I note many public evolutionists, Prothero and Shermer and many others always stress the cases of vestigial parts in marine mammals as evidence for evolutionary biology.
Yet in reality this is a sampling error that in fact makes the opposite case against evolution.
I agree marine mamnmals once were land lovers and only later gained features to surbvve in the water. Not the impossible steps said by evolutionists, as Berlinski demonstrates, but some other mechanism.
Anyways evolutionists persusde themselves, and try to persuade others, that the real changes found in marine mammals proves creatures changed greatly and by Darwins method.
Yet the great truth is that for all the living and fossil biology that is observed at least 99%% has no vestigial features whatsoever. If all biology evolved then all biology should be crawling with remaining bits but in fact its a great missing anatomy. There are no vestigial bits save in very few special cases like marine mammals.
Therefore if evolutionists use these few cases to make the evolution case then in strict sampling disipline they actually make the opposite case. If finding a few vestigial bits is to prove evolution then the glorious ascence makes the true case that evolution didn’t happen because it should be that vestigial bits are the norm and not the exception.
So i propose its a sampling error to say vestigial bits of marine mammals prove evolution and in fact it must be proving the opposite.
I think this is a good point unless someone can show otherwise.
Other than keeping one, I guess.
Glen Davidson
CharlieM,
Funnily enough, it was unexpected that whales would be placed close to hippos in the Artiodactyla. Morphological evidence did not put them quite there, but as a sister group to it. Someone had to persuade the field otherwise for the current view to take over. Molecular evidence convinced ‘closed minds’ to change. It was annoying, because they’d already printed a lot of books! Someone had to use a lot of Tipp-ex. 😉
The evidence is pretty compelling, if you’re open to the reasoning behind it. Have a look at the SINE paper.
What do you mean here? What about the “living being” is being directed from within?
Why do you care what he meant apart from some internal desire to know?
Another non self directed post on your part?
When all the evidence, of which there is an enormous amount, supports one and only one possible history, informed minds do tend to close around this as being the only plausible history.
If you think about it, it’s fortunate that this occurs, since knowledge is cumulative.
There’s not much that can be done about minds that stubbornly reject all this evidence, but we can be happy science progresses despite them.
LoL- No Allan, it is clear that you have no idea what objectively test mean. And no OI never said nor thought whales evolved directly from fish. There isn’t any evidence that fish can evolve onto something other than fish.
And I will take on John. He has no idea if whales could have evolved from land mammals and he is clueless of nested hierarchies
Frankie,
No, sure I don’t. Neither does the author of any phylogenetic paper ever. Just you.
What does objectively test mean then? Don’t say ‘evolve a whale’. That would not be an objective test of the phylogeny of modern whales, which is what we are looking at.
Why do SINE data arrange into very neat nested sets, with whales nestling snugly next to hippos? Your ‘Common Design’ hypothesis (oh, my aching sides) doesn’t explain that, unless of course the designer wants it to look evolved in a branching manner. To the extent of making indels and substitutions within the SINEs and/or flanking sequence reveal the same tree pattern at finer resolution still.
Evidence they did, I count as evidence they can.
Sure. I’ve seen you gibber about nested hierarchies for a while now. I’ve made my own mind up as to who is clueless.
Again, phylogenetics assumes Common Descent and looks for relationships based on the degree of similarity. It is not a demonstration of it. You need a mechanism capable of producing the changes and a way to test that mechanism is capable. That would be an objective test.
Oh my aching sides! You have no design nor engineering experience at all. and are obviously clueless in that regard. And you have no idea what pattern evolution would produce.
And I have supported my claims about nested hierarchies, complete with quotes for the experts in evolution and evolutionary biology. I am OK with the fact it all supports my claims.
The objective test for relativity came during a solar eclipse and observing light being bent by gravity to the exact degree predicted by Einstein’s equations. Objective tests for medicine involve controlled trials that test for efficacy vs the null.
Hey, I’ve supported my claims with quotes from experts in evolution too, namely me. Why do you consider those other experts to be correct (assuming for the sake of argument that you actually understand what they meant) and me wrong?
