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.
Yep. Card carrying member right here.
Indistinguishable from “poof” goddidit!
Rumraket,
No, the ontological argument says that the greatest possible being must exist, because if he didn’t exist he wouldn’t be the greatest possible being.
Like I said, it’s a lame argument. But there is an argument. It doesn’t suffer from the brute fact problem.
The God of Dice and Cards
Rumraket,
Aye. I don’t know how else to view the improbable string of meetings stretching back from my own parents through to the origin of sex. Lucky for me, unlucky for all the never-born alternatives.
By definition, none can be greater.
It made more sense in earlier philosophy, since they typically believed that existence is a kind of goodness. Evil was a lack of being, while more being meant more goodness. So existence itself was a kind of goodness, or greatness, hence the greatest possible being had to exist or it wouldn’t be the greatest, simply because it lacked the greatness of being.
Once existence was no longer considered to be a quality, the argument collapsed.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
Aha. I always wondered how anyone could ever think that argument made sense. Thanks for the education!
My favorite thing about the goofy ontological argument is that it implies there must be a maximally great turnip, a maximally great carburetor, a maximally great herringbone sweater, etc.
Perhaps they’re all in heaven with God.
Are the following classes of mammals by common descent or common design? The evolutionary euphemism and epicycle to explain the similarity is “convergence”. Balderdash.
The obvious homology between a marsupial mammal and the corresponding placental mammal fits well with Owen’s notions of homology by pre-planned design, not Darwin’s notion of homology by common descent.
Allan Miller,
Fortunately the cause of each of these events is known. The origin of the cause is yet still a mystery.
Why is convergence balderdash? You have to have some kind of argument here. You can’t just dismiss it out of hand. Doesn’t it make perfect sense that species introduced to similar environments might come up with similar adaptations? If not, why not?
On the other hand, if it’s common design, why are the adaptations different rather than identical? Why do placental wolves have teeth more similar to those of other placental mammals while thylacines had teeth more similar to those of other marsupials? How is that common design?
You are misusing Owen’s term. Homology is not just surface similarity. And in fact Owen himself viewed homologies as evidence of common descent. Richard Owen is not your friend.
Ontological Arguments
bark! bark!
That’s your ticket in! I wouldn’t knock it.
First you need to define what you mean by an adaptation.
And the answer is no. It’s pretty obvious to even a casual observer that all the species in the same environment don’t look the same.
Just part of the incoherence of evolutionary theory. We expect critter to share the same adaptations, except when we don’t.
You have a common design that even evolutionists can’t explain by common descent right there in the example of placentals and marsupials. It shows how useless the theory of common descent is. Common descent is a good explanation for similarity except when it isn’t. Convergence, ha!
Why do you think marsupials and placentals converged. Natural selection? That’s an assumption that evolution of such similarities is natural, but assumptions are not acts. Has anyone gone through the details of what selection pressures are needed, whether such pressure are available, whether such pressures are feasible? Nope. The rigor in the assertion of convergence is about as good as the rigor in explaining the origin of spliceosomal introns — which means rigor is non existent.
So, believe convergence if you choose, but let’s not pretend it’s a fact, its only a speculation.
If I may ask, how big of a mechanistic gap is needed between the transition from one form to another before you’d be willing to invoke a miracle. If you say “no gap is too big for evolution to bridge”, then maybe that’s a problem for you arriving at the truth, if indeed special creation is the truth. So, given you have incomplete information, how are you going to decide what is true? You can guess or be agnostic, but you surely can’t say you absolutely know.
You accept evolution by faith, not by sight. You’re no different than a creationist who lives by faith and not by sight, but you just won’t admit it.
I’m not trying to be combative, but I’m just confronting you with issues that if you had answers for, I might be an evolutionist instead of a creationist. I used to be an evolutionist. The more I studied the gaps, the less I found UCA believable.
The gaps I describe don’t look like gaps in knowledge, they look like mechanistic gaps requiring miracles to fill.
Here is a molecular example of a strange convergence.
I wrote:
Paul Nelson said the Sternberg-Collins discovery gave him goosebumps. It screams common design over common decent.
How does Theobald’s hidden Markov Model explain those similarities. Even evolutionists don’t think it is due to common descent.
