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.
Mung,
Of course not. He is trying to tutor me that it is wrong.
Parroting and cheerleading do not bring forth fruit. Just crackers.
That would probably qualify as independent.
I just want to know what people are claiming when they say the data sets are independent of one another and why they think independence is so important.
If they cannot explain it, I’ll understand. They are probably just repeating something they read on some atheist blog somewhere on the interweb. No actual understanding.
John Harshman,
I have down loaded it and will read it over the next couple of days. It looks like you studied the myc gene sequence among crocodile and the alligator families to test the current morphological tree and molecular tree.
Mung,
So, you are looking for a feature not actually possessed by any organism.
The data on SINEs (for example) is independent of the data on lactate dehydrogenase. There is no apparent correlation between the pattern to be expected from those two examples. Although, they do correlate in fact. The likeliest reason for that is common descent. ‘Common Design’, in comparison, is just saying a couple of words, one of which is ‘Common’.
I learned from Salvador, so I learned from the best.
I’d even go so far as to say that the structure of DNA actually resists being replicated. That the process has to be tightly controlled and regulated.
DNA is template-copied. Is there really a need for gotchas on this point?
No, that’s you making things up. But not for naught!
Congratulations, you are today’s winner of the keiths award! For the next 24 hours nothing you write can possible be wrong.
Well, you’re wrong. DNA can be annealed in vitro. That is raising the temperature of an aqueous solution of DNA will cause the strands to dissociate. Cooling allows them to re-associate.
This is just you restating the claim that data sets are independent. In what sense are they independent? That they come from different stretches of DNA from the same organisms?
In what sense is the genetic data set independent from the morphological data set? Does this refer to DNA sequences that have nothing at all to do with the morphology of the organisms being compared to the morphology of the organisms?
Does that help you understand what I am asking about?
Mung,
A game anyone can play, eh Mung?
It was the only way I could interpret your idea of ‘independence’. If two randomly chosen DNA sequences in organisms are not ‘independent’, what is?
And this is what you mean by replication?
Mung,
No – that they do not correlate functionally. Lactate dehydrogenase operates regardless of the presence of a particular version of a SINE sequence – or its absence. There is no functional reason to expect correlation of their respective trees.
Well, I don’t believe that phylogenetics consists of grabbing DNA sequences at random and trying to build trees from that data.
Maybe I’ll learn something today.
Mung,
That is a somewhat different question. Whether two random sequences are phylogenetically useful is not a given. But it was in relation to your question on independence. Multiple sequences used for phylogeny, nonetheless, should ideally be functionally independent, to avoid the confounding effects of selective correlation.
I’m an eternal optimist.
Mung,
There is an important aspect of replication in the way the purine adenine (A) always pairs with the pyrimidine thymine (T) and the pyrimidine cytosine (C) always pairs with the purine guanine (G). This is the basis of accurate replication and the genetic code. And it is inherent in the basic structure, an emergent property.
What is this supposed to mean? That DNA can self-replicate spontaneously? This must be false.
No, I’m just pointing out how much of the propensity for DNA to replicate is an inherent property of its structure. The process requires energy and enzymes.
Gunter Bechly was a Nationally rewnowned Darwinist in Germany. He then became a creationist. He cites the common design of male reproductive organs as evidence of design. I asked him point blank if he though the Dragon fly penis and the mammalian penis was or was not the result of common ancestry. He said it was not, it was a convergence. Bechly is an expert on fossil Dragon flies.
He describe Dragon fly copulation in great detail here. Sometime after his 1 hour of opening remarks you’ll see me asking him about the convergence of the male organ:
At a deeply personal level, I think there must be a Creator. When I hear a beautiful singing voice like that of Kasey Cisyk (not Debbie Boone) singing, I think “Only God could make a voice like that!!!”.
It doesn’t seem like the product of Natural Selection. Like the Peacock’s tail which made Darwin sick (since it was evidence against natural selection), such extravagances in biology (like a beautiful voice) make no sense in the world of Darwin, but it does make sense in terms of a world where the Creator wishes to showcase his genius to man. Here is the voice of Kasey Cisyk with actress Didi Conn portraying the singer:
So, given energy and enzymes, DNA can self-replicate spontaneously? Like, put a pot on the fire and water will heat up and begin to boil at some point?
