One of the densest Creationist tropes has to be ‘Common Design’. It is proposed as a direct competitor to Common Descent – template mediated copying of DNA – as an explanation for the high sequence similarity of two DNA segments. But what is actually held in common? If we look at a particular transposon sequence, and find it is in A and B but not C, and another that is in A but not B, etc, we can generally organise a set of such markers into a ‘tree’ structure, much as would be predicted by Common Descent. But no, we are assured that these apparent markers are in fact part of the ‘design’. If A is a whale, B a pig and C a deer, there is something that is vital for the function of both whale and pig but is definitely not required in deer. Instead, a sequence which, in whale and pig, sits either side of the insertion, runs uninterrupted in the deer. That, too, is functional, supposedly, even though the insert would give a product which was the A/B one with a gap and possibly a frameshift, if it were transcribed.
But this is held to be the case even if the sequence, with and without transposon, is never transcribed. A sequence that does nothing, and organises hierarchically exactly as would be expected of common descent, is nonetheless functional … because?
On observation, there must be some genome pairs that are highly similar because they are commonly descended. We can see it happening. But there are, on this notion, supposed to be identically-patterened runs of similarity that are not due to common descent, but instead result from a completely different cause – some entity bolting together genomes, or parts thereof, from scratch, I guess, and choosing to repeat a known pattern – up to a point – in a manner that fools our most adept molecular taxonomists into seeing descent.
There must be a line in a taxonomy where the one shades into the other – on one side, sequence commonality is all Common Descent; on the other, Common Design. Where does this discontinuity reside? Species, genus, family, order? Is it a gradual transition, gene by gene, or all at once? How could you tell? Why does it not show up in computer analyses of blind datasets?
If I were to provide 3 genomes shorn of all differences, it would be impossible to tell which were commonly descended and which commonly designed from the data. But there must logically be a transition of causes, were I to take the genomes from sufficiently distant species and this idea were true. What persuades us to adopt this causal explanation in preference to that which explains the pattern better: Common Descent?
No one knows that for sure.
Transposons that are not transcribed can induce somatic mutation critical for development. Also, until we find out what the histones are doing in those regions — as in comprehensive real-time tracking — one really doesn’t know what those things do.
I mentioned the LINE-1 transposon several times here at TSZ. Most of my detractors have criticized my assertions, but oh well, science marches on:
I even remember certain someone asserting he’d eat the hats of all the guys at UD without salt if L1 functionally transposes since that certain someone was so certain L1 wasn’t even retro-transpositionally capable! Oh well, empirical science yet again damages an idea widely promoted by evolutionary theorists.
Same happening with Alu’s (11% of the happening genome).
Now happening with L1s (17% of the genome)
Happening with microRNAs (maybe 1%)
Happening with pseudogenes.
Happening with lncRNAs.
See a trend?
“Common design” is a useless hand-waving excuse because no one was has established ANY design in biological life, let alone common design. “Common design” has exactly as much explanatory and predictive power as saying “MAGIC!” – none. It’s the worst kind of intellectual laziness and cowardice from the IDiot crew. It’s only purpose is as an excuse by the IDiots to not investigate and understand biological phenomena.
stcordova,
Close enough. If organisms of the species can survive quite happily without – which they can; vast numbers of these things are polymorphic, for both insertion and excision – then non-functional is a damned good first pass.
Even if they are functional, you just scoot straight past the question of hierarchic organisation, and the question of where the one – which definitely happens – shades into the other. Functional genes form a hierarchy too, you may be aware, and are demonstrably inherited. Common Descent does not rest upon non-functionality.
THE LINE-1? Was that the one that has some role in memory, according to your speculation? Don’t deer need to remember anything? Or is it pigs?
Sure, I see a trend where someone extrapolates 0.001% increments as inexorably leading to 100%. I am going to be a millionaire, what with my 0.001% increments in wealth. No, a billionaire!
Wait, you are saying that all Alus are functional (in the ‘happening genome’ 🙂 )?
stcordova,
Actual quote, please. I would be surprised if I claimed anything in the region of “all L1s are dead”, which is what you imply.
“Common design” is a term that exists almost entirely in creationism/ID, because nothing like what it is supposed to be is known in actual design. Reuse of some parts is known at times, and sometimes one design is tweaked to fit something else, but the kinds of wholesale shifts of genomes and morphologies seen in life are unknown in designed objects. The strange case of similar retrotransposons certainly makes no sense under “design,” but I’d really be more interested in actual functional parts that make little sense in sticking with heredity, since one could always say that accidental commonalities may be accidental indeed, as does Behe.
