Yeah I think I remember him using 11,000 bird species as some starting point for the number of species that should appear every year. Something like that. It’s hard to keep up with every stupid thing he says.
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But he’s “open” to the common ancestry of humans and chimpanzees. Just that, open. Undecided, it could go either way. Maybe with some more “poofing” he’d be on board. I was tempted to remove the f.
The common descent thread on theskepticalzone went over 5000. And there have been a few subsequent >300 post threads on it since.
The primate change denial is strong in this one.
Can you describe the model to me?
Bill. The “model” is outlined in numerous textbooks and review articles published over decades
Then Allen who is a supporter of the theory should be able to explain the model as well as Nathaniel explained his model. I already told you what I thought the model was. Nathaniel requires several poof events and I think the standard evolutionary model model requires only one.
@AllenWitmerMiller here is my proposal for the competing models.
OK then. Truth tell, I do think that between Evograd’s articles, the MacMillan-Duff articles and responses, and the further comments of others on this thread, that Jeanson’s work has been read, thoroughly and accurately understood, fairly appraised to be flawed and deficient, these shortcomings fully and accurately conveyed, and at this point we are apparently scattershot going in circles.
But to reiterated a point I have made before, and is germane because Jeanson’s model is scarcely motivated by curiosity but rather by the mandate to come up with an explanation for nature which complies with a strictly literal interpretation of Genesis - there is noooooo justification for this interpretation of the Biblical kinds. I really have not seen any response from Jeanson’s defenders on this.
For centuries, even millennia, before the modern origins debate, a horse was a horse and a donkey was a donkey, and good grief, please let me not go on further. There isn’t any scriptural support for the idea of kinds as some ancestral wellspring of all these creatures the Hebrews already had specific names for. What happened to “plain reading”? So Jeanson is bending genetics into pretzels to defend a young earth with some quasi-heretical conception of kinds for which is not even good Biblical hermeneutics. What is the point then? It is not the Bible being preserved here, it is some strange world building exercise that has become untethered from the Biblical account. Even in the fundamentalist, literalist church of my youth, nobody ever talked about kinds in this way, and lions went all the way back to Eden. So Jeanson has succeeded at being both pseudoscientific and pseudobiblical.
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What exactly are you asking? Common ancestry is extremely well supported. Period. There are plenty of ongoing areas of research and open questions in evolutionary biology. None of those questions however causes anyone to doubt common ancestry.
Yes I could. But why should I repeat what others have already explained? Moreover, I’ve seen a number of scientists on PS post links to excellent tutorial articles which have already done the work for me.
I will also put in a plug for Potholer54’s “Evolution Made Easy” video and related videos on his Youtube channel, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w57_P9DZJ4 (Peter Hadfield is the journalist’s name.) There are a lot of great evolutionary biology tutorials online but I find him particularly interesting and entertaining—and a good start for people wanting to get a basic grounding on these topics.
I’ll also repeat what others have said about Young Earth Creationist Todd Wood. He has plenty of objections to the Theory of Evolution but he freely and honestly acknowledges that the science is based on a very powerful model. I disagree with Dr. Wood concerning evolutionary biology but we probably share a great deal of Biblical theology—and I also respect his honesty in how he tends to go about disagreeing with other scientists. (He doesn’t simply deny all of the evidence and solid analysis.) I think a lot of other anti-evolution YEC ministry leaders could learn from his example.
I hate to sound curmudgeonly but that’s not setting a very high bar. Yes, I do think I think I could do a better job than Jeanson—but why should I reinvent the wheel? So many scientists have already done the work for me.
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Allen here is what I wrote. Does this represent the two positions to you?
Make any corrections you like. Maybe we can get some grounding in this discussion. Let me give you a clue where I think this ends up. There is no substantive difference in the positions when everything shakes out unless the evolution side is ready with a testable mechanism that explains innovation.
Mutation, gene duplication, regulatory gene evolution, drift, selection, it’s all there. This stuff isn’t as big a mystery as you are making it out to be Bill.
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Is your claim that these mechanisms are responsible for all the diversity of innovations that we observe with the created kinds of Nathaniels model?
None of this is merely “my claim” Bill.
This is the science.
There are plenty of ongoing areas of research and open questions in ALL of science and evolutionary biology is no exception. None of those questions however raise any doubts about common ancestry and with genomics and fields like evo-devo we have learned quite a lot about where evolutionary novelty comes from (gene duplication, mutation, selection, HGT…).
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You are struggling to commit to the evolutionary model. Unless you have a mechanism the theory is essentially the same as Nathaniels. He just describes the cause of all the innovations as special creation.
Yes Jeanson’s mechanism is basically an appeal to magical spells.
The mechanisms we have for the evolution of novelty in science are things like mutation, gene duplication and selection.
If so, then he must agree that genes are gained and lost, because members of the same genus or famiy don’t have all the same genes. Given that, what’s your problem with evolution being responsible for Sal’s flower?
There are many evolutionary models. The one we’re supposed to be talking about here is simple: common descent with lineage branching.
No, he describes the cause of some of the innovations as special creation, and you have said that innovation within kinds results from standard evolutionary processes. That would include gene gain and loss among others.
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That would be the same one people have described to you dozens of times over the years. 
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Heh. Bill Cole thinks no mechanisms for evolution have ever been described or tested. No genetic variation from sexual recombination, gene duplication, SNPs, indels, frame shifts, etc. No natural selection, no horizontal gene transfer, no neutral drift. This is the level of scientific competence from colewd we have to deal with every single day.
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Have you looked through the two papers I cited?