several times before. Which means he ignores his critics and just keeps spouting demonstrable falsehoods.
Meyer is lying to you, Mung, and you only agree with him because you’re emotionally and psychologically predisposed to agree with his conclusion. That is, for religious reasons alone do you support him.
Going to deal with the reference I gave earlier at some point?
Over at ENV the gurus have settled on Doug Axe’s formula.
Argue that contemporary sequences are resistant to modification; therefore Cambrian sequences were also.
That’s just about all there is to Meyer’s argument.
I’d expect Cambrian sequences to be approximately as resistant to Axe’s changes as modern ones. It was only 550-odd million years ago.
It does somewhat depend on what sequences you pick, what you do to them, and what proportion of nonfatal changes occur amidst the damaged majority. Most-therefore-all is a common fallacy in these discussions. It’s probably got a name, likewise its corollary few-therefore-none.
My reading of the literature is that things were more permissive. I’ve seen that word used by the pros.
The problem isn’t so much with resistance to modification, I’d expect most sequences to be more or less constrained to be best at what they’re currently doing.
The problem is that Axe and co. neglect to consider the role of a changing environment. What may look like a fitness valley for an enzyme on some specific substrate, might be a peak on another substrate.
When Axe changes his enzyme and it has a reduced catalytic rate, or none at all, it is entirely possible it has increased catalytic rate on a related substrate. In fact this is often the case given that enzymes are often functionally promiscous. See for example:
Reconstruction of Ancestral Metabolic Enzymes Reveals Molecular Mechanisms Underlying Evolutionary Innovation through Gene Duplication
Petrushka:
Well, it was approximately 3 billion years after LUCA, who already had a substantial suite of protein coding genes. Residual cross-kingdom homology suggests that even in LUCA plasticity in individual proteins had been substantially reduced.
The issue at the Cambrian is related to developmental pathways. These are controlled by a small subset of the total genome, and relate to the interactions of the cells of a body – agglomeration, signalling, switching sequence, controlled cell death etc. It is probable that those pathways were more plastic when animal multicellularity was getting off the ground. But that’s a different issue from knocking out bits of an enzyme and drawing conclusions from its resistance to change. It depends what the enzyme does. If it’s not involved in a developmental pathway, its plasticity in the Cambrian is neither here nor there (but unlikely to be much different to now) . If it is involved in a developmental role, then clearly there are likely to be things you can’t do now that you could have done then.
Allan Miller,
Too late to edit, I should have said ‘biological polymer’, not ‘enzyme’.
That was my argument. I don’t have the technical expertise to write what you just wrote.
It seems to be the issue relevant to new body plans.
I don’t have the technical expertise to write what you just wrote.
Me either! 😉
From my understanding of Axe’s work, he tends to look at catalytic proteins, since you can determine ‘activity’ in the test tube. To the extent that ENV may be extrapolating such work to the Cambrian, they are looking at the wrong thing. It’s more probable that ‘new body plans’ involve changes to timers, promoters, inhibitors, nucleic acid and cellular binding sites, etc than novel or changed catalysts.
All rooted in DNA, one way or another, ultimate expression being via the translation system (ie: a protein product) or not (ie being a functional RNA transcript or a change to raw DNA/RNA that influences the binding of other molecules).
Reification (also known as concretism, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete, real event, or physical entity.
You all believe “the tree” is a real concrete entity. Admit it.
Equivocation, Mung? How sad. I thought you loved the truth.
Mung,
Can’t speak for anyone else, but I believe the tree represents our best understanding about the relationships of life. But as I said previously, I also believe the tree will be revised in the future as we learn more. Thus the tree can’t be real, but it certainly can be close enough to what is real that it can be a useful tool. In that respect, it’s no different then any other theory treated as “real”, like gravity.
Mung:
Don’t be daft. A ‘real concrete entity’ would have to have some singular existence in time. Clearly , the tree of lifeTM doesn’t. Do I also believe my family tree is a real concrete entity? Or, for that matter, a hierarchical data structure? What else do I believe?
Yes, I admit it. “the tree” is a real concrete entity. I admit it, because science has shown it.
Problem here is, you don’t even know what I’m admitting to believing. Just to make clear, the strawman you have in your head is not what I believe in. What I believe in, the “tree” I believe in, I already gave a reference for earlier in this thread.
Well he kinda shot himself in the foot when he used the word “entity” which can mean basically anything.