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.
Sal,
Please give the URL of this thread to your subscribers, so they can see the kind of incompetence they are paying you for.
stcordova,
ROFLMAO
You really don’t know what you’re doing. I’m assuming your NJ tree used simple matching distance. Even without a gap penalty, sequences 1 and 2 are a distance of 3 from each other, and 3 and 4 are also a distance of 3 from each other. Sequence 1 is a distance of 4 from sequences 3 and 4, while sequence 2 is a distance of 7 from them. A gap penalty would just increase the latter two distances by whatever the penalty is. Also, this is an unrooted tree. The sole information content is that there’s a branch separating 1 & 2 from 3 & 4. NJ is trying to fit all these distances into a tree, and since they don’t fit a tree very well it’s doing the best it can; it sticks 3 on a zero-length branch and 4 on a long branch because it just doesn’t know what to do with incompatible data.
Alan,
No, because if that had been his point, he’d have been agreeing, not disagreeing, with me.
DNA_Jock, in response to Allan’s comment quoted above:
To the contrary, it was a point I chose to emphasize:
Jock:
Which is also a point I have emphasized:
It’s the last sentence that pinpoints the disagreement. Allan has both disputed, and agreed with, my exclusion of HGT.
Here he disputes it:
Here he agrees with it:
DNA_Jock,
I responded to that argument the first time you made it:
Rumraket,
Sal does seem to be deeply insecure. He reminds me of Trump that way, wanting everything to be about him. He couldn’t even let the Las Vegas shootings pass without immediately making it all about him and his “close call”.
As Glen drily remarked:
Exactly. That’s a problem.
The exercise with clustal falsifies John Harshman’s claim that taxonomy approximates phylogeny. The molecular taxonomy is real, the phylogeny is totally bogus.
As I said, the imaginary phylogenies generated by his methods are so “real” to John that they take precedence over actual facts, which is basic similarity comparisons.
What I demonstrated is that intelligent design can also create taxonomies, therefore nested hierarchical structures are not proof of common descent nor that common descent can create orphan systems. It’s a non-sequitur to argue a that merely because sequences can be arranged hierarchically that orphan systems can therefore come about naturally. That is a non-sequitur.
Don’t kid yourself, Sal. The elephant is still in the room. Would you care to explain to us why, out of the more than 10^38 possible trees for the taxa in Theobald’s Figure 1, we infer the same exact tree from the morphological and molecular data?
Coincidence? The Designer just happens to be an anal-retentive evolution mimic? He hates the eggheads and wants to fool them into accepting common descent?
Be brave and answer the question.
Or admit that you can’t.
Consilience
of
independent
phylogenies.
He’s never going to get it, Rumraket. It isn’t clear that he’s bright enough, but even if he is, he can’t allow himself to get it.
It’s the Jebus Effect.
Nobody has claimed that intelligent design can’t create a taxonomy. You’re missing the key part here, which is prediction and falsification. Intelligent design doesn’t PREDICT taxonomies. It is only compatible with them in ad-hoc fashion. But intelligent design is compatible with ALL POSSIBLE patterns in the data exactly because it doesn’t make any particular predictions more likely than others. So nesting hiearchical structures can’t be evidence of ID, since ID could also have made a completely different pattern.
But common descent absolutely demands that independent data sets yield highly similar phylogenies.
There are no “proofs” in science. Proof is for formal axiomatic systems of deductive and/or mathematical logic.
We’ve been through that nonsense now ten times at least. Even if your pet orphan character was magicked into existence somewhere along the way, it still doesn’t mean the unbelievable level of consilience of independent phylogenies isn’t an astonishing confirmation of common descent.
[ERROR COMMENT, SEE NEXT COMMENT]
The elephant, Sal.
Here are 8 sequence created for the fun of it using PHYLIP format. It was in intelligently designed nested hierarchy. Goes to show that just because there is a nested hierarchy, it doesn’t necessarily imply common descent was the cause.
