Reproduction may be an authentic mechanism, but there are alternative hypothesis which should be considered. For instance, the ERV argument does not account for this correlation:
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Checkmate evilutionists. Babies are delivered by storks, not sex. Just don’t think too hard about where the storks come from.
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Hi Andrew
You can think of no counter argument at this point?
Counter argument to what? You haven’t said anything of substance for me to respond to.
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The answer is obviously “no”. So here we go:
If separate ancestry is true, unconstrained sequences should form nested hierarchies within groups that share common ancestry, but not across groups that do not; they should be uncorrelated across such groups, even if originally designed to be similar/identical.
If common ancestry is true, we should find nested hierarchies in unconstrained sequences across all living things.
By “unconstrained”, I mean “not subject to purifying selection”.
That’s it. That’s the test.
We find the latter. Separate ancestry falsified. The end, thanks for playing.
It’s not more complicated than that.
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Cue another 100 posts where Bill fails to understand anything you just said.
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To your assertion that the only explanation for this pattern is common descent or a deceptive designer.
You have made a conclusion how do you anticipate that conclusion can be challenged.
I am going to break for the day. Talk tomorrow.
He’s right, @colewd.
Bill, can you at the very least acknowledge that the nested hierarchy is not mere similarity?
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Also, I know this is going back a ways in the conversation, but what on earth is this supposed to mean? Who is there to cave to when it comes to Jeanson? Not to put too fine a point on it, I’m the guy on this one. I’m the evolutionary biologist most publicly ripping Jeanson. His work is trash, I’ve shown why, repeatedly and at length. I’ve told him he’s wrong to his face. Is there someone who has a lower opinion of his work I can cave to?
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YEC needs some way to account for the fact that there is near universal acceptance among scientists that the world is old and evolution is integral to biology. It does not help their case if that acceptance is due to being persuaded by unassailable evidence, so they must attribute ulterior motives and pressures, such as career advancement, brainwashing, rebellion, or in this case, group think.
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Yes, and accusing former creationists of having never been a “true creationist.” After all, if they had been a true creationist, they never would have “caved” to the “pressure.” This has already happened to me once, which was frankly one of the most ridiculous things I had ever heard, since I was such a vehement creationist for so long.
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Psychiatrists and psychologists call it projection.
Bill’s position is solely a product of CP groupthink, while yours is based on evidence. On some level, Bill is aware that his position is not consistent with the evidence, so his ego defense mechanism is to desperately pretend that the converse is true.
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I’m curious. How is convergence for increasingly ancestral nodes determined?
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You estimate the states at ancestral nodes using a tree (or two trees in this case). Then you use some measure of similarity to determine the similarity of the extant species and the similarity of the estimated ancestral nodes, and observe whether the ancestral nodes are more similar to each other than the extant species are. And so they commonly are.
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Basically like this:
First you make or use a big tree that has at least the two clades you want to determine whether converge on each other in their ancestral nodes. Of course you need some sort of idea of what is “ancestral” in each of these tree, and you use the big tree to give an estimate of that. Even if the true root isn’t exactly where the big tree implies it still gives you an idea of what should lie ancestrally in the two different clades you want to test.
If there really is ancestral convergence, nodes closer and closer to the root in B should be more and more similar to everything in C, with more similarity to root in C than to leaves in C.
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Actually White, Zhong, and Penny were very careful not to assume that each group formed a larger tree. Instead, they reconstructed the ancestral sequences for each group independently of one another, to eliminate any possible bias toward common ancestry.
However, they did re-analyze one of the pairs (eudicots and monocots) using a single tree, and unsurprisingly found that using a single tree the p-value was even smaller (by 36 orders of magnitude). The only problem with doing it this way is that it seems to assume common ancestry from the outset, and so it’s not as good of a test of common ancestry as using two independent trees.
They do exactly what I describe. In order to determine what constitutes “ancestral” for each group, they have to use the main tree as a guide. Otherwise by what criterion do they determine which node is more ancestral in each subtree? That can only be done with some sort of external information.
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But they don’t need to put two trees together for that. They just need to root each tree in some way, which can be done by midpoint rooting or by adding a single outgroup that isn’t a member of the other clade.
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Oh, I guess I misunderstood what they were saying. So doesn’t that seem to presuppose common ancestry? Or am I missing something?
Hmmm I’m not sure that’s completely correct if you use an outgroup root. Suppose your outgroup sequence has a higher average pairwise similarity to group C than to group B, then using the outgroup to root B will force a degree of ancestral convergence to C automatically?
It seems to me you have to either midpoint root, or pick a position by some other criterion. When you start introducing sequences from other clades that are not exactly equally distantly related to both, you run the risk of forcing the result?
Edit: mistakenly replied to @misterme987, meant it as reply to @John_Harshman
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