It appears that you won’t believe whales evolve from land mammals until someone actually takes a land mammal population and causes it to evolve into a whale population in the lab. Is that correct? That’s a ridiculous notion, but it seems to be what you demand.
What makes you think that design or engineering experience is more relevant than evolutionary biology experience? You seem to know little about phylogenetics, which does not look for relationships based on degree of similarity. (There are methods that do that, e.g. UPGMA, but nobody uses them because their assumptions — chiefly a perfect molecular clock — are unlikely to be true.) Nor does phylogenetics need to know the mechanism by which mutations arise; we’re just trying observing the pattern they make, and it makes no difference whether they’re random replication errors or are lovingly and individually placed by Jesus. You have no alternative explanation for the pattern. (I know you have waved your hand at “common design”, but that isn’t an explanation.)
Catch 22, that would be directed evolution
I doubt even a time machine would be good enough, in which he could go back and watch it happen. Since the actual transition would require many lifespans in real time, he’d have to sample every N years to see it. And between samples, we’d miss the events he knows must have happened. We’d have to assume the developments between samples necessary to result in the changes we saw, and those assumptions are, of course, pure bias.
How do you suppose your scenario could be tested? That, by the way, is how science differs from whatever it is you’re doing: we ask that sort of question, and we even try to answer it. Not only that, we follow through and do the tests.
To pick a specific example at random, the phylogenetic relationships of whales have been tested to death, and so have the characteristics of their ancestors. Ask me how (though I and many others have already told you, and you dismiss it as “speculation”).
Frankie,
And yet that’s exactly how I earn my crust. How strange!
A branching tree pattern, if inheritance is mostly vertical.
Frankie,
That would not be an objective test of the relationship. Phylogenetic analysis would. If they were unrelated, you would be very unlikely to recover a tree. If related, the probability goes up sharply. You don’t need to know what mechanism produced the tree to test – objectively – how well supported the tree hypothesis is. It’s still possible that the phylogeny is not a phylogeny at all, but a false trail left by a designer. For some peculiar reason.
But since a tree is an expectation of common descent, but is not an expectation of Non-Deceptive Designer mechanism, recovering one supports the former but not the latter.
I can’t for the life of me see why it bothers anyone that whales evolved from land mammals.
It bothers Charlie because it violates his notions of directionality in evolution. It bothers Frankie because it violates his notions of “kind”. It bothers Byers because of the word “evolved”. Not quite sure, so far, why it bothers Mung or Phoodoo.
John Harshman,
It does not really violate any Scala Naturae notion though. Whales are hardly regressive, rubbish feet nothwithstanding, and dolphins very clever – the ‘humans of the sea’!
But sea-land-sea does not obviously interfere with baraminology more or less than sea-sea-land.
OK, I can buy that – but actually I don’t think it bothers Byers. He is a hyper-evolutionist in some respects, and a fan of Sheldrakeian notions even if he wouldn’t recognise them as such. He thinks marsupials gained pouches independently, for example, due to ‘something in the air’ (I paraphrase), so I’m sure whales could be explained by ‘something in the water’.
Never believe anything an evolutionist tells you, I’d guess. Which I think is actually at the back of all the objections.
Frankie
This statement is rule-breaking. Had I been around earlier it would have gone to guano. Please respect the rules in future.
Glancing at some other comments (not by Frankie) I accept there is provocation and if an admin misses a rule-breaking comment there is a strong temptation to respond in kind. However, can I request our members restrain themselves.
Is this mean’t as a serious question? On the assumption that it is, do you think wanting to know the answer – curiosity – interest in the subject – isn’t a good reason to ask a question?
Frankie is welcome to declare her / his Engineering accomplishments if they want to be treated as an expert.
LoL! It bothers us that there isn’t any way to objectively test the claim and that flies in the face of science
And you don’t understand the concept of a common design? Really? Do you know anything about IEEE?
And why a branching tree pattern when a spiral would be OK?
Umm my quotes and experts supported my claims wrt nested hierarchies. Nothing you have said supports your claims wrt nested hierarchies.
