Moderation note: I am considering how to act on a flag in this thread, and for the moment opting to do nothing (ignoring the flag). That doesn’t mean I condone the behavior or that I won’t flag some comments myself tomorrow.
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Prove it then. Like what?
At the genus, family, and orders level
Keep in mind, as AJ points out, “scientists still use the Linnaeus system of classification but they have introduced several additional categories or taxa (e.g., subphyla, supra kingdoms, suborders, etc.). Many organisms undergo frequent reclassification as new data emerges. Since Linnaeus’s system is based on observed morphologies, behaviors, and ecological space, classifications entail subjective elements according to observers and which characteristics they prioritize. Naturalists often disagree about variants and specific species identifications. So, classification of organisms is a bit arbitrary as to when something falls within one taxon or a closely related taxon.”
This is what I mean from the study:
"In both Old World and New World monkeys Mhc-DRB sequences have been found which resemble human DRB1*03 and DRB3 genes in their second exon. The resemblance is shared sequence motifs and clustering of the genes or the encoded proteins in phylogenetic trees. This similarity could be due to common ancestry, convergence at the molecular level, or chance …
…Statistical comparisons of exon 2 from different DRB1*03 and DRB3 lineages indicate that it was neither gene conversion (descent), nor chance, but molecular convergence that has shaped their characteristic motifs . The demonstration of convergence in anthropoid Mhc-DRB genes has implications for the classification, age, and mechanism of generation of DRB allelic lineages."
Make up your mind. Are you arguing that they flow out of Eden/Persian Gulf or in it:
“Sorry, but the rivers don’t flow into Eden; they flow out of Eden.”
I am happy to show you all the evidence for it on another topic if you like.
Read the study to see what I mean.
I have already show how you can falsify the common design model in my previous topic
In our own previous discussion on the topic of falsifying design hypotheses in ID, I explained why these are generally unfalsifiable. I realize that was a somewhat different hypothesis, but the problem remains.
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None of those are WITHIN species. All of those CONTAIN species, usually many of them.
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I refuse to repeat myself endlessly when you just ignore the answers.
That wasn’t an answer. Please try very hard to say something meaningful that responds to the question. How can there be kinds (separately created taxa) within a species (a set of interbreeding or potentially interbreeding populations, reproductively isolated from other sets of populations)?
This isn’t true. AJ confuses ranks (subphyla, superkindgoms, etc.) with the groups themselves and their phylogeny. The groups are not subjective but the ranks are. We are constantly refining our estimates of phylogeny in the light of more complete data, but that’s not subjective any more than are more accurate estimates of, e.g., the charge on the electron. Your source is talking nonsense.
None of that answers my questions. Please try again. Here: I’ll repeat them. What do you mean by that? How does it tell you whether species belong to the same or different kinds?
The rivers in the Genesis story flow out of Eden, arising from a common source within Eden. This isn’t an argument. It’s just reading the text. Did you read the text?
Sure. Go for it. But it’s futile, as you will only ignore all objections, just as you always have.
You didn’t. And as a bonus, you confuse separate creation vs. common descent with the causes of variation. These are two orthogonal questions. I’m still waiting for you to stop ignoring nested hierarchy, which you have previously said was a test for kinds. Do you retract that suggestion?
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Me too. He said his model expects nested hierarchies due to common descent and also discontinuities due to independent creation events. He expects both, making his hypothesis (whatever it is) unfalsifiable. These are his words:
He came here for apologetics. I admire all attempts to engage with him, but its a waste of precious time and effort.
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This is a good step towards falsifiability. IF you can predict which kinds are independent, THEN you could look for data to affirm or deny this.
There are some difficulties. Common design means some shared parts, therefore you won’t find complete independence. This means looking for independent features between kinds and predicting that, kicking the can of falsifiability down to smaller and smaller features without necessarily ever solving the problem.
DNA deletions may also be problematic, falsely giving the appearance of independence.
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Thanks for chiming in. 
Let me ask you a few questions. Would it be unscientific to use the bible to predict which kinds are independent?
Would predicting functional convergence between kinds make it more falsifiable? The study I gave to John would be an example of functional convergence
This includes predicting function between kinds from vestigial features like pseudogenes or ERV’S
No. Any source of hypotheses is fine. What’s unscientific is to ignore the data when testing whether they’re independent. The data say, for example, that all mammals are a single kind. Carnivores are in the same nested hierarchy as marine mammals, long-legged herbivores that can be tamed, etc. In fact the various “kinds” you have mentioned are not even real phylogenetic groups, their various members being mixed throughout the tree.
