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.
fifthmonarchyman,
So, you think that things are arranged in a manner that would result from a process of evolution principally in order to help us make sense of the biological world.
Is making sense of that biological world in terms of its resulting from an actual process of evolution off the table, or not?
Rumraket,
When are we going to stop calling dogs dogs?
With such rapid rates of change, it should be any day now right? Maybe finally we can say that we have actually witnessed evolution, and we have a new animal. Many new animals in fact. We have basset hounds, and poodles, and huskies, and Irish setters-Termites..
Perhaps off topic, but windows computers are much closer to forming a nested hierarchy than macs. I can run a lot of compiled programs I wrote for the original IBM pc on Windows 10.
Nothing written for the early Apple computers or early Macs will run on current hardware. The discontinuity is at the transistor level. Or at least at a very low level of organization.
It would not be a bad analogy to say that generations of Apple computers use completely different genetic codes, whereas PCs exhibit descent with modification.
Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black?
Actually found the Sp100-rs repeat featuring in the book; page 52-53. It is indeed associated with a driving effect in heterozygous females, by selectively killing of homozygous wildtype embryos. Nice.
I like the book so far.Thanks for the recommendation.
Reminds me of the Droste effect.
stcordova,
Thanks for the invite Sal!
I’m not sure what I’m going to be doing around that time… I usually plan my family vacations well in advance and around conferences and such I need to attend…
This year is different as the project I started working on got cancelled unexpectedly… I got paid for the full project, so I’m not complaining about that but there is a string attached to it…If they decided to reinstate it, I have to be available within 2 weeks or so…I might consider attending your conference though…
I’m also planning to attend the The Science of Consciousness Conference – April 2-7, 2018
I was offered to submit an abstract for a presentation on quantum consciousness vs quantum soul theme but now everything is on hold…as I’m obviously tied up to some prior commitments…
http://medicine.arizona.edu/news/2017/science-consciousness-conference-april-2-7-2018
I don’t know about “principally” but it’s quite a coincidence that it works out that way. Don’t you agree?
The folks I hang with might call it providential but I suppose atheists would have to call it super lucky.
If I was being theological I might say that the “making sense” part is a reason that God chose to use evolution instead of some other method to bring about the diversity we see in nature.
peace
Of course all words contain letters just as all cellar structures contain proteins
You are missing the point.
The same kinds of words tend to share the same combinations of letters
present participles of verbs often end in “ing” common nouns not so much.
Adverbs often end in “ly” verbs no so much
At a glance paragraphs in a scientific text book would have different phraseology than paragraphs in a romance novel..
get it now??
peace
I’m not sure we could make sense of these sorts of man-made entities if we did not already know their history or purpose.
I know that one of the ways we know if a particular set of symbols is gibberish or a text in a unknown language is by looking at the pattern of the symbols to see if we see an underlying structure.
Now imagine we came across a large hoard of alien technology. I think one of the first things we would do is try and categorize it into smaller groups of similar looking stuff.
If we could not do that I don’t know how we could ever begin to understand what we had.
peace
Yeah, but Apple devices run on Darwin
Throw your IPhones into the fire, creos!
The day your questions stop being dumb.
Honestly, no. If I misunderstood what your point was, fair enough.
But I got the impression from your earlier post, that you were attempting to argue that other objects in addition to biological organisms, could be sorted into nesting hiearchies.
But your categories do not form true nesting hiearchical structure. I would agree with you that they are fine as categories, as the different objects you listed can indeed be categorized. And they can be called groups. But those groups do not objectively sort into nesting hiearchies.
Again, your version of “evolution” is a strawman and you should find a different word for it. Evolution properly taught requires no mention of god to understand. In your version god is intertwined everything. Stop using that word, you’ve no right at all to it.
Ever convince Sal it was wrong to mess with your comments?
So critics of evolution are conflict with God’s plan of making sense?
Yea, about as dumb as showing photos of different dog skulls, and claiming its evidence of evolutionary change.
Let me try again
The terms “species” and “genus” do not objectively sort into nesting hiearchies.
Actual Individual species objectively sort into a particular “genus” forming a nesting hierarchy.
This similar to terms like “”word” and “part of speech” they do not objectively sort into a nesting hierarchy.
On the other hand individual words do objectively sort into particular “parts of speech” like noun or “verb”.
we then can link different parts of speech together to form sentences and different types of sentences to form paragraphs etc etc etc.
get it now??
peace
Although I’m not a critic of evolution I would say no as long as you believe that evolution is not the only way to produce a pattern that can be categorized into ever smaller units.
I suppose it’s an open question whether Darwinistic evolution can be expected to produce a pattern that can be categorized into groupings that would make sense to us.
I’d have to think about it but my first inclination would be to say no.
peace
It is a manifest instance of evolutionary change.
