The pattern is what we observe by fitting the evidence (DNA etc) into a man made tool as a way to help interpret evidence. A Pareto diagram is also used to prioritize and clarify evidence. It in itself is not evidence but a tool used to look at the evidence and try to conclude what are the causes of the observed evidence.
In industry we use tree diagrams, fishbone diagrams and Pareto diagrams as tools to categorize evidence and determine root causes in order to improve processes. When you can fit the evidence into a tree that is only a preliminary step to determine root cause.
This seems confused. DNA is not the evidence itself. It is the distribution of markers (genes, pseudogenes etcetera) within it that forms the nested hierarchy pattern. That unique, generally consistent nested hierarchy pattern is the evidence for common descent. Similarly, the unique location and composition of markers in your genome creates a pattern consistent with your family tree, that is, the markers in your DNA are arranged in such a way that consistently reveals the direct ancestor-descendant relationship between you and your parents. The DNA analysis tools don’t fit the markers to make the pattern, they check to see if the markers fit the pattern: if there was no nested hierarchy pattern, those tools won’t find it; similarly if your current parents are not your real biological parents, you won’t fit into any of their pedigrees uncovered by genetic analysis techniques.
No, a Pareto diagram which is a bar chart shows what should be prioritized depending on the goals of the investigator. The data directs action, not the other way round.
You seem to have this mixed up. Bar charts display trends (patterns) in data, the same way phylogenetic programs display a nested hierarchy pattern post-computation. Bar charts are analogous to the result display functions in phylogeny programs, not the patterns themselves.
Oh my God. Nobody fits anything into a tree. The data appears tree-like. It is a nested hierarchy.
Are you objecting to the use of empirical measurements in science?
The tree-like structure is objective. It is an empirical measurement. When the empirical measurements match the predictions made by a scientific hypothesis then those measurements are evidence for the hypothesis. That’s how science works.
It seems that your real problem is with the scientific method, not the theory of evolution. At this point, you are tacitly admitting that evolution is a scientific theory, but you reject the practice of science itself.
You are trying to make something which is obvious and essential into something obscure and imposed.
Nested hierarchy is a concept, not a tool. The idea is baked into consciousness from routine experience of the world and features in language.
Say you have a friend, farmer Clem who is bright but had to leave school in grade nine because someone had to milk the cows after the accident. You are both strolling when you see a snake, and stepping back, you ask Clem what it is - he knows this stuff. Clem has never even heard of nested hierarchies, but he can readily tell you that it is an animal, a reptile, a snake, a rattlesnake, a western diamondback. How can everyday speech apply five different names, which are not synonyms, to a single creature? Well, they are simply successively broader categories based on the degree of observable shared features. Common language also recognizes branching. Clem knows that his cows are also animals, but you will not convince him they are diamondbacks or even reptiles.
You ask what do I mean by stating the pattern labeled “nested hierarchy” is a feature of nature? Simply this - nature is not all criss crossy. Clem knows you would not expect udders on reptiles, scales on cows, feathers on bats, or leaves on critters, and he does not have to draw a tree schematic for this. Nature sorts into a nested hierarchy both by which features are shared within a grouping and just as significantly, which features are never found within a grouping. The Bible groups animals into beasts of the field, those with cloven feet and without, and goats. You do not need any tool for this, the abstraction is a part of language itself.
Of course, rigorous scientific study utilizes many actual tools to extend, formalize, and sometime contradict such common observation, and DNA adds a whole new dimension, but that is still based on the same essential recognition - that some species are more related than others by what they share and what they do not. That would be true were there no tools, or were there no language or us for that matter.
I will repost this explanation I gave to Bill just a few weeks ago. Not because if he reads it again he will understand it. But to demonstrate that this concept has already been explained to him and still he does not understand.
Let’s see if this analogy helps you understand what you are missing.
Imagine we have two scientists. Scientist One hypothesizes the existence of a force called “Gravity”. According to his hypothesis, if a rock is held above the ground then released, it will fall to the ground.
Scientist Two hypothesizes the existence of a force he calls “Schmavity.” According to his hypothesis, when the rock is released Shmavity will act on it in a random way such that it will either fall to the earth or be repelled up into the air.
They test their hypotheses by conducting one million trials. In every single one, the rock falls to the earth.
Scientist One says "I guess the data supports the existence of Gravity, and not of Schmavity.
Scientist Two replies "Not at all. According the my Schmavity Hypothesis, every time the rock is released, it could fall down to earth. And, every time, it did. So the data supports Schmavity just as strongly as it does Gravity.
Speaking of Occam’s razor and the multiplication of entities, what do you think of the multiverse concept that was devised to avoid to infer the existence of God from the fine tuning of the universe?
What do you mean by related? More similar features or are you asserting ancestral relationships. The discussion emerged from the claim that there is a LUCA.
A theoretical ancestor with loosely defined (prokaryotic like) molecular make up that is defined as the ancestor all extant living organisms.
Is the historical existence of LUCA a testable hypothesis?
Can you test LUCA as a hypothesis without showing how through reproduction and endosymbiosis the spliceosome, the nuclear pore complex, and chromosome structure (eukaryotic features) emerged?
I’m usually opposed to emojis, but I can’t tell if you meant that seriously or if you’re joking, so an emoji would have helped. Especially since you’re a creationist; anyone else I would have assumed a joke.
In this case, I simply mean more similar features. No begging of the question intended, although I think that consideration of such comparative evidence leads to the general conclusion that organisms related by feature is due to their being related by descent.
Personally, I do not have enough relevant knowledge to offer a substantive opinion. I am more an interested bystander when it comes to abiogenesis and LUCA discussions going back before chordates to a squishy era which left little trace. If you are good with whales and newts sharing common ancestry, having arrived at their present state by way of recognized evolutionary processes, your argument is not really with me.
Yes, it is testable. There is no reason separate creations would share basic genetic and metabolic features, but we would expect these shared features if there was a single universal common ancestor. There is also the nested hierarchy, such as the phylogenetic signal measured in features like tRNA’s.
I don’t agree with that statement. I think you could argue that on some models of separate creation, a designer would re-use the same designs over and over again(you can imagine many reasonable motivations for this, such as wanting to save time, resources, and cognitive effort).
That implies that, while shared attributes are explained by common descent, they are not uniquely explained by common descent, so unless you can show they are more likely given common descent than on independent creation, they can’t be said to be evidence favoring common descent over independent creation.
It is the second aspect of the argument you make that is the strongest evidence for common descent. The fact that the attributes (the sequences in shared similar genes) are NOT identical, but merely similar, and that there is a consistent nested hierarchy in these sequences. Consistent both with respect to different parts of the same sequence(which can be shown with bootstrapping) recapturing the same overall phylogeny, but that even for different genes performing different functions you still get the same overall phylogeny. That’s consilience of independent phylogenies, and that is a unique prediction of common descent.
For an all powerful deity with unlimited knowledge, time, and resources it would take as much effort to reuse a design as it would to use a new design. (credit to @John_Harshman for beating me to it, approved his post after posting mine)
I also wouldn’t expect a lot of these shared features if there were more than one origin of life that stayed separate (i.e. no HGT) until modern times.
Of course that requires a designer who isn’t omnipotent and for whom creation takes effort, and who is therefore most certainly not the Christian God. Good luck finding anyone who likes that model.