This is an attempt to revive a discussion of “created kinds”, holobaramins, or whatever you want to call them. How do you define their boundaries? Can anyone name any specific holobaramins? Is there anyone who believes they exist and is willing to defend their existence?
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I always assumed that the idea was to not be able to define boundaries. That way, there could never be evidence for crossing the boundaries, so there could never be evidence for evolution.
</cynicism>
I am sure that all baraminologists have decided that Homo sapiens is a baramin.
But I hold out hope for a different result — with enough work on baraminology it will ultimately be realized that all of life is one baramin.
… well, anyway, with Homo sapiens defined broadly to include Neanderthals.
I think you’re barking up the wrong baramin.
?
Woof.
John,
Good luck finding someone here at TSZ willing to defend Young Earth Creationism, much less capable of defending it. Even good ol’ Salvador, who is nowhere to be found of late, is not interested in defending YEC.
I emailed johnnyb about the thread. He’s a member of what used to be known as the Baraminology Study Group.
I don’t think baraminology necessarily implies YEC.
OEC would be just as good. OEC progressive creationism would be just as good. What’s your view?
Mung has to ask Barry first what Mung’s opinion should be. 😀
I am neither YEC nor OEC, so don’t really know of a label I can give you.
I accept that the universe is old, that the earth is old. No problem with dating as provided by the latest science.
I am a theist and a Christian. I am not a deist. I am not a naturalist. I reject the idea of “nature acting alone.”
I believe the universe is created and sustained by God I believe the same of all living beings. I accept common descent or descent with modification as the best explanation for the history of life on earth, but reject the idea that this happens without God (by a random undirected process).
I’ve not identified myself as a theistic evolutionist because I find myself in disagreement with theistic evolutionist authors.
So the best description I can offer is “intelligent design” proponent.
Mung,
If you don’t think there are separate kinds, we have nothing to discuss here. We seem to have a shortage of people who are willing to admit to believing in “kinds”.
I don’t know how much time I will have for this thread as the semester is starting up, but this is a subject near and dear to my heart, and I appreciate keiths letting me know that it was here.
Probably the most rigorous list of defined Baramins is in Todd Wood’s book “Animal and Plant Baramins”. It is not a long list, but when you look at the amount of work Todd put into it (whether you agree with the results/technique or not), you can see why it takes a while to determine a Baramin in a rigorous fashion. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of the statistical approach to Baraminology, as I find it simply takes our prejudices as assumptions and then makes them disappear into numbers. I’m all good with prejudices and assumptions, I just think they should be laid out on the table as clearly as the numbers.
Others have done baraminic studies with hybridization data. The Creation Biology Society, back when they were the BSG, used to maintain a database of known hybrids that could be used for baraminological study.
Jean Lightner tried to do a comprehensive study of mammalian holobaramins in her AiG paper, “Mammalian Ark Kinds”. However, this was not a rigorous study, but rather an attempt to get a first-pass look at the likely boundary points.
If you look through the pages of the Creation Biology Society’s annual conferences, you will probably find several other holobaramins.
Another attempt at a systematic cataloguing of mammalian holobaramins was done by Kurt Wise, using what he calls the “Post-flood Continuity Criteria”. I actually love this approach, though in several cases the results were less than clear. Basically, he traced each mammalian fossil group through the fossil record back to the flood/post-flood boundary (the K/T boundary), and put the holobaramin at whatever taxonomic level was represented at the time. I.e, if the furthest back in the fossil record for family X we have several different genuses represented, the created kind is probably at the genus level. However, if only the order is represented, then the created kind for that group is probably at the order level. You can find his detailed analysis in his chapter of the book “Genesis Kinds: Creationism and the Origin of Species”.
So, for the two easiest created kinds to both name and defend, I give you Canidae and Felidae.
Methods for determining holobaramins:
1) Post-flood continuity criteria mentioned above
2) Statistical methods (bdist, anopa, multidimensional scaling, and other mechanisms – look for defined groups which group together away from nearest outgroups)
3) Hybridization – look for groups which hybridize together and those which cannot
4) General morphological considerations – do the organisms share the same general developmental and body architecture
5) I forget the name of this one, but essentially it relies on the fact that humans are pre-built with an idea of God’s baramins in mind (in Genesis man names the animals, also see the book by an evolutionist – Naming Nature – excellent read). In many cultures, one taxonomic group is named using “heritable” analogies (i.e., the family). Look and see where traditional taxonomies line up and agree on where these heritable designations belong.