Creationists usually agree it is microevolutionary change. Micro-evolution. Micro evolution. Hence, evolution.
Are you saying you disagree? Are you saying there is not even such a thing as microevolution? Are you an organism immutabilist? Did dog-breeds get instantly poofed into existence by
DogGod?Heck of a thing for the leader of The Church of Allan to say.
ETA: Are you sure?
John Harshman,
So the question is, is the pattern we see that has nested groups adequate evidence for the claim of common descent. Sal talked about the prokaryotic to eukaryotic transition. Do you include this in your common descent claim or could eukaryotic cells be a unique design?
Yes.
John Harshman,
.
Fifth has made the claim that humans can create a nested hierarchy and books, paragraphs, words and letters are an example. I threw out a family of computers as an example. Rumraket tried to explain why these are not nested hierarchies. The reason was because common words can exist in other areas of the book. Fifth replied that proteins can exist in other life forms. So Rum then reverted back to an assertion.
I honestly think the above claim which you keep repeating is unsupported. Theobald claimed that a designed group of cars can create a nested hierarchy but not an objective one because color is subjective. Theobald falls into the same trap as Rum as some biological features are subjective like the peacocks tail.
My level of belief is in accordance with my level of understanding. 🙂
Cool 🙂
It seems to me that most of the arguments in this thread are not arguments for common descent but rather arguments against this or that idea which is at best only tangentially related.
I did ask for folks to suggest to me the best books to read in order to find the best arguments for common descent so that I could improve my own ability to argue for it.
I don’t believe anyone came up with any books for me to read, which I did find a bit odd. I reviewed a number of books that I have and they fail to even argue for it. Why on earth would they leave it out? Makes me wonder where people here learned their own position on the matter.
Perhaps their reasons for belief aren’t that strong either.
Dog breeding is a huge scam and ought to be illegal.
Sue the designer
So what does he know? There are certain hierarchical effects, in fact, made for our convenience, like book and chapter, and further divisions sometimes exist (like verses in Bibles). Clearly we can make better hierarchies, like in the military, which we do for the sake of command and control. “Hierarchy” as a word comes from hierarchical religion, which explains the “hier” part, which meant “priestly” and “holy,” and many religions have been hierarchical, so the latter word came simply to refer to hierarchies in general.
Yes, and you totally ignore that it’s not. At the very best there’s a certain amount of imposed hierarchy and some continuity effects, but the hierarchies are wholly compromised by revolutionary changes, not carved deeply like evolutionary changes effect.
One problem with the “book analogy” is that books don’t typically have common descent, while above the domains in biology is “life.” The problem with words, on the other hand, is that they appear in no hierarchical relationships with each other, rather they exist according to other criteria, like in making sense. Also, they don’t evolve like proteins do across separated lineages. Words are all the same, except for certain things done to be clever, word coinage, etc.
Theobald was just making the point that you can arrange practically anything in nested hierarchies.
How wrong can you be? What the fuck is subjective about the peacock’s tail? Peacock relatives also have display tails, the Indian Peacock or Indian Peafowl being generally considered the most spectacular. There’s nothing subjective about the nested hierarchy of peacock tails, most notably because they’re totally derived from pre-existing feathers. I can only suppose that you think the tails are “subjective” because they’re subjectively judged by potential mates, but that certainly doesn’t make them “subjective” in any evolutionary sense.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
Glen,
You have made circular reasoning and assertions an art form. 🙂
GlenDavidson,
So biological innovations like sight and flight are not revolutionary changes?
Ever try to make a legitimate case, rather than simply asserting your prejudices?
Glen Davidson
newton,
Even more bold the suing city hall 🙂
Sure, the terms don’t. The referents of the terms (the actual species), do.
Yeah, sure, there is a category of words called “verbs” and another called “noun”, and so on. And sentences are made of verbs and nouns, and paragraphs are made of sentences, and chapters are made of paragraphs, and books are made of chapters.
I get all that, that’s a nested hiearchy. But it is not an objective nested hiearchy. There is no characteristic that defines a chapter, it is subjectively imposed by the writer.
Look, the claim is not that designers can’t design nesting hiearchies. Of course they can, I can even give examples of designed nested hiearchies. The file system on your computer is a nesting hiearchy. There are folders, which contain even more folders and files, and inside those folders there are more folders and files, and so on and so forth.
But again, that is a subjectively imposed nested hiearchy. It is not defined by the characteristics of the folders or files they contain. It could be rearranged in any way you like. The same could be said of a book. The contents of a chapters could be copied completely randomly into other chapters. Chapters can be made of a single paragraph, or even a single word or sentence. Or there could be fourty chapters all saying the same thing, containing the same paragraphs, words and sentences. All completely identical.