Less falsifiable. Try dealing with nested hierarchy, the criterion you yourself have agreed on. Stop ignoring it.
I suspect that nobody knows what you mean by “function between kinds”, and of course you would have to establish what the kinds are before trying to test such a hypothesis, even if you could make it coherent.
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If people like Sanford, Jeanson, Kurt, etcetera who are way more knowledgeable about some of the basics haven’t figured this out, what hope is there for someone with an extremely crappy understanding of basic biology to do this?
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Well, that’s the end of it, then. Your whole endeavor here is basically a critique of, and an attempt to provide an alternative to, the results of the application of phylogenetic methods to living things. But no critique which is written from a position of total ignorance of its subject matter can ever be of any value to anyone.
You’ve been demonstrating, in the posts since, the depth of this ignorance. But the bit that jumps out at me is your insistence that the use of phylogenetic methods is circular reasoning. Obviously this is false, and just as obviously, you’d know that if you bothered to learn. But instead you uncritically repeat a creationist talking point.
I actually have, for some perverse reason, bothered to read and understand your attempts to describe a “common design model,” which are quite awful. But I do find your attempt to draw an equivalence between this and your admitted ignorance of basic science hilarious.
I think there’s something basic you don’t understand here. You are not the first person to plow this field. Explorations of the descent of living things have been going on for a long while and the bodies of evidence developed on this subject are immense and detailed. You seem to think that others should regard your baseless speculations on these subjects with the same gravity and seriousness that you should regard that entire body of evidence. This is a severe misapprehension. If you refuse to take the evidence seriously, I think you will find that nobody whose attention is worthwhile will take you seriously. Yes, you might find yourself the intellectual center of a very un-intellectual clique of half a dozen creationists, but if you think you have an idea which merits respect beyond that, you will soon enough find yourself hollering at the skies in frustration.
No, obviously you didn’t. What you did was cobble together, and reword, various traditional creationist notions. It was incoherent, badly written, and of no use to anyone – certainly worse than no use to you. I did comment, pointing out various flaws to which you did not address yourself, but that’s to be expected: none of those flaws were remediable so it’s important, if you’re on a project of creationist apologetics, to ignore them.
But as for your lack of desire to read “my” sources, I think you once again fail to get the point. There’s nothing unique about the PARTICULAR sources I cited – they were just examples of the sorts of things you might read if you realized how horrifying your ignorance of this subject is and wanted to repair that. You seem to think that you can play some sort of tit-for-tat with me: if I recommend a book of actual science, you have no reason to read it unless I coo and praise your nonsense rantings about a completely nonviable “model” of common design. But, in fact, you have every reason to familiarize yourself with the field of study whose conclusions you seek to overturn. If you do not do it, who can possibly care what you have to say on the matter?
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That’s not true. I take everyone’s critique seriously including yours. I have been doing the best that I can to respond and change my model in response to those critiques. I admit that my presentation of my theory has been complete garbage throughout most of my interactions on here, which is why I have been doing everything I can to take in everything you guys have said. But, if what you are saying is wrong or you don’t respond to my latest changes of my theory, I am not going to just accept what you say simply because you are scientist. On the other hand, when I felt that your critiques were right on, I either abandoned the topic I created or dropped certain points I made and stopped mentioning them…
You are right. I would have just copied and pasted my responses to your objections that you have yet to respond back to.
Well, the common design model probably would only be useful for predicting whether species belong to different kinds. With that said, I have already showed you how.
Again, as scientists continue to sequence more and more environmental samples or newly discovered organisms, some organisms will emerge that do not fit nested hierarchies already in place.
Newly discovered (and sequenced) organisms should fit into the ever-bushier plethora of nested hierarchies depicting evolution’s common descent from the last universal common ancestor in the evolutionary model.
In contrast, if common design is true, independent hierarchies may be discovered. I gave you the study on Hemimastigophora that illustrates my point.
Your response was…
Then, you are missing the point of the topic I created here. That was just an example of how the common design model can be useful potentially but I am not necessarily trying to prove that it is useful or true.
It is not so much that I am ignoring it. It is that you are focusing on this particular aspect of the common design model and you are suggesting that if we don’t have this aspect fully worked out, then it means the entire model cannot be useful. There are other predictive elements of my model I mentioned that you did not address.
