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.
They’re unconnected in my view. Whether or not evolutionary theory is a good explanation for the diversity of life on Earth has nothing to do with religious belief, as far as I’m concerned, unless the chosen religious belief entails factual claims that are at odds with the facts.
What other theory could explain the existence of life without the need for a God?
That’s the one your side is still looking for a name for.
Explain how your version of a God did it?
Exactly, the theistic evolutionists have no problem with accommodating both views
stcordova,
A doddle to correct for this by increasing your number of character-states. Especially molecular ones. Molecular ones are cool.
stcordova,
You are ascribing to me a position I do not hold. It would not be a reliable conclusion, on being presented with one or several miracles, to aver that everything that ever happened must also be due to that same common cause. Not just in biology, but everything ever, if one follows your logic through (God may have just been using a biological exemplar to illustrate his more general miracle-wrangling capabilities).
It remains perfectly possible, logically, for any combination of God and ‘Darwinism’ to have wrought the fabric of the modern biological world. 1 extra cause.
Pure random chance? Spontaneous generation? Something in between? An infinite regress of life?
Which is why nobody does that.
But there IS evidence of within-clade phylogenies of eyes. Eyes have arisen several times independently, but for some of those independent origins of eyes, it is possible to construct phylogenies of eye evolution within their clades.
What does that sentence even mean, “define function by phylogeny”? It doesn’t seem to make sense.
The evidence for common descent is much broader than some arbitrarily picked single phenotypical function, like “eyes”.
Also, what is “a gap in one species giving rise to another”? What does that mean? Try to give an example.
We don’t “assume” eyes exist in many different species, we observe that they do. We would observe this regardless of anyone had ever thought of common descent or not.
But there are patterns in the distributions of the particular morphological features, and the underlying genetics that control development and code for the protein components of eyes. And it is the strong degree of congruence between the independent data sets that imply common descent. Hence it is not an assumption, but a conclusion implied by the data. Data that show patterns which cry out for an explanation.
But the backwards and forwards wiring of octopus and human eyes aren’t claimed to be evidence of their common descent, eyes or otherwise.
I’m starting to suspect you really don’t understand anything about the evidence for common descent.
Sal, you really really need to understand the concept of consilience of independent phylogenies. THAT is the evidence for common descent.
How is it a better explanation? If they had the SAME wiring, would that make common design a worse explanation? Do you even really know what you mean by this phrase “common design”. What does it predict? What does it really mean?
When they’re similar, that’s when you invoke common design. But when they’re dis-similar, that’s when you reject common descen’t and.. also invoke common design?
Seriously, do you have any goddamn clue what you’re trying to argue?
But then what about the dissimilar wiring? That’s also evidence of common design?
For fucks sake Sal. You are much, much smarter than this. Can’t you see you’re just trying to rationalize around what is at bottom just an emotionally appealing but intellectually incoherent fantasy? You don’t have any actual explanation here. It’s all just unfalsifiable ad-hoc reasoning. After the fact rationalizations.
When it’s similar, then it’s similar because it was designed by the same designer, presumably for the same purpose.
And when it’s not similar, then common descent is false and it must have also been designed by.. the same designer using… a different design, but still for the same purpose?
It’s NONSENSE Sal.
If it’s an inference then it’s not an assumption.
*sigh*
Wait, weren’t common features supposed to be evidence of common design? But now you’re saying gaps, as in things that are so different they are wholly unlike each other, are also evidence for common design?
Besides, creation needs to make observationally testable predictions that follow from it’s basic postulates. “There will be gaps”, is rather vague, and doesn’t really seem to follow from the claim “God made all living organisms instantly appear in a single day 6000 years ago”.
Even less from the claim “there is a common designer of the common features of life”.
So on the subject of gaps, what are you really saying? What does your common design “theory” really actually predict about these gaps? Both qualitatively and quantitatively, how many gaps should there be, how big should they be, where should they be, what particular entities should there be gaps between? And so on.
You can’t claim that “gaps” are evidence for common design creationism before you get specific and make it qualitatively and quantifiably predictive (and there for scientific and testable). Until you do this, all you have is just ad-hoc reasoning to some sort of vague, manifestly incoherent appeal to “gaps” of some undisclosed nature we’re just supposed to sorta kinda squint hard at until we see?
For evolution to be falsified, there needs to be a statistically significant lack of consilience between independendent phylogies. And that’s an actual thing. Read Theobald’s 29 Evidences for macroevolution.
Right back at ya.
But how do you show that a miracle is needed to make something happen? Was a miracle needed for the flying machine for all of human history until 1908?
Suppose we have one. Given that you have now asked for evidence, what evidence do you have that mechanistic gaps between organisms ordinarily are created by a divinely ordained wish, especially at the biochemical level?
I mean, you wouldn’t be asking for evidence for something if you can’t provide any yourself, would you?
Except when it does.
Schmitz JF, Bornberg-Bauer E. Fact or fiction: updates on how protein-coding genes might emerge de novo from previously non-coding DNA. F1000Res. 2017 Jan 19;6:57. doi: 10.12688/f1000research.10079.1
That image came through wrong. 2nd try.