What, may I ask, is the common design between Dean Kamen’s Segway and Dean Kamen’s stent? While he and his team did, no doubt, make Segway designs that shared many commonalities, what happens in design is that much remains exactly the same while new things are added or old things taken away. There may be some modification of meshing regions, but no wholesale shifts of the entire design.
A real designer may take a prop design and stick jet engines on it, with whatever modifications are necessary to deal with changed weights and other stressors. Likewise, cars got radios that were wholly unrelated to what had been in cars beforehand. Computers in planes and automobiles appeared de novo, taken from wholly unrelated phenomena.
Life, by contrast, generally gets no complex parts de novo (some HGT), either by design or by copying. What is the point of IDists/creationists anyway, when parts have no common design with other life at all, with respect to adaptations to flight or what-not? Birds, pterosaurs, and bats all have “common design”, but there is no commonality in their adaptations to flight other than merely adapting to tetrapod skeletons. Why not? Did God make their “common design” and demons or angels make their adaptations to flight?
Designers take the best available designs (for the price, etc.) and stuff it into their creations. Life does not. Mammals have the better ear bones, while the “common designer” failed to give these to birds and reptiles. Birds have the better eyes and lungs, and mammals didn’t benefit from that common design. It’s the pattern expected of evolution, not the pattern expected of “common design.”
Basically, “common design” is a magic warding-off invocation meant to take away the power of evolution. Creationists/IDists just invoke it and fail to consider the implications of actual common design and lack thereof in the case of separate adaptations. They don’t really mean anything by it except to claim that God did it, not evolution. For the patterns are not those of common design at all, they just don’t want to know that.
Glen Davidson
This has to be the most stupid and ignorant OP in the history of TSZ.
Common design is an entailment of Linnaean taxonomy. It was proposed decades before Common Descent. As matter of fact evos stole Linnaean taxonomy and changed “archetype” to “common ancestor”:
Simpson echoed those comments:
So no, it was not proposed as a direct competitor to Common Descent as it existed long before it.
And seeing that you don’t know what mechanism can produce Common Descent you don’t know what pattern would be left behind.
Not in a deeply redundant, multiple pathway system.
The folly of the thinking “knock out” is good evidence of non-function was refuted here (with experimental citation to boot):
The human brain and nervous system has large amounts of fault tolerance. Not surprising L1s can suffer compromise. But globally they seem functional.
First pass is not a final pass. Skepticism about the first pass is always in order. I’m just providing some skepticism here at the Skeptical Zone. 🙂
Thank science we didn’t write off Alu’s transposons and L1 transposons as non-functional. Thank science we didn’t go with the “damned good first pass” because it was wrong.
Also Common Design is based on observations and experiences. We even have ways to tell if people copied something illegally.
PCs exhibit a common design- PC clones. Cars exhibit a common design. Houses and buildings built to the same building codes exhibit a common design. Lumber yards cut their timbers to prespecified sizes- common design.
Common design runs deep in our society and even throughout the animal kingdom. Beaver dams in New England resemble beaver dams in the Northwest. Ant colonies in the Southeast resemble those in the Southwest.
But you don’t have a mechanism capable of producing reptiles, birds, mammals, lungs, eyes, etc. So that would be a problem.
How do I know that you don’t have a mechanism capable of producing those? The total lack of peer-review supporting the claim that you do. You don’t even know how to test the claim that natural selection, drift or any other non-telic process can do it.
“Conservation” (aka common design) is accepted as a marker of function. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean the same function. A mouse pseudo gene that is homologous to a human translated gene has a different function.
http://www.reasons.org/articles/unitary-pseudogenes-have-function-part-2
Shapiro and Sternberg cited even better examples. I don’t have them handy at the moment. Bummer….
I don’t think I see common descent and common design as being at odds, so I don’t see common design as an alternative explanation to common descent. I certainly try to avoid appealing to common design if common descent makes sense.
Convergence, otoh, might be a better place to look for common design.
I think where common design might come in handy is if someone was arguing for multiple designers each with their own design. A common design might be a better explanation. But I don’t see that many people arguing for multiple designers, Alan Fox being a notable exception.
I would like to know what a theory of common design would look like, if anyone has developed such a theory.