Anyhow, the bible can be used as a model and criterion for deciphering kinds or independent nested hierarchy, as you admitted.
Alright, so the bible + looking for function in Vestigial features + comparing those functional features between kinds and applying it to different environments= unrelated organisms.
Would this potentially be useful?
Hugh Ross:
“Bara is not used in Genesis 1:25 because the different kinds of land mammals described in Genesis 1:24–25 are not the first land mammals that God made. Rather, Genesis 1:24–25 describes three subcategories of land mammals, the subcategories that would prove crucial for enabling human beings to launch and sustain civilization. A much longer description of the features and roles in serving human beings for many of these animals is described in Job 38:39–39:30. God created the three subcategories of land mammals mentioned in Genesis 1:24–25 long after he created the first land mammals. Hence, the different kinds of land mammals described in Genesis 1:24–25 are not brand new.”
Hugh Ross:
"The Genesis 2 text describes the places from which the four rivers flow out. The Tigris and Euphrates flow out from Asshur, the Pishon out from the mountains of Havilah (where there is gold), and the Gihon out from the region of Cush. Asshur is indeed in Mesopotamia. The mountains of Havilah are located in west central Arabia, a region that contains gold, though the rest of the Middle East does not. Today we associate Cush with the horn of Africa. However, during the end of the last ice age the Red Sea was largely dry, which means the region of Cush would have extended into the mountains at the southwest tip of the present Arabian Peninsula.
Satellite imagery reveals the dry beds of two large rivers that once flowed from central and southern Arabia into the southwest region of the present Persian Gulf. Melting snow and ice on the mountains of Havilah and Cush at the end of the last ice age would have made the Pishon and Gihon as mighty as the Tigris and Euphrates. Since most of the Persian Gulf was dry land at that time, the four rivers would have come together in what is now the southeastern portion of the Persian Gulf. From those “headwaters” the rivers would separate and continue to flow toward and empty into the Indian Ocean.
Such a warm, lush location explains why Adam and Eve did not need clothes (Armenia, by contrast, would have been quite cold). Since a large aquifer exists under the Persian Gulf, it also explains the springs mentioned in Genesis 2:6.
Also, researchers recently discovered the Karun and Wadi Al-Bāṭin riverbeds flowing into the Persian Gulf. Though it is not necessary to identify these rivers with the Pishon and Gihon, they are clear evidence that, not too long ago, more major rivers than just the Tigris and Euphrates flowed into the Persian Gulf."
Hm. Well, yes.
Well, I’m not a scientist, so it’s even easier for you there. But nothing I have said to you is at odds with anything a scientist would be very likely to say. And you’ve faced the same objections, and much more, from scientists.
But really, the problem you’re facing is in some ways vastly more complex, and in some ways vastly simpler, than you think. The problem is that you are attempting a takedown of an entire field of scientific inquiry which you admit to not only knowing nothing about but as to which you acknowledge remaining intentionally ignorant.
This groundbreaking takedown probably won’t happen at all, from anyone. But if it WERE to happen, it would come from someone deeply aware of the issues, not from someone who ignorantly and inaccurately accuses the whole enterprise of being nothing more than an exercise in circular reasoning.
There’s a starting place for this, and it’s not what you think it is. The starting place is for you to learn phylogenetics. When you’ve learned a fair bit about it and about its place within biology, well, it’s time for you to head to grad school and get in deeper. Then it’s time for you to be able to formulate and test phylogenetic hypotheses: and THEN you can embark upon the project of showing that everyone else is wrong and that the gut feeling you had, based purely upon faith, before you knew anything about the subject, was right all along.
But you probably know how that story ends. It almost always ends with fundamentalism, not phylogenetics, being discarded.
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Let me append to that a sort of analogy from my lawyering days.
I had a bit of a career in the realm of what was known to some as the “property rights” movement – people who were bothered by what they saw as excessive interference by state and local government into their use of their land. In that work, I represented various rural resource users and land developers. I brought civil rights lawsuits against people whose actions interfered with the use of land, and most of the time, I won.
Now, that was a group of people who had quite a few nuts in the mix. Hollerin’ types who railed against the got-durned gubmint and who had extraordinary notions about the constitution and its bearing upon their property rights. I knew those people, and I talked with them regularly. If you’d set one of 'em loose in a US District Court to argue his points, you’d see him out of court in seconds flat.