And don’t blame me because you cannot objectively test your claims. You need a mechanism and you don’t have one that can produce the changes required.
Also don’t blame me for your inability to grasp a common design. That just happens to be the premise Linne based Linnaean taxonomy on. Geez they understood the concept over two centuries ago!
Wrong, John. It bothers me because the claim is unscientific and you are claiming otherwise.
Frankie,
A spiral is not an expectation of common descent. A branching tree is.
Frankie,
John is himself a published expert in the field. Though I know my words will fall on deaf ears, I would suggest that you are simply making a fool of yourself.
Frankie,
A professional engineering body has some input to the manner in which SINE inserts, and other markers within the same, would be expected to cluster?
LoL! No, it shows what a common design is based on, ie STANDARDS
What field? Phylogeny is not a nested hierarchy!
How do you know? The way characteristics can be lost, gained or remain the same a branching tree is but one of many trees evolution could produce. And it really shouldn’t produce that. A net is more likely
Where are the published STANDARDS for the “design” of biological life? In the DI’s “science” lab on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard”?
Frankie,
Where on earth would one find the standard that dictated that a SINE – an apparently non-functional insert, but I’ll accept it could be otherwise – generates a neatly hierarchic set? Why would one think there was such a standard, just because the IEEE exists?
How does evolutionism explains SINEs? They just happened? LoL!
Frankie,
I know that a spiral is not a sensible expectation of a process of inheritance. I don’t even know how you imagine sequence data could be so arranged, nor why a process of inheritance would result in such an arrangement. Perhaps you could provide an example of a set of genotypes that forms a spiral.
Which is why I specifically said “if inheritance is mostly vertical”. A net is more likely if LGT prevails, but it is a pretty simple matter to distinguish between those possibilities where one or the other is the dominant mode.
There is no evidence for lateral transfer of SINEs, and gain or loss at the precise insertion point, without touching even a single base either side, is in any case extremely unlikely. If there is any incursion of the flanking sequence, or imprecise excision, that itself would be inherited by descendants, and can be distinguished from pre-SINE ancestors and become a character state in itself.
The evidence for Cetartiodactyla overwhelmingly supports a tree, which is precisely what vertical descent with no LGT would predict. A reasonable conclusion is that there is vertical descent with no LGT or precise loss – if it were not the case, the data would be highly unlikely to support that conclusion.
Frankie,
It does not particularly need to when using them as character states.
But in fact the mechanisms of SINE insertion are very well known, and they have their own gene trees which root quite nicely. They have characteristic motifs, and continuity with active elements that are used in paternity and forensic tests within a species. They appear to be parasitic, perhaps reduced or incipient viruses.
I know that a branching tree is not sensible given the complex nature of evolution.
LoL! If you don’t have a mechanism capable of explaining them then you have no idea what pattern they would produce
Frankie,
Hmmm … A mechanism capable of explaining things…
Frankie,
I don’t see how the complexities of evolution would change expectations in descent. Parents have offspring, offspring have parents. The result can only be a branching tree, barring LGT/loss.
Frankie,
Once inserted into a genome, it does not matter if they came from outer space, they would be inherited along with it. One does not need to explain their origin in pathetic detail to know this. So, one knows exactly what pattern they would produce – a branching tree.
Same goes for any individual instance of LGT. Everything falls into the main line of vertical inheritance. Which produces a branching tree.
And yet a family tree is more of a net- how many family trees can claim you as part of it?
And yet Darwin said:
Are whales a different kind from cows? How do you know?
That Darwin quote doesn’t mean what you think it means, though I can’t be 100% certain because you haven’t actually said what you think it means. What do you think it means?
Frankie,
Take a family tree back far enough and the same ancestors appear again and again – the more so the further back you go. It’s not a ‘true net’ over evolutionary timescales. All matings are between relatives, albeit often fairly distant ones, and heterozygous loci coalesce on a single instance eventually – ie a single node. Gene trees coalesce.
AGAIN- I was just explaining to you what the opposition says using the same evidence
It would be a net throughout, especially given Common Descent
It means we wouldn’t expect a branching tree as that would be too simple of a representation