This falsifies the notion that just because a taxonomic nested hierarchy exists that it necessarily means common descent was the cause.
http://www.trex.uqam.ca/index.php?action=phyml2
8 8
AAQA MTVRAAQA
AAQI MTVRAAQI
AARL MTVRAARL
AARK MTVRAARK
ATTY MTVRATTY
ATTZ MTVRATTZ
ATKN MTVRATKN
ATKN MTVRATKN
NOTE:
Wordpress messes up the spacing in my PHYLIP data.
keiths,
I think if you perceive someone as arguing with themselves, you have to be alert to the possibility that you may not have grasped their point. Those statements aren’t contradictory. In the second, I am pointing out that HGT itself is not ‘descent’ at all. It’s not an instance of inheritance, it’s a path by which sequences can be inherited. But whether vertically or horizontally, those DNA sequences are inherited from a common-ancestor-sequence.
Corneel and DNA_Jock seem to have got my drift; you seem to be trying to pursue some kind of definitional insistence. You can define common descent as anything you like of course; I am more interested in the mechanics of the situation.
I think you may be hung up on the ‘vertical/horizontal’ thing. I’m a molecular biologist by training. So to me, it’s all about DNA polymerisation. DNA is either polymerised as a whole and transmitted as a whole, during whole-genome replication, or it is transmitted fragmentally. The latter is HGT. Both of these are strictly ‘vertical’, in that DNA is polymerised in both cases. Sequence coalesces upon the original double-stranded DNA molecule, and phylogenetic information is available, in both cases. In the HGT case, we have two strands of phylogeny to consider, is all, and each can pollute the signal of the other.
You seem unwilling to accept the point that species trees are ‘really’ bundled gene trees with a particular mode of travel, and that gene trees can in fact follow any available path. The term ‘descent’ is unexceptionably used to refer to inheritance-by-DNA-polymerisation, for example in the term ‘Identical By Descent’ (IBD)‘. Although one typically talks about IBD in terms of DNA stretches in individuals in a population, conjuring up thoughts of whole organisms, that applies equally to a population of viruses, for example, whose ‘environment’ happens to be multicellular organisms. Their sequences are still commonly descended – even when integrated into a host’s genome – and I don’t see a reason other than arguing for argument’s sake to say otherwise.
Congratulations, you have deliberately created a nested hiearchy in a single data set for no other reason than you wanted to create one to show that an intelligent designer can decide to create that pattern. This was not at any point a question that was in doubt for any of us on “this side” of the argument here.
Here’s the key question: Why would the designer do that over and over again, independent gene for independent gene, literally millions of times, so the tree you get from Gene 1 with a phylogenetic algorithm, is highly congruent with the tree you get from Gene 2, and Gene 3, and Gene 4, and Gene 5 etc. etc. And with all sorts of morphological and physiological characters too?
Think about it Sal. You deliberately created the sequences you did to yield that particular neat branching order. So you have eight species you want to create, and you put those eight sequences into those eight species, one in each. Why would the tree you just made deliberately, with those gene-sequences, also match to a high degree of significance, the tree we get from morphological characters? Or a tree inferred from the next gene you make eight new sequences for? Why would you do that, as a designer? What purpose does that serve? It doesn’t serve any. There isn’t any functional reason for independent data sets to yield highly similar branching orders. It’d be the sort of thing you would do for no other reason than to prove that it is possible to fake the pattern common descent predicts: Consilience of independent phylogenies.
That is the exact sort of pattern that common descent predicts. An extremely high level of statistically significant congruence, between the trees constructed by an algorithm, from different data sets (different genes, or different physiological or morphological character sets). Remember, the branching order does not correlate with function. There are sequence constraints on the functions of molecules, but there is not a branching order constraint on their function. So it’s not like if you made a new sequence to put in your creations, it would have to yield a highly similar branching order to the previous sequence you made, in order for it to function properly in your organism.
So why WOULD you ever expect it to yield a similar tree if analyzed by a phylogenetic algorthm? You would only ever EXPECT that if there actually was common descent.
Think Sal. Think!
Indeed, it demonstrates clearly that a nested hierarchy could also have been produced by a designer bent on tricking John Harshman into believing there is common descent.
But seriously, why did you make those proteins diffferent? To make it consistent with all of your previous posts on functional constraints of protein sequence, you should just enter the same polypeptide eight times. This intelligently designed tree is supposed to follow as a prediction of intelligent design, right? Which means some but not all variants will be tolerated and a specific distribution might actually be inferred. That would finally get us somewhere.