Anyway, let me know if you have specific questions, I will try to come back and answer.
Of these, I prefer 1, 3, and 4, but am also highly interested in 5. 2 is fun, but I tend to not trust statistics for traits, since the method to determine traits for statistical use is presupposed.
By the way, my own contribution to baraminology (not that anyone has paid attention, including within baraminology) is here, with a slideshow about it here that also has a lot of general information on the method of baraminology (it turned out, many of the people who attended the Creation Biology Society meetings were not totally familiar with the methodologies of the group). Also, if anyone is interested, I have a paper I wrote to go along with the abstract that I never submitted because I haven’t had time to polish it up and finish it out. I would prefer the paper be kept confidential for the moment, but would appreciate any feedback on it if someone wants to read it.
One other note – if someone is interested in learning more, the best general book on baraminology is Todd Wood’s “Understanding the Pattern of Life”. It is sadly out of print but thankfully not hard to find.
Thanks for showing up. Hope you stick around for a while.
Here you have neatly encapsulated what I consider to be the second-largest problem with baraminology: baraminologists spend almost no time discussing basic assumptions or attempting to justify their methods. Why should we believe that the methods used should be capable of finding baramins? (The largest problem is that it deals with an imaginary subject, but let that pass.)
This seems puzzling to me for several reasons, discussed below.
I would appreciate it if you attempted to defend either or both of them. On what evidence do you make the claims?
This needs to be fleshed out. Set aside questions of whether there actually was a flood (there wasn’t) or how one can identify the K/T boundary with the end of the flood, and just take all that as a starting assumption. Now what I would expect is that every kind would be represented in flood sediments, and also in immediately post-flood sediments. But there are no known Cretaceous placentals at all, much less members of modern families or even orders, and few modern groups are Paleocene either. With reference to Felidae and Canidae, neither is known from the early Cenozoic. Canidae appears in the late Eocene, and Felidae is even younger, late Oligocene. How do you reconcile that? And wouldn’t Primates be a holobaramin by that criterion?
What justification is there for considering any of these methods to diagnose holobaramins? Such defined groups can exist within nominal species, genera, and families.
What justification is there for thinking that hybridization or lack thereof can diagnose holobaramins? Why couldn’t members of different holobaramins hybridize? Why can’t reproductive isolation evolve within a holobaramin?
I find this too vague to be useful. It could be used to diagnose all chordates, all tetrapods, all mammals, etc.
Would you agree that this one is too absurd to be considered?
You have failed to mention another criterion Todd Wood includes in his book: biblical exegesis. May I suppose that’s because you know it would not be considered scientificaly valid?
I would be interested in an explicit defense of Felidae and Canidae as holobaramins. How do you know they are separate holobaramins from other feloids and canoids or from each other? How do you distinguish divergence within holobaramins from distinctness between them? I would be especially interested in your take on the molecular data. And I am also interested in any justification you have for supposing that any of these methods should diagnose holobaramins.
I was able to find a copy on Amazon several years ago.
One more note: if we use a crown definition of Canidae and Felidae, they’re both late Miocene. How does that fit the paleo criterion?
That is not my experience – perhaps not the basic assumption of the “kind”, but given the existence of the “kind”, they do spend a decent amount of time attempting to justify their methods. On the statistical side, I agree with you that their justification is inadequate (it misses some important questions), but I don’t think that they “spend no time” doing it by any means. In fact, I think that baraminologists have a much better justification for their processes than, say, evolutionary linnaean taxonomy. I have looked for an evolutionary justification for even having kingdoms, classes, phyla, etc., and have not found a good justification. In fact, the only good justification I could find comes from Louis Agassiz’s Essay on Classification, written from what we would today think of as an OEC perspective.
Not really. If you imagine what the flood would do, most animals who could would escape to the higher places. Mammals and birds are generally more mobile, and would miss a large part of the flood that was involved with sedimentation. Additionally, their low bone density would cause them to float (as happens today). Interestingly, if you throw random dead organisms into a flume, they come out in basically the same order as the geologic column. That isn’t to say that this is how it is formed, but just a side-point to the fact that mammals both are escapists and they float, which generally prevented their existence in flood sediments. However, I will also point out that it is a known problem that mammals are not as well described by paleontologists looking in lower rocks, simply because they went into paleontology to look for dino bones! Mammals are boring. So, I do think that there have been finds in mammals that are simply overlooked in flood sediments simply because people don’t care.