Why are you making phoodoo’s point for him?
Please elaborate. What was phoodoo’s point and how did me mentioning that option make it?
So, to summarize this thread: it appears that Sal is incapable of defending common design vs. common descent, and accordingly has abandoned the attempt.
His immortal soul is on the line,maybe his God does not require a good argument just the effort
If (as seems unavoidable) we have to bring G-d into it, I always end up wondering ‘why YEC’? Is he seriously expected to punish everyone (from a particular geographical region) who looks at the evidence and doesn’t see YEC? Because, I just don’t.
When I look at genomes with high percentages of sequence alignment, common design seems a total non-starter – even before you start tracing the hierarchic patterns of indels and suchlike: the devil in the details. We are urged to look at the differences, and wonder. But why are they even identifiable as ‘differences’? Because they sit in a background of identity.
I would have some very sharp words for my Maker if my honest assessment of what I see led me to being eternally tormented. What’s he gonna do, punish me?
And why not start sacrificing chickens? There’s going to be some deity, somewhere, who’ll be Almightily pissed off if we don’t. Seems that Pascal’s Wager demands some hedging.
Allan,
I once had the following exchange with Sal:
keiths:
Sal:
I think it is even worse than that. What I got out of this exchange is that he was incapable of understanding the issue. He simply was unable to see that the inference of common descent had nothing to do with the origin of derived character states.
That is Interesting: When scrolling back, I found Sal approvingly referring to Richards Owen discovery of homologous structures:
Indeed, sir Richard Owen coined the word “homology” to indicate the similarity in skeletal structure between, say a whale’s fin and a human hand. That was the very thing that led him to pose the idea of the vertebrate body plan (“archetype”) which I have been trying fruitlessy to make J-Mac accept. Yet Sal accepts it gladly, even using it as a defense for “common design”. Instead Sal refuses to accept common descent (which poses no threat at all to the core idea of ID) and seems completely incapable to grasp the issue.
Corneel,
Sal’s a YEC, though like many he makes use of ID arguments when it suits. Such as the Cambrian Explosion, which should not even be a thing if Cambrian and subsequent strata resulted from a Global Flood.
I know, but I thought even YECs accepted some level of evolution, at least since the deluge.
So the octopus eye and human eye have a retina (with the octopus retina wired “forward”). Do you think then the eyes of these two creatures are then the product of common descent because they both have retinas? Not even evolutionists believe that. Thus common descent is a pretty much useless add on assumption.
Me failing to grasp. No one has explained the problem of shared proteins between prokaryotes and eukaryotes that takes the mechanistic problem of spliceosomal introns and initiation complexes.
Rember this and the problem of splicesomal introns?
Prokaryote gene:
XXXXXXXXX
Corresponding Eukaryote gene:
iiiiiXiiiiiiiiiiXiiiiiiiiiiXiiiiiiiiiiXiiiiiiiiiiXiiiiiiiiiiXiiiiiiiiiiXiiiiiiiiiiXiiiiiiiiiiXiiiiiiiiiiXiiiii
Just like the eyes between octopus and human, so there are analogous structures between the genes, but they are not exactly alike are they? No smooth transition from one to the other, or no smooth transition from some supposed common ancestor is mechanistically feasible. There is a gap. No. You guys are in willful refusal to even acknowledge the gaps exist.
Spliceosomal introns are an orphan feature, a taxonomically restricted feature in eukaryotes. Yet there is a common design in the notion of a gene in both eukaryotes and prokaryotes, but they are different enough to create a substantial gap not bridgeable by a series of transitionals with small changes. Certainly not like having a point mutation here and there on a gene from generation to generation.
I just see willful refusal to acknowledge a substantial gap.
No, we think that they have retinas because they have eyes that work. Or would an eye be just fine without actually taking in information from that eye?
You just keep on with this inane prattle. We expect functioning eyes, hence we expect similarities based on function. We don’t expect similarities in structure based on ancestry, nor do we find these. For instance, the octopus eye develops as an invagination of skin, the vertebrate eye develops as an extension of the brain.
Of course they “converge” to functioning eyes, that’s what evolution does.
Glen Davidson
Don’t mean to offend you, Sal, but you are still not addressing the issue at stake here, which is the distribution of derived characters in a nested hierarchy.
But we covered this several times already, let’s not go there again. Rather, I would like to know something else. Do you believe branching evolution occurred at all? For example the radiation of modern species from primordial kinds? YECs accept that, right?
Introns are often junk, or at least is through to have proliferated as junk, and then some of them have secondarily evolved functions over deep time. It is not even that simple, as the mere presence of introns might have become functionally important to some genes, but their large sizes are byproducts of nearly neutral inflation of selfish elements.
As for an explanation for how they came to exist: They evolved from self-splicing introns. As some self-splicing introns gradually diminished in their ability to splice themselves out (culminating in a total loss of their ability to do it themselves), crossreacting proteins and RNA that assisted the splicing process were selected for. As self-splicing became incrementally weaker, assisting RNAs and proteins incrementally grew more effective. Eventually we have both self-splicing introns, and introns that need help with splicing from the spliceosomal RNA and protein complex. These parasitic elements then eventually evolved to be functional in some cases, but often times also grew much larger than their functional roles strictly required.
