I promised John Harshman for several months that I would start a discussion about common design vs. common descent, and I’d like to keep my word to him as best as possible.
Strictly the speaking common design and common descent aren’t mutually exclusive, but if one invokes the possibility of recent special creation of all life, the two being mutually exclusive would be inevitable.
If one believes in a young fossil record (YFR) and thus likely believes life is young and therefore recently created, then one is a Young Life Creationist (YLC). YEC (young earth creationists) are automatically YLCs but there are a few YLCs who believe the Earth is old. So evidence in favor of YFR is evidence in favor of common design over common descent.
One can assume for the sake of argument the mainstream geological timelines of billions of years on planet Earth. If that is the case, special creation would have to happen likely in a progressive manner. I believe Stephen Meyer and many of the original ID proponents like Walter Bradley were progressive creationists.
Since I think there is promising evidence for YFR, I don’t think too much about common design vs. common descent. If the Earth is old, but the fossil record is young, as far as I’m concerned the nested hierarchical patterns of similarity are due to common design.
That said, for the sake of this discussion I will assume the fossil record is old. But even under that assumption, I don’t see how phylogenetics solves the problem of orphan features found distributed in the nested hierarchical patterns of similarity. I should point out, there is an important distinction between taxonomic nested hierarchies and phylogenetic nested hierarchies. The nested hierarchies I refer to are taxonomic, not phylogenetic. Phylogeneticsits insist the phylogenetic trees are good explanations for the taxonomic “trees”, but it doesn’t look that way to me at all. I find it revolting to think giraffes, apes, birds and turtles are under the Sarcopterygii clade (which looks more like a coelacanth).
Phylogeny is a nice superficial explanation for the pattern of taxonomic nested hierarchy in sets of proteins, DNA, whatever so long as a feature is actually shared among the creatures. That all breaks down however when we have orphan features that are not shared by sets of creatures.
The orphan features most evident to me are those associated with Eukaryotes. Phylogeny doesn’t do a good job of accounting for those. In fact, to assume common ancestry in that case, “poof” or some unknown mechanism is indicated. If the mechanism is unknown, then why claim universal common ancestry is a fact? Wouldn’t “we don’t know for sure, but we believe” be a more accurate statement of the state of affairs rather than saying “universal common ancestry is fact.”
So whenever orphan features sort of poof into existence, that suggests to me the patterns of nested hierarchy are explained better by common design. In fact there are lots of orphan features that define major groups of creatures. Off the top of my head, eukaryotes are divided into unicellular and multicellular creatures. There are vetebrates and a variety of invertebrates. Mammals have the orphan feature of mammary glands. The list could go on and on for orphan features and the groups they define. Now I use the phrase “orphan features” because I’m not comfortable using formal terms like autapomorphy or whatever. I actually don’t know what would be a good phrase.
So whenever I see an orphan feature that isn’t readily evolvable (like say a nervous system), I presume God did it, and therefore the similarities among creatures that have different orphan features is a the result of miraculous common design not ordinary common descent.
This simply is not true.
The fossil record could be relatively recent and common descent could still be true.
Many YEC thinks the fossil record was a result of a global flood that took place a few thousand years ago. So the fossil record would tell us nothing about the evolution of life before the flood. It follows that YFR does not weigh in against CD.
Not only don’t you provide any evidence for common design, your whole “orphan features” nonsense would seem counter to common design as much as it would be counter to common descent. Not that miracles can’t save common design, but then they could also save common descent as well, so long as we’re just making up stuff.
Most importantly, as always we get no explanation for the slavish derivation of features in organisms (quite unlike manufactured goods), and no evidence for common design. Sal just handwaves, and because that’s good enough for him, it’s supposed to be good enough for science.
Glen Davidson
But what about antifa?
Given it is a recent phenomenon, that’s common design.
Especially those with a nervous system.
Sal,
This is not the post you promised. You haven’t even tried to present any evidence for common design. You haven’t even tried to explain anything by common design. I also have to say that this was an extraordinarily rambling post, worthy of Byers. Months go by after your promise, and this is all you have to show?
You talk about orphan features, but you give no examples, so there’s nothing to discuss. And let’s be clear: even if we accept your explanation for some “orphan feature”, that still leaves the question of common descent within whatever clade shares these features. If you want to argue for poofing of eukaryotes, or animals, or whatever, that still leaves all the groups within. And of course your criteria for “orphan” seem to be no more than personal incredulity.
