A YLC is Bemused At Others Engaging Evidence

Was it, really? It seems to me, before looking anything up, that heterostracans and osteostracans have been known for well over a hundred years.

Vehicles have many “easily” quantifiable, and distinguishable attributes. They have distinct components, and those components have attributes too. Type of material they’re made, size, weight, etc. etc. You need to compile a significant set of characters and do the actual work of determining which vehicles have these characters or not, and then you can try working out whether there is any significant amount of nesting hierarchical structure in that dataset.

Randomly pick ten extant and historical cars across manufacturers, ten vans, ten trucks, ten motorcycles, ten bikes, ten trains, ten airplanes, ten boats and ships, and so on. Then decide on a substantial set of attributes, for example:
Wheels? Yes/No
How many? (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.)
Inflatable Tires? Yes/No.
Rubber tires? Yes/No.
Reinforced with metal wires? Yes/No.
Spoked? Yes/No.
Made of what? Wood(what type?), metal(what type?), plastic(what type?), etc.
Rear wheel drive? Yes/No.
Front wheel drive? Yes/No.
Steering on all wheels? Yes/No.
Steering on no wheels? Yes/No.
Windows? Yes/No.
How many?
Material of which it is made? (Type of glass, plastic, etc).
Windshield? Yes/No.
One big? Yes/No.
Segmented? Yes/No.
Material of which it is made? (Type of glass, plastic, etc).
Number of engines? (0,1,2,3 etc.).
Combustion engine? Yes/No.
Attributes of the engine(s) such as type of fuel used? (Coal, wood, oil(what type?), gasoline, jet fuel(what type?)
Electrical engine? Yes/No.
Fuel cells? Batteries? Solar powered?
Number of cylinders? And all the rest related to engines and propulsion.
Manufacturers of the individual components?
Who made the tires?
Who made the spokes?
The gears, chassis, engine, plates, what are they made of? How many are there?). And so on.

The more characters you use, the more significant the result you get, the more convincing it will be if you are actually right.

Something you have still not done, and you have shown no sign of even comprehending what means. Until you have actually done this, all you have done is blindly asserted that vehicles fall into an objective nested hierarchy. A claim for which you have shown zero actual evidence.

Nobody should believe you when you repeat the claim, including yourself. The number of characters to choose from, and the sheer number of different types of vehicles over time and from different manufacturers, are so incredibly numerous that you simply cannot claim to know that any significant, unbiased sub-sample of them sort into an objective nesting hierarchy. You need to write stuff down, analyze countless actual real specimens for their attributes, compile lists and so on. It would require a type of work and effort that just can’t be done in your head. And you’re clearly not at all prepared or even interested in doing.

So you still have all the work ahead of you. You have not even begun.

You have to do the actual work of demonstrating the truth of what you are claiming, otherwise you are simply demonstrating that you are not interested in finding out whether your claim is true.

You seem to believe it without having ever really tested it, and you show no sign of wanting to find out whether it is actually true. You seem more interested in advertising for what you believe, than in finding out whether you should.

6 Likes

It gets even better than that. Just google pictures “snake with legs”. We are bathing in living transitional snakes.

1 Like

Yes, but the phylogeny of all of these organisms hasn’t always been clear. It was in the early-middle 20th Century when it started to really become clear that sharks secondarily lost bone.

To be clear though, none of these extant species are particularly closely related to snakes, they’re lizards with snake-like morphologies.

3 Likes

This thread is a great review exercise in Greek and Latin morphemes which explain the terms:

gnathostome= gnathos (jaw) + stoma (mouth)

…which contrast with jawless creatures.

heterostracan= hetero (other) + ostraka (pottery shard, if you recall voting in ancient Athens. They voted by using pottery fragments as ballots. If you got voted out by the citizen court, you were ostracized.) Heterostracans are other armored creatures.

osteostracan= osteon (bone) + ostraka (pottery shard) Bone-armored creatures.

I think I learned that one from Sir Richard Attenborough, the Nature documentary narrator.


POSTSCRIPT: A coelacanth has fins which are “hollow spines”: koilos (hollow) + akantha (spine). They are Sarcopteryggi: sarx (flesh) + pteryx (fin) creatures. They are euteleostomi: eu (good) + teleo (complete) + stoma (mouth), also known as the bony vertebrates.

We now return you to the taxonomy tutorial already in progress.

4 Likes

Are you trying to be funny? You responded to my question by drawing a completely different tree, and did not use rubber tires. How is that supposed to be an answer to my question?

Can you cite a publication for this late realization? It seems obvious to me that gnathostomes are a clade that excludes “agnathans”, and it should have been obvious to anyone from the beginning.

So are snakes.

The photo I posted was of a Ball Python, definitely a snake.

Yes, living pythons (and boas) retain pelvic spurs, but I was referring to animals like the 3-toed skink that @Rumraket posted a picture of. If you google “snake with legs”, most of the images are skinks, amphisbaenians or pygopodids. All are snake-like and can have limbs, but aren’t on the snake lineage.

Avoidance noted. What may or may not apply to biological nested hierarchies is irrelevant to and will not resolve the clear failure of your cartoon phylogeny. So:

According to your phylogeny, those vehicles are cars. Either those vehicles are cars, or your phylogeny doesn’t work.