Yes but the problem is universal common descent doesn’t make any sense, scientifically.
No. In real life we see single designers use different designs. Why aren’t people arguing for multiple designers?
Thus spake creationist. Feel free to hang your hat on that one.
Not sure what you mean here. Arguments for common descent often appeal to what are thought to be non-functional sequences. Why would an intelligent designer do it that way … ?
Richie’s comments reek of cheerleading and ignorance. But desperate times call for desperate measures.
That’s what I’d like to know!
if all ID can do is detect “design”, then there’s nothing in the theory that can tell you how many designers it was.
They actually go to painstaking ends not to ask those (very valuable) questions. Because ID is simply a method to try and sneak creationism into schools without getting caught.
it probly was a team, come to think of it. I mean, Frank Gehry doesn’t personally design each panel and I-beam and electrical outlet. I guess ID actually implies multiple designers. Huh.
ID is about the detection and STUDY of design in nature.
I like fjords. In the next version of earth, I’m putting them in Africa.
Frankie,
You are only sore because your “there is no theory of evolution” wasn’t there to take the prize.
No it isn’t. It is a possible explanation of the fact that a hierarchic taxonomy can be constructed – one that common descent fits FAR better. Whatever Linnaeus thought.
But anyway there must be a taxonomic rank that IS commonly descended, surely, even if round the subspecies mark. Where do you draw the line? Do you think that Common and Spotted Sandpipers were separately created or commonly descended? Or how about the Faroes vs the European Starling? American vs European Badger?
Isn’t it strange, science moving on? Why doesn’t the prior theory get left for ever, irrespective of all data?
That’s why I support the Discovery Institute, because they are opposed to teaching ID in public schools. And if they were a religious organization (creationist), my company would not match my donations to them. So they are not a creationist think tank. Thank God for lawyers!
stcordova,
Oh sure, one of them. Them vague things over there that I’m waving my arms at.
It is not merely knockout. Novel transposition events can be detected in an individual, or a family group. Are you saying they must be functional in that individual – because they exist?
Are you, in broader terms, saying every single base in DNA is functional? Whether polymorphic or not, transcribed or not, bound or not? Certainly seems that way, with this some-therefore-all reasoning.
stcordova,
Are you saying that the quite large array of unrelated places functional Alus are found – in promoters, repressors, coding sequence, non-coding – that this means every one of those million Alus is functional?
Or are we going with ‘well, you never know’?
stcordova,
Way to ignore the point. If you don’t think evolution happened, you aren’t entitled to any conclusions from it. Conservation isn’t even conservation if the sequences did not commonly descend.
Mung,
Uh huh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District
Mung,
But you therefore see a boundary – a point in the taxonomic series where the same basic data pattern moves from being due to template copying to some entity – for reasons unknown – doing something that looks exactly like the pattern at the lower taxonomic rank – the difference is only in percentage.
Mung,
That is specifically because the ‘Common Design’ notion loses traction in non-functional sequence, which is why we see the likes of Sal trying very hard to make it look like every single bit of the genome is functional – including deletions, inversions, even the bias in GC content … everything. It is something of a stretch, to say the least. Because even in ‘true’ functional sequence there must be a possibility of changes that don’t have any significant effect.
An IDist can dream!
Glen Davidson
Allan Miller,
Further, this nth-degree insistence that there is no non-functional signal does not comport with what we know of design. If I design a program, I meant it all, every last spelling mistake, bug and all? And if someone copies that code, and it includes 98% identity with mine, including all the bits I didn’t intend, I cannot say that they copied it lock, stock and barrel? “Common Design, mate” they would smirk, as I danced with impotent rage.
Frankie,
Having babies, Frankie.
So common descent makes sense to you on Tuesdays and Thursdays?
Whales, sharks, penguins, seals, ichthyosaurs all bear adaptations to a life in seawater. The niche is an effective designer.
Not sure how you think I’ve ever argued for multiple designers. My sole candidate is the niche. But there are myriad niches. If that’s what you mean, then you are correct. 🙂
Can’t help you there.
Just not the how,what,when and who of the design.
Those are separate questions as you don’t have to know those answers in order to determine something was designed and study it.
Humans give rise to humans. Not quite what Common Descent requires.
Common design is an observed phenomena whereas universal common descent is not. Railing against observed phenomena is a sure sign of desperation.
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Allan Miller: Common design is an entailment of Linnaean taxonomy.
Of course it is. He based everything on “archetypes” just as Mayr said.