Allan Miller,
Yeah, I was hoping that keiths would be able to figure out that your two statements were NOT contradictory, if he pondered my question to him
But pondering does not seem to be keiths’s thing.
I also thought that he had finally understood that John Harshman only needs to assume that the guider does not deliberately erase the phylogenetic signal in order for (partially) guided evolution to produce an ONH. Surely he must have recognized that when he wrote
Thereby providing the necessary, and obviously devil-placed-the-fossils silly, scenario.
But I over-estimated him; he still does not see it, and his ‘refutation’ consisted of regurgitating his previous argument that rests on the fully-guided/not-guided false dichotomy.
Wow, you just showed us that fraud can exist.
I’m…overwhelmed with that revelation. I never thought that one could deliberately fake anything at all. Maybe the Nigerian prince that I’ve been sending money to isn’t really a prince.
Now we just need to figure out if it’s God or the Devil faking evolutionary evidence. Or both, even.
Of course the real question is why anyone would fake evolutionary evidence in designing anything at all. Would Apple exist if it insisted on merely tweaking the design of Apple II forever, making iphones dependent upon 1970s technology with no real revolutionary infusions of chip technology? Will any maker of robots seriously consider making bipedal robots based on quadrupedal “designs,” like humans are? Will robot makers be successful hanging onto old hearing designs when better new ones are available, like the designer of birds and reptiles eschewing fancy mammalian ear bones just because it wants to fake a hierarchy? Would any designer be so stupid as to make rigid bird bone structures by fusing together the separate bones that once became articulated in terrestrial dinosaurs during development, rather than just starting out with single bone structures? Do juvenile platypuses (and juvenile baleen whales) grow teeth, only to shed them completely, in order to maintain the appearance of an evolutionarily-produced hierarchy, all by design? The vertebrae of our coccyx exist for what design purpose?
Sal has brilliantly shown that faking it is possible. Now all he has to show us is how his God faked so much evolutionary evidence, and if possible, why. Oh, and that this Great Faker exists, rather than being some pseudoscientific claptrap. You know, the whole creationist dog and pony show badly needs corroboration. And Sal’s not at all likely to provide any such corroboration, or even to attempt it, since he has never based his beliefs on evidence or been open to seriously considering the evidence for evolution.
Faking it is possible. Which is what explains the existence of ID.
Glen Davidson
stcordova,
Congratulations. Your second attempt, unlike your first, actually has a nested hierarchical structure. As everyone else has been telling you, this proves that it’s possible to fake a phylogeny. Yes, it’s conceivable that god has faked all the data just to fool us into believing there’s a phylogeny. And you count that as a victory? Why?
Independent of the organism they come from and their evolutionary history? By the way, it’s a well-know fact that your “independent” phylogenies don’t always match up. Not even for animals. Else why are there disputes over which phylogeny is the correct phylogeny? And there are disputes.
Neither does common descent.
The same can be said for common descent. Common descent never predicted primates, or that primates would diversify, or that humans would be primates.
It’s all after the fact.
Yes common descent helps make sense of the pattern, but the pattern is not a prediction of common descent.
Assumes facts not in evidence. That’s just you, making assertions. Butt we thank you for your opinion.
No reason. Just call it a brute fact.
Why are you asking this when I have explained this to you before at least three times?
It’s also a well-known fact that the degree to which they match up can be rigorously quantified using statistics, and that even the most incongruent phylogenetic trees from actual biological data are still statistically significantly congruent
Meaning, despite them not showing identical branching orders, they are still significantly similar to a rigorously quantifiable extend.
Because gene-trees aren’t species-trees, but they don’t need to be in order to still overwhelmingly indicate common descent.
All this, and more, would you have understood if you’d read Theobald’s 29+ Evidences for macroevolution.
Literally every one of your “objections” here are accounted for.
Not so fast.
Suppose we have the 8 species lines via common descent, it is possible that as the lines evolve, except for the functionally conserved regions (methionine in the first position is always there), the viable regions become randomized, so you get hypothetically something like this:
I preserved the old labels so you can see how, supposing we started off with the correct phylogeny (as in the previous diagram and sequences), but over time evolution and random mutation erodes the signal, and then you get a mess, the taxonomic relationship doesn’t reflect the actual phylogeny, in fact it is impossible to accurately reconstruct the phylogeny.