Pick one.

1 Like

I asked an expert about this and went through some literature and it seems I was mistaken. Apparently it’s pretty much always been recognised by palaeontologists that bone must have been present in the ancestors of chondrichthyans due to the obviously bony agnathans like osteostracans, but the details of where the types of bones appeared were hazy. For example, chondrichthyans are micromeric (lots of dermal scales) while osteichthyans and placoderms have large dermal bones (macromeric). For a long time placoderms were though to be a monophyletic group that were more closely related to chondrichthyans, and that macromery had evolved twice independently in placoderms and osteichthyans.
More recently, it’s become clear that placoderms are a paraphyletic stem group of gnathostomes, and some of them clearly resemble stem osteichthyans (see the macromeric jawed placoderm Entelognathus), and that acanthodians are stem chondrichthyans rather than a monophyletic group closely related to osteichthyans (or stem osteichthyans), all of which means that the ancestral condition was probably macromery, and that chondrichthyans secondarily become micromeric.

Anyway, while palaeontologists have been aware of the bony stem gnathostomes for over a century, biologists seemed to be a bit behind the curve on this, and were labouring under the idea that “proper” bones evolved in osteichthyans after chondrichtyans diverged away, and it’s only fairly recently that it’s become apparent from a biological perspective that bones were secondarily lost in chondrichthyans.

Now the evidence from the 2 fields is in harmony, and serves as a good example of how palaeontology can inform our understanding of extant organisms.

1 Like

hey guys. i see now that i have some limitation of posting comments (about 1 per day). so i will answer to all of you in a single comment.

ok. but again its the exceptional and not the rule. its very important point that we need to remember. also remember that even if we will find a single case of that nested hierarchy in a single company then the entire claim of “designed objects cant produce nested hierarchy” is incorrect.

so how do you want me to made a phylogeny out of vehicles?

they are actually use it as a part of their reproductive system. so they are not realy limbs:

indeed but as you said its hard work and i dont think that anyone have the data we need to test it. this is why i ask if in general a car is closer to other car than to a truck. i guess that even you agree that at least a car is closer to other car than to an airplane. am i right? if so we both agree that we can group at least some vehicles. that is a start. if you still not convince let me ask you this: does it make sense that a designer will made creatures in groups like reptiles, mammals etc? if so we can agree that nested hierarchy in nature can also point out to design.

That’s an empty claim. You need evidence.

What you need is a statistically significant phylogenetic signal. I have yet to see you attempt such a measurement.

Check out any vehicle seller’s website - they’ll have specification data for every vehicle they have for sale. Easily enough to generate a phylogeny. This has been pointed out to you before.

So data is available. You just can’t be bothered to use it, or don’t know how. Meanwhile, others are using data to refute your claim.

1 Like

They are the remains of limbs, regardless of their current function today. The fact that they’re not useless doesn’t mean they’re not vestigial. Of course, as a creationist you can always claim “they have a function therefore God probably created them that way”, but that’s a separate argument.

By the way, pythons and boas, the “primitive” snakes that retain these pelvic spurs, also have much more highly conserved sequences of a key enhancer involved in limb development, while snakes lacking the pelvic spur (or any other limb remains) have more diverged sequences:
https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674(16)31310-1
gr1

5 Likes

Then you should stop posting and start gathering the data. Contact manufactureres, persuade them to send you the data. You know, what actual biologists do when they want to analyze genetic data from different species. Work!

It doesn’t matter if some car is “closer” to some truck. You don’t get a nested hierarchy from that.

i guess that even you agree that at least a car is closer to other car than to an airplane. am i right?

It doesn’t matter if two particular cars are more similar to each other than to some airplane. You don’t get a nested hierarchy from this kind of mere similarity. It also doesn’t matter if in general, cars are more similar to each other, than they are to airplanes.

if so we both agree that we can group at least some vehicles.

No, we can’t. We can’t just blindly declare that we can group “at least some vehicles”. That’s not a nested hierarchy. You need to show that with actual data. Not imagine it, not insist on it, not try to get people to state that they agree. You need to do the work. Collect the data, show that the hierarchy is an objective property of the data.

that is a start.

No, it isn’t. Empirical facts are not established by imagination, or by popularity. You have not even begun. You still have all your work ahead of you.

if you still not convince let me ask you this: does it make sense that a designer will made creatures in groups like reptiles, mammals etc?

No, it does not make sense for a designer to deliberately create organisms by independent creation, which nevertheless sort into an objective nesting hierarchy. That does not make sense.

if so we can agree that nested hierarchy in nature can also point out to design.

But we can’t do that until you show, by doing the actual work, that designed objects really do sort into an objective nested hierarchy. Which you have not done, for anything.

1 Like

That is ludicrous. Motor vehicles are man-made objects, and therefore we know every single part of which they are made and every single aspect of how they function.

There is no reason a creationist could not apply the standard phylogenetic techniques to them and demonstrate that it will produce the same sort of trees that we find in biology.

Why has no one done this?

2 Likes

Because most of them don’t know how, and the few that do know also know what the outcome would be.

2 Likes

I think the question is less about dermal bone than about endochondral (cartilage-replacement) bone.