I will have to look at the chart tonight to see. My defence of Felidae and Canidae are that:
1) they are interbreedable within themselves, but not outside
2) they have distinct morphological continuity within themselves, but not outside
3) humans have an interesting instinct to distinguish them. If you think about a 2-year-old – they easily distinguish dogs and cats. They even put giant lions and tigers as “big cats”, and little pipsqueak dogs as being different from cats. If you think about this, it is actually quite an amazing feat, considering how similar in outline they are. However, the human mind is pre-wired for this distinguishment.
Again, I will have to look at Wise’s paper to give you more information – I don’t spend as much time as I should with geology and paleontology. When I read it initially, it was in the context of an ongoing discussion as to whether Ruminantia is a holobaramin or merely an apobaramin. It could be that Wise puts all of Caniformia into a holobaramin – I’m not sure.
As to humans, first of all, I think that the basic difference between humans and all other animals is enough to put us into our own holobaramin absent any other evidence. Building roads, writing books, etc. I think the reason we are not in earlier sediments is simply because of the length of time the first generations after the flood lived, and how close they lived to their initial departure. The animals departed, the humans stayed around, and the humans didn’t die for several hundred years.
There are some people who think that they can hybridize, though I am not one of them. However, sexual productivity is seen by all as being a good measure of holistic similarity. That seems self-explanatory to me.
As to the second, everyone agrees that this can happen. However, having hybridization exist gives good evidence of continuity. Even if not every species can hybridize, if species A, B, and C are part of a monobaramin, and species B can hybridize with a monobaramin includes D, E, and F, then that is good evidence that they can be joined even if not every member can hybridize with every other member.
Sure, as quoted, you are correct. However, I think that one can combine it with Intelligent Design to find out how much information it would take to get the amount of disparity within the group, and then use that to measure whether this is a likely happening or not.
Not at all. In fact, I find it quite interesting, as per my dog/cat example above.
That’s one of the data sources. I thought you were interested in generalized techniques, though. The Bible only helps in a small number of cases.
Anyway, I will try to get back to this more in the next few days.
You’ve been crossing house-cats with Tigers lately?
Obviously if you limit yourself to two groups that are easily distinguished, they will be easily distinguishable. But what if you don’t cherry pick them? There’s more than just cats and dogs in the world.
How about mice and rats, or is it broader? Does it extend to include squirrels, maybe even rabbits and hares? All of the Glires?
That’s because there is no good justification. Ranks are arbitrary. But clades are not. Would you agree that there is a good justification for having groups within groups and for the methods used to find those groups?
That makes little sense, considering that there are Cretaceous (even Triassic, depending on how you count) mammals, as well as lots of Mesozoic birds. It’s just that Mesozoic members of these groups don’t belong to modern orders (except for a couple of anseriforms). Mammals are by no means boring, and there are plenty of paleontologists studying, and looking for, Mesozoic mammals. You are just plain wrong on this.
Not sure #1 is true. How many hybrids between raccoon dog and maned wolf are there? #2 is unclear and subjective. #3 is nice, but I have my doubts it really would work. I bet if you showed a kid a linsang, he’d shout “kitty”.
If so, then my next question would be why, and why not Feliformia too? And it would seem also that including pinnipeds in the “dog” kind would be giving away the store.
Sorry, but that’s just plain nonsense. The humans all died in the flood, which is all that matters, and they’re the ones with the supposed long lives. Anyway, human fossils are found only at the very end of the Cenozoic record. Why are they missing from almost all of it?
That isn’t an answer. Why is it good evidence? I see that you are now claiming that failure to hybridize is not evidence against belonging to the same holobaramin, which I would agree with.
I’m afraid I see that as armwaving. First you would need a measure of information that works the way you want it, and then you need a criterion for setting a limit, neither of which you have, and neither of which I think is possible. Nor do you have a justification for why that ought to diagnose holobaramins.
That’s unfortunate. I presume, then, that you would agree with the typical child that “fishy”, “birdie”, and “bug” are all holobaramins? This doesn’t hold up under the most cursory examination.