Why is that? It’s because a proper understanding of property rights law involves grasping a number of core notions about property rights and about the contours of those rights. Among those are notions which were anathema to the more wild-eyed people I knew: to state the point broadly, for example, the government really CAN comprehensively regulate land use without it being deemed a violation of constitutional rights in any traditionally recognized sense.
But when you really, really UNDERSTAND a field like the constitutional law of land-use regulation, you can develop a discerning eye. I had clients who could not obtain representation at all because their cases were obvious losers – to everyone who didn’t have my particular narrowly-focused expertise – for whom I won six-figure judgments and settlements.
Now, to the person naive in understanding, it may have looked as though I came to court with a radical reimagining of property rights, and by sheer gumption or smooth talking or some such thing, won the day. But the reality was that I came to court simply understanding the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate government action better than my opponents did. The key insights were not massive world-shaking ones which break all the rules of constitutional law; they were, instead, the fine art of detail.
But you do not get there by being ignorant. You don’t get there by being a pure iconoclast, thrashing and smashing your way around and denying the validity of what everyone else says. You get there by being a master of the particulars of the subject itself. You get there by finding the flaw in others’ understanding, getting a pry-bar into that flaw and opening it up.
If you want to undo phylogenetics as it is currently understood, you will need to do just that. You will need to be a master of phylogenetics. And telling people that the whole enterprise is circular reasoning is just the kind of thing that will do nothing but make eyes roll.
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A good place to start:
Then follow up with this:
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Yes, I noticed this pretty earlier.
Not completely accurate. My model would potentially take down a particular aspect of Modern synthesis, such as universal common descent. But, everything else would just be an improvement of the theory. I am only intentionally ignorant of things that are irrelevant to my overall argument, such as what you presented to me.
I actually misunderstood you and did not mean to suggest this. With that said, I agree with you here.
This is why my goal on this forum was to just present a model and have it be torn apart and improved on enough for Christian scientists to take notice and they can take it to the next level for me.
Again, I much rather allow the experts work it out, such as RTB or Winston and his supporters. In fact, almost everything I presented came from RTB.
No, that is completely accurate. Your attack requires rejection of substantial parts of the findings of phylogenetics. Universal common descent has never come into it – you’re talking instead about taking out, for example, the common descent of the mammals. We could have multiple origins for various groups of single-celled organisms, or not, but that would be of no consequence to any of the issues you’ve expressed interest in here.
Understand: Common descent of all metazoa is not “universal” common descent, but everything you challenge is within the metazoa. There’s no doubt at all that the metazoa share common ancestry. That’s got nothing to do with universal common descent, and that’s the insurmountable challenge you’ve set for yourself: establish that the scientists have all got it badly wrong.
But that’s not true, of course. For example:
You’ve explicitly stated – and certainly nothing in your posts contradicts or suggests a contradiction – that you have no interest in phylogenetic concepts at all. These concepts are not irrelevant to your views. They are, rather, at the heart of what you purport to challenge, and the only successful avenue of challenge would be to produce a superior set of phylogenetic methods to those now in use.
Lordy, lordy. You did say it, though, explicitly. As the King of Swamp Castle says, “Didn’t mean to? You put your sword right through his head!”
Failing to understand that those people are not experts is a very basic error. They will never have any role in working any of this out.
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Not necessarily. You would have to be more specific. Are you suggesting that all mammals descended from a common ancestry or you suggesting that the bible has got it wrong at some parts?
Your responses are just repetitions of previous claims, and you don’t respond at all to most things.
You haven’t. Please explain. Not with regard to hemimastigotes but with regard to mammals. That’s what we were talking about. Are whales and hippos different kinds? How can you tell?
No problem. No independent hierarchies have been discovered. Common design is falsified. The study you cite didn’t discover any such independent group.
You haven’t shown how it can be useful. I would submit that any hypothesis that’s already falsified is not useful.
It isn’t that the aspect isn’t fully worked out. It’s that the data falsify your claim of independent creation. There’s no need for further consideration of a falsified hypothesis.
No, you are confused. The bible can be used as a hypothesis of independently created kinds. But that hypothesis has been falsified. It’s not a criterion at all.
No. Common descent doesn’t predict that vestigial features must be nonfunctional. The rest of what you say is gibberish.
Hugh Ross is saying, apparently, that the subcategories are not kinds. So if you believe him, all that is irrelevant to any hypothesis of separate kinds.
He’s wrong about that too. The rivers flow out of Eden and into Havilah (where there is gold), etc. Have you ever read Genesis? And Ross appears not to understand what headwaters are.
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