So unless you actually have genealogical records, the taxonomic nested hierarchy is can’t be confirmed to re construct the actual phylogeny.
You’re also left having to rely on a supposed molecular clock, but here is the problem especially with bacterial species that maybe regenerate 200 or more times a year, heck every 20 minutes in some cases, why would you expect a phylogenetic signal to remain for bacteria? Yet the same broken clock is used for species with 4000, 40000, 400000 (who knows) or more time slower reproduction rates. Reductio ad abusrbdum.
So common descent creating a nested hierarchy that is truly orderly isn’t a given, and even in that case it won’t necessarily be accurate. Compare the orderliness of the first hierarchy I created with the mess random mutation creates. You still get a nested hierarchy, but with the exception of the “MTVR” motif, there are not any conserved motifs, but you can still create force a nested hierarchy that makes little sense.
In contrast, in the hierarchy intelligently designed, the motifs are preserved in a very nice methodical way where “AA” and “AT” are motifs in the 5,6 position that demarcate two distinct families.
You can’t reconstruct an accurate phylogeny anyway without some generous and likely false assumptions, so it’s rather pointless to say it’s a “fake” phylogeny because for all you know, the ones evolutionary biologists are fake as evidenced by all the kludges it needs (like HGT and convergence), not to mention a dubious molecular clock assumption.
Yes it does and it still does and you dropping in here to brainlessly assert that it doesn’t is just a reflection of some sort of infantile contrarianism.
Common descent isn’t a theory that predicts what future grouping we will see, so to bring that up as some sort of argument against the inference of common descent from the congruence of independent phylogenies shows a level of confusion I have a hard time understanding how the hell you have ended up with. What the flying fuck, Mung?
Common descent is a theory that predicts a particular pattern should exist, if common descent took place.
No, it isn’t. Every new species discovered is a test of the theory of common descent. Their gene-trees, or morphology-to-genes tree comparisons could be extremely significantly incongruent. But they never are.
What the hell do you even know about the level of strength of the prediction of congruence between independent phylogenetic trees?
Would you care to put some numbers on that claim? Can you show using realistic assumptions about mutation rate, genome size, and reproductive success, that all phylogenetic signal of life has a realistic chance of having been erased over geological time without incurring a lethal genetic mutational load?
And since you’re one who doesn’t believe in brute facts, you would agree that doesn’t qualify as a sensible answer.
Technically not correct and this is important, because it also show that your “poly constraint proves immutability” rationalization is just flat out factually incorrect:
From the “prestigious scientific journal nature”:
Frida Belinky, Igor B. Rogozin & Eugene V. Koonin.: Selection on start codons in prokaryotes and potential compensatory nucleotide substitutions. Scientific Reports 7, Article number: 12422 (2017) doi:10.1038/s41598-017-12619-6.
There are even examples known of non-AUG translation initiation in Eukaryotes including human stem cells.
Rumraket,
Could a taxonomy be the result of a design change? For example how a single fertilized cell becomes a fully formed animal?
In the computer industry the move to MOS transistors created clear change to the group of computers that used them.
This is hopelessly confused. Yes, it’s possible for the phylogenetic signal to be erased, given enough time. But if there’s a nested hierarchy in the data, that tells us that the signal hasn’t been erased. Randomized data don’t have a hierarchical structure.
This too is hopelessly confused. Phylogenetic analysis makes no molecular clock assumption, and randomized data won’t give you a tree even with such an assumption. A phylogenetic signal remains for bacteria because the mutation rate is low per generation and, longer term, because some sites are under constraint and that constraint also changes with time. And species with slower rates would preserve the signal for a longer time.
No, you don’t get a nested hierarchy from randomized data. You can force a tree, but the data aren’t hierarchically structured, and there are any number of tests for that. Your ability to force a tree is not one of those tests. Sal, once more you only expose your ignorance. There’s nothing wrong with being ignorant, but there is something wrong with believing you know more than those who actually do know something about the subject and being unwilling to learn.
Sure, and if you had wanted to fake real data you would have added a little noise here and there. And you still haven’t explained why god would create a nested hierarchy in the first place, much less a noisy one.