Common design is supposed to explain the nested hierarchy of life. A proper post would advance an argument for why common design would be expected to display such a hierarchy.
If you aren’t going to talk about YEC, YLI, or YFC, there was no reason to bring any of them up. (But I wish you would attempt to defend those in a post, hopefully one with more meat than this one.)
Finally, your notion of what “Sarcopterygii” means is stuck in the middle of the last century. What you mean by “taxonomic hierarchy” is apparently whatever somebody believed a hundred years ago or perhaps more. I suppose you find it revolting to think of giraffes, etc., as sarcopterygians because it makes you uncomfortable to be reminded of evolutionary transformation. Correct?
This was my understanding of what I promised when I promised it. We have apparently different views of what was meant by what the discussion was to be about.
Chromatin is not something in prokaryotes. It is a common design only in eukaryotes. Chromatin does not agree with universal common ancestry. You don’t find that to be evidence. Ok, so what would count as evidence of common design for you.
One more thing: I am unable to see how someone could reconcile an old earth with young life or young fossil record, since the evidence for an old earth is the same as the evidence for old life and old fossil record. Some day, perhaps you can explain that.
Absolutely NOT!
Designers don’t necessarily build things conforming to some pre-defined expectation of you or I. It is sufficient to show that common descent is a BAD explanation. I provided evidence for that with Chromatin.
Richard Owen when he coined the word “homology” defined homology in terms of common designs conforming to a pre-defined plan. Convergences and analogies are examples of common designs conforming to a plan.
That said, such hierarchies defined with Orphans is evidence against common descent.
I have no idea what you mean the discussion to be about, since you offer nothing capable of being discussed. What is your argument in favor of common design as opposed to common descent? Given that you presumably don’t think each species was separately created, you probably believe that common descent is the explanation for some of the data. So before we can even talk about this you would have to make clear where descent leaves off. What are the “kinds”?
OK, finally something specific. But so what if chromatin isn’t found in prokaryotes? How is that evidence of common design? Is a feature lacking in group X but present in group Y evidence for the common design of X and Y? Evidence for the common design of Y only? If the latter, how do you tell which features are evidence of common design and which are common descent? Is the absence of legs in fish evidence of the common design of tetrapods? Or is there some special criterion that must be satisfied in order for a feature to be evidence of common design?
You need to present some scenario and then offer evidence for it. First the scenario: How many eukaryote “kinds” were separately created with the common design feature of chromatin? (By the way, have you seen any of the literature on archaeal chromatin?)
Exactly. So why is there a nested hierarchy of life? If nested hierarchy is not an expectation of common design, then common design can’t be an explanation for that hierarchy.
Your problem is that you interpret common design as being synonymous with separate creation. No, “common design” is the general creationist attempt at an explanation for nested hierarchy. “Separate creation” doesn’t imply common design; in fact one could argue that it implies that there should be no similarities among “kinds” except for those necessary to function and that any such similarities should be identities rather than nested hierarchies. But that’s another argument; I only mention it to show that common design and separate creation are not synonyms. Another thing one might mention is that separate creation should not assume creation by a single entity; there could as well be thousands of unrelated creators.
All 10 billion species on earth fit into the nested hierarchy of life? I think Harshman is not even bluffing…lol
No John, that is false. He gave an example of the nervous system. Did you even read the OP?
That’s an example for you John, right from the OP.
Uhh, something that is predicted to be the product of “common design”. As in, if all life was designed by common design, we should expect to find X.
There is no chromatin in prokaryotes doesn’t seem to follow from that hypothesis. Can you help me out here?
Oh by the way, Archaea have histones, and it makes chromatin:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11738046
The archaeal histone-fold protein HMf organizes DNA into bona fide chromatin fibers.
Tomschik M, Karymov M A, Zlatanova J, Leuba S H.
Structure. 2001 Dec;9(12):1201-11. PMID: 11738046
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9783158
Histones and nucleosomes in Archaea and Eukarya: a comparative analysis.
Pereira S L , Reeve J N.
Extremophiles. 1998 Aug;2(3):141-8. PMID: 9783158
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23240084
Chromatin is an ancient innovation conserved between Archaea and Eukarya.
