Yes, I read the papers and you claimed that all flightless birds shared a common ancestor with limited comparative DNA sequences. You asked me if I agreed and I said I don’t know.
It was not the main claim of the paper but it was critical to your conclusion that flight had been lost multiple times.
Why don’t you know? Do you deny that the evidence matches my claims, and if you didn’t understand the evidence (which you didn’t), how would you know?
Not true. The paper was only about ratites, not all flightless birds. And in fact while ratites share a common ancestor, the point was that the ancestor wasn’t a ratite.
It (by which I mean the phylogenetic tree of shared descent) was indeed the main claim of the paper. The conclusion about multiple losses of flight was an interesting implication of that claim.
What about the crocs?
I’m not a biologist, so I have not looked closely.
But it’s pointless. You are trying to prove that common descent is not strictly true. But everybody knows that already. The existence of horizonal gene transfer already shows that genetic material doesn’t all come via a direct line of descent.
Scientific theories idealize and oversimplify. Future scientists can help to refine theories by filling in more of the details. There’s nothing surprising about this. Boyle’s law is false for real gases, but is a pretty good approximation. Kepler’s laws are false for real planets, and it must have been obvious to Kepler that some of the data he was plotting did not exactly fit on his elliptical curves.
You are pointing out imperfections in theories that everybody knows are imperfect. And then you are jumping to unwarranted conclusions based on the existence of those imperfections.
I don’t think you can confirm common descent with phylogenetic trees alone. I don’t think you can dismiss it either.
I agree.
Do you have evidence of synonymous vs non synonymous mutations?
If the amino acid changes are nominal I think you have a good case here. Given the same evidence with ratites I also think you have a good case. If I remember correctly this biggest outlier was the Ostrich.
Do you think the issues with origin of the eukaryotic cell are well understood? Certainly Eugene Koonin has been upfront here but there are other papers that just assume this transition is true.
So you do deny that the evidence matches my claims. How can you know, since you didn’t understand the evidence?
Of course I do. You could look it up yourself.
No idea what “amino acids changes are nominal” means. Why should that matter?
I’m not a biologist, so it’s not up to me to judge. The endosymbiosis idea seems like a pretty good working hypothesis, but it could be mistaken.
Because you do not have a standard to reject common descent against.
What is the ratio?
If the changes were nominal then at least for what we are observing it indicates that the DNA started in close to the same place which is evidence for descent.
I agree but the bigger problem it is just a partial explanation. There is a lot it does not explain even if it is true.
-the origin chromosome structure
-the origin of the spliceosome
-the origin of the nuclear pore complex
etc
What is your standard Bill? Genesis 1 in the Christian Bible?
Why is that a problem for the rest of the huge amount of evidence for evolutionary theory?
Almost all scientific fields have areas with incomplete explanations. That’s why we still do science.
What about the problems for ID which has ZERO explanations of mechanisms? Why don’t they bother you like ToE does?
How can you know that if you don’t understand the evidence? Now of course there’s a standard, but “reject common descent” isn’t how null models work. If the null model is no common descent, and we are unable to reject the null model, that doesn’t reject common descent. It merely says that we are unable to say that there is common descent. Now, as it happens, we can strongly reject that null model.
Don’t know. I would have to look at the data. Why?
That makes no sense whatsoever, and you still haven’t explained what “amino acids changes are nominal” means.
I understand your position here.
if the synonymous to non synonymous ratio is high s/ns mutations is high then the starting point of the DNA could be much closer than the variation you are looking at.
There is redundancy in the DNA. On average about 4 DNA condons code for every amino acid. A lower ratio is not reason to reject common descent as the proteins may have high substitutability. If however through experiment you found those AA substitutions to be highly deleterious that would be a problem for the common descent hypothesis.
In the case of spliceosome proteins this ratio is extremely high. Gpuccio makes this calculation in some of his UD articles.
How about it Bill? What is your standard you reject common descent against?
I see no evidence of that.
More word salad.
Did you mean to say “condoms”? And do you realize that the bulk of the data in that ratite paper is non-coding DNA?
Why is that even a problem? Should you throw out your holy book because it only has partial explanations?
We always start with partial explanations, and then attempt to build on those.
It’s fine to have a partial explanation as long as it is represented accurately as a partial explanation. Design is also a partial explanation.
Merely saying “Design” isn’t an explanation for anything any more than saying “MAGIC!” is an explanation. You know that but your religious fanaticism won’t let you admit it.
So would you say it is true that “Magic” is a partial explanation for the Iphone 10?
We know the mechanisms by which the Iphone was designed and manufactured as well as the identity of the designers.
You can’t answer the simplest question about the mechanisms of your claimed “design” for biological life. To you it’s all magic.
Why are you dodging the question about your standard for rejecting common descent? You demanded such a standard from others yet you can’t provide your own. That’s pretty hypocritical.