No. I’ve not seen you advocate for a hypothesis that the common ancestors of different, supposedly independently created clades, were created with identical genes.
You usually just link Ewert’s dependency graph paper and then wave your hands.
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To be clear, I wasn’t saying that @colewd necessarily advocates the “identical starting point” hypothesis. I was just pointing out that the only two ways to explain ancestral convergence without invoking common descent are the “identical starting point” and “duplicitous creator” hypothesis, both of which have fatal flaws. It’s entirely possible that @colewd is just extremely confused about the significance of ancestral convergence and has no idea what his answer to this evidence is.
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Hi Andrew
Where did you get the idea that design models were limited to these two possibilities? Is this your own conclusion?
Hi @colewd,
Let’s try thinking critically.
Based on the data produced by White, Zhong, and Penny (2013), genetic similarities between organisms consistently get greater as you go back in time. Even if this is only the case for the genes that they studied, this is still the case for those genes. We could merely conclude, as White, Zhong and Penny did, that common ancestry is true. But let’s think through alternate possibilities, as you keep asking us to do.
So, what are the possibilities for separate ancestry?
First, it could be that God duplicitously created all organisms in such a way to make it look as though they descended from a common ancestor. But we can reject this a priori because this position is self-refuting: if God can create things to look differently than they are, then we have no basis on which to know anything (radical epistemic skepticism), which means that we have no basis for even thinking that God is duplicitous. So although this position could, logically, be true, we must reject it a priori in order to avoid radical epistemic skepticism.
Second, it could be that God created all organisms originally with identical, or nearly identical genes, and then these diverged from there. However, this would imply a “star tree” pattern in which each created ‘kind’ begins at a single origin point and immediately diverges from there. This is emphatically not the pattern that we see from the molecular data – ancestral convergence appears at many different levels, not just at the family level, or whatever level you want to designate as the ‘kind’ level. Therefore, we can reject this hypothesis as well.
Is there any other hypothesis that possibly explains ancestral convergence without invoking common ancestry? …No, there’s not. The only way to reconcile separate ancestry with ancestral convergence is if each created ‘kind’ diverged from an identical or nearly identical gene sequence, or if God duplicitously created each ‘kind’ to appear as though it had separate ancestry. Neither of these are possible. So the only hypothesis that fully explains ancestral convergence is common ancestry.
If you can think of a third hypothesis that explains ancestral convergence without invoking common ancestry, or if you see a rescue method for any one of the above two, then please share. But the onus is not on me to provide a third hypothesis to rescue separate ancestry. So to avoid your ‘sealioning,’ as @Mercer so eloquently puts it, I will not respond to you any more until you can provide either a third hypothesis or a rescue method for the other two.
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Hi Andrew
Yes part of the design strategy God used was to build animals from a gene set that included shared genes with other animals and unique genes.
This is exactly what we observe from the two papers I shared.
The shared genes would converge just like the paper you cited.
Yes. But as we’ve explained several times to you, they would create a star tree with each ‘kind’ branching off of an identical or nearly identical starting point for the shared genes, not the actual nested hierarchy that we see. This does not explain the data. Try again.
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Welp, it happened again. I guess you’ve predicted the future.
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That’s one form of the common design hypothesis. There is no standard form, and “common design” by itself predicts nothing. But if you suppose that all differences in sequence are functional and that most genes do not change function, then one might suppose that different kinds would start with much of their genomes identical, the differences being only in those bits necessary for different bodies and physiologies. All difference we see today in those originally identical sequences would have arisen independently in each kind through ordinary evolutionary processes. And thus we would see every kind arising independently from a root. Nested hierarchy would be seen only within kinds, not between them.
Of course that isn’t at all what we see, but a creationist can hope.
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Design models aren’t limited to those two possibilities. Design models that predict ancestor convergence are limited to those two possibilities. Other design models would not be so limited, but they would certainly fail to match the data, which I would assume to be a disadvantage. Do you have another design model?
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No.