Ammar R , Torti D, Tsui K, Gebbia M, Durbic T, Bader G D, Giaever G, Nislow C.
Elife. 2012 Dec 13;1:e00078. DOI:10.7554/eLife.00078
Notice how it’s in Archaea (which are the putative ancestral host to the mitochondrial and plastid endosymbionts). The organism that would go on to evolve the nucleus, and inherit it’s chromatin forming histone molecules from it’s archaeal ancestor.
So since designers can elect to design anything and everything, even things that look like they evolved, then we can have no expectations about what design would look like. That’s essentially what you seem to be saying. The designer is so unlike you and I, we can’t even speculate on what it would want, or how it would go about achieving it.
How can something be evidence for a hypothesis so broad it predicts nothing in particular over and above something else?
And yet here, in contradiction to the sentence above it, you now posit that designers design things according to some plan. What plan? Weren’t you saying we can’t know the plan?
The plan is that some things are sorta similar, so common design. But also when you think they’re dissimilar (chromatin in A but not in B), that’s also common design.
What isn’t common design then?
You’re welcome to name a single one that doesn’t.
Nuh…I will wait for you and Harshaman to show first that all 10 billion of the species on earth fit into the nested hierarchy of life…
I mean first Harshman and now you wouldn’t make such an assumption unless you knew that at least 9.9 billion of the species fit into the nested hierarchy of life, would you?
You two wouldn’t try to deceive people, who may trust you that you would know this for a fact, would you?
If you didn’t, that would be contemptible, wouldn’t it?
Please say it isn’t so…
10 billion?
I can Trump that.
Bafflegab!
So we have all these young fossils in old rocks and sediments (since we’re assuming an old earth). Presumably deposited there by a miraculous act of of the Common Designer.
I’m a Young Rock Creationist. The earth is old, but the rocks and sediments are young. I believe this is due to Common Deposition by a Common Depositor.
I think we know the real reason Salvador deleted my posts from this threads at UD, lol.
I don’t see how Common Design survives in the molecular age. One would have to suppose that nothing was nonfunctional for ‘like organisms need like DNA’ to get even close to getting of the ground. But it can’t even waddle. Indels, silent substitutions, SNPs, polymorphisms, transposons, viral inserts, inversions and other karyotype rearrangements, junk DNA of some fraction, even if we quibble about ENCODE – it is preposterous to suppose that every single one of every single one of these should cluster on the same trees as genes and morphological features, if they weren’t inherited.
Looks like Harshman hasn’t read the news from the world-renowned population geneticist Joe Felsenstein…If he had, he probably wouldn’t have made such wild guess…But who knows? lol
Here it is: http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/betting-on-the-weasel/comment-page-13/
That’s one of the reasons I took up such a hobby…I’m trying to find 2 evolutionists who would agree on something major other than just evolution..lol
ok, I finally made it all the way through the OP. Whew.
If the fossil record was young, that would be evidence for common design. But Salvador is going to give everyone break and go ahead and assume that the fossil record is actually old. So toss away all that evidence for common design.
So what’s left. Something called “orphan features.” Orphan features are evidence for common design.Take the nervous system, for example. But wait, don’t nervous systems appear in the fossil record? So what are they orphans of, exactly?
And if orphan features are evidence of common design, why should that even be so? You have all these different features cropping up, all so very different, and that’s evidence for common design, because they are all so very different?
*scratches head*
His actual post was
By his context the 10 billion seems to refer to an estimate of all species both extinct and presently living. Mr google puts the number at five billion extinct which would put Joe’s estimate as high.
newton,
comment #48“Joe FelsensteinJoe Felsenstein Post authorAugust 23, 2017 at 1:00 am
J-Mac: I do not know about others but I’ve been waiting breathlessly for you to tell us how many of the 10 billion species on the earth are in the transition into another species…
Did you cook up some math? What does the population genetic say about that?
Don’t keep us in suspense!
I agree with dazz: all of them. Every species is busy changing, and if we wait long enough it will change enough that anyone will call it a different species.
They too are still evolving, they just have a low fitness.
ETA: But that could just be temporary.
No. He specifically mentions species descended from those on the ark. Do you think Joe meant to include the five million species that have gone extinct in the past few thousand years? What does your Mr. Google have to say about that?
I see in John a rather hilarious figure. He actually expected a meaningful post on common design from Salvador.
