Not quite true. Your figure shows a tree structure that results from severe pruning of actual relationships. All those people have two parents, not one, and each of their parents has two. This is a tree if you consider only the haemophelia allele, but it’s not a tree of relationships among people. Bill would be confused.
False.
Ewert states that common descent predicts a tree of life, otherwise known as a nested hierarchy.
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Common descent does not predict a nested hierarchy it predicts a high level of genetic commonality.
If God is involved it is not a reproductive relationship. A reproductive relationship means reproduction and natural variation. The differences in the cells is not being generated by reproduction. They are being generated by God modifying the cell.
Evolutionists advocate different standards for the alternative models. Are you able to show to a 99.9% certainty (that Joe claims the design inference requires) that all deer share a common ancestor?
I may not know what a nested hierarchy is (by your definition) but until you can show common descent predicts the pattern we see in the tree of life knowing the exact definition of a “nested hierarchy” is not important.
According to Ewert, common descent does predict a nested hierarchy.
If you think this is wrong, please explain why common descent would not produce a nested hierarchy.
If you had a species with derived features from birds (feathers, flow through lungs) and derived features from mammals (hair, mammary glands) this would falsify common descent. If we saw the same thing at the genetic level this would also falsify common descent. This is exactly what Ewert is arguing for in his paper, that there are genes which violate a nested hierarchy which points to design. He’s wrong about those genes, but the argument exists nonetheless.
Your argument is failing on two counts:
- It can be shown from first principles that common ancestry would produce a nested hierarchy.
- The creationists you cite also state that common ancestry predicts a nested hierarchy.
It unequivocally does.
Here’s a challenge for you to dodge: rigorously define “nested hierarchy” without any reference to biology or Matryoshka dolls, the latter because it is a very special case of nested hierarchy.
I don’t think you can do it.
I strenuously object to your use of the conditional.
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Genesis 4:1, NIV
Adam made love to his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain. She said, “With the help of the Lord I have brought forth a man.”
That isn’t true, as long as there are changes happening during the process of descent. And you still seem to have no idea what a nested hierarchy is.
That’s your personal definition, which is at variance with pretty much everyone else’s, including your buddy Behe’s. If God causes a mutation, nobody else thinks that eliminates the chain of descent. You’re free to think that way, but you have just accepted what everyone else means by common descent, and species do not have “separate starting points”, and all deer do share a common ancestor.
Yes, I would say so. Support from genomic analysis would rise to that level. And I think you’re probably misunderstanding what Joe said.
Do you know what a nested hierarchy is by any definition, exact or even fuzzy? And how is it not obvious that common descent predicts a nested hierarchical pattern? Just look at any picture of a phylogenetic tree that has characters mapped onto it. That mapping explains the nested hierarchy of the data.
A fine example here:
And I strongly object to the word “confused”. It does a dis-service to confused people everywhere. 
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Is it possible that Bill is indescribable, or merely fundamentally objectionable? 
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Your claim is random changes with the process of descent will create a nested hierarchy?
What we are observing is substantially more than a few mutations.
Do you really think that everyone considers God guided common descent a part of the general theory?
You have support from genomic analysis that shows that all deer share a common ancestor to a 99.9% level?
All the maps have theoretical ancestors. I also do not see different proteins generating the same patterns.
I know what a tree pattern is however I have never seen one used to make a conclusion from the pattern itself. I have seen a tree used to identify possible causes.
A pattern of what? Genes, chromosomes, morphological features or random mutations?
What were you referring to when you said common descent would not produce a nested hierarchy?
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Try reading what he wrote, Bill. Descent with ANY changes (random, nonrandom, even God-directed/executed produces a nested hierarchy.
Why did you try to pretend that John had specified “random”?
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As @Mercer has pointed out, that’s not my claim. Though it’s true: random changes will create a nested hierarchy. But it’s also not just “the process of descent”; it’s necessary for there to be a tree structure of descent, i.e. descent with branching.
So? About 40 million mutations separate humans from chimps. Is that too many? If so, why?
No. How is that relevant?
Yes. There’s one in the muntjac paper that you keep referring to, for example.
I can’t help what you see, but I doubt you have actually looked.
Still can’t help what you see. Every phylogenetic analysis uses the pattern to draw a conclusion of common descent. The reason is that common descent predicts a nested hierarchy.
Yes, all of them. Any heritable change.
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Why is a tree structure of descent a byproduct of reproduction?
The 40 million mutations are a small piece of the story. What needs to also be considered is about 170 genes not shared, two less chromosome in humans, and thousands of different alternative splicing sites.
If it is not part of the general theory why are we discussing it?
Please be more specific. How did this paper confirm common descent of deer to the 99.9% level?
Since we have discussed this in the past and both you and have posted protein trees from uniprot I am surprised you would make this statement.
Then why did you only ask about SNP differences between chimps and apes?
Because as has been recently discovered, reproduction comes with this fascinating little property called “inheritance”. In fact, this property is so fundamental to the process, that without it we would have essentially no means by which to recognize descent whatsoever.
Yours truly made an evidently ignored attempt at explaining this in some from-a-lay-person-to-a-lay-person detail back in this post.
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Because of branching. One organism can give rise to two or more, each of which can then go on to found their own independent lines of descent. Lineages split. So like a tree has branches that split into two or more, so do lineages of descent split into separate branches.
This has been explained to you like two hundred times over the course of half a decade. Nobody agrees with you. Everyone ostensibly on your side are embarrassed by you.
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Obtuse, thy name is Bill.
Name them.
Not sure what you mean by “byproduct”, but a tree structure of descent is a product of inheritance, genetic change, and branching. Why that’s the case should be so obvious as not to need explanation.
170 genes not shared, if indeed that number is correct, are due to mutations. I would expect about half of them, or more, to be due to loss in chimpanzees, in which case I would expect there to be homologous chimp pseudogenes. Have you looked? Some are due to new genes in the human lineage, either by duplication or by recruitment of non-genic sequences. In either case there should be evidence in a chimp-human comparison. Have you looked? The chromosome difference is due to a fusion, for which again there is ample evidence. The different alternative splicing sites, almost all of the spurious, are due to point mutations. And all of this is counted in the 40 million mutations I mentioned.
I don’t know what your link is supposed to be to, but you have done something wrong.
It’s an attempt to get you to recognize a theory that fits the data better than yours but still allows you to put God into it. Why don’t you like that theory?
I would suggest that when all branches are supported at 100% bootstrap, that’s a good confirmation.
You post a lot of random crap without understanding it. I can’t be expected to keep track. But I don’t recall you posting anything that made a real point.
There are 35 million SNP differences and about 5 million indels and other differences, including one chromosome fusion. So you are incorrect about what I said.