There is your explanation.
stcordova,
You are confusing the absence of modern descendants of intermediate states with the absence of intermediate states.
Nobody supposes that spliceosomal introns arose by ‘a point mutation here or there’. Strawman.
Talking of gene organisation though, it’s interesting that that of mitochondria and chloroplasts is much more ‘prokaryote-like’ than ‘eukaryote-like’ – eg operons and the general absence of introns. So, one should be careful about over-generalising.
And what does common design add to the pot? What is the common design criteria that explains the difference in eyes?
Rumraket,
What selective advantage do you think self splicing introns initially provided? How do you think self splicing introns evolved?
That you, and others like you, will accept the illogical position of appealing to an infinite regress before you’ll consider God.
They do, except when they don’t. YEC’ism is incoherent too.
So much for the light-sensitive spot! Must have retinas!
That’s a nice story. You should embellish it a bit more though. It just won’t sell as is.
crap
Nilsson and Pelger have competition for making up eye models (Ok fine, conceptions of eye models-it saves time).
Mung,
By which I infer that one should actually over-generalise without restraint?
Oh boy, somebody is going to learn something cool.
It is thought that spliceosomal introns are derived from Group II self-splicing introns. They had no selective advantage whatsoever, because they were genomic parasites, a bit like viruses.
If you want to read more, go here and scroll down to “Origin and evolution of spliceosomal introns: a synthetic concept”
http://what-when-how.com/molecular-biology/self-splicing-introns-molecular-biology/
interesting
Corneel, regarding colewd:
That’s the hope, anyway.
Corneel,
This appears to be a different thesis then the one Rumraket proposed. How do you propose that a major factor of evolution or lifes diversity arose by accident?
I’m not even sure what that means. Phoodoo implied there were no other options, I merely gave examples that showed that his dichotomy was false.
And I don’t see what is “illogical” about an infinite regress, they don’t violate any basic logical axioms to my knowledge.
My main beef with infinite regresses (and I do have a beef with them, thanks for asking) is that they are sort of like brute facts (like “the universe just IS, it has that property, or God just IS necessary, he has that property): They might be true, but they’re intellectually unsatisfying. In a way they seem to just handwave away the problem of explanation. Like turtles all the way down. I don’t consider them “before” I consider God, I consider them individually according to their parsimony and explanatory power. When we’ve hit philosophical bedrock I no longer know how to choose, all the options “down there” seem to be suffering from variations on the same theme of problems.
We are back to “is there an explanation for everything and if there is, would that explanation not also require an explanation?”. And so it seems to me it must either terminate somewhere in something that either just is, or it goes on forever. Theists will here, as far as I have experienced, try to argue there is a third option: Something is necessary. My beef with that is it isn’t actually a third option, because it suffers from the brute-fact problem. Why is it necessary? Well it.. just is. Fuck! For a moment there it sounded pretty good, turns out it’s really just a brute fact again.
Mung,
It is, although I trust you noted the term ‘general’ in my ‘general lack of introns’? That’s not the same as ‘complete’. I avoided an over-generalisation.
He asked for an explanation. We either have one or we don’t. It’s also a hypothesis that makes predictions, and for that you’ll have to go read some papers because I can’t be bothered.
Suppose it’s false, suppose God made introns. Suppose I ask for an explanation, and I’m given one about how God made introns. You’ll be along again to say “That’s a nice story, You should embellish it a bit more though. It won’t sell as is.” Right? I guess not, because the God-made-it story isn’t even a story. There’s no beginning or middle, just an end. *KAPOOM* -> Introns. Ironically, you would literally buy a book that sold that “story”, wouldn’t you?
None. I see them more as parasites that managed to proliferate by taking advantage of pre-existing cellular mechanisms for reverse transcription. I don’t think they proliferated because they were advantageous to the host.
Think of them sort of like lice, the little bugs you can get in your hair and on your scalp. Despite them not being advantageous to you, they can still manage to multiply and live off you and exploit your “resources” even though they’re actually slightly detrimental to you.
You mean originated, right? You’re asking how they came to exist in the first place?
I hate when I write ‘through’ when I mean to write ‘thought’. I do it so often. Arrgh. 🙂
Rumraket,
Yes.
According to the paper that Cornell cited they have had an important contribution to evolution going forward. How does an accident become a strategic element in life’s diversity through mechanisms like alternative splicing?
Rumraket,
Actually, there is an argument for why it’s necessary: the ontological argument. It’s a poor argument, to be sure, but it does exist.
I think that ones really just down to chance. At some point, the accumulation of mutations in the genomes of some organism, could have happened to produce a stretch of DNA which when transcribed into RNA, that RNA could fold back on itself and splice itself out.
By sheer chance.
Rumraket,
The Lucky Accidents Club!
Yeah but, the ontological argument has the brute fact problem.
IF God has maximal greatness, then he is necessary. Sure, cool. Whatever. Why does God have maximal greatness, instead of some other property?
Well He, uhh, uhh… just does!