Erika is currently pursuing her Master’s of Research in Primate Biology, Behavior and Conservation and is the creator of hundreds of punchy, entertaining YouTube videos. Her channel’s primary focus seems to be debunking Darwin-skeptics. Unfortunately, she does not seem to apply an equally critical eye to evolutionary theory.
Also, not a terribly impressive piece, even by EN&V standards. I found this puzzling passage amusing:
To elaborate on her third critique, Erika argues that there is no genetic demarcation or separation that would mark a stopping place for comparison between species and higher orders of phyla. She is clearly ignoring reproductive barriers here.
I looked at that post yesterday, when it went up at that ENV site.
Erika (Gutsick Gibbon) is right. The ID people need to develop their own research program if they want to persuade anyone. It’s easy to sit back and declare “common design could have done this”. But they have little to show in terms of actual evidence.
Honestly, I thought it was a great article by Emily. Though we’ll disagree with the science at times, her post is acrimonious, and just an intro to what will be some more posts.
A collection of PRATTs is a great article?? Acrimony is a good thing?? I know you bend over backwards to be friendly to creationists, but this is carrying things a bit far.
You are being charitable, surely. This is quite awful.
You don’t honestly think there is a legitimate scientific question raised here, do you? I would be shocked to hear you suggest any such thing.
Lordy. Preserve us. Pickle us, even.
So am I, because she is both scientifically competent and an excellent presenter. But you know very well that most of the people who post here could easily dismantle this nonsense. I’m sure she’ll do a better job than I could do, and I shall enjoy watching the puddle of left-over protoplasm run down the drain when she’s done. But I am also sure you could do a better job than I could do, which is why I am surprised that you feel it necessary to express a favorable opinion of this piece.
Earlier this year, a popular evolution YouTuber, Gutsick Gibbon, or Erika, created a video response to my post here at Evolution News , “Do Statistics Prove Common Ancestry?”
I hope that smiley face is intended to indicate that the preceding statement is a joke. Or that your definition of “conversation” in this context is “humiliating takedown of a clown.”
Seriously, now: I could imagine an interesting conversation where the fringey “Ah Ain’t Kin To No Monkey Dietary Counseling, LLC” clinician explains, on the basis of genetic testing, that as the patient ain’t kin to no monkey, the patient should go on a banana-free diet. But such a conversation will have all the scientific merit of the “if she weighs the same as a duck, she’s made of wood” conversation.
If the seemingly “deceptive pattern” exists for a functional reason and has a “good design” explanation, then there really isn’t a “deceptive pattern.”
True, it’s just that no ID-creationist seems to be able to come up with what that functional reason is for the nested hierarchy in DNA sequences, or anatomy. They just assert it, never show it.
The “deceptive pattern” is imposed only by materialist lenses and a poor understanding of functional reasons for the similarities.
But I’d love to be told what the functional reason is with, you know, an actual predictive model with equal or better explanatory scope and power. Not just a mere assertion that “there are functional reasons”. A demonstration of it.
Thus, the assumption that ancestry is the only mechanism or best explanation for character similarity is not held by the ID proponent. Instead, ID proponents hold that a designer may produce similarity, much like different Gucci purses exhibit similarities. A more technical explanation of one ID model for separate ancestry can be found here.
“Here” links to Ewert’s dependency graph, which isn’t an actual model of separate ancestry and doesn’t deal with DNA sequences, anatomy, or the fossil record, physiology yadda yadda, and did not in fact show that any method of design consistently produces nesting hierarchical structure, etc.
You will note that the author never mentions “nested hierarchy” at all, just “similarities”. It’s a good way to avoid noticing the pattern that needs explanation.
I’d like to point it that “Nutriplexity” is not an impressive name.
“The Gene Emergence Project Department of ProtoBioCybernetics & ProtoBioSemiotics, The Origin of Life Science Foundation, Incorporated.” is an impressive name.
Perhaps she thought “Bio-Complexity” was a marvelous name, and wanted the same reputation for honesty and solid scientific integrity to be associated with her business. And that might be why she’s working out of the back end of Bremerton, Washington (“Gateway to Washington’s Meth Country!”).
Emily could be reading your posts. From her new post:
In my previous post responding to YouTuber Gutsick Gibbon, aka Erika, I linked to Winston Ewert’s 2018 BIO-Complexity article, “The Dependency Graph of Life,” as a more technical explanation of how common design can yield a dataset with some tree-like structure. Winston’s central thesis is that the nested hierarchical pattern observed in subsets of genes is better accounted for by a dependency graph which reflects the fact that programmers re-use similar coding modules in different independent systems to fulfill similar functional needs. …
What ID proponents are encouraging in the greater scientific community is honesty about the fact that both design and ancestry can create genetic similarity.
Nobody disputes that design can create similarity. Nobody ever disputed that. Heck, nobody disputes that design can create a nested hierarchy, at least deliberately or as a product of aping the process of branching descent with modification.
What we are disputing is that design creates a consistent nested hierarchy as a byproduct of functional constraint. That claim has not met it’s burden of proof.
However, I trust that I have made it abundantly clear that ID proponents and others who question common ancestry have excellent scientific reasons for doing so.
You haven’t made that clear at all. You’ve consistently confused a nested hierarchy with mere similarity, and you’ve merely asserted that “functional constraint” should yield a nested hierarchy, but when the time came to explain why, you instead offered a superficial explanation that only entailed mere similarity.
So we are still left with the nested hierarchy being unexplained.
