Here we go again. How often are you going to make the “tree” argument, then force me to post the pyramid? @John_Harshman I have a suggestion. So I will not have to keep doing this, can you please just make a personal copy for yourself? Maybe tape it to your computer somewhere highly visible?
It’s really weird we can propose the same sort of process for humans and any other species on earth, with the only difference being the smaller number of sequences that would remain in common from the original “template”. And the degree to which common genomic elements are retained from this original template correlates to an astonishingly accurate degree with how closely we would be related to any given species if the evolutionary model of common descent was true.
So I now look forward that the amazingly detailed post hoc account you concoct to explain away this observation.
Please don’t disappoint!
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Hmm. You are mistaken. I do not intend to, nor will I attempt to explain it away. I simply told you how God probably, actually, truly, authentically, did it. You don’t have to believe God if you don’t want to.
You have faith in your anti-Bible hypothesis. Keep it if you want to. Don’t let me stand in your way.
What I don’t appreciate is when you make bald assertions that yours is the only game in town and that if people like @thoughtful don’t buy into your paradigm, she is someone less intelligent than you.
I don’t think he is. Or if he is, that’s only because the bar is so low. He clearly doesn’t understand nested hierarchy well at all. Case in point:
I’ll just point out that what you have posted isn’t a pyramid, and it isn’t a representation of what the tree shows either. You will note that many of the branches on that tree don’t have any stated characters, and your “pyramid” reproduces only the bits marked by characters. It also happens that most of the branches with characters marked on them constitute a sort of “great chain of being”, a single linear sequence broken only when we get to amniotes; and it’s there that your “pyramid” ceases being a pyramid at all, where your only attempt to represent the branching of the tree appears.
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What on earth was that line? Did you even understand it? Are you making this up? Has it been peer-reviewed?
Hmm. Well, we evolutionists have an explanation that has has been supported by an ever increasing volume of evidence for 150 years. I mean, how could Darwin have even dreamt of ERV insertions?
Whereas you won’t even attempt to come up with an explanation.
I give you credit for knowing when you’ve been beaten.
What part didn’t you understand? I will try to explain further if you express your confusion in more detail.
You think too highly of yourself and your paradigm.
Oh gosh no. Please do not bother.
Still willing to own that statement?
Well, if you insist the game is still on, you are quite free to provide your explanation of how your little fable of a god creating new species from a “genetic template” produces a nested hierarchy. Only you said you won’t even try.
That amounts to another loss for your side.
No, you win.
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No, he didn’t. He just said that we don’t have to observe them because they happened. And no realistic simulation necessary because they happened. That’s all I ascertained from his comments.
So how do you respond to this? Do All Life Forms Fall into a Nested Hierarchy? | Evolution News
If it’s the only pattern evolution can produce and isn’t actually consistent, then that doesn’t really help your case.
So now I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to be understanding about nested hierarchies and why God can’t create interesting relationships among animals.
How is your example different from a family tree?
Yes I did, RonSewell is exactly correct. I did in fact explain why the “waiting time problem” logically does not preclude evolution being true, that is, it does not show that chimps and humans can’t share common ancestry within the last 5-7 million years. I explain how Sanford et al fails to show that there is a waiting time problem.
I also explained that if you accept the waiting time problem, if you take it at face value, it precludes the common ancestry of any two species of animals even “within kinds” following the YEC timeline since Noah’s Ark. If even 5 mutations would take a billion years to evolve, then clearly two species of cats that differ by 5 mutations also can’t share common ancestry in 6000 years or less. That immediately logically follows.
That is an egregious falsehood. Nowhere did I say that.
Then I’m sorry but I find your skills in ascertainment leave much to be desired.
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Maybe it would help this discussion is you tried to summarize @Rumraket’s explanation, in your own words, as best you understand it.
Here’s a couple hints to get you started: If the theory of evolution is true, but humans never arose thru evolution, did humans arise thru evolution?
If evolution happened, but never produced humans did evolution still happen?