This is wholly unlike biology, where (to pick an example) the group “vertebrate” contain the group “mammal”, defined among other things by mammary glands. But looking outside of vertebrates we don’t find mammary glands anywhere, but we could easily imagine that such a thing was possible. A designer could have given mammary glands to squid, snails and jellyfish, just like a designer can decide to put particular files into any folder or subfolder he desires. Or put any particular paragraph, sentence or word into any chapter, or indeed an entirely different book. There is no systematic categorization going on in the same way there is for life where particular characters define a clade to the exclusion of all others.
Even more importantly, there is no consilience of independent phylogenies. You could try to construct a phylogenetic tree from the contents of chapters of some book. Pick a particular sentence, see if you can find similar sentences from other chapters in the same book, then use an algorithm to construct a phylogenetic tree from those “homologous” sentences.
Now do it again, pick another sentence from the chapters in that book, see if there is a similar sentence in the other chapters for that one too, then construct a phylogenetic tree for that sentence.
Now compare the two trees, do they exhibit similar branching orders? My bet is they don’t. And if you were to find ten such sentences that are re-used in other chapters, you either find they are essentially direct and unaltered copies, or you find that they all yield wildly incongruent branching orders.
This is very different from the nested hiearchy of life, which is constantly corroborated by independent phylogenies. The explanation for that either has to be common descent, or the designer is deliberately making it seem as if there is common descent. I can’t prove to you that there is not an invisible hand of god making it seem as if there is common descent when there is not. But because that hand is invisible, I’m just going to go with common descent.
Of course they aren’t. They’re utterly evolutionary, and derivative of pre-existing forms.
The Wright brothers did what intelligences do, they adapted airfoils and wing shifting from birds (at least ultimately the derivation was from birds), used revolutionary changes like aluminum and the internal combustion engine, and made a revolutionary new flying machine, based in part on wind tunnel testing.
Birds could take nothing from unrelated organisms, and derived wing structure from a design-improbable source, terrestrial limbs. Archaeopteryx remains a relatively poor flyer.
Glen Davidson
I’m sorry, but you know better than to utter the name of the designer.
Look! Birds can fly! Therefore, men can go to the moon. It’s what intelligences do.
Or looked at from a different perspective, instead of assuming that birds are not intelligent, perhaps they adapted from other sources, and rather than attributing their “adaptations” to blind mechanical sources we should attribute it to the birds themselves, because that’s what intelligences do.
Is it like against the rules to actually put forth a cogent argument here? Or are birds just dumb as a rock too.
In order to give an example, you have to actually give the example. Simply typing the words “mac computers” does not give an example of a nested hiearchy of mac computers.
Objective nested hiearchies. There’s a significant differences.
What? Where?
I don’t see that reply to me anywhere. But even so it is true, there is the (observed in the real world, therefore not ad-hoc) phenomenon of horizontal gene transfer, detectable as horizontal gene transfer exactly because almost everything else objectively sorts into the nested hiearchy.
Where are these posts? Are you halluscinating? What assertion? So you have now confabulated reading a post where fmm says there are proteins existing “in other life forms”, and additionally you have confabulated that I have responded to this by “reverting back to an assertion”?
Have you been institutionalized somewhere before for having such episodes of complete disconnect from reality?
In what way is it unsupported that common descent explains the nested hiearchy?
And he’d be absolutely correct. It would be an imposed hiearchy that couldn’t be corroborated by another character.
… w… what? What the f*ck does that even mean?
Rumraket,
I think you would see a similar hierarchy on books written about specific subjects like calculus or biology. You could see the words and, but, so, animal etc in all books but you probably won’t see cell or DNA in a calculus book and vector or tensor in a biology book.
What is a “revolutionary” change? What does it accomplish that you describe them as “revolutionary”?
If to you, “revolutionary” change is just another way of saying it is “change so great evolution couldn’t plausibly have produced it”, have you then not essentially begged the question against evolution by deciding to call it “revolutionary”?
I think you don’t even know what you’re saying here.
Why would that yield a nested hiearchy? Or consilience of independent phylogenies?
@Mung
Love the new profile pic, fits well. 🙂
Rumraket,
fifthmonarchyman
December 16, 2017 at 12:46 pm
Ignored
Rumraket: Your latter two lists don’t yield objective nesting hiearchies. To pick an example, your book chapters will contain words and letters found everywhere in the book. The same is true for paragraphs, sentences, phrases, words and syllables.
Of course all words contain letters just as all cellar structures contain proteins
You are missing the point.
The same kinds of words tend to share the same combinations of letters
present participles of verbs often end in “ing” common nouns not so much.
Adverbs often end in “ly” verbs no so much
At a glance paragraphs in a scientific text book would have different phraseology than paragraphs in a romance novel..
get it now??
peace
colewd,
And he’d be absolutely correct. It would be an imposed hierarchy that couldn’t be corroborated by another character.