Nobody makes a molecular clock assumption in doing phylogeny. Nobody needs to assume HGT or convergence. Those are conclusions. Given that you have no idea how phylogenies are constructed, how can you make pronouncements about them? Once more you expose your ignorance. I have invited you several times to examine real phylogenetic analyses, and you have always ignored my invitations. Here is one again:
Harshman J., Huddleston C.J., Bollback J., Parsons T.M., Braun M.J. True and false gharials: A nuclear gene phylogeny of Crocodylia. Systematic Biology 2003; 52:386-402.
You will ignore this too.
What do you mean by “design change” in the context of taxonomy?
Correct!
Intelligence is not very predictable, it is creative. Intelligent Design doesn’t predict Mount Rushmore, but no one will argue mount rushmore is a deterministic or random outcome.
In contrast, because of orphan systems, common descent doesn’t predict the existence of nested hierarchies definable by orphan systems. Therefore from a probabilistic standpoint common descent is not a highly probable explanation for the taxonomic pattern.
Common descent “might” make a molecular taxonomy along individual genes with some generous assumptions (like non-erasure of phylogenetic signals which is a real problem as I showed in the diagram in my previous comment). But common descent doesn’t predict or account for Orphan Systems. Orphans in the taxanomic sense have no ancestor, non-existent ancestors falsify the assumption of common descent unless one is willing to invoke miracles to rescue common descent.
I’ve tried to point out supposedly ancient motifs like the motifs in aaRS genes in bacteria are too orderly to be truly ancient. We might look at other critical genes other than the aaRS family like Topoisomerases, whatever.
Why are the aaRS genes so similar among all bacteria if a random walk has been in play for billions of years? You might say, “purifying selection on functionally constrained motifs”. Well OK, then there is no random walk, changes have to be punctuated or poofed into the genes, which looks too much like progressive creation.
I’ve tried to point out a phylogenetic relationship does not automatically generate and MAINTAIN a taxonomic hierarchy as illustrated by the previous comment. I don’t think the aaRS signals should be so nicely preserved in bacteria for so long.
Why hasn’t erasure of phylogenetic signals happened in bacteria? I illustrated the problem of erasure in the prior diagram. It’s bothered me for a long time. It’s one of the many reasons when I look at molecular taxonomies that I don’t think they are the result of common descent, but rather miraculous special creation.
So, no, I don’t think the nested hierarchies look like they are the result of common descent, they are too orderly, not something I would expect from a random walk. Too much randomness over time and the taxonomic hierarchy becomes an disordered mess.
Yes common descent can make a taxonomic hierarchy for individual genes (but not orphan systems), but only under certain conditions and for a limited number of generations. I showed conditions where it breaks down.
Yes, but it can also be the result of creativity.
In the field of music, which is one of the most purely creative endeavors, we have taxonomies of musical forms.
It first starts with construction of the pitches relative to each other, then the musical scales, like major, natural minor, harmonic minor, melodic minor, and several other Greek modes. In classical music there are relatively discrete art forms like symphonies, concertos, sonatas, nocturnes, minuets, operas, ballets.
Bach for example might compose 24 different pieces in 24 different keys (12 major and 12 minor). Thus they have different taxonomies. Those who study music theory see this quite clearly.
A designer can make a taxonomic relationship merely because it expresses his creativity, it may or may not have anything to do with survivability.
A designer can design something foremost because it amuses them, the fact it is recognized as a nice design by onlookers might be a secondary issue.
John Harshman,
Mammals appear to be particially the result of a design change of how a fertilized egg becomes a fully formed animal. This new feature along with others are part of the class Mammalia. What we see is not predicted by design but possibly the result of a design change.
The existence of this feature in whales looks like the result of a design change for ocean dwelling creatures.
Regarding musical taxonomies:
http://users.cis.fiu.edu/~taoli/pub/icassp-2005.pdf
All this to say, it seems in purely creative human endeavors like music, taxonomic nestedhierarchical relationships exist, so why should we (especially evolutionists) presume God, the author of music, would not also express his creativity in discrete nested taxonomic forms of life!
What do platypuses think of that? And how would you arrange monotremes in relationship to marsupials and eutheria?
No, lactation is.
Why don’t you actually deal with the fact that design changes don’t happen according to need, but according to ancestry? That’s what’s important in how different changes are in life than they are in designed contrivances.
