It’s what you don’t know you don’t know that trips you up.
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Why are trying to make this complicated? No math needed. This proposal has hierarchies too. Of course it cannot agree with a whale/camel ancestor, or crocodiles and birds. But then, those are speculative anyway, aren’t they. And no, it cannot agree with a single UCA at the bottom, but you cannot prove that anyway. That is pure speculation, too.
Look, if you are trying to prove that I do not fully understand this field, let me put your mind at ease. I do not. But if you are trying to prove that this proposal is completely off-base, I think that plain old common sense will say otherwise.
Ok, so a quick look online says this
Strange and interesting. If true, then God (for some unknown reason) would have used a common genetic template on which to construct those species.I would have to hear the reasoning behind their relatedness. If it is not via genetics and merely something like hair/fur/scales, etc., I think that would make the “evidence” debatable.
My opinion is still out on the whale/camel correlation. I would not think that one has as much confidence.
Wow. Real scientists investigate complex phenomena involving massive quantities of evidence. Math is needed because the math is absolutely essential in order to make sense of the data!
No. This is both an Argument from Personal Incredulity fallacy and an Argument from Ignorance fallacy. (These are not meant to be insulting. They are standard terms from undergraduate logic textbooks.)
Science doesn’t deal in proofs. (Most people first encounter proofs in a high school geometry courses.) Science deals in weighing the evidence and producing the best explanation for that data.
No it is not. However, I will concede that to those who are unfamiliar with the data and the analysis employed by scientists—and especially the complicated details of the nested hierarchies—it probably seems like “pure speculation.” Years ago when I was an anti-evolution Young Earth Creationist, Common Descent certainly seemed to me nothing but “pure speculation.”
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Yeah in place of ancestors, you just have templates. Where the X’s are in your diagram, you just have more templates. It’s a completely ridiculous idea invented simply to square creationism with evidence for common descent. There’s no sensible reason to create anything by first creating a template, only later to derive more templates from the previous template, and then finally create the species by deriving them from the templates.
If you think God created species like that you’re effectively saying that God is faking the evidence one would expect from common descent. You’re not better than the creationists who say that distant starlight was created with the appearance of age, or that fossils were put in the ground to test our faith.
It just doesn’t make sense and it’s patently obvious to a rational observer that it’s just ad-hoc rationalizations.
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You have obviously never heard a paternity lawsuit as a family court judge.
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I suspect that if you thought the math would work, you’d claim that the math was incredibly important.
No, you’re mistaken.
Science never considers anything to be proven, so “you cannot prove that” is a red herring.
Utterly false. There is a vast amount of evidence supporting it.
There is a lot of real estate between “pure speculation” and “proven.” Can you at least acknowledge something that obvious?
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Forensic DNA analysis also is applied across more distant relationships. How do you suppose that 23andMe is able to develop an ethnic origin profile?
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And more importantly, testing the prospective empirical predictions of those explanations (hypotheses and theories).
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Sorry, but you’ve already used a common template to explain birds. You can’t use another to explain birds + crocs. Groups within groups is an evolution sort of thing, and your templates can’t be made to fit that. As for the reasons, that originally comes from fossils, and why you think that’s debatable is unclear. Birds and crocodiles are both archosaurs, and archosaurs have a number of clear diagnostic characteristics. There’s also plentiful molecular evidence. While all that could be explained by a template, you’ve already used up your only template in that area.
What you would think is not relevant, since you are unacquainted with the evidence. Here again, both molecular and morphological evidence are clear. Early whales have the central defining character of artiodactyls, the double-pulley astragalus, and notably share a number of SINE insertions with a nested series of artiodactyls, being most closely related to hippos. You could go with a template, but again you would need templates within templates to deal with all the groups within groups. Nested hierarchy, in other words, defeats this template idea.
You might conceivably profit from examining some of the actual evidence and the methods used to analyze it. For birds and crocs, you might in fact start with this: John Harshman: The Phylogeny of Crocodiles, right here on Peaceful Science.
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Of course. But those applications aren’t the ones that provide the empirical foundation for shared mutations corresponding to common descent, they’re the ones done after that foundation is established.
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What does that mean? I put an “X” there trying to designate “no template” because no relatedness. I think you misunderstand my "X"s. To me they mean “not related”.
This is not convincing enough. Has empirical genetics shown otherwise like C Falter supplied for humans/primates?
I have heard all this before and am not convinced. Has genetic relatedness been established as C Falter’s study showed?
first- who said that all ervs are non-functional?
who said its always the case?
I would like to hear more about this study in particular. Is this relatedness due to genetics?
How did you determine non-relatedness as opposed to template relatedness? Genetics? Morphology? Flip a coin?
Please explain.
It’s not one study. It’s the combined results of many many studies using both genetic and fossil data to reconstruct phylogenies.
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I thought I have made it clear that C Falter’s submission about primates/humans genetically-based relatedness is the approach that I favor. If I did not make that clear, then I am making it clear now.
Perhaps… but probably not…
Unless scientists believe there is limit to what can be know via methodical naturalism, it cannot be neutral.
And I don’t see many scientists who believe anything is beyond the scope of what can be found out through methodical naturalism.
What specifically in genetics did you use to determine non-relatedness as opposed to template relatedness?
Details please.
How do we know that any particular gene does not have a function? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to state that the function is not known?