Comments on Jeanson Accuses Duff Again

You didn’t cite any scientific papers Bill. You cited two pseudoscience papers published by AIG, Jeanson’s YEC employer.

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Groups within groups consistent across different independent lines of evidence

Here comes Bill’s usual demand to be spoon fed things anyone with high school basic science knowledge already understands. It’s a great time wasting diversionary tactic, one of Bill’s favorites. :slightly_smiling_face:

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It’s almost like a competition for bragging rights here, being the first pro-science poster to get Bill to accept anything about the evolutionary sciences he keeps attacking. :slightly_smiling_face:

I mean one could go on and on as to how common design doesn’t explain the patterns in biological diversity we actually observe.

Take Jonathan Losos’ classic studies of Caribbean anoles. Each island has its own assemblage of anolis lizards. Some are on the ground, some in the trees, some with large clunky heads, others with small pointed heads. Each suite of traits suiting each species to their ecological niche, in creationist lingo their “design”.

So if you look at some phylogeny built from a shared set of genes among the lizards if common design explained the diversity then all the tree forms should fall on one part of the phylogenetic tree, the big headed forms together on another part, the ground forms clustered somewhere else, everything sorted out by design. Is that what the data look like? No!

Instead groups of species are related by island with these different traits popping up independently on each island. This is exactly what you would expect if each island was colonized by a single species of anolis which subsequently evolved by natural selection to fill the ecological niches on that island.

It’s nothing like we would actually expect if shared design not shared ancestry explained the patterns. You can repeat this for many different organisms from flies to sticklebacks to silverswords to cichlids.

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I would expect gene pattern between species to look like this one posted previously were a designer is creating diversity by mixing and matching existing genes and adding new ones where needed.

It’s just so much easier to say POOF! MAGIC! than to scientifically investigate and explain the actual details. None of that messy evidence stuff to deal with. :slightly_smiling_face:

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WHY Bill? All you keep doing is showing things and saying “a Designer WANTED it that way JUST BECAUSE”. Evolution explains WHY we see certain patterns. “Common Design” is a coward’s non-answer, an excuse for doing no research at all.

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All vertebrates are remarkably similar precisely because they share a common ancestry and evolution has modified the vertebrate body plan by tinkering with the same set of genes. But still danios fall neatly with other ray finned fishes in any phylogeny you care to produce and mice closer to humans. Within this diversity you see convergence running rampant with evidence for evolution coming up with superficially similar adaptations completely independently. You do not see clusters by ecological function, or “design”, as you would expect based on a common design hypothesis and once you introduce the whims of some inaccessible omnipotent agent into your “model” then all bets are off entirely because such an agent(s) could idiosyncratically make nature look any way they like and for no rhyme or reason at all.

Common design is an ad hoc bit of nonsense that is difficult to take seriously as science.

Let’s ignore for a moment no one has demonstrated ANY “design” in biological organisms, let alone “common” design. Bill you need to explain why your “Designer” assembled “designs” which look exactly as if unguided evolution over deep time has occurred.

The whole thing is beyond ridiculous. It’s embarrassing that anyone would have to spend this much time explaining this to someone.

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If people like Jeanson or Douglas Axe were given any real responsibility in science then we would be set back a century and science would operate as a de facto theocracy. It’s difficult to overstate just how dangerous and corrosive these people really are.

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I gave up hope of ever getting Bill to understand the science some time ago. It’s obvious Bill doesn’t want to understand, he just wants to justify his Fundamental religious beliefs. I post rebuttals to his repetitive Creationist pseudoscience for any lurkers who may be hanging about.

Yeah. My patience is rapidly running out for this.

Again I agree 100%. It’s not that these people hold such wackaloon anti-science ideas. It’s that they actively market them to unsuspecting laymen and try to undercut scientific literacy across the board. That’s what frosts my butt. :rage:

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After all this time you don’t know what a nested hierarchy is? It’s not a vague concept at all. It’s groups within groups, with no partial overlaps of groups. To say exactly the same thing in another way, it’s the fit of the taxonomic distribution of characters to some particular branching tree. The fit need not be perfect, since there is such a thing as homoplasy. But there are ways of testing whether the fit is significantly better than expected in the absence of common descent. Look at what I did with Sal’s flower. Do you understand the significance of the trees I mapped the gene distributions onto?

I don’t think that’s true. It was based on morphology in general without particular
regard to function.

I suspect that Jeanson’s response would be that all the anoles belong to the same kind, so it’s not relevant. Try a deeper node. I like whales and hippos, dugongs and elephants.

There is no mixing and matching. It’s best explained by a phylogenetic tree. If you recall, only a tiny proportion of the changes are not explained most simply by the same tree. Of course you don’t recall, but it’s still true.

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Yes I have. Further, I have read Genesis in most every translation and, at one time, the opening chapters in Hebrew, for what that is worth. One does not have to be some special Biblical exegete here. There is no way the original writers and audience of these writings would have understood kinds in the sense that Jeanson projects. Kinds meant the animals familiar to old testament people, both in terms of the animals Adam named and Noah boarded. Do you really think that Adam named the animals based on some sort of Linnaeus style groupings? Of course, the authors thought lions to be lions. Jeanson is reading into scripture here.

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They want to erode the public’s trust in science so they can insert their religious culture war agenda in the gap.

I think if there is any time in history when we desperately need more public trust in science it’s now. Erosion of trust in public education, science, public health and our scientific institutions is an existential threat I think on par in severity with terrorism.

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Yeah but I’m giving him a little deference in thinking Linnaeus correlated morphology to the plan of an Almighty God. Regardless I think Jeanson’s suggestion we return to any sort of approach to classification that would resemble that of Linnaeus is a very naive mistake.

Yep he likely would attempt to wriggle out of that particular problem by claiming Anolis was a created kind. In doing so he would just punt the exact same problem however to a deeper node as you rightly suggest. Never mind of course the ongoing problem with this example of evolution exceeding the diversity between humans and chimpanzees and the biogeographical problems with a Western Hemisphere genus like Anolis making a bee line to the Americas from Mount Ararat.