To me also it always seemed that Darwinian evolution entails a Spartan world devoid of ethics. But in reality, nature is Baroque. Darwinian principles like “survival of the fittest” and “might makes right” have an empoverishing effect on nature, not enriching as declared by Darwin. And rationality dictates that proper humanity is ethics-driven, otherwise to be considered subhuman, whereas Darwinism classifies every human as just another mammal.
The real reasons appear.
Glen Davidson
Erik,
DNA is replicated during the cell cycle which is a very complex set of processes that end in a cell dividing. There are check points in this process that makes sure DNA is ok for replication. One check point will initiate DNA repair, if that is successful the cycle will continue, if not a cell death cycle check point ( apoptosis) will be initiated. When these check points fail a tumor can be generated.
This process is regulated by the availability of transcriptional proteins in the cell nucleus. One way it is regulated is through a destruction mechanism (breaks down a protein into amino acids) that reduces a mission critical transpirational protein. This destruction mechanism is made up of a 5 protein complex. Mutations in the proteins that make up this this complex are implicated in several types of cancer.
I have linked to a graphic of the cell cycle and some of the proteins involved.
https://images.nature.com/full/nature-assets/nrneph/journal/v11/n5/images/nrneph.2015.3-f6.jpg
Erik,
here is a simpler image
https://d2gne97vdumgn3.cloudfront.net/api/file/Qfg0CN1bQWyHErlQDnzg
Yes, given the conditions in vitro as in the Wikipedia article on PCR, the DNA sample will replicate with extreme accuracy.
Not really. I get the impression you’re not really interested in what science can tell us but rather what it can’t.
It now seems clear that Erik doesn’t like evolution because of what he considers its bad moral implications. In other words, “if it is true, let us pray that it does not become generally known”. (This is apparently apocryphal, but still applicable.)
Both are important, both what science (in this case, biology) can and cannot tell. I happen to be more of a philosopher type.
Truth has priority. There are reasons why Darwinian evolution cannot be true. That’s why, when I asked you questions about biology, I insisted on the kind of standards I insisted on. Incidentally, the comparative method (the primary method used in historical linguistics that impressed Darwin) passes this standard, so I don’t think I have been too hard on evolutionary theory.
Darwinian evolution just is too lax a theory. When dealing with a complex subject matter, the fundamentals must be absolutely flawless.
And you evilutionists thought that the patterns of traits meant something. When it means nothing, or at least it means common design as much as common descent. Because Erik says so.
It was only your lax standards that made you think that the evidence had meaning. The fact that Erik’s lack of explanation and mere negativity toward evolution coincides with his moral beliefs just bolsters the fact that evolutionary theory is too lax a theory.
Glen Davidson
Meaning has nothing to do with it.
I thought (and I still think) that there must be a cause for evolution. Mere correlation of genetic (and morphological and anatomic) material across biosphere without any cause is insufficient to uphold Darwinian evolution, particularly UCA.
I think you have, perhaps by accident, shown that not to be the case for you. You may not realize what you revealed here:
…but I assure you that the rest of us do. For the record, your interpretation of Darwinian evolution is wrong. But it’s also irrelevant to whether evolution actually happens. I will also note that here you are not attacking speciation or common descent; you are attacking natural selection. Do you in fact deny that natural selection happens? Finally, you are falling victim to the common fallacy that if natural selection happens it should guide our morality, and we don’t want that, so natural selection must not happen. Your major premise is false.
That’s not how I reason. I simply have the following wager in my mind:
1. If truth matters, correct reasoning is more important than survival. 2. In the Darwinian world, survival matters more than correct reasoning.
So, if you pick Darwinian evolution, you are not putting much emphasis on truth. So you are just a hypocrite if you whine about anyone else’s apparent lack of truthfulness. Stay fit, survive, and don’t pay any attention to the less relevant lower-order things like “truth”, “hypocrisy” and such. Those are mere human inventions and don’t belong to the overall natural order, if Darwinian evolution is the backbone of this world.