#HopeSpringsEternal
5 billion not 5 million!!!
Billion
He say check this crazy shit out:
Per answers in genesis
In Genesis 6:19–20, the Bible says that two of every sort of land vertebrate (seven of the “clean” animals) were brought by God to the Ark. Therefore, dinosaurs (land vertebrates) were represented on the Ark.
Creationist researcher John Woodmorappe has calculated that Noah had on board with him representatives from about 8,000 animal genera (including some now-extinct animals), or around 16,000 individual animals as a maximum number.
So every land vertebrate that isn’t wandering around went extinct after the flood.
Then again Joe might have hit the b by mistake
How many dinosaur species do you believe were on the ark?
What’s a decimal point between friends?
Which movie version?
Not among friends…no… 🙂
But even if a friend wants to convince me that 10 billion species have evolved on earth in all the time available and all of them are still evolving and transitioning into other species and he can’t point out even a 100 of them or 10, I would say the decimal point is very important…wouldn’t you think?
Because how does Joe Felsenstein know that all 10 billion species are evolving and transitioning into other species???
Is he making it up?
He’s using one of those alternative definitions of evolution. It’s a typical Joe F. equivocation.
The Disney one. The one where the dinosaurs don’t go extinct millions of years before the flood.
Right, the time frame is what makes the whole Flood thing unbelievable.
All of evolutionist, when they talk about evolution, they talk about that organisms change…That is not what Darwin wrote in their bible!
He wrote On the Origin of Species and not on change within species…
Change withing species was know thousands of years before Darwin…
J-Mac corrects Mung:
Mung compounds the error:
This “orders of magnitude” concept tends to baffle IDers. Here’s phoodoo, from a recent comment:
You might tell your friend he is confused, the estimated 5 billion species that have gone extinct are no longer evolving or transitioning. They have no living members, no reproduction, no evolution. Another mystery of evolution
Not because of common descent because of the orphan features that aren’t mechanically feasible. You don’t seem to appreciate the absurdity of invoking common descent without statistical miracles for the explanation of Eukaryotic architecture. If a theory of common descent needs statistical miracles to make the orphan features of taxonomically nested hierarchical arrangement feasible, it is little different from special creation.
Phylogenists don’t seem to appreciate the engineering difficulties involved because well, they’re phylogenists, they don’t actually construct functional machines. That’s why engineers, who are increasingly recruited to work in biology, don’t have much regard for phylogenetic explanations of orphan machines since such explanations are essentially vacuous answers equivalent to “evolution did it” with no mechanical details. That’s little different than “God did it” except, “God did it” is more honest as it highlight the miraculous transformations required.
Further, intelligence does not follow simple definable expectation, it is capricious, so it’s absurd you’d be assuming you can read someone’s mind and predict their behavior in so much detail as to say, “I expect and intelligence will make prokaryotes and eukaryotes.”
Richard Owen who actually coined the word “homology” said creatures follow some pre-defined plan and architecture and thus have variations on a theme. That actually is the closest thing to explaining nested hierarchies.
Also, you never seem to get the problem nested taxonomic hierarchies pose for common descent. Here is what common design with nested hierarchies defined along the lines of Orphan systems:
That is easy to see just by observation. A bird does not follow a fish plan, nor a giraffe a prokaryotic plan. This agrees with Genesis 1: “God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds.”
Contrast this with the jumbled mess of a phylogenetic hierarchy created by force-fitting data:
Now which theory lines up better with reality? Common design which defines taxonomic nested hieararchies which are demarcated by orhphan systems or the jumbled mess of phylogeny?
Rumraket,
Thanks for pointing out my mistake. That was worth the price of admission.
Chromatin does not exist in bacteria. Is that better. 🙂
Rumraket,
Do you then think the wiki entry is wrong on Chromatin:
LoL!
keiths has absolutely ZERO sense of humor. It’s simply not possible that I wrote what I wrote knowing full well that it was a joke.
I feel sorry for you keiths, I really do.
stcordova,
Or mitochondria/plastids. Curious, no?
Mitochondria aren’t bacteria unless you believe they are. They are organelles in eukaryotes. 🙂
stcordova,
Still curious, no?
If mitochondria have chromatin, wouldn’t this count against endo symbiosis. I’m curious. You tell me.