No. Monotremes likely continue to exist in Australia because monotremes and eutheria reproduce in ways that are compatible with water living (genetics suggests that echidnas evolved relatively recently from platypuses), while marsupials do not. Whales presumably could be monotremes rather than eutheria, although it would probably be more awkward than placental development would be for whales. Oviviparity might be a good compromise for whales.
You just keep on with the “change” theme, as if that were what clades and nested hierarchies are about. The question is why “design changes” don’t occur across the board, like they typically are for manufactured items. Why do you avoid the whole point time after time?
Glen Davidson
Oh good lord, you don’t see how unlike life’s nested hierarchies are from that artificially-separated nested hierarchy of music?
Do you think that pop and rock are actually separate genres? Or even classical and rock being separate? Ever heard a violin in rock/pop music?
That “nested hierarchy” might be convenient for some purposes, but it’s not the least bit “natural,” as none of the genres is truly separate in the sense that life’s clades are.
Glen Davidson
I should point out the same gene between species may have different functional characteristics starting with the presence or absence of spliceosomal introns (a constraint at the DNA level). Not to mention the binding sites serve different sets of molecular machines in species, especially for trans chromosomal machines as I illustrated with the FIRRE lnc RNA.
Next at the RNA trascriptome level there are all sorts of functional differences starting with micro-RNA regulatory networks. Thus a gene in bacteria with a corresponding gene in eukaryotes is totally regulated with different mechanisms and this all contingent on the slightly different sequences in the gene.
Next as I hinted at each group of species may have different discrete integration of the gene when expressed as a protein: phoshoproteome, methyl proteome, acetylome, conjugated glycol proteome. These are also contingent on differences in the same gene between species.
Thus the nested hierarchical relationships in a gene spread across species looks like a nested hieararchical relationship based on function, not random walks, and as I pointed out, random walks with common descent aren’t guaranteed to create an orderly taxonomic nested hierarchy, in fact, given enough time and chance, random walks acting on common descent will create a mess, not a nested hierarchy in any meaningful sense (as I illustrated above).
GlenDavidson,
Because the data is not supporting this assertion. Mammalian features along with echolocation in sea going creatures is a strong contradiction to ancestry.
Why?
You keep saying the same stupid thing without any kind of support.
Why aren’t whales’ skeletons shaped like those of sharks (aside from quite old homologies)? What’s the “design” point of being distinct from sharks and marine reptiles in mammals like whales? Why do whales have hair? Any particular point? Why don’t sharks have hair? Why are some sharks oviviparous, and not simply viviparous like whales?
IOW, why don’t you ever face the fact that ancestry dictates possibilities for sharks and whales, not the state of “design” at this time? WTF do your “questions” about “design change” have to do with anything except for your keen ability to avoid the issues that taxonomy raise against any intelligent design and how the patterns seen tell for evolutionary processes?
Glen Davidson
colewd:
Derp.
Interesting how threads that are nominally about creationism end up being about Dunning-Kruger, instead.
To go with the computer analogies, one should ask why cephalopods (like other invertebrates) lack myelination of nerve fibers. One reason cephalopod nerves have been a favorite for study is that because they are unmyelinated they must become rather large in order to increase the speed of action-potentials.
So vertebrates “updated their technology,” and no designer bothered to put that kind of information into cephalopods. Will the creationists explain why?*
Glen Davidson
*Of course not, flinging poo at evolutionary theory is the best that they can do.
GlenDavidson,
So you are claiming that whales don’t have echolocation and mammalian features like a placenta? How would you argue that these features support the common descent hypothesis?
How dumb is that?
Is echolocation non-mammalian? Are bats mammals?
Are you claiming that only birds can echolocate, or what? It’s impossible to make sense of your babbling, since all you do is repeat the same stupid shit that echolocation in whales somehow isn’t compatible with common descent, which only seems to comport with the IDist BS that you lap up without any kind of thought or evidence.
How do you ignore the features that are shared between land mammals and whales and not with large sea vertebrates like sharks and marine reptiles?
Do you ever think, or do you just spout inanities?
Bill,
Is it any more likely to sink in after the 20th explanation? At this point I think we can safely say that you will never understand this stuff. It’s simply beyond you.