By laughing uproariously at the fact that you cited a blog post by Casey Luskin in a scientific discussion.
For instance:
From an evolutionary perspective, you might expect an animal tree to divide up neatly according to whether organisms display bilateral or radial symmetry. Not so. Echinoderms are placed much closer to vertebrates than they are to cnidarians and other phyla with radial symmetry. In fact, in another weird twist, vertebrates (with bilateral symmetry) are thought to be much closer to echinoderms (with radial symmetry) than they are to other bilaterian phyla like the arthropods, mollusks, or annelids. This grouping is made on the basis of early developmental processes. Echinoderms and vertebrates are both deuterostomes, meaning that early in development the first opening in the blastopore becomes the anus rather than the mouth. The upshot is this: animal symmetry is not distributed in a treelike pattern.
That is incorrect. The reason echinoderms are classified as bilateria is that they do demonstrate bilateral symmetry - in the larval stage. This is lost as they develop to adulthood in a form of metamorphosis. Funny that Casey doesn’t mention that, isn’t it?
EDIT: I should add that I do not know if this is the reason they have been classified under bilateria. But the point remains that Luskin’s claim that this example violates the nested hierarchy is false. Even if bilateral symmetry is not used as a defining characteristic, echinoderms remain nested within deuterostomia which is, itself, nested within bilateria.
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I would be happy to get a better understanding of your often use concepts of nested hierarchies, phylogenetic tree and how they are related. Do you have some educational ressources for the layman on this matter?
Well, it sort of is. And family trees arise from descent, right? It’s different from the usual human family tree because every human has two parents, whereas the species in that figure each have only one ancestral species; that’s how speciation commonly works.
The important thing to note is that one of the little branches on that tree is Homo sapiens. You’re a primate, and you have cousins all over that tree.
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There’s a book, Tree Thinking, that should be a fairly easy read. If you google that title, you will also run into some videos and other web resources on the theme. But the book is probably best.
The basic concept is pretty simple. A nested hierarchy consists of groups within groups: the relationship of one group to another is such that either one group is wholly contained within the other or the two are entirely disjunct; no partial overlaps. Linnean classification is one nested hierarchy. Phylogenetic trees are one way to display such a hierarchy. Boxes inside boxes would be another. The pyramid idea, not so much.
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Thanks a lot
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It’s full of denial and misinformation. There is a phylogenetic signal that sticks out way above the noise. What Luskin tries to do is focus on the noise, but ignores the signal.
[note: I’m not a full on expert in phylogenetics, so I’m hoping others will correct any mistakes I make]
Luskin also makes the same mistake you do, confusing an assumption with a hypothesis. This seems to be a common theme within ID/creationism. The hypothesis is that when you force the data into many different trees there will be just a few trees that are much, much better than the rest if evolution is true. The better trees are those where the common features follow the branches and the differences are on separate branches. This is exactly what we see with life where similarities and differences naturally form good trees. If we randomize the data we don’t see a few good trees and a bunch of bad ones. Instead, all the trees are pretty bad. This is what we call a phylogenetic signal, and it is a very real thing that is measured, not assumed.
Talkorigins also has some good information on nested hierarchies:
Added in edit:
Just a follow up on signal v. noise. Here are some data points and a regression represented by a line:
This is a graph of pulse rate compared to the speed of an elliptical exercise machine. Most people would say the data strongly supports the conclusion that pulse rate is driven by the speed of the elliptical. Luskin, on the other hand, would completely disagree. You see, the data points do not fall perfectly on the regression line. Therefore, according to Luskin, the conclusion is completely false. There is absolutely no evidence that the speed of the elliptical is causing changes in the pulse rate of the person on the machine.
We have the same situation with phylogenetic signal. There is a very strong signal of evolution in the data, but there is noise just as there is in almost every data set in every field in science. What scientists look for is the ratio of noise to signal, and if the signal is well above the noise then the hypothesis is supported. That’s the case for phylogenetic signal and evolution.
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