The flood is another digression best left out of this thread.
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I mean itâs all connected. Start pulling on one of these creationist threads and the whole thing starts coming apart like a cheap rug.
Yep. Thatâs why I always hammer on the consilience of evidence thing. Creationists hate consilience, just hate it. Itâs almost impossible to get one of them to even type the word. No Noahâs Flood means no Noahâs Ark which means no âkindsâ on the Ark repopulating the animal world. Creationists demand every last one of their talking points be addressed alone, in a vacuum, with no reference to any other of their ridiculous claims.
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Thatâs basically what Jeanson did when I debated him. He left out stuff because he didnât want to talk about that stuff and resented next bringing up stuff he didnât want to talk about. It was all part of his strategy of obfuscation and avoidance.
You canât explain the pattern with a âcommon designâ strategy, because there is no mechanism on âcommon designâ that inadvertently constrains the different gene sequences to yield consilience of independent phylogenies unless the designer is being intentionally deceptive.
You would have to posit that the designer is deliberately doing this forcing on the data for no apparent reason, essentially producing the exact pattern you would expect from common descent simply to make âcommon designâ compatible with that same evidence. Which would make the designer act in an intentionally deceptive manner for no functional reason.
If the designer is creating genes for specific functional purposes, there is just no reason to expect those gene-sequences to be constrained in their sequence by how they should end up grouping if some decides to use them as input in a phylogenetic algorithm.
If you want a more in-depth explanation for why this âcommon designâ rationalization of yours doesnât make sense and doesnât explain consilience of independent phylogenies, read this post:
This is that famous word-salad of yours again. A criticism of an explanation is not itself an explanation for anything. Itâs not supposed to be. But explanations for WHY common design does not explain consilience of independent phylogenies have in fact been provided many, many times before.
Itâs because âcommon designâ is a vacuous idea that doesnât predict any particular pattern. There is no mechanism in âcommon designâ that produces nesting hierarchies.
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And in the case of Michael Behe, even though he shares those religious objections to the theory of evolution, the evidence for common ancestry is too strong for him to deny. Although I think in that case he does not openly deny common ancestry because he believes heâs figured out a way to reconcile common ancestry with his religious preconceptions. IOW, he remains a pseudoscientist.
Please show us where the creationists have identified every single kind, which current species belong to which kind, and provided the complete genome of the original ancestor of each kind?
Thanks in advance.
So this has been explained to you for, I donât know, ten years? 20? More? Often by professional researchers and educators in the field. And still you donât know.
Whose fault is that, Bill?
You understand Jeansonâs model just as poorly as you understand evolutionary theory. Yet for some reason your arenât pestering him with your sealioning.
Incidentally there was a paper on building phylogenetic trees for designed objects (musical instruments in this case) by TĂ«mkin and Eldridge in 2007 published in Current Anthropology 48:146-154. They found that trees of manufactured objects differ significantly from those we construct for living organisms.
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Can you expand on this with some specific examples? Jeansonâs model includes lots of variation from common descent.
The pattern contains convergence. For arguments sake I could state that convergence requires design so your claim of exact fit is false.
There is a strategy that produces this type of pattern and that is conservation of design. I want as few different parts as possible to get the job done.
Then why do birds and bats which occupy virtually identical ecological niches have completely different wing structures? Why do cetaceans have to breathe air instead of having gills like sharks? Why so many different designs for eyes?
Sorry Bill, âcommon designâ doesnât explain anything unless you have a deliberately deceptive Designer who wanted us to think evolution happened.
I was not aware of that. Will have to have a look. I have often suggested that Creation Scientists could test their hypothesis that designed objects could just as easily produce a nested hierarchy as those that arose thru common descent by performing just such an analysis. Itâs interesting that, AFAIK, they have never done this yet continue to make the claim.
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Mammals only, and no genomes, but here is a start by AiGâs Jean Lightner.
For Johnâs benefit, here it is for ark birds
And here she lays out her methodology
Jeansonâs basic premise being that the animals Adam named were created with maxed out heterozygosity, and then channeled to more homozygous varients, one wonders how was it, that much later in creationist years, the breeding pairs which boarded the ark retained the heterozygosity to repopulate the earth with a bunch of new species? Oh well, I suppose there is some ad hoc explanation as always, whatever is required by the plotâŠ
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Think about it Bill, what is the mechanism on âcommon designâ that would force gene-sequences from different genes to yield highly similar phylogenetic trees? If you imagine that the same gene-sequence was inserted into the last common ancestor of the individual âkindsâ, and these subsequently evolved in the many species that make up each âkindâ, why should this happen to end up producing the nesting hierarchy? There is just no reason why this should happen. You are essentially saying that a consistent phylogenetic tree across different and independent loci is just an accidental byproduct of âcommon designâ. But the odds of that are astronomically against it.
So what? Convergence isnât evidence against common descent.
You could say those words but youâd be talking out of your rear end, and so accomplish nothing. Thereâs nothing that prevents two separate lineages which derive from a common ancestor, from suffering the same mutation. In fact itâs expected to some times happen. Itâs also been observed in real time (for example in the LTEE).
In particular, when separate but highly similar organisms are subject to similar selective pressures, would you expect mutations that are adaptive in one lineage to also be adaptive in the other.
Yeah, the âre-using of the same part over and over againâ idea. That wouldnât produce a tree, that would produce a star with one central node from which all branches emerge directly. Or a giant polytomy with many small clades on each branch connected to the polytomy.
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Its evidence against universal common descent being a complete model/
Why would there be any evidence of convergence if everything was explained by common design? Wouldnât everything with the same function cluster together?
Meaningless nonsense. Universal common descent isnât supposed to be a âcomplete modelâ for anything. Universal common descent is the explanation for the tree like structure in the sequences of universally shared genes.
So no, convergence has no bearing on the question of universal common ancestry. Youâre talking meaningless gibberish again.
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I do not see how that is even connected. Convergence is generally about similar environmental pressures operating on diverse lineages. So no bearing on common descent at all.
Are you saying @colewd that there are multiple designers each with their own plan? One making mammals, one birds, one fish, one insects, etc.
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As usual Bill is making it up as he goes. Donât expect any logic or consistency. 
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Universal common descent is not a complete model yet Jeansonâs model starting from created kinds may be a complete model.
It is complete. Complete science-free garbage.
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