Just like the plancental and marsupial mammal similarities, they aren’t explained by common descent, but they are explained by common design, just as Owen said.
ffs LOL
That isn’t an argument, it’s just repetition of your scoffing. We know it’s convergence because placentals and marsupials are separate groups, as shown by a nested hierarchy of most characters, morphological and molecular. Therefore we know that the similarities are convergent, not homologous. And there are other clues, because as I have mentioned the similarities are different if you look closely. You are in the position of claiming that because birds and insects both have wings, evolution is wrong.
Yes, natural selection. That’s what natural selection does. While it’s hard to see the details of selection operating in the distant past, one can certainly approximate what selects for the characters you show in that picture. All the similarities between wolves and thylacines are clearly adaptations to being a large, cursorial predator. Do you disagree? Now of course you know nothing of the literature on convergence, so one wonders how you can so confidently assert that the evidence is lacking. Coincidentally, there was recently a post on a book you should read if you want to gain entry to that literature: Improbable Destinies by Jonathan Losos. If you look, you will find plenty of research on convergence in real time as well as the genetics and selective regimes responsible.
Don’t know, but before we got into it you would have to demonstrate that the gap actually exists, not just in extant species but in the distant past. There are plenty of gaps that have been filled by fossils. How can you know that undiscovered fossils or features that weren’t preserved in fossils wouldn’t fill the gaps that nothing currently fills? Why aren’t you claiming that transformation from reptilian jaws and middle ears to mammalian jaws and middle ears is mechanically impossible?
How do you know that? I keep showing you evidence, but you keep ignoring it.
But what do you find believable? How many separately created kinds are there, what are they, and how do you tell? I don’t think you can tell, and that’s because there are no such things. Why is life a nested hierarchy?
How do you distinguish between the two? And what does convergence between marsupials and placental have to do with any of that?
Do you think they actually did come from a common ancestor? If not, what’s your evidence?
As for the SINEs, I don’t know what you think is happening. Is it the fact that SINE insertions (of different families) tended to happen in roughly the same regions of the two genomes? What that tells me is that SINE insertions tend to happen (or perhaps only tend to be fixed when they happen) in sequences with certain characteristics more often than in sequences with certain other characteristics, and that those characteristics vary across the genome. What those characteristics might be isn’t quite clear to me, but I see no evidence that either selection or the hand of god is responsible for the insertions. It looks as if SINEs might have some preference for GC-rich regions, though I’d like to see a statistical test of that. What evidence do you have?
Oh, and “One of the most brilliant evolutionary biologists of the present day, Richard Sternberg, PhD PhD” is laying it on with a trowel, wouldn’t you say?. As a matter of fact, you later say he isn’t an evolutionary biologist at all. I demand that in the future when you respond to me in the future you refer to me as “John Harshman, PhD, one of the most brilliant molecular phylogeneticists of the present day”.
colewd,
Rubbish. I don’t even know ‘the cause’ of my parents meeting, although working at the same hospital probably had something to do with it. But … how do you know there wasn’t Divine Guidance? Like there is for mutations?
Rumraket,
PhD PhD though!
stcordova,
But they do think that the vast areas of commonality, into which such ‘anomalies’ are embedded – and which is somewhat essential to their detection – is due to common descent. Even as you deny common descent, you rely upon phylogenetic methods for your evidence against. Which is funny.
HT: Mung! That’s Right! Mung!
I told Sal the exact same thing last time he brough this SINE stuff up. I really don’t see the issue. The number of ways a site-preference for insertion can emerge as a byproduct of other genome reading/editing functions is rather large.
They could simply be active areas of the genome undergoing higher levels of transcription(and therefore for that reason be similar among closely related groups like rats and mice), which in turn leaves them less protected, creating more opportunity for insertion, almost like a classic feedback-loop.
IIRC that’s also one of the ways we get mutational hotspots. Again, I really don’t see how this is a problem for common descent.
As usual, Sal doesn’t say. He seldom presents actual arguments. He just shows pictures and talks about how prestigious the journal and eminent the scientist he’s parasitizing is. And then he’s gone.
…writes Sal Cordova, who is renowned across the blogosphere for his puffery, and who once appeared in a cover story of the prestigious scientific journal Nature — as an example of an ID loon.