My major premise is not that Darwinian evolution or natural selection should guide our morality – and the result would be horrible. It’s that there’s nothing in Darwinian evolution to give us any morality to go by. If Darwinian evolution with natural selection as its main principle is the reason for our existence, then where did the totally unrelated morality come from and why should we value it?
First, there isn’t correlation without any cause, that’s just what you tell yourself.
Second, it isn’t merely homologies and nested hierarchies as I’ve stated repeatedly and you’ve ignored in order to repeat your shamefully false claim that it is “merely” that regardless. The fossil record is a very strong source of evidence that cross-correlates with the evidence of homologies. The extreme complexity of life, and especially of complex conserved pathways that have no cause in intelligent planning isn’t really another line of evidence, but these provide particularly striking examples, and of course you utterly ignore these as well to return to your ignorant tripe.
Third, since only evolutionary processes actually require that the patterns of derivation should appear much as they do, it’s very good evidence on its own. Erik doesn’t get to make up the rules to exclude whatever he likes.
Effectively, Erik tries to wipe out the evident meaning found in the patterns of life. He does so by ignoring the other evidence for evolution, and by trying to force linguistic requirements where these have no application. The fact is that if we had absolutely no record of language from the past, we’d have no excuse not to conclude that languages like the Indo-European tongues evolved from a common language, and without fossils we’d still have every reason to conclude that life evolved from common ancestors. The historic record of language and the fossil record of life turn the high likelihoods of evolution into near certainty.
Glen Davidson
Then you can tell me what the cause is. Please. Thanks ahead.
So, that doesn’t have any consequences for the truth about the world.
That’s a fallacy, the false dilemma. Clearly an organism with general intelligence needs to be able to discover a great deal of truth about the world in order to survive at all long.
That natural selection is no guarantee of truth is quite evidence as creationists do whatever they can to deny the evidence.
We don’t “pick Darwinian evolution,” we recognize that the evidence is very strong for it, with no alternative that produces meaningful explanations. We have reasonable confidence in such judgments in part because evolution would tend to produce a capacity for inferring models of the world that provide very useful correlations with the relevant data.
You’re as good a philosopher as you are a scientist, in part because you let your emotions rule you, and in part because you think in black and white. Your false dilemma, and the tautological (if hardly well articulated) “If truth matters, correct reasoning is more important than survival” (why must this be so?) that yields no meaningful conclusion in any form, belie your claim to be more philosophical. At least in any good sense, although you’d have a lot of company in doing bad philosophy.
Glen Davidson
You can go learn something beyond fallacies, for once.
Glen Davidson
Do you have any clue of context? Truth and survival come face to face when we contrast morality and ethics with Darwinian guiding values, of course. How does “truth” fit into the system of so-called natural selection at all? How would it arise, for what reason or cause, and why should we value it?
You assert that Darwinian evolution is a meaningful explanation, but unfortunately it is not a meaningful explanation for that which matters the most – truth. It is a meaningful explanation for struggle for survival, just that.
If so, then your attempts to bring the good news of natural selection to them is actually against the natural order. Natural selection demands you to let creationists be in their natural state, but you are free to kick their butt with your superior survival skills. So much about the value of truth under that system.
Yes, and there’s nothing that makes “correct reasoning is more important than survival” follow from “If truth matters.” Do you have any clue about logic?
I don’t know, most of us can see how recognizing the “truth” of “reality” helps in navigation, knowledge of what to eat, and recognition of what to avoid. That you don’t get it–well, what do you get?
“Truth” as you apparently think of it doesn’t arise. Getting things correct clearly is of importance. If you don’t understand that, well, color me shocked.
Oh the deepity of that tripe.
Your tautology-styled question provides no means of explanation for truth whatsoever, although I can see how it’s convenient for those who’d rather believe that they’re right than to discover what’s right.
Well, that’s in-line with your “knowledge of evolution.” One cannot get ought from is, on evolution or any other subject..
You’ve reached a nadir with your reasoning with this little nugget, because of course there’s every reason to suppose that social animals would evolve to teach others and to make space for their own freedom to discover things. I would not want you teaching kids, especially mine, your “logic” and “science,” because it would hardly help them to understand the world properly. Above all, I wouldn’t want you ruling and funding apologetics while being intolerant to discovery.
