Media Science

[T_aquaticus]

@Ashwin_s

What is the p value… I don’t see any values in the highlighted portion.

I couldn’t get the calculator to work, but the p value for perfectly congruent trees for just 20 taxa is 1.2x10^-22, so it will be even smaller for 30 taxa. You can check out the calculations here:

29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: Statistics of Incongruent Phylogenetic Trees

@Ashwin_s

And you still haven’t addressed the issue of how comparing a phylogeny signal and a DNA fingerprinting is like comparing apples and oranges… do you agree to this?

I don’t agree. I think they are comparable. Matching STR alleles between the DNA at a crime scene and the DNA from a suspect is very comparable to the match between trees based on morphology and trees based on DNA sequence.

@Ashwin_s

I have yet to go through these evidence in detail… have just finished checking out the case of mutation rates and predictions of divergence being evidence for common descent.
When I get there, I will comment on it.

You can check out my thread on the pattern of substitution patterns over here:

Mutations Are Consistent With Biochemistry

In a previous thread I discussed what science meant by random mutations and how this term is defined by experimental results and statistics. A lot of this work was done in the 1940’s and 50’s, and since then many new facts have been discovered in the field of genetics, such as the discovery of DNA. This gave rise to the field of molecular biology and allowed us to understand biology at the molecular scale. So what exactly causes mutations? We once again have to reiterate the the limited scope of science. What science can do is put forward hypotheses and see if the evidence is consistent with that hypothesis. What science can not do is make ontological statements about absolute truth. With that in mind, the next few posts will discuss the evidence that links mutagenesis (the production of mutations) with the biochemistry of the cell and why scientists aren’t simply assuming that mutations are caused by biochemistry.