From the op.
Supposed Gish Gallop. Looks pretty consistent to me.
No one has suggested that this quote from Paul was a Gish Gallop, or inconsistent with what he said earlier. Who are you replying to?
pnelson
This is what’s known as the Gish gallop. None of what you said there has anything to do with the meaning of the bit you quoted originally. You’re just bringing up other stuff.
This is John Harshman’s comment above.
Yes, in reference to an entirely different comment.
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What comment?
From context, I inferred it to be #54.
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From 55 this seems consistent with his thesis.
What a magnificent waste of time and bandwidth.
We’ve already established that you have trouble with reading comprehension and that your opinions are not based on analysis, just on prejudice. You like creationists, therefore Nelson is right.
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Can you support your claim of Nelson making a Gish Gallop?
He already did in the post where he made the comment by pointing out that Nelson brought up a new issue instead of trying to resolve the previous one.
Also, you’re derailing an informative discussion someone might learn something from. Shut up.
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Yes, but I’m disinclined to rub your nose in what’s right in front of your face, considering that you will neither read nor comprehend nor remember anything I say.
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I think you should support your claim. If I am wrong I will admit it. You have tried to Label Nelsons argument yet it is unclear you have.
John,
The passage itself (from Baverstock and Moritz) is crystal-clear, and doesn’t need any additional exegesis. I was trying to explain why “data selection,” of the sort that they recommend, strikes me as problematic. Plainly I failed, because you heard Gishian hoofbeats. 
“Aboriginal discontinuity” is the contrast class to evolutionary continuity (universal common descent). A forest or orchard, instead of a single Tree.
Note to evograd: of course you’re right – sequences exhibiting absolute or near-total conservation won’t work for determining branching order; likewise, sequences varying too much. But notice what always lies in the background, as we make these judgments about data quality and suitability: a branching pattern of common ancestry exists, and we must find the proper data which will enable us to infer that pattern reliably.
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I think that this is an approach we should all try to avoid. The inverse of this is that others do not like creationists (for instance) and therefore their comments are (for instance) wrong. I’m sure that it is said out of frustration and that the frustration may be legitimate, but it’s far better to focus upon the issues over the person as much as possible, because this criticism could be applied to anyone and there’s really no defense for it.
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And it could be the case that one could not be found. So what is the problem again? It’s not like searching for it somehow makes it exist. Either there is data from which that pattern can be elucidated, or there is not. For your objection to make sense it would have to be the case that data is artificially manipulated to create that pattern, as opposed to merely searching for it among lots of data wherein it can’t be found. Discarding data that doesn’t conform to the pattern is not the same thing as creating it where it doesn’t exist.
Presumably you would agree that there is data in me and my siblings that attest to our common descent(and how we are related), but there is also data that does not? To search for this data that attests to our common descent, and discarding that which does not attest to it, is not to force a conclusion upon the data. I might have some scar on my knee not shared by my siblings. Discarding this data as phylogenetically uninformative is not to force a conclusion about my relationship to my siblings.
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If we want to test hypotheses regarding lineages that split in the very distant past, we generally want to use sequences that are relatively conserved, so that the evolutionary history is still relatively preserved in the data.
If we want to infer the relationships among closely related species, we will need to pick sequences that evolve relatively quickly so that enough variation is present to differentiate among species.
Likewise, if we want to examine gene flow among members of the same species, we have to look at very fast evolving sequences that will differ at the scale of the population.
And, of course, if we want to infer paternity or maternity, we must use sequences that are hyper variable.
The data used must in principle be able to answer the question we want to address. The scale of the variation must match the scale of the question. I don’t see what’s wrong with this.
And yet you said
You never did. You started talking about something else. That’s the Gish gallop.
So what do you think that quote is saying and why, specifically, is it a problem?
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I don’t actually think it could.
You don’t think that you could similarly assume that because one supports a particular position, they would also assume that the data (testimony, etc.) of another who supports the same position is correct?
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