Of course you have to make up what I’m doing. I’m hardly out to change the minds of creationists (many relatives) who aren’t any threat to science and honest education. For those who are, though, I am interested in stopping their attempts to prevent the teaching of good science.
That little made-up scenario certainly indicates little value of truth in your system.
Glen Davidson
Whoa, those are some really bad bits of reasoning. Each sentence is one or more fallacies. Let me take them one at a time. But your main problem is a confusion of “is” with “ought”, very common among creationists.
Faulty syllogism. It truth matters, correct reasoning is important, but the relative importance of other things is not thereby addressed.
What’s “the Darwinian world”? If you refer to natural selection, “matters” is the wrong word. Survival, or more properly reproductive success, results in contribution to the next generation and thus change in allele frequencies. It’s not a moral judgment, and there is no claim that survival is either important or good. It’s just something that has certain results.
There you confuse the process of evolution with the process of science. Science puts emphasis on truth, but the process of evolution doesn’t. Similarly, oxidation puts no emphasis on truth either, and yet we can agree that it does happen.
There you are again with “is” vs. “ought”. There is no rational reason we should model our behavior on the process of evolution, just as there’s no reason we should model it on oxidation. And there’s no rational reason we should expect evolution to match our ideas of morality. Oddly enough, though, there is evidence that many features of human morality are evolved and are present to varying degrees in our closest relatives.
On that we can agree. Fortunately, nobody looks to evolution as a model of morality. Of course, even if evolution itself has no morals, it can act to promote morals. If it’s advantageous for individuals in a social species to have moral rules, selection may act to promote such rules. That’s the source of such innate moral sense as we possess.
I might with equal validity ask if god is the reason for our existence (as I imagine you think — as far as I know you have never actually said), then where did morality come from and why should we value it?
Or I could answer: morality comes from the experience of people living in a society, trying to come up with rules that make that society stable and promote their own welfare and that of others they care about. We also have various innate impulses, such as fairness, evolved because they are advantageous in social species.
I happen to be unfamiliar with baraminology (is it just Ken Ham or are there any real scientists behind it too?). Insofar as I know ID theory, I don’t find anything worth advocating there.
Then I know about the ancient principle that life forms come about when there’s first plenty of food available that they could consume – and they would originate directly from that food. For example, mosquitoes and lice would arise from epidermis and sweat, maggots would arise from rancid meat, some insects and earthworms from earth, etc. It was believed that lower life forms could arise spontaneously like this any time. People who believed this would have a reason to keep strict hygiene.
There were two theories about the world or universe – eternity theory on one hand and origination or creation on the other. On the latter theory, the lower species would arise first, because the simpler coarser potential food would take shape first. Over time, the biosphere would gradually become more complex, resulting in roughly the same pattern that is expected on Darwinian evolution.
Just FYI that baraminology, special creation, and microtinkering a la ID do not exhaust the options of so-called creationism.
False analysis. It’s not a syllogism. I said it’s a wager. The points belong together and must not be separated. You are only good at deliberate misreading. Enough about that.
But one can get cause from correlation, particularly on evolution. In fact, only on evolution, because it is impermissible on every other subject, science, and also in philosophy and logic.
School is in session.
I worry that this “wager” trades on some fairly serious equivocations.
We care about having true beliefs. Evolution doesn’t and can’t care about anything, since caring is a property of minded animals, and evolution is not itself a minded animal — it’s just a historical process, variation across generations, etc.
So “matters” is being used literally in the first claim — truth matters to us, in the sense that we care about having truth beliefs. But “matters” being used metaphorically in the second claim, since a historical process can’t care about anything, and so nothing can matter to it.
The really interesting question is whether we can explain our care for truth in evolutionary terms. And I think the answer is largely, “not really”. I say that because our concern for truth, that having true beliefs is important to us, is largely due to our cultural history.
And while we can explain in evolutionary terms why it is that we have any cultural history at all, I doubt we can explain in evolutionary terms why we have the specific cultural history that we have.
There’s no reason why anyone should adopt the general principles of evolutionary theory as a guide to conduct. That’s just a fallacy — the fallacy of taking an “is” as an “ought.” Anyone who takes evolutionary theory as a guide to personal conduct is committing a fallacy, whether evolutionary theory is true or not.
