Let’s have a serious discussion about phylogenetic systematics.
What are the assumptions, the methods, and the inferences that can be drawn from phylogenetic analysis.
For example, is there anything to the creationist claim that phylogenetic systematics assumes common ancestry and does it even matter?
I’ll be using a number of different references such as Molecular Evolution: A Phylogenetic Approach and Molecular Evolution and Phylogenetics.
This thread will not be password protected, but it will be protected by angels.
John Harshman,
I showed you a process that creates transcription rates that are dependent on the environment not heredity.
This also assumes common descent as an a priori assumption in order to come to the conclusion, and you admit it cannot explain new features.
I have also showed computers can create a nested hierarchy something we know is the result of design.
You should probably have explained your reasons a while ago. But I don’t find them credible. These days the general public is more likely to read a web article than a book.
That book seems to have little in common with Theobald’s article other than the presence of a particular word in the title. So you’re wrong about that.
You didn’t answer the question. Do you intend to answer?
It isn’t a matter of admission. It’s a matter of understanding what common descent is and what it explains, which you apparently do not. I’m not sure what you think assumes common descent.
No, you haven’t. Computers do not form a nested hierarchy, and your attempts to impose one are irrelevant handwaving.
It’s impossible for computers with storage systems that neither could (not by natural selection, at least) nor ever did have any kind of derivative relationship to nest within a nested hierarchy.* That’s kind of the point.
I know you think you’re always right when you’re fairly consistently wrong (a few trivial facts end up being right), but that doesn’t mean that you have any grasp of the issues. Any at all, from basic issues of evidence and science, to the details of evolutionary theory.
Glen Davidson
*Of course some HGT can occur, but a complete, major system is something you’re not going to get transferring via HGT or some such thing.
Nested hierarchy doesn’t just mean group by similarity. Something must get “nested.” Some patterns of things shared by all groups would be seen at the base of the tree, some sub-patterns shared by each group would be seen in the “branches,” and the same for subgroups, etc.
Another problem is the apparently little information in the structures you’ve decided to use for grouping. The lungfish skeleton seems lacking in terms of enough bones to decide where it goes. Here I’d need to learn anatomical stuff better, perhaps follow the development of the lungfish skeleton to decide if those protruding things near the “neck” correspond to, say, clavicles, or to something else, then check the development of other bones, whether some bones disintegrate, or fuse, during development, etc, etc. Then, as someone else pointed out, the tuna skeleton looks incomplete. Either way, if there’s not enough information in the skeletons, I’d risk making the wrong groups based on a shallow analysis.
That is why anatomists don’t rely on single-stage skeletons, like use just the larvae, or just the adult, for deciding their groupings. Scientists gather as much information as they can.
Even “old school” structural comparisons rely on sufficiently informative features. Not shallow resemblances. What your “question” shows is either that you haven’t read what people have been explaining to you, or you lack on reading comprehension capabilities.
John Harshman,
Its based on your assertion that it must be the result of heredity. Special creation does not have this requirement.
They do John, and not only a nested hierarchy but an objective one. Computers are language based. Also they are build on the progress of prior generations where they can use similar parts and change others. They also use common operating systems but add and update over time. Unlike the idea of random change creating a nested hierarchy where if you look to early, you don’t see nesting, and if you look too late the signal is lost, design will preserve the hierarchy we see.
I think you need a stronger argument then accusing me of hand waving.
GlenDavidson,
Glen the argument is if a designer (or group of designers) given the right tools will create an objective nested hierarchy over time. The computer example shows a designer will. Natural selection is not part of this discussion.
Can you link to where that objective nested hierarchy was shown, specifically? I’m interested. Objective as in others will be able to discern it, right?
Sure, if every individual is specially created. Is that your claim? I see that once again you have not answered my question.
Other people have explained to you why what you say isn’t true. I don’t choose to repeat.
That wasn’t an argument, just an observation.
Why does it need to be every individual and not just enough individuals to kick off a new species?
colewd:
OMagain:
Yes, please. This ought to be entertaining.
I guess you can repeat your fantasies with no end in sight.
Glen Davidson
Bill, Sal, fifth, Mung, Erik. Dunning-Kruger cases, every single one of them.
And each of them emotionally unable to acknowledge his incompetence, thus preventing him from escaping the Dunning-Kruger trap.
Fascinating.
Mung,
Bullshit. This is not about your wanting to know what’s being presented to “the general public.” You yourself don’t understand the evidence for common descent. You’ve blindly accepted it without being able to defend it, just as you’ve blindly accepted Christianity. That’s embarrassing. You’d like to be able to defend common descent for a change.