Again, I have to ask you to justify the claims that any of these methods ought to diagnose holobaramins. Let me also suggest that if holobaramins existed, they ought to be ridiculously easy to tell apart based on all manner of complete discontinuities, most simply in DNA sequences. All holobaramins should be genetically equidistant from all others. Phylogenetic analyses should recover a star tree with long, independent branches separating each one from the root. This we most certainly do not see.
Well humans being made in gOds image are a unique kind. Unrelated to the body.
Snakes are a KIND. primates, which we are a copy of, must be a kind.
On the ark the dove/the other one were kinds of birds. so birds seems not to be kind.
sThe fall distorted everything. then to survive biology has mechanisms that further distort everything.
There are no divisions like reptiles,mammals, dinosaurs, marsupials however. These are classification errors from the old ones too excited about trivial like traits.
Sorry my participation has been spotty. I re-read parts of Wise’s paper, and there is a really interesting graph where diversity in mammals has an exponential growth from the lower paleocene to the middle eocene.
Wise does admit that the earliest fossil records may not include all of the kinds because of the limited population sizes at the time (as well as the limited timespan that the paleocene utilizes – approximately 20 years), and points out that there was, in fact, a dearth of organisms in the paleocene.
Wise general puts lower eocene as the place where we can generally look at having a good enough sampling of organisms to draw conclusions, but also says that there is some room (about 2% chance) to think that some of them were first sampled in the middle eocene. Wise covers the statistics of fossil occurrence, and how likely it is that sampled data from the geologic column actually matches biodiversity at the time. It is a really interesting read.
As has been suggested, Wise, rather than using Canidae, actually places the ark kind at Caniformia and Feliformia, with Miacidae and Viverravidae being essentially the form that was on the ark.
Plausible, but I would have to investigate the morphology of, say, bears more closely before I would be comfortable placing them in the same kind as canidae.
“The humans all died in the flood, which is all that matters, and they’re the ones with the supposed long lives.”
Nope, the first two generations *after* the flood also lived long lives. Not only is this recorded early in genesis, but also later you find reference to it when Jacob, at over a hundred years (I think it was 130!) says that his days have been short, unlike his ancestors (who may have even still been living at the time – I would have to check the chronology).
“#3 is nice, but I have my doubts it really would work. I bet if you showed a kid a linsang, he’d shout “kitty”.”
First of all, from Wise’s perspective, they would be correct. Also, the point is not that 2-year-olds are the end of the issue (that was merely to illustrate the point), but rather the general idea that humans seem to have an in-built sense about the nature of nature, and this is even reported on by evolutionists (see the book, “Naming Nature”). Thus, the Cognitum method (I found the term) is not about asking children, but rather asking experts from different cultures in order to get a larger sense about where the human mind places these organisms in a worldwide sampling.
“Ranks are arbitrary. But clades are not. Would you agree that there is a good justification for having groups within groups and for the methods used to find those groups?”
I agree that clades are consistent and justified within the evolutionary perspective. However, I would argue that ranks are also consistent and justified (even moreso than clades), just not within evolution. And Agassiz gives a fairly good outline of what these ranks mean. To summarize (and include a few Agassiz did not):
Anyway, Baraminology as such is a fairly new science (in the last twenty or thirty years) and has a very small following, so I won’t be surprised if it has many changes over the years (think of how many changes evolution has gone since Lamarck!). Nonetheless, I find it a very fascinating way of looking at the world, and, in the end, I think it will be a more correct and more helpful guide to biology.
Not true. There was in fact a dearth of diversity, but not of organisms. Of course the Paleocene was short compared to the Eocene, so we expect fewer fossils in general. However did you figure out that the Paleocene lasted 20 years?
In some respects that resembles real paleontology. But there are plenty of Paleocene mammals, just not much in the way of modern groups. Why should there be such a bias toward extinct (presumed) holobaramins? And how did they manage to achieve such large populations, even at low diversity, in 20 years? Worldwide, too.
Oh, my. That’s a real problem for you, isn’t it? It contradicts every one of your other criteria for recognizing holobaramins. I suggest you worry more about pinnipeds than bears. How much within-kind evolution can you tolerate?
You quibble with ages and ignore the main points, which I will repeat:
1. No human fossils in flood sediments, and in fact not a single placental mammal. Why is there not a single extant placental holobaramin represented in the flood?