It’s true that evolutionary theory doesn’t give us morality, but so what? That’s not it’s function. That’s like saying that it’s a problem with evolutionary theory that it doesn’t explain why the respect that students owe to teachers takes very different forms in Western and Middle Eastern cultures. It’s not the job of evolutionary theory to explain the history of cultural differences (though evolutionary theory may be relevant to a historical explanation).
In point of fact, there does seem to be a fairly compelling evolutionary explanation of human morality. The basic idea that humans are the kind of animal that depends on extremely high levels of cooperation, and that morality is how we regulate or maintain cooperation. So the evolution of morality (and, I would say, of rationality) is the evolution of cooperation.
(I say “fairly compelling” because the evolutionary models have their problems, the comparative psychology has some problematic assumptions, and the relevant paleoanthropological data is hard to come by and hard to interpret.)
But suppose this explanation is false — so what? It’s not the job of evolutionary theory to tell us what moral values we should hold or why we should hold them. Evolutionary theory is at most an explanation of human morality in general, not a justification of any specific moral framework.
ok, so now I have some examples of what evolutionary theory is not supposed to explain. So what is it supposed to explain?
The kinds of inference that we make when reconstructing phylogenies based on consilience across multiple lines of evidence or testing models of evolutionary scenarios aren’t any different than what we do in geology, cosmology, astronomy, or physics.
It’s supposed to explain the origins of novel biological traits and under what conditions those traits will become widespread in a population.
The only relevant question in biology and philosophy of biology is whether it is a good explanation.
But I assume you understand that already.
That’s your only response? Arguing about what to call your argument? No, not enough about that. You need to explain where my comment was wrong, and why.
I have to admit I have no idea what you mean by calling what you said a wager. What did you mean?
So morality is a biological trait, but any specific morality is not a biological trait? Just trying to make sense of what you’ve written. Assuming it makes any sense.
What does that even mean?
That sounds to me like saying that evolutionary theory can explain religion, but it cannot explain Judaism.
Wow. His efforts at undermining the evidence have fallen short, so now Erik is making a (bogus) argument from (bogus) consequences!
No, not what the argument is called. It’s what the argument is. The problem with you has been all along that you cannot tell the difference between the thing and the label on the thing.
Look up syllogism. Now try to square at least three statements (which make up any syllogism) with a single statement you falsely called syllogism.
It is not just a name issue. The issue is that you have no idea what you are talking about. You are spewing terms that are obviously over your head.
What are the phylogenies in geology, cosmology, astronomy, and physics? Does any geologist, cosmologist, astronomer or physicist infer something like “things multiply with variation” based on a phylogeny or have they instead determined on something like “from nothing, nothing comes”?
You must be messing something very deeply up here. Those subject matters are not analogous in any way. You have lots of explaining to do to demonstrate that they are.
But, if true, then this said process made us and we are subject to the process, not vice versa. On this scheme, truth is a negligible epiphenomenon, a non-issue on the grand scale. Now put one and one together: Given evolution, if we are to put truth into *true persective* (which we care about because you say so), we *should* care about truth as little as evolution does. Why are ardent evolutionists blowing it out of proportion?
No, it’s the same “matters” in both cases, subject to the broader perspective you/we may assume. First, we care, that’s a fact. Next fact is that some caring makes sense, some other caring makes less sense (e.g. urge to prefer sweet food to nutritious food, to overeat etc.; on evolution all so-called caring would be in the same category as any lame instinct or desire). To arrive at the proper proportion of caring, it must be put into wider perspective. Preferably true perspective, because we care, right? Now, if evolution is true, it’s the thing that must guide our perspective. No? What else is there? Should we really go off on the tangent of the most recently evolved barely defined epiphenomenon?
Correct, that’s not its function. So there must be some completely different reason to value morality, insofar as we know morality exists anyway and it’s obviously harmful to attempt to ignore it. What is that other reason? Specifically, what is that other reason so that evolution with its “struggle for survival” would be both true and compatible with caring for all sorts of entities that are materially unfit for struggle and survival? Are these things compatible at all? Why not let evolution eat its own children and bury its own dead when that’s the only way evolution worked until humans came along? Who are we to change the natural course of events and why should we?