Did We Have "Reptilian" Ancestors?

How so? Is it not exactly the pattern we would expect from phylogeny? The most common losses are single losses, and double losses are very rare. How do you explain that without phylogeny?

What other explanation for a tree can you present as an alternative hypothesis?

I have no idea what you mean by that, so I can’t agree or disagree.

Once again this shows your inability to comprehend that common descent and the origin of mutations or new features are two different things. You have been unable to get past this misunderstanding for years now. I suspect you never will, but until you do it’s impossible to have a meaningful discussion with you.

That’s not how it works. Humans are intermediate in size between mice and elephants, but we are not transitional between mice and elephants.

There are cars with mud flaps, and also vans and trucks that don’t have mud flaps. This trait doesn’t work.

as i said and showed: these are vestigial flippers. so your claim is basically why a flipper of a dolphin is similar to the structure of a limb of a land mammal. as i said: this is the argument from a common similarity.

as i showed- its also true for vehicle:

because these are vestigial flippers, not vestigial limbs (or actually legs) .

There is no tree structure in that data. You can find cars with mudflaps, and trucks without. The difference between real biology and your examples is that you are cherrypicking one representative vehicle from each category, and deliberately excluding vehicles that defy your criterion of categorization.

None of the attributes you can think of can truly define an exclusive clade. You can find cars that are as big as trucks and vans, and cars that weigh as much as trucks. You can find cars with as much horsepower as trucks, with as many cylinders, that use diesel etc. etc. There is just no obvious nesting hiearchy there. You are doing this way too superficially, and if you were to really actually seriously try to create a nesting hiearchy of cars, you would discover that there are cars that literally violate any imaginable way of categorization you can think of.

Every new species discovered is another test of the theory of universal common descent, as they could in principle be found with features that violate the clade-defining attributes. There could be mammals with feathers, and fish that lactate, and birds with fur. There could be insects with bat-wings, sharks with chitinous exoskeletal segmented body parts, and crocodile jaws. And so on ad infinitum. But we never find that. Ever.

It’s not speculation when it follows the predicted tree.

That’s like saying a swirly oil print found at a crime scene was not caused by a finger. A nested hierarchy is the fingerprint of common descent, so finding this pattern is evidence for common descent.

I have yet to see another explanation for the nested hierarchy, and you have failed to explain how common descent is only a partial explanation, or how it does not include new features. Even Darwin explained how evolution is modification of features found in ancestors.

We have seen this claim over and over, and yet not one single person can produce valid probabilities for these claims.

DeepFaceNine

i referring to the majority rather then to the minority. most vans (as far as i a ware) do have mud flaps but most car dont. even so it will not prove evolution anyway.

It has to work for all of them.

So that means there is no nesting hiearchy. That’s the whole point. Given that plenty of exceptions exist, the nesting structure is violated. So there is no objective nesting hiearchy for vehicles. And even further, you can’t reproduce the same nesting structure with another set of attributes.

You asserted that it is true, but failed to provide the features that the tree is based on. Therefore, you have not shown it is true.

Then why do they have the same bones as the bones found in the human arm?

Not a very good argument, considering that there’s plenty of homoplasy in actual phylogeny. A better argument is that he has never produced any data at all, and that if he did it wouldn’t be consistent with any tree. Phylogenetic data isn’t perfect, but it does exist, and it strongly supports a nested hierarchy even with the imperfections.

as john noted : the same is true with evolution. so you basically rejecting common descent by this criteria.

Whats troubling is the quantity of gene loss and the pattern.

its base on general similarity. so in general a car is more similar to another car then to say a bicycle. by doing this we will end up with a tree.

its like asking why a bicycle wheel is similar to a car wheel.

Yeah I didn’t think that one through. How embarrassing.

There is an objective nested hierarchy in the case of complex eukaryotes. You have yet to show that this is the case with automobiles.

Why is that troubling? You’ve now repeated that it is troubling, but have yet to explain why.

That’s not how it works. You need to list features.

For example:

image

Because he can’t. Not only is he incapable of creating a data matrix and analyzing it, if somehow he did he would not get the result he claims.

Seals are bears.

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