JeffB and Swamidass: Understanding Evidence for Phylogeny

Sorry. I missed it.

No. Sorry.

Homoplasy is similarity that is NOT consistent with a tree, and therefore NOT well explained by common ancestry alone. These are the exception to the rule of phylogeny.

Homology is similarity that is consistent with a tree, and therefore well explained by common ancestry alone. These are the rule.

Both Homoplasy and Homology are types of similarity. If common descent were true, we would expect to see mainly Homology, with some Homoplasy, and that is what we see.

BLAST is a way of measuring similarity between sequences, but it does not use a tree to do so. So, effectively, it groups Homoplasy and Homology together and makes no distinction between them.

SIFTER group sequences by a tree, so it tries to ignore Homoplasy and focus on Homology.

If similarity was explained merely by common design for common purposes, we expect BLAST to work better than SIFTER. However, we see that SIFTER works better than BLAST. That is what we expect if common descent is true.

Of course, in this case, we are looking at (mainly) microbes. There is no clear reason why creationists should reject common ancestry of microbes. It is really the common ancestry of humans and apes that is really difficult to work through. The evidence for that was in the video I linked you.

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