No.
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Hi Andrew
You can put the data in many forms this tells you nothing about the cause of the data we are observing.
We could create many different patterns depending on what slice of the data you were looking at. The data I am describing can be displayed in a Venn diagram. It is actual gene data of the similarities and differences between vertebrate species. Again the similar genes will do exactly what your paper described. The smoking gun you desire against common design does not exist.
Why do you think similar genes in a common design model does not predict ancestor convergence? The only requirement is a common initial sequence for all the genes.
actually there is. for instance, the designer could made new species in the same way he did with Eve. note that Eve was not created from nothing but from a part of existing species (Adam). so its possible that the designer just use an existing genome of an existing species in order to make a new species. and this is why we see a nested hierarchy. this can also explain things that evolution cant such as the existence of IC systems.
another possibility is that maybe there is an explanation that wee haven’t thought of yet. after all, evolution cant explain yet how (for instance) a complex IC system could evolve or why nature looks designed etc. and yet many dont reject evolution because it cant explain X yet. so why creationists cant do the same? note: this is my final comment here in public. if you realy want we can continue in private.
No, we would not observe a nested hierarchy, unless this “creator” started with a single origin of all the species, and varied them from there. That would mean every organism, including humans, would share common ancestry with every single organism that has ever lived. But that is not what you believe, is it?
Even if that is what you believe, “common creator” does not predict this pattern, so evolution from a common ancestor remains by far the better explanation, since it requires nothing more than the process of reproduction that is occurring countless times at every moment right now.
This has been addressed. Many times in many ways by many different members.
It seems creationists are somehow constitutionally incapable of understanding the concept of the nested hierarchy.
Wrong.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ICsilly.html
Also wrong:
https://diobma.udg.edu/handle/10256.1/3805
I realize I’m wasting my breath here with you. But maybe someone else will find this interesting and informative.
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Then you’re not describing the same data that I am. I don’t know how you can be this confused, lol.
No, they won’t. You are not even understanding what the paper is describing. It’s not similarities and differences between extant organisms, but between ancestral organisms…
I’m done with this. We’ve explained to you why this is wrong many times already and if you don’t get it now you never will.
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So common ancestry but with extra steps? I mean, I’m fine with that. Maybe God did direct the evolution of new species. That’s unfalsifiable, but I have no problem with it. But you have to realize that what you are proposing is literally the same as common ancestry, just guided by God. (And on a shorter timescale, which I don’t agree with at all, but that’s off topic since right now we’re just discussing evidence for common ancestry and not the age of the Earth.)
It’s only a smoking gun against a particular model of common design, the one that results in star trees. It may or may not be a smoking gun against your model of common design; no way to tell because you haven’t been able or willing to articulate a model, though you have at times seemed to defend the star tree model without realizing at all what it predicts. So what’s your model?
Yes, and that’s one of the two models already proposed, the ones you said were inadequate. But that model predicts a star tree, not a nested hierarchy. Since we don’t see a star tree, the model is wrong. This has been explained to you several times, but as usual you fail to understand or even notice.
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Parsimony.
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There is no reason why this would produce a nested hierarchy. Humans design organisms that share genes, and they regularly violate a nested hierarchy For example, the Glofish:
These fish share a gene with jellyfish, but it is a direct violation of a nested hierarchy because no other vertebrate fish share this gene. Even Ewert himself tries to argue that there are sets of genes that violate a nested hierarchy because that is what he thinks would be evidence for design.
There is absolutely no reason why we would expect the sequences of these genes to form a statistically significant phylogeny if they were separately created.
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Hi John
What do you mean create star trees. We can create lots of patterns as we look at small cuts of data.
The paper Andrew proposed also creates a star tree when when they are testing similar sequences across a diverse set of species. We can see many patterns in subsets of the data.
Good argument but far from a smoking gun.
You have more work to do starting with function vs non function which is hard for both sides to empirically confirm. You also need a model showing enough time is available given time to fixation constrains sequences.