What do you mean here?
Mung,
From the evo side? Huh. All I am seeing are attempts to keep the discussion focused on common descent on the one side, and attempts to talk about anything but on the other.
You surely don’t need ‘a book on common descent’? I’ve never read one, as such, and I don’t feel it all all necessary to do so in order to grasp the basics. It derives pretty readily from easily-grasped first principles, whether talking of morphological commonalities or genetic ones.
If one has a process of descent with modification and bifurcation, one would expect a tree structure – nested sets – to be found in extant data, and that we find. Modifications in an ancestor would be inherited by all descendants, albeit to some extent obscured by further modification. Bozos who don’t know what ‘circular reasoning’ means call that circular reasoning; I don’t. The data support the expectation; they aren’t force-fit to it.
Now I don’t see anything at all difficult about that. Indeed, if we were just talking about hierarchies of text, or computer data, you would have no problem with it either, I suggest. Or if we were just talking of, say, commonalities in rats and mice, or bacterial lineages. But because of religion, it becomes unimaginably difficult for you to grasp.
If it comforts you to think that, go ahead. But I know that I find the evidence compelling – particularly when one considers the molecular, sequence data, unavailable to Darwin. The thing Sal dare not examine, for reasons which to me are obvious.
You may have to take my word for it, but it does not strike me as a ‘belief’, but an honest assessment of the data of which I am aware.
Thanks for posting it! It was either that one or the zinc finger. 🙂
That is pretty much the definition of a belief. 😉
peace
So explain it to me with the above skeletons. I studied all sorts of geometry even varieties of non-Euclidean geometry such as found in General Relativity. Why don’t you try explaining a nesting structure based on geometry for a change. Or how about set theory. You want to say I don’t comprehend, you can use some formal language to add some rigor to this discussion.
Since you just seem to hand wave and not try to formalize anything, we can work with some geometry.
But we can start with some basics, like bilaterian symmetry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilateria
Oh, that’s another problem, how to evolve a bilaterian and a radially symmetric animal from a common ancestor, but I digress….
So we have the bird skeleton and the lungfish skeleton:
And within the bilatarians we have vertebrates:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertebrate
Lungfish are veterbrates, Pigeons are veterbrates, kangaroos are vertebrates, frogs are vertebrates. So all these creatures nest within vertebrates.
What’s the problem there? I’ll tell you what the problem is. They may all nest within vertebrates, and superficially this looks like an evolutionary pattern of all of them descending from a vertebrate ancestor. But the problem is, and has always been, as Matzke pointed out:
So you can’t rigorously demonstrate we descended from a fish, at best you can only prove a Parrot and Lungfish are members of sister groups, and even then this assumes common descent to begin with!!!
For the present discussion we are only describing nested hierarchy in terms of structure, not genealogy or phylogeny nor even common design.
Apparently you’re having some serious problems classifying things based on geometry and structure. That’s probably a symptom of having your thought process being so mangled by phylogenetic thinking you can’t do straightforward structural comparisons anymore. It’s a PhD in mangled thinking.
But let’s be a little meticulous. I see the bird skeleton having:
Why should this skeletal architecture be nested within a fish architecture that doesn’t have these things, but has some other things?
I think you’re having some issues with set theory and abstract concepts. You accuse me of lacking comprehension, but actually I think you’re the one suffering so badly from the effects of phylogenetic illogic that you aren’t able to see there are problems with your conception of these architectures in a framework of sets and geometry.
But lets review a little set theoretic approach. Bilatarians are the set of all animal that have bilateral symmetry, within Bilatarians are the set of creatures like vertebrates and a variety of in-vertebrates (like insects).
Within the set of vertebrates are sets of other creatures like: mammals, birds, and various sets of fish. Birds have a skeletal structure distinct from fish.
Structural classification is about structure and geometry, John, not phylogeny. We can also extend this to physiology. But it’s not about phylogeny.
I’m afraid however, your thinking is too steeped and colored by phylogenetic phantasies that you are now arguing with circular reasoning.
The discussion was common design vs. common descent. So you can’t use phylogeny which assumes common descent to argue that common descent is real! You can’t only use the assumption of common descent in a “proof by contradiction” where common descent is assumed for the sake of argument.
Your reasoning is sloppy and illogical.
You can’t use phylogeny to do structural classification, you have to use a method independent of the assumption of common design or common descent. The method is structural, geometric and set theoretic based. You’re now showing utter ineptness trying to argue on terms independent of your circular reasoning.
Here’s your chance to be liberated of your circular reasoning and see biology in the light of geometry and structure, not phylogeny.
fifthmonarchyman,
What a pointless piece of equivocation.