Science has nothing to do with it.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Common_design
“This creationist argument is a misunderstanding of the evidence for evolution. That evidence is not about mere similarity, but rather a very specific pattern of similarity: the twin-nested hierarchy. The vast majority of possible patterns of similarity would not be consistent with common descent. For example, bats with feathers would be hard to explain via common descent since feathers evolved after the last common ancestor of birds and bats.[2]
Most anti-evolutionists believe the common designer is all-knowing and all-powerful. But consider that a great deal of the reason why common design in human creations exists is that humans are finite beings with finite abilities, finite resources, and finite time. For this reason humans almost never create from “scratch” but modify previously-existing designs. The omnipotent designer envisioned by most creationists could have created each species from scratch, using radically different design philosophies. In its attribution to the designer of the same limitations which affect human designers, this argument is a transparent case of self projection as god.
In evolution, the theory of descent clearly requires a particular pattern of similarity. Intelligent design, however, has an omnipotent creator which is capable of anything, so there is no reason to assume that each organism would have to be very similar to others at all. In fact, if they were all specially created for some particular purpose, there’s no reason any of them would be similar.
The patterns of similarities and differences in question, particularly in genetics, appear to extend even to areas in which there are many different independent structures that would all do the same things or that do not actually do anything. For instance, many proteins can have different amino acid sequences without this affecting the way they fold and hence what they do. However, species thought to be more closely related by common descent have sequences more like each other than they do with species that are more distantly related, which may have different sequences that do the same things. A common designer would have no reason not to simply use the exact same sequence over and over, or at least would not have any reason to create a pattern of differences that belies a specific cladistic ancestry that just so happens to be consistent with all the other apparent patterns of ancestry found elsewhere.
To take one example of close similarity and the claim of “common design”: the human body is most similar to the bodies of chimps and other apes. If that similarity is due to “common design”, then that can be either because (a) the laws of nature and the properties of the raw materials constrained the designer(s) in what they could produce; or (b) the designer(s) had common goals in mind. (Option (b) could suggest that, in order to act according to the goals of our designer(s), we ought to “act like apes”.)
This is an elaboration of point #4 but it’s worth mentioning that Sarfati’s argument of the shared proteins in nurse sharks and camels, as evidence of common design over ancestry, unwittingly falsifies common design. To elaborate, in the case of common ancestry we expect to see similar DNA sequences, such as the similarity in the chimp and human cytochrome c proteins. According to Creationists humans and chimpanzees are both different “Kinds” and would just assert common design as the explanation. Fair enough, but when we look at the DNA sequences in those shared by the shark and the camel, also two different “Kinds”, we see different DNA sequences, as would be expected in the case of convergent evolution, but completely inconsistent with what pattern one would expect from a common designer. If common design were the case, we should either see identical DNA sequences in all proteins or difference sequences for each “Kind”, not a pattern that shows common ancestry where evolution needs it and convergence where it would otherwise falsify common ancestry.”
There isn’t a scientific theory of evolution, Allan. That is just a fact of life.
Frankie,
It’s a start … in any case, it is the mechanism of common descent – continuous lineages are all that is required. As in any tree. Sex – which, from experience, is the card you play next – does not change this materially.
Umm there isn’t any evidence that said mechanism can produce anything but humans given humans. There isn’t any evidence that said mechanism can produce humans from non-humans. So that would be a problem
Frankie,
Not in biology it ain’t
I never stuck ‘universal’ in, you did. Common descent is routinely observed, and there is considerable additional supportive evidence – an embarrassment of riches, considering most scientists accepted common descent years ago – coming from genome sequencing, among other things.
Quite.
Frankie,
I don’t think ‘entailment’ means what you think it means. Anyway, Linnaeus was a clueless hack. Mayr too. This is fun!
Frankie,
What about Sandpipers? Is there NO evidence that Common and Spotted Sandpipers are commonly descended? What about Faroese vs European Starlings?
Wow, way to run around with the goalposts. Sandpipers evolving into other sandpipers is baraminology, as is your starling example. Starlings will never evolve into something other than a bird and will remain similar to starlings.
Of course it is- see Linnaean taxonomy.
Because I am sick of equivocations. Baraminology is OK with common descent so yours is an equivocation.
So if a non human produced a human, why wouldn’t it be greater evidence for design than evolution? It other words ,it seems to me the lack humans arising from non- humans is more of a problem for ID than evolution.