Common design, not convergence.
John:
Mung:
Did Mung create his very own thread*, just like the grownups? Yes, he did! Who’s a big boy? Mung is! Yes, he is!
*In which he laughably described the book as “Another nail in the coffin.” Of Mung’s credibility, perhaps.
John’s afraid to discuss the book. So are you. No surprise there.
Where did you read that? I was under the impresssion that he never accepted common descent. But then again, he was terribly unclear about his ideas on the matter, probably because he had to walk a fine line between science and religion.
Yes, I noticed that. How else did he recognise marsupial and placental mammals are separate groups?
http://www.reasons.org/articles/archetype-or-ancestor-sir-richard-owen-and-the-case-for-design
Allan Miller,
There is only one event that caused the transition from your parents germ cells to you.
We understand the cause and have lots of experimental data confirming that it is the cause.
It is a deterministic process that we can diagram with a flow chart.
If you were to claim that it was random changes to your mothers germ cells DNA followed by the fittest egg suddenly dividing and differentiating then you have to deal with probability or luck being part of the cause.
Mung,
Interesting article.
It seems to me that convergent evolution (or features appearing disappearing and reappearing) is a contradiction to the nested hierarchy claim. Do you agree? Design appears to be a much better explanation.
No, it’s not a contradiction to the nested hierarchy claim. Even if features disappear and reappear it doesn’t change the nested hierarchy.
Design is a much better explanation for what? Disappearance and reappearance of features? I don’t understand why design, especially common design, would be a better explanation. A better explanation than what?
A feature that disappears and reappears really makes no sense outside the context of common descent. IMO.
Facepalm at colewd’s last two comments. The incomprehension is astounding.
Mung,
Then what is the nested hierarchy? Is it even a coherent claim? If you think it is, why?
If you have nothing useful to contribute I can always put you back on Ignore.
Rules: Address the content of the post, not the perceived failings of the poster.
Even Creationists accept the existence of and coherence of the nested hierarchy. They may even have come up with the idea.
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/history_05
Mung,
Do you agree with this definition from UC ?
I will confess that I found it on Wikipedia. Owen’s views were certainly both complex and confusing, not to say confused. Here’s a relevant paragraph:
“Sometime during the 1840s Owen came to the conclusion that species arise as the result of some sort of evolutionary process.[5] He believed that there was a total of six possible mechanisms: parthenogenesis, prolonged development, premature birth, congenital malformations, Lamarckian atrophy, Lamarckian hypertrophy and transmutation,[5]of which he thought transmutation was the least likely.[5] The historian of science Evelleen Richards has argued that Owen was likely sympathetic to developmental theories of evolution, but backed away from publicly proclaiming them after the critical reaction that had greeted the anonymously published evolutionary book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in 1844 (it was revealed only decades later that the book had been authored by publisher Robert Chambers). Owen had been criticized for his own evolutionary remarks in his Nature of the Limbs in 1849.[12] At the end of On the Nature of Limbs Owen had suggested that humans ultimately evolved from fish as the result of natural laws,[13] which resulted in his being criticized in the Manchester Spectator for denying that species such as humans were created by God.[5]”
So anyway, he denied that humans were descended from apes, but presumably he was thinking of some other mammal rather than fiat creation.
Explain how it explains it.
Unless it’s just, well, omniscience can do anything. Which seems to be about all that you really do think about it.
Glen Davidson
It doesn’t look to me like it’s a definition. Link please?
Why does design appear to be a better explanation? And even if it were, why should we accept an explanation that fits a few features rather than one that fits most features?
Now, if convergence were the result of design, wouldn’t we expect the convergent features to be identical rather than just fairly similar? Wouldn’t we expect octopus eyes and vertebrate eyes to be anatomically and developmentally the same rather than radically different in detail?
Omniscience can do anything. That’s what omniscience means.
This will no doubt be a challenge to those who are sarcasm challenged.
Yes, though it isn’t so much a definition as a simile. And I would change the last bit to “…tends to increase with relatedness.”
Mung,
If that’s the criterion, we’ll need to change the software so you can put yourself on ignore.
I already pay no attention to anything I write. Haven’t you noticed?
Mung,
Page 16 is where the comment is from.