Paul Nelson: Testing for Common Descent (Signal + Noise?)

[T_aquaticus]

@pnelson

On the other hand, when UCD is protected from empirical challenge by moves such as “that’s just noise, and we expect noise,” or an indefinitely elastic ring of auxiliary or ad hoc hypotheses (e.g., incomplete lineage sorting, convergence, horizontal transfer, you name it), UCD looks dangerously like an axiom, not a testable proposition.

You can check out the statistical methods and formulas for comparing phylogenies here:

29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: Statistics of Incongruent Phylogenetic Trees

There is also this quote:

“Biologists seem to seek the ‘The One Tree’ and appear not to be satisfied by a range of options. However, there is no logical difficulty in having a range of trees. There are 34,459,425 possible [unrooted] trees for 11 taxa (Penny et al . 1982), and to reduce this to the order of 10-50 trees is analogous to an accuracy of measurement of approximately one part in 10^6.” (Penny and Hendy 1986, p. 414)

Statistical analysis is how science works. If you reject the idea that statistics can be used in science then you are rejecting nearly all of science.