What’s really happening here, it seems to me, is that you’re ashamed to admit that you don’t understand Theobald, and you’re hoping that someone will recommend a book that’s easier for you to digest. Your supposed curiosity about what’s being presented to the general public is just a cover, when what you really want is an argument for common descent that is dumbed down enough for you to understand.
You’ve already confessed to being baffled by the section of Theobald that deals with nested hierarchies:
The problem is not with Theobald’s writing, Mung. It’s with your limited powers of comprehension. Swallow your pride and admit that, and approach this with the desire to learn rather than the determination to save face at all costs.
keiths,
A projecting Troll.
Fascinating 🙂
You didn’t answer my question. Your on my ignore list now. Good bye.
Can you make an objective nested hierarchy of the Dunning-Kruger cases at TSZ?
So help me out.
No, that’s false. False is not the same as embarrassing.
I’ve said so many times. I want to be able to present the argument to others rather than do like you did and just point to an article on the web. Maybe you don’t understand it either.
That’s anachronistic. Do you need help with that word? And what’s wrong with that in the first place, as I’ve already said I don’t understand Theobald. You promised to help. When are you going to deliver? Is it that you’d actually have to think about it?
So? Like I said, I need to be able to present the argument to other people. People who are not nearly as brilliant as I am.
Congratulations sherlock. Did that come to you before or after you claimed that I’m ashamed to admit it?
ok. Gulp.
Want me to start a new thread or will you? This thread is supposed to be about phylogenetic systematics. If we’re going to discuss the evidence for common descent in a way that I can understand it that should probably be memorialized in it’s own thread.
By the the way, you have a history of making claims that you don’t back up. Please don’t disappoint me again. I don’t think I could take it.
Not so. It snowed here Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I discovered and even admitted that I really do suck at throwing snowballs. It wasn’t even all that hard.
Mung:
You tried to blame it on Theobald:
The problem lies not with Theobald, but with you, Mung. Face it.
Again we have moved beyond mere common descent to something approaching full blown Darwinism.
However i’m interested in the nested hierarchy’s relationship with common descent in isolation.
Is there any evidence for that?
and wouldn’t something like discrete creation events utilizing information and raw materiel from preexisting populations also lead to a nested hierarchy?
Before you go off half-coked I’m not saying that is what happened I just trying to understand why nested hierarchy uniquely suggests common descent to you.
If that is correct then the tree of life is clearly not a nested hierarchy.
For example we assume that eukaryotes arose from the union of two different kingdoms anaerobic archaea and respiring alpha-proteobacteria
Species that arose from hybridization also come to mind as do lichens.
Not at all
An anatomist can objectively recognize a bird if what she sees is in fact a bird.
Given atheism I just don’t see how she can demonstrate that what she thinks she sees is objective reality.
I don’t hold that position objectivity is not a problem in my worldview.
Atheists on the other hand should reconsider their position that objectivity is possible in a world with no God as it definitely leads to absurdity
Peace
I wish I had your decisiveness .
peace
Yeah that’s it
The reason that people disagree with Keiths is because they are not smart enough.
The evidence for common descent is so esoteric and obtuse that only folks with keiths intellect can make sense of it
😉
peace
ok, the problem is not with Theobald, the problem is with me. That should have been evident enough in what I wrote, but for you, I spell it out. Now what?
Are you now going to start defending your claims? My money is on no.
I know. It’s as if they can’t make up their minds.
John has already said it would. Perhaps the zachriels will disagree.
No, fifth. As I keep telling you, the concepts are not difficult or abstruse, nor are they secret or esoteric. They’re simple, straightforward, and available to anyone with a modicum of scientific ability.
The problem is that you are unusually bad at science.
In order to understand this, you would have to have read what Bill was claiming. I’ll wait here.
Fair enough I guess. 🙂
“How to be a Scientist” was an elective. I went for “How to get Rich Quick.” iirc there was one poor kid who took the “How to be a Scientist” course and he was mercilessly bullied. wow. flashback. His name was Keith. what are the odds.
Mung:
No, because you tried to blame it on Theobald instead of taking responsibility for your own screwups.
I”d suggest that you sit it out and leave the topic to folks who are brighter and more diligent than you.
If I thought you were sincerely trying to understand, I might be motivated to help. But I don’t get that impression at all. Between your lack of ability, your resistance to learning, and your chronic dishonesty, efforts to teach you seem to be a waste of time.
