I must admit, the so very serious manner in which you all approach this subject is just a little humorous to a YLC like me. Wasn’t it shown some years back that and single couple from the Garden could have easily populated the planet? Your answer will be Yes, but we must make allowance for all the ape-men to get in the mix. Sorry, but it’s just not necessary in my paradigm and that’s what makes it funny to listen to. I guess I am relieved that I don’t have all that so-called evidence to account for as you do. Sorry to interrupt. I guess I am trolling.
[apologies again. I know these things are important to you]
For us, honesty and accuracy in the science is pretty important. I don’t see any need for an ancient DNA bottleneck, but others do. I want to be trustworthy in how I represent the evidence to others.
I made an error. Never mind. You are different somehow. I haven’t figured it out yet, but you are just different. That’s all I can say. Though I must disagree with you on things, I for some reason am not allowed to engage you in an argument. Must be something spiritual for lack of a better understanding. Carry on. I said nothing. (What I forgot anyway is that the true bottleneck for my paradigm is Noah and his family anyway, so I missed it there). Carry on.
Over at The Skeptical Zone there have been several threads about the evidence for common descent. In the end each thread was thousands of comments long. And basically none of the creationists present would admit that there was any evidence for common descent of, well, anything with anything. We kept hearing that this could all be due to “common design”, a notion that explains everything that we see but also everything that we don’t see. Or that they wouldn’t believe in common descent until we had explained, in detail, all of the changes since the common ancestor. I’m supposed to be Peaceful here so I will not further characterize their mindset. That it was a frustrating experience for the rest of us would be putting it mildly.
Believe me it’s every bit as frustrating here too. The big difference is here we’re not allowed to call out the ID-Creationists no matter how disingenuous their behavior.
I suspect that at some point, “common design” philosophically collapses into “common descent”. Scientists are usually only concerned with the quantifiable observables. It is impossible to scientifically rule out the notion that the universe popped into existence Last Thursday or in 4000 BC, while appearing to be billions of years old. It is an unfalsifiable philosophical commitment. From a purely quantifiable, observable point of view there is no difference between this “common design” position and the conventional one that the universe actually is billions of years old (or that living things actually share a common ancestor).
Therefore, once somebody deploys the “common design” gambit (without rigorously defining what it is in scientifically quantifiable, observable terms), the debate has become a foundational philosophical dispute rather than a scientific one.
That is it exactly. Yes, God could have created each and every creature, by design, to look exactly like it would had it descended from a common ancestor. Ultimately, this looks like omphalos hypothesis, and as noted, there is no way then to disprove it. The nested hierarchies will all be there. But it makes little sense that God world restrict His creations to such a constraint when he has a blank slate with every entity. If you cannot distinguish such a creation by entity from one created by natural principle, why not just lay down the principle and let it unfold as a unity?
Naw, you are missing something. He would have no reason (agreeing with you) to create trying to give the illusion of a common ancestor. But there is commonality in physical things like gravity (I know, it’s a weird argument) that necessarily guided his creation of creatures fit for survival on the planet he made.
Gravity had to be overcome whether on land or in the seas or in the air.
On land, a specific phenotype had to be created to push against and overcome gravity and survive.
In the seas, a different phenotype than that on land had to be created.
In the air, a phenotype all its own had to be found in those creatures.
My point is that something as simple as the gravity he created and the fact that creatures had to push against it, stand, run, move, generally overcome in order to survive, could cause creatures to appear to have arisen from a common starting point.
This would be a commonality in physical function leads to a commonality in form [design] type argument. It doesn’t take long, however, for the discussion to veer back to commonality due to some type of blueprint which looks like descent. Sharks and orca whales live in similar ecological niches with the same physical constraints with superficially similar body plans, but their anatomies strongly follow from family classification.
The requirement of the animal
to overcome gravity,
to retain a center of gravity no matter its mass/size,
to process oxygen,
to survive atmospheric pressure, hydrostatic pressure
etc for the ones I haven’t considered
How and where do these enter into the naturalist discussion?
Given these natural forces and your idea of common descent, why did not just a single land animal arise, a single air-borne creature arise, and a single sea creature arise?
Because there are millions of different ecological niches each with its own unique selection pressures and opportunities for evolution to explore different solutions.
. What is the topic?
