(The moa you know would have to be fossilized. 
)
In keeping within the theme of the OP: Yes, thatās why moa paleontology is a hard science.
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Thanks for getting us back on topic. 
The thread to which we pointed gives some examples of objective criteria. Did you learn what they are?
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I think so. Your idea of measuring homoplasy is interesting and John came up with a measurement criteria between 0 and 1. Thanks for pointing me here.
Where does common descent fail given this testing criteria?
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OK guys, Iām calling a brief Time-Out. This discussion has a few problems that no one is addressing:
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Salās initial statement is incredibly vague. I know this was split off from a previous thread, but without some sort of summary or clarification this thread makes zero sense to me. I have no idea what anyone is arguing about. I canāt tell that anyone here knows what the argument is about.
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Establishing truth and authority is hard. Without clear definitions of what is actually being discussed this just isnāt going anywhere. Try starting with points of agreement. If you havenāt got any points of agreement then there isnāt any basis for discussion.
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Reliability is a subjective quality. Measures of reliability that are considered to be very good in one application may be totally inadequate in other applications. You cannot make claim that one field of science is more or less reliable than any other without further defining your criteria.
OK, Time-In ā We now return you to your regularly scheduled game of Brocknian Ultra-Cricket.
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Since Bill has not responded, could someone tell me who these people are?
Harold Smith Phd nuclear engineering MIT Under secretary of defense Bill Clintonā admin. Professor Professor UC Berkeley worked on photosynthesis w Melvin Calvin(nobel prize 1961)
Cedric Garland Phd Johns Hopkins discovered Vitamin d and cancer link. Professor UCSD head Naval research academy. Used micro evolutionary theory for cancer hypothesis.
Peter Rowe MD Stanford. Specialist in kidney theory. Interested in evolutionary theory.
3 Great thinkers I have lots of respect four. When I saw the sequence challenge to evolutionary theory I used Harold as a sounding board as I was astonished this level of a problem could be real with a theory so widely accepted. After a few days of independent research he understood the sequence problem.
Cedric was concerned with my skepticism and I wrote a paper for him that showed the problems w the eukaryotic transition. We eventually agreed that his hypothesis was based on micro evolutionary adaptions and the sequence challenge was not an issue.
What sequence challenge to evolutionary theory would that be? The one where you took a 5-letter English word and made random changes to show how genomes all break down?
Common descent yields data with high consistency. This provides a way to test if the data fits common descent.
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What about Peter?
Peter recently became a skeptic after reading Peter Gelenterās opinion based on Meyerās book Darwins doubt. Peter and Harold know each other.
Thatās a pretty low standard for belief, a third hand opinion. How do you know these guys?
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Peter and Harold are friends that belong to the same country club as I do. Cedric is a close friends cousin and the guy I did research for on vitamin d.
I agree its a low standard as he has just become skeptical but the key message is the design group (discovery) is eroding public belief in the theory. The youtube video with Meyer, Gelenter and Berlinski has 600k views in a month.
Thatās not the point. Becoming skeptical because of what some other person said about what some other person said about a subject none of the three in that chain is conversant with is a very, very low standard.
And of course eroding public belief in evolution is exactly what the Discovery Institute is about, which has nothing to do with science or scientists.
You have strayed far from the subject, which was whether there are scientists who think evolutionary biology is not science. Are these three people scientists? Do they think evolutionary biology is not science?
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I have not claimed that evolutionary biology is not science. The issue is skepticism around the grand claims such as universal common descent and knowing the mechanisms of how species transition into significantly different life forms.
This is America. That isnāt hard to doā¦
They are failing in the most important area. The scientific community.
And if recent polls are to be trusted they are failing with the public as well.
Iām glad youāre backing off from that. But you know, it was the original question.
Thatās multiple issues, and the second one is so vaguely stated as to be impossible to discuss.
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