Sure.
You love contradicting yourself. You implied the opposite right before you started this piece of presuppositional bullshit.
This sentence is self-refuting. It translates into this: according to your subjective opinion you have no problems with objectivity.
It’s even worse, because you declared before that according to your worldview something is objectively true only if “God” believed it, which translates into a meta-self-refuting claim: according to your subjective opinion, something is objectively true only if it’s the subjective belief of an imaginary being.
Your “worldview” is a monstrous pile of self-refuting bullshit.
Well, I doubt that your adherence to subjectivity, and the easiness with which you make self-refuting claims, allow you to judge anybody’s position as “absurd.” For that to be possible you’d have to step out of your cloud, recognize the flaws of your bullshit, and start thinking. Given my experience with your kind, I doubt you’re about to do that.
What sort of designer would create like that? Certainly not a good one in my opinion.
It shows no respect for continuity or flow and and makes comprehension of the design process difficult to impossible for observers.
The fact is one of the greatest gifts a designer can bestow on others is a sense of continuity and history and correlation .
The letters on my computer keyboard are arranged in a QWERTY pattern not because the designer had to do it that way or because he was constrained by some sort of “ancestor-descendant relationship” but because it’s familiar to me and therefore I didn’t have to learn an entirely new pattern in order use it.
The same goes for organisms on earth
A lung of a mouse is pretty similar to the lung of an elephant or the lung of a human so you don’t have to start from scratch to understand the workings of each and every animal you encounter.
That is a great gift and the hallmark of good design
peace
Only those who keiths determines are adept enough at science can understand the evidence for common descent.
The rest of us are out of luck
peace
I bet you can’t even see the moving goalposts.
God’s beliefs are not subjective. He is by definition objective.
All knowing and just and all that.
That is just your subjective opinion right?
😉
peace
So your offer of help earlier in this thread was never actually serious. Will you admit that you lied?
To keiths:
Focus, keiths. Defend your claims.
Volume or quality?
Unless it is logically impossible for even an omnipotent ,omniscience being to do what you assumes He does.
Right, If objectivity is logically impossible then it necessarily does not exist.
But in that case any conclusion of that nature would necessarily be just my own subjective opinion. There would be no way to know for sure
😉
peace
Fitness. Of course.
I honestly don’t know why it takes a book.
Only known process generating extensive pairwise genetic identity: template based nucleic acid replication. Find extensive genetic identity: pending another cause, conclude template based nucleic acid replication. Not happy? Find another cause.
Only thing that would automatically generate a congruent hierarchical relationship using two or more otherwise uncorrelated genetic stretches: template based nucleic acid replication (plus bifurcation and divergence). Find robust hierarchic relationship in such datasets, conclude common descent with bifurcation. Not happy? Find another cause.
It doesn’t, necessarily. But I collect books, I like reading books, and I am far more likely to read a book and take it seriously.
If no good arguments for universal common descent can be found in books then why can’t people just say so? If people were not convinced of the truth of universal common descent from reading a book why can’t they just say so?
Who here became convinced of the truth of universal common ancestry from reading Theobold’s talk origins article? Anyone? If not, why do you believe it?
OMagain,
Get kieths link to Theobald and read about objective nested hierarchies. A designed hierarchy is in the discussion. I think you can connect the dots.
John Harshman,
No just some have to be specially created as in your croc and bird examples.
Some say the inference to common ancestry from the nested hierarchy is independent of any causal process. Others say it is dependent upon a causal process. You seem to be in the latter camp.
It’s amazing to me that we have still not even agreed on this point. Who is right? Erik has been trying to explain this for months, and the best that keiths can do is ignore Erik’s point and erect a straw-man in its place.
Is the causal process relevant or is it not?
fifth,
No. That you’re bad at science and unable to understand the evidence for common descent is true, independent of my assessment. You simply don’t get it.
It’s above your pay grade.
Who’s assessment are you relying on exactly?
And who gave them the authority to judge such things?
—-
Only those who keith’s authority determines are adept enough at science can understand the evidence for common descent.
peace
You read the article by Theobald when you were 12 and that’s what convinced you that universal common ancestry was true?
fifth,
That comment demonstrates your poor reasoning skills.
It’s your ability that determines whether you can understand this stuff, not whether your ability has been assessed, how it was assessed, or by whom.
You’ve shown us that you lack the requisite ability. It couldn’t be more obvious. Anyone who thinks that this is a nested hierarchy, much less an objective nested hierarchy, is clueless: