The evidence for common descent is a pattern that does not isolate common descent as the cause…
Of course its based on evidence as with one of the pieces you converted a Venn diagram to a tree and market it up with red and green marks. Turning the data into a tree did not differentiate common design from common descent.
Again why would God use reproduction to alter gene patterns. Reproduction is not the right process for the change.
The nested hierarchy does not differentiate common design from common descent. Common descent fails to explain all patterns the data fits into. It fails against the dependency graph and it fails against the Venn diagram. Both the Venn diagram and the dependency graph point to separate ancestry.
You need a good reason why God would use reproduction when generating a unique cell design. It is equivalent to claiming a software engineer would use copy and paste to generate new original code. This is completely illogical.
BTW I see you snuck unguided evolution into your claim. There is no way this hypothesis works based on the sequence and waiting time problems. Andrew brought up Prp8 with 2300 preserved amino acids between humans and slime mold and he thinks he can explain its origin with unguided evolution. It is one of 170 proteins in a complex that splices out introns. There is no set of reasonable assumptions where unguided evolution can account for this protein. The unguided claim for this protein is about far from reality as you can get.
Ctrl C, Ctrl V, Ctrl F, edit. → Modified function. Software engineers do this ALL the time, EVERY DAY. There is almost always some near prior art. You should at least check everything though. Global edits can lead to “Cdesign Proponentsists” type bugs.
It has already been established that that Bill does not know what common ancestry is.
So it is not reasonable to expect him to be able to describe evidence against it.
No. You’re still confusing common ancestry with unguided evolution. The changes we see (given God-guided evolution for the sake of argument) would not merely be the result of mutation and genetic recombination, but of some sort of larger-scale ‘tinkering’ in the genome by God.
Word salad, and you still don’t even understand what a nested hierarchy is, apparently.
No, we don’t. Again, who are you to know the mind of God? How arrogant you must be to think that you are on par with God and can understand His ways. All that we need to show is that common ancestry happened, based on the evidence; we don’t need to provide a full description of God’s motives for doing so, that would be so arrogant and prideful.
Also, you are still evading the entire point of this thread. You’re asking us to provide evidence for common ancestry, when we already did that extensively and repeatedly on the “Evidence for common ancestry” thread. I understand your selective amnesia may have made you forget, but you can go read through that whole thread. Instead, I want you to provide evidence that separate ancestry explains the data better than common ancestry.
The fact that you haven’t done so yet just tells me that you have no evidence against common ancestry. And that just makes me even more confident that common ancestry is true.
If you had another explanation, you would have trotted it out by now.
Yes it does, because is shows that the data form a nested hierarchy. You have no explanation for that hierarchy.
Theology again. And bad theology at that.
This is your assertion, but it doesn’t hold up under examination. It’s nothing you can support.
You see wrong. There is of course evidence for it, but that isn’t relevant to the subject at hand.
So, you have produced a whole post with nothing but empty rhetoric. Now you should explain why the data in those two papers I handed you argues against common descent. Start with explaining why the mitochondrial and nuclear trees for primates match each other so well.
Excellent, you have picked up the tactics of John"word salad"Harshman 
Why don’t you share a precise definition of a nested hierarchy. We also know this as a tree diagram.
It’s you that is insisting God may have used common descent to generate life on earth. I think this is ok as science is simply an exercise in understanding God’s creation.
This is not what you need to show. You need to show that God used common descent in every instance of generating new life from the original population. Your claim is universal common descent.
You showed evidence that ignored the sequence and waiting time problems. This is not convincing evidence to people who understand these issues.
This is not as big a problem as your need for education of the mathematical challenges to the theory’. You are not stepping up and really challenging your own assumptions. The arguments in all the papers you have cited I have been aware for years and have learned the weakness of those arguments. Initially the ERV argument did look very convincing to me until I tried to think thorough the feasibility of a mathematical model of how these ERV’s would become fixed.
I think you will believe in this until you dig in and understand the mathematical challenges and what those assumptions are based on. You need to understand real biological function and how more complex function can change the mathematical challenges. You have attached yourself to one side of the argument and until you take the opposing argument seriously you will remain a biased observer.
This is what you said:
Sure seems like word salad, since putting those words together in that order has no meaning. You might be able to convince someone who doesn’t know anything about phylogenetics that what you said makes sense, but words just don’t work like that, sorry.
I don’t need to show anything. That’s not the point of this thread. We already discussed the evidence for common ancestry, and you demonstrated that you have no valid answer for it, on the other thread. This thread is for you to show us your evidence against common ancestry. I’m still waiting for you to do that.
Correct. The sequence and waiting time problems are, indeed, not convincing evidence to people who understand these issues. And the evidence that I showed directly refuted these ‘problems,’ which are unrelated to the question of common ancestry anyway.
Then why haven’t you educated me?
Then why haven’t you come up with any valid weaknesses of those papers?
And you’re trying to change the subject again. We discussed this and other evidence ad nauseam on the other thread. Stop doing this.
Then why don’t you help me to understand? You haven’t shared any mathematical challenges to common ancestry yet.
Nope. A tree diagram is a representation of a nested hierarchy, not the hierarchy itself.
No, it’s that the data show common descent, not something else. Your version is theology, our version is science.
That’s what the data show, unless (as the thread title mentions) you can find evidence against it. So far you have failed.
How would you know what’s evidence to people who understand these issues? You don’t seem to understand what would be evidence for or against common descent.
What was the result of your thinking attempt? Presumably a model is not feasible, but why?
(And note again that this off-topic, since it concerns the source of variation, not the pattern. Not evidence against common descent.)
It’s always funny when Bill tries to school others.
Wait, are you trying to pass yourself off as a person who understands these issues? You literally just admitted that you don’t even know what common ancestry entails…
Winston did the heavy lifting here. The argument has been around for several years.
Data does not form a nested hierarchy it simply can be arranged in one and be tested for fit. Data can also be arranged in a dependency graph and a Venn diagram. The data did not have to be marked up to be arranged in a dependency graph or a Venn diagram. A tree was the wrong tool for the job as you eloquently demonstrated.
This is a claim that science is bad theology. I don’t see a theological problem understanding Gods creation. See the ending of the book of Job.
It’s way more then an assertion but we need to connect the dots. Time may solve this on a less restrictive thread.
You were first exposed the the mathematical challenges to the theory which was discussed 7 years ago on Larry Moran’s thread. If you were paying attention you would have seen the failures of the opposing arguments because they did not understand the sequence problem. You would have also noticed how disappointed Larry was during a debate between Lawrence Krauss and Steven Meyer at his university at not understand the fixation (waiting time) problem. Larry declared on this blog that the Steven Meyer (ID advocate) had won the argument.
Here is Larrys comment from 2016.
Larry Moran said…
During the debate, Stephen Meyer emphasized random nature of evolution and it’s inability—according to him—to come up with new protein folds and new information in a reasonable amount of time.
Krauss misunderstood the argument, which was based on the frequency of mutations, and tried to dismiss it by pointing out that evolution is not random—it’s directed and guided by natural selection.
Meyer corrected him by pointing out that the issue was the probability of mutations and not the probability of fixation once the mutation occurred. (This was when he was struggling with a migraine so he didn’t do as good a job as he could have.)
Krauss stumbled on for a bit emphasizing natural selection and the fact that evolution is not random.
That was embarrassing. I think Krauss gets most of his information about evolution from Richard Dawkins so he (Krauss) probably doesn’t know about random genetic drift or historical contingency or any of the other features of the history of life that make it “random” (in the colloquial sense).
I suspect that Krauus still holds on to the Dawkins view that life has the appearance of design. Truth is, in the big picture, life really doesn’t have the appearance of design. Certainly our genome doesn’t look designed and my back was not designed for walking upright as it let’s me know every morning when I get out of bed.
A tree is not a nested hierarchy… you’re still showing that you don’t know what a nested hierarchy is. As @John_Harshman explained, a nested hierarchy can be represented as a tree, but a nested hierarchy is not a tree.
Lol. The book of Job is literally all about how we cannot know God’s motives for doing anything. And you are referencing it to show that we can understand God’s motives? Your theology is truly awful. And anyway, this thread is meant to be about the scientific evidence against common ancestry (though apparently there is none, since I’m sure we would have heard about it by now if there was), not theology.
You are still on about the sequence and waiting time problems? Despite the fact that those ‘problems’ are irrelevant to the issue of common ancestry anyway? And despite the fact that we already showed that Axe’s work is directly refuted by experimental, observational evidence? Must be that selective amnesia again…
Yes, it’s been around for a while, and yet you seem not to have noticed any of the reasons why his claims are bogus.
Data can’t actually be arranged in a dependency graph. They can be arranged in a sort of oddly connected branching and reconnecting graph, but it’s purely ad hoc, and the “modules” mean nothing. The Venn diagram also means nothing. Further, those figures are only possible for presence/absence data, not sequence data. Even further, we have no reason to expect that separate creation will show any particular pattern fitting either of these figures well.
On the other hand, a tree and the nested hierarchy that produces it would be the natural expectation of branching common descent but not of anything else. So when we consistently see hierarchical structure in the data (which we do), that’s evidence for common descent.
Now, what was that evidence against common descent that this thread was set up for? Why haven’t you mentioned anything in over a hundred posts so far?
It is not. Hypothesizing what God would or would not do isn’t science.
That argues against you, since you’re the one claiming to know what God would or wouldn’t do. And the bible isn’t science anyway.
That’s an admission that your assertion has nothing to do with the topic. So why are you constantly trying to bring it up?
Then get together with John and come up with an objective definition of a nested hierarchy and how you measure fit to it. The reality is you maybe making tree diagrams and calling them a nested hierarchy as the data unlikely fits an ideal nested hierarchy.
Then show how common descent or reproduction generates one. I will then show you how common design also generates one and it is unlikely common descent generates one with as strong a fit as common design.
When you get done maybe you can come up with an objective definition of common ancestry without that definition unintentionally deceiving the public on what evolutionary theory actually explains.
Bill thinks this quote illustrates a mathematical challenge to common ancestry. Once again, words fail.
A nested hierarchy is a pattern of groups within groups, in which every two sets of elements have one of two relationships: either one is a proper subset of the other or they are disjunct. Data have hierarchical structure if they support groups having those relationships. There are many tests for hierarchical structure in data, most of them involving fit to a tree.
That should not need explaining. It should be obvious that if there is a tree of descent, with changes happening at various points on the branches, and with inheritance of characteristics, the data should naturally produce a nested hierarchy. If you really can’t see this, you have a big problem.
Not ideal, no. We do expect a certain amount of homoplasy based on known evolutionary mechanisms. Noise is inherent in the system. But so what?
Go for it. All ears.
I have no idea what you were trying to say there. You are the only person I know of who doesn’t know what “common ancestry” means.
This thread has highlighted something that I’ve become increasingly aware of: separate ancestry has nothing to support it. The only separate-ancestry arguments that ID/creationism has are supposed ‘debunkings’ of arguments for common ancestry. But in science, it’s not enough to just bash arguments for someone else’s theory, you have to provide evidence for your own. It’s no wonder that the few ID proponents whose religion doesn’t require them to believe separate ancestry (e.g. Behe) agree with mainstream science on common ancestry.
This thread offers no evidence for that claim, since if there were such evidence Bill would be incapable of recognizing it or stating it. It could be, hypothetically, that competent creationists not involved in this thread would be able to present such evidence. Mind you, I’ve never encountered any such people. But this thread doesn’t show that they don’t exist. Still, it may be that we have a filter in place here: competent creationists recognize that they have nothing and so don’t show up here, leaving the stage to the clowns we encounter.
Then come up with an objective definition. The male common ancestor to me, my father, my brother, my two sons and daughter and my 3 grand children is my fathers father or my grandfather.
Can we create a nested hierarchy of these relationships? Are we able to explain these relationships by reproduction alone?
If this fits the strict definition of common ancestry how do we then reconcile this with the definition used in evolutionary terms where reproduction is not the complete explanatory mechanism?
Well of course we can explain those relationships by reproduction alone. How would you explain them?
Who has any idea what Bill is trying (and failing) to say here? This isn’t just word salad, it’s tossed salad.