2. Why are there no human fossils, post flood, until the late Pleistocene? I’m not sure of your time scale, but surely that represents many hundreds of years.
I don’t think you’re comfortable with Wise’s perspective. Either the 2-year-old is evidence or she isn’t. Can we now agree that she isn’t? There is no built-in sense, merely the ability to observe. And I’m speculating that the book, which I haven’t seen, is about species. True?
I do wonder whether any of these worldwide experts recognizes either Caniformia or Feliformia. I also wonder what justification there would be for supposing that recognized groups would correspond to holobaramins. You are still mighty short on justifications in general.
I would claim each of these is either not true, too vague to be useful, or both. Also, if there are separate kinds, why should there be any structure at all above the holobaramin? How could you distinguish structure above, below, and at that level?
Your faith is touching. I have a different take. I think baraminology is cargo cult science, adopting certain of the surface trapping of science in order to achieve the benefit of perceived legitimacy. It will never contribute anything whatsoever to biology.
As we have seen, you can’t even identify one holobaramin. Maybe Canidae, maybe Caniformia, maybe something else. Why would this be? If there really were separately created kinds, it ought to be easy. I suggest a simple reason: life is in reality a branching tree, with no divisions into within-kind and without-kind, and thus no way to identify those divisions. And that’s why groups within groups occur at all levels.
Don’t have time to respond to everything, but did want to point to this:
http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~jacks/Eomaia.pdf
A placental mammal from the lower cretaceous.
Are you acquainted with the saying “A Jesuit accused of killing three men and a dog will triumphantly produce the dog, alive”? That seems to be a habit with you. You pick at trivialities and ignore the main points. Even the authors of that paper don’t say Eomaia is a placental, just a eutherian; the two groups are identical for extant forms, but not for extinct ones. And anyway, it probably isn’t that, and is most likely a stem-Therian. See O’Leary et al. 2013.
Most importantly, unless you want to claim that Placentalia or Eutheria or perhaps Theria is a single holobaramin, Eomaia doesn’t help you at all. The point, which I should remind you of, is that there are zero members of extant placental holobaramins (whatever those may be) known from “flood” sediments. Doesn’t that just plain falsify all your claims about holobaramins?
But aren’t you committed to the idea that the Earth is around 6 – 10,000
years old? The paper is suggesting this fossil is around 125 million years old.
I think that for the purpose of remaining on-topic we should accept, for the sake of argument, that Paleozoic and Mesozoic sediments result from the worldwide flood a few thousand years ago and that Cenozoic sediments are post-flood. Save challenges to those claims for another thread.
Is there a -/+ margin of error there at all? What is it?
OMagain –
The 20 year mark is just abstracted from Wise’s paper, and he gets that from another paper that I don’t have (and he says a few years to a few decades, hence why I said 20 years). I have not researched the timescale of the early post-flood period, so I am just taking what Wise says at face value. My focus is generally on extant, not extinct organisms.
Alan Fox –
And? Have you never used data from one hypothesis without the interpretive framework? Without the ability to do that, no science could ever advance. The actual data being reported in the paper is that it is from lower cretaceous, which, in YEC circles, is generally considered to be during the flood. (The K/T boundary is the flood/post-flood boundary for most, though Oard puts it much later (and, I think, for the reasons Harshman is alluding to).
Also, just for the record, I am not *committed* to the idea of a young earth. I used to be a very satisfied old-earth creationist. However, I was convinced on the evidence to change. I would change back if I felt my prior decision to be in error. I think the Bible leans in the direction of YEC, but not enough to force commitment to it contra facts on the ground.
Harshman –
I think I misunderstood your criticism – you were saying that the placental mammals we do know from the fossil record do not match extant holobaramins. It is an interesting point, but I don’t actually know enough about Eomaia to know if it could be classed with another holobaramin. The paper, which I only read briefly, seems to compare it with rodents in several places, so it may be part of geomorpha.
Nonetheless, I am not sure how it would falsify the claim either way – it might indeed be problematic for the claim of holobaramins, but I think falsification would require something more direct.
By the way, I much appreciate the criticisms. Most creationists do not spend much time thinking about the details of creationism, and I appreciate your willingness to bang out some details with me. I’ve actually been very sad that I have not been able to go to a Creation Biology Society meeting for a number of years. I’m not their favorite person, but they are some of mine. And, between the meetings, I can hardly find anyone else who enjoys discussing the topic’s technical details.
