Thank you for having taken this considerable step towards a more reasonable approach to the topic. That puts considerable distance between you and Bill it seems.
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Just moving this to the thread where it best belongs.
I think you need to clarify your position, Bill, since the above seems to contradict what you have been writing over the course of this discussion for the past 781 posts.
Is it the case that you actually accept universal common descent? To be clear, this would include the proposition that all deer share a common ancestor.
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HI Faizal
I am not sure how anyone who looks at the data objectively with some knowledge of cellular biology can accept universal common descent without Divine intervention. This is the real issue as scientists currently do not consider Divine guidance when they make a conclusion based on the UCD inference.
When God is invoked to explain a change, however the method, I consider that a separate origin event.
That did not answer my question. Will you, please?
Is the question you are looking to have answered is if I accept guided common descent as the best explanation?
No. It is whether you believe universal common descent is true regardless of the mechanism. This would include a process where God causes specific changes in the genome of an individual organism that result in a new species being created, or one in which He causes such changes in many or all of the members of a population. All species of deer being included, of course.
But to hopefully make it easier for you: If you “accept guided common descent as the best explanation”, then your answer should be “Yes, I accept universal common descent, and that all deer share a common ancestor.” Or words to that effect.
I don’t doubt that God could have used guidance along the way but as far as universal common descent I don’t think this fits the evidence as it fails the first transition of the prokaryotic cell to eukaryotic cell. The designs are too different to think they are not completely independent designs.
This problem of big differences in transitions is the rule and not the exception.
What about deer, then?
Why can’t he just answer the question? It’s really not that difficult to just say what he believes. And if he’s not sure, he can just say that.
I will never understand this strange waffling they do on this subject. It clearly makes them uncomfortable to say what they believe. It just isn’t that difficult.
I believe that all organisms on Earth share common ancestry. Universal common descent. Heck, I am convinced it occurred entirely by natural processes.
Is that so hard? If anyone disagrees, state what you believe differently from me.
How big? Outside of having literal documentation of who and when begat two organisms, what biological observable would you probe for and accept as an indicator of common ancestry between them? If “difference” (how ever we are to measure that) is what separates organisms, and if any two organisms have so little of it that we would identify them as having a familial relation of any kind at all, then there must be some threshold value that allows us to make this distinction, some line one can draw between what it means for things to be related by ancestry and for things to not be related by ancestry. Is there any place you’d commit to drawing it at all?
I say if we are going to respect the scientific enterprise in general or biology in particular at all, reasoning quite like this is inescapable. For the alternative is to say that any and all biological features are entirely up to the designer’s whims, and no child need be biologically related to his mother, if no amount of biological evidence is sufficient to establish that they are. And as laughable as that would seem, at the very least this would be a position one could adopt with some consistency. It is grossly unscientific, yes, but at least it is a single unreasonable stance one never need to twist or alter to weazel out of specific challenges, like one would need to if one were to admit some but not all common ancestry.
I’m also a little unclear about what you mean here. Are you saying that the “designs” are so different that not even God could have created them using guided mutations from a common ancestor? Why would that be beyond His powers?
Why don’t we leave this as an open question.
As for now I don’t believe we have a known mechanism that will allow us to model the transitions. It is more likely than the prokaryotic to eukaryotic transition or the fish to land animal transition yet there is no real scientific hypothesis that can yield us an answer with a high level of confidence.
I appreciate Rums conviction on natural common descent as I think God driven common descent is not a relevant or useful idea. The real issue is if God was involved in the origin of the new species or not.
I would tentatively draw it where chromosome counts and gene arrangements matched. I think the dog/wolf is an interesting case study.
Why should we?
Even if that was true (it isn’t), it would not mean it is not possible to answer the question of common descent, particularly as it pertains to deer.
Is it really possible you still do not understand this? Incredible as that seems, I guess that is the most likely explanation. Because I cannot otherwise see why you will not answer the question.
This is another weird thing about those creationists who claim to be interested in the science of origins. Even if you grant that God did it all somehow, why would it not be interesting and relevant to better understand the specifics of the “somehow”? I doubt anyone would take seriously an atheist evolutionary biologist who said “I have no interest in understanding the mechanisms by which species evolved. All that matters is that God did not do it.”
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Perhaps you are not sure because you have neither looked at the data nor have any knowledge of “cellular” biology? Tipoff: those with some knowledge call it cell biology.
Yet the hypothesis was not confirmed with a population genetics model in over 700 posts. The problem with the nested hierarchy claim is it relies on a naked assertion.
This is because science does not consider God driven common descent in its use of the theory.
The first level of inquiry is if God was involved. How God did it is an interesting question but not the primary issue at this point.
No, that’s the problem with your sentence. A pure naked assertion.
If you don’t know how God did it (what God would do), then you don’t know what to look for to determine if God was involved. For that reason it is impossible to determine if God was involved if you’re not willing to posit a model of what God would do.
Was that a question?
We don’t because we want you to state what you think instead of having you waffle around making mutually contradictory statements depending on which thread you’re participating in.
In some threads you cry about gene loss being impossible, in others you wholly endorse it. Just look at how you’ve cried about gene loss in this thread, and in Sal’s thread you have no problem with it and agree evolution works largely by being able to inactivate genes for gains in fitness.
That’s why we don’t leave it an open question. Your never-ending cowardice and hypocrisy.
So gene loss is back to being out the window again it seems. You should go tell Sal in that other thread.
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That’s absurd, Bill. A model can never confirm a hypothesis. “Model” and “hypothesis” are synonymous.
Hypotheses are confirmed with DATA, not models. Sheesh.
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Bill thinks that “only common descent is expected to produce a nested hierarchy of life” is a naked assertion. But he has failed to present any sort of critique. In particular he’s failed to propose an alternative explanation.
And then he seeks to redefine “separate creation” to include common descent with divine guidance. But I think he still rejects that too. It’s hard to get a coherent understanding of his position, since he lacks one himself.
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Yeah I also suspect that’s what he means by it. Besides the fact that he never offers an alternative explanation for the nested hierarchy that actually works, we have on numerous occasions actually given explanations why only common descent is expected to produce a nested hierarchy.
Just super short for readers benefit (we’ve all given up hope on @colewd): There are many more ways to not arrange the data into a consistent nested hierarchy, and we know there is no functional constraint that would force different pieces of data to exhibit very similar trees (from innumerable experiments in biochemistry, observations of horizontal gene transfer, the enormous wealth of different sequences performing the same functions). No, the gene-sequences from different genes do not need to display the same branching topology for some functional reason. There are incredible numbers of entirely dissimilar sequences that would connect to different nodes in a tree, yet can function just as well in the same organism. So there IS no functional constraint for why independent phylogenies should agree. I have now explained again why there isn’t.
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