I think you still misunderstand my criticism. I’m saying that there are no pre-flood (in your terms) mammals that match any extant group that you might consider a holobaramin, whether or not Eomaia is a placental (though it probably isn’t). Yet according to the flood theory, all extant placental holobaramins should be known from flood deposits, and Cambrian would be as likely as Cretaceous.
Not really relevant, as even if it were put in a modern holobaramin, that would only be one out of the many (dozens? hundreds? thousands?) that should be there. What is “geomorpha”?
There’s your problem in a nutshell: there is no way to falsify a claim that two species belong to one holobaramin, or that they belong to different holobaramins.
You should find some of that here, though not from the creationist side, as all the creationists we have here are unfamiliar with the technical details, incoherent, or both. On the other hand, there are several biologists here, all of whom would consider your claims nonsensical, but some of whom would be willing to discuss them in your terms. Me, for example. I’m willing to assume a young-earth, flood timeline for the sake of argument, but be warned I will expect a consistent inference of that scenario’s implications. And I think those implications, fairly considered, are fatal to baraminology: we see nothing like what the scenario would imply.
John, much appreciated.
However, when you say, “There’s your problem in a nutshell: there is no way to falsify a claim that two species belong to one holobaramin, or that they belong to different holobaramins”, how is that different from an evolutionary phylogeny? This is the problem with most of the criticisms of creation and creation-based theories. The people making the criticism don’t seem to see how the same criticism applies in spades to their own theories. In fact, one could argue that common ancestry is both the originator and the supreme non-falsifiable theory in modern science.
What evolutionary tree survived completely intact from Darwin’s day? Answer – none. Additionally – cladistics completely rewrote the way phylogenies were constructed. Additionally, some phylogenies are being published that seem to be practical jokes on the whole notion of cladistics (i.e., Pegasoferae). But somehow the fact that many baramins are unclear despite the fact that there are maybe 12 people working on them part-time in the entire world is supposed to be de fact evidence of its falsity.
I enjoy thinking about the issues involved, and the issues that remain – that is the fun of research! But I just really find it odd that it receives so much criticism (i.e., how can you not see that it is falsified!) when the standard view of evolution still remains as random mutations and natural selection. The most simple-minded creationist views are more sophisticated than that, but it is the creationists who receive the most opprobrium.
That’s fine with me, I just thought I’d let you know why I don’t feel especially moved by the fact that Baraminology still has quite a ways to go in order to fully understand life, and continues to have major flaws. Of the contenders, Old-Earth Creationism is probably the next best, but in such a platform you would still have Baraminology of a sort.
As I pointed out in a paper of mine a long time ago, there is no fundamental problem with any amount of change, provided that there is a source of the information to perform the change. There is evidence of significant amounts of change in the fossil record, less so in living organisms, so knowing what is the result of in-built mechanisms vs. divine intervention vs. some other source is, in fact, a difficult problem, and the biological, genomic, and fossil data do not actually match up very well in this regard.
This is a fascinating subject, and why there aren’t more people involved is beyond my understanding.
Yep, rather easy to find. I have it right here on a shelf next to my desk.
John Harshman has asked that YEC assumptions be accepted ad arguendo in this thread and I will respect that. I, for one, would however be interested in a separate thread where you describe and discuss the evidence that you believe supports a young earth.
Beg to differ. Common ancestry makes some very clear predictions which, if they turned out not to hold, would cause us to doubt the theory. We expect to see tree-like structure in the data, all the way down, and we do. We expect to see order in the fossil record that fits the trees we make, and we do. Phylogenetics is chock full of falsifiable hypotheses that have successfully resisted falsification. Baraminology has none of that.
Well of course the instability of phylogenetic trees, which you exaggerate, is a good thing. Science advances. We know more about phylogeny than we used to, and some of the things we thought we knew turned out to be wrong. I’m not sure what’s funny about Pegasoferae, but I can definitely name a great number of clades that are as close to absolutely certain as science can get about anything. You, on the other hand, don’t have a situation in which “many baramins are unclear”; you don’t have a single baramin you can point to and no clear criteria by which to judge.
This is puzzling, since under common descent we expect a fair amount of ambiguity and difficulty, whereas under separate creation I would expect almost all holobaramins to be simple to detect and defend. My suggested solution to this conundrum is that clades have the advantage of being real, while holobaramins do not.
I deny that any creationist views are in any way sophisticated, but the most important response to this paragraph is that random mutation and natural selection — or any evolutionary processes, really — are irrelevant to phylogenetics. The mechanisms of evolution and character change are a whole nother argument, off-topic for this discussion.
I would say that it has quite a ways to go to achieve minimum scientific respectability and consists of nothing but flaws. But maybe that’s just me.
Not sure what it is you think doesn’t match up. But if you will accept lots of change, what’s in the way of you supposing there to be only one holobaramin encompassing all of life?
I would suggest that most creationists have zero interest in science. If they’re interested at all it’s only as a form of apologetics, and they’re prepared to accept anything that reinforces their preconceptions and reject anything that doesn’t. If you already know all the answers, there’s no need to investigate.
The way to determine baramins is going to be very much like the way to determine clades. I have already told John H this so I don’t understand the issue.
I did, and you snipped. Here: “Common ancestry makes some very clear predictions which, if they turned out not to hold, would cause us to doubt the theory. We expect to see tree-like structure in the data, all the way down, and we do. We expect to see order in the fossil record that fits the trees we make, and we do. Phylogenetics is chock full of falsifiable hypotheses that have successfully resisted falsification. Baraminology has none of that.”
Not true. We see a tree with occasional reticulations affecting individual genes. Anyway, we were talking about animals specifically.
I suppose your meaning of “test your claims” would require a time machine, or perhaps an experiment in which we get a chimp to give birth to a human. Nope. That claim has been tested frequently, every time someone does a phylogenetic analysis of new data.
The mechanism of diversity is simple and well understood: speciation plus divergence. Rinse and repeat for 4 billion years. You may be thinking of the mechanism of disparity, i.e. how those character changes get into the tree in the first place. The standard answer is mutation plus selection and/or drift. I have no reason to suppose that to be inadequate, and anyway it isn’t relevant to phylogenetics, which only requires that the changes exist, without regard to how they arose.
I agree that you don’t understand the issue. The problem with determining baramins (and let’s be clear that we mean holobaramins here) by phylogenetic analysis is that there are clades at all levels: clades within clades within clades. How do we decide that some of those clades are holobaramins, some are groups within holobaramins (actual clades), and some are artificial groupings of holobaramins without any real connection? Once you start seeing clades, it’s hard to stop until you end up with a holobaramin called “life”.
Moved a comment to guano.
@ Frankie
Remember the rules, Joe.
John Harshman,
No, we do not. Prokaryotes do not produce a tree: Charles Darwin’s tree of life is ‘wrong and misleading’, claim scientists
If it requires a time machine then you don’t have any science to support your claims.
That is the untestable assertion.
You have no reason to suppose it is adequate. That is the entire problem.
And as far as you know phylogenetics shows the relationship of a common design.
Body plan would be a start, just as I have told you before. There isn’t any known mechanism to change body plans.
Trouble for the tree-> evolution does not have a direction:
Can evolution make things less complicated?:
I’m afraid I don’t consider a newspaper article to be good evidence. Clearly there is a certain amount of reticulation. But not enough to obscure the main signal. Even bacteria have clades.
Fortunately, we don’t need a time machine. Learn to read more closely.
Ah, but it is testable. It’s what would result in a tree, the one you claim doesn’t exist.
Since, as I explained, this is irrelevant to the question at hand, I don’t intend to discuss it.
Not true. We just don’t expect common design to form a consistent nested hierarchy. Common descent is the only process that is expected to produce the pattern we see in the data. “Common design”, on the other hand, is vacuous. A designer could produce any sort of pattern, or none.
So far, “body plan” is too vague a concept to make your idea meaningful. You could start by giving a few examples of holobaramins and explaining what’s different about their body plans. Most often, the term is used to refer to differences among phyla, but I suspect that isn’t where you’re going.
You will have to explain why that’s trouble for the tree. You may have a misunderstanding of what trees entail.
John Harshman,
What does the tree explain?
Moved a comment to guano.
Complaints about moderating decisions need to made in the “moderation issues” thread.
How does the Intelligent Designer do it?
Other way round. Common descent must produce a tree. The tree is a result of a process, not the other way round.
Would we expect to see a tree if common descent was not true?