@r_speir’s drive by comment was off topic, and thus responses to that would also be off topic. I’m guilty of taking the bait at times as well, but @jeffb has put up a good faith query that is focused, so it would be nice not to derail that and some of the good conversation which has ensued.
As has been pointed out, phylogeny’s seem to go all the way down. Just looking at a genetic phylogeny, the question I would have for my YEC friends is, “what analytic quality guides the line of demarcation within kinds, or micro-evolutionary relationships, and the genetic phylogeny relationships which exist between kinds, or macro-evolutionary relationships?” I have not seen any formal or rigorous distinction offered which would consistently locate some line at junctions of tree branches to say, based on such genetic analysis, the distinct kind begins here - not further up the tree nor further down the branch.
Ok side note here: I have to laugh. I finally got around to trying to catch up on the original thread, only to find it had jumped up to 129 posts, and figured “I don’t think I can read through all these”
Then I thought back to my very last statement in my starting thread:
I have to wonder, how many of you read that and thought “Yeah Jeff, good luck with THAT!” ???
BTW I noticed @swamidass just closed that thread because it “has become a morass”.
Understandable.
I believe there to be overlap between descent vs design even within phylogenies simply based on the fact that the domain space we’re working with: Life forms that are very similar, living in similar environments. One would have to really go out of Their way to ensure what He created did not have phylogeny signals in it.
And congruencies don’t oppose common design. Unfortunately this topic requires one to have a complete picture of just how much noise exists, then make a holistic judgment call based on how much noise an evolutionists is comfortable with, or how much lack of noise a creationist is comfortable with.
Regarding the talkorigins data: I like it because it’s trying to address the issue numerically. Although I have to admit, I’d have to study this further before I felt like it was a good way of saying: “This data reinforces an exclusion of Design”.
There’s nothing standing in the way of testing a hypothesis, then, correct? What’s yours?
OK, if we look at cow, whale, seal, dog, and fish, your “living in similar environments” hypothesis makes a very clear prediction of what one will observe.
Ah, but our being unable to know what they are is evidence against their existence. Again, I suggest that if there were indeed such things as kinds, they ought to be fairly obvious. So why aren’t they?
You must explain that. Why would separate creation result in (false) signals of phylogeny? In fact, life forms in similar environments are frequently quite different. Australia has (or had) something rather like a wolf, but it also has kangaroos.
One should also note that common descent and design are not mutually exclusive. That’s what theistic evolution is. The question here isn’t of descent vs. design; it’s of descent vs. separate creation.
Science discussions predicated on a misunderstanding of science are problematic. OTOH, Jeff originally asked for a thread split for this, which is entirely appropriate. My experience is that arguments and misunderstandings occur BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE ASKING THE WRONG QUESTIONS. This is compounded by other trying to ANSWER QUESTIONS BASED ON FAULTY ASSUMPTIONS, which leads to contradictions and inconsistencies. Smart people (including myself) are not immune to this.
But that doesn’t require a nested hierarchy. For example, you can find an octopus and vertebrate fish in the very same environments. However, one has a forward facing retina and one has an inverted retina. Why? Bats and birds fill a lot of the same niches yet a bat is a modified mammal while a bird is a modified dinosaur. Why? Why not mix and match features from mammals and dinosaurs so we can have a flying species with feathers, teats, flow through lungs, and three middle ear bones?
I will stress this again. A nested hierarchy is much, much, much more than just having similarities. It is the PATTERN of similarities AND differences that matters.
Actually, just the opposite is true. Human designs don’t fall into nested hierarchies, and we would have to put forth a lot of effort and wasted design resources to force our designs into a nested hierarchy. For example, if humans adhered to a nested hierarchy then only one lineage of cars would have air bags. Just to keep a nested hierarchy we would have to invent all new safety features for each lineage of car that couldn’t be shared with other lineages. That doesn’t make sense. For the same reason, there is no reason why God couldn’t mix and match features from many different branches if life were separately created.
Added in edit:
Here is some food for thought. Here is a picture of forelimbs from different tetrapods:
We see the same bones in the same arrangements regardless of environment. And yet, when we look at the forelimb of the whale and whale shark, who share the same environment and niche, the skeletal structure of their forelimbs is very different. So why would a whale forelimb be more similar to a human forelimb than a whale shark forelimb?
Sharks and orca’s share similar environments, being large aqueous apex predators, sharing a close likeness in body shape and arrangement. And yet sharks are unmistakably on the fish branch and orca’s on the mammal branch of the tree of life. Why? This is not evidence of arbitrary “fit for purpose” creation. It is exactly as expected, however, given common descent. Most everywhere we look in nature, this is what we see - a nested hierarchy featuring constrained novelty as populations adapt to new challenges and opportunities.
What do you mean by “mammal”? Isn’t that just an arbitrary category based on a few superficial resemblances? What good is it if it combines animals as different as bats and whales? At least in your world, there should be no such objectively defined group, and a host of other divisions of the biota should be as good.
Of course in my world, things are different. Mammals are real.
We were told that species share features because they live in a similar environment, and yet we have an aquatic species that shares more with humans than it does with other aquatic species in the same environment. Wouldn’t you agree that the “similar features, similar environment” explanation falls short?
Abiogenesis is not inherently part of evolution. And even if abiogenesis becomes scientifically well supported a century from now, it would not conflict with Biblical faith. The God who uses gravity can also use RNA world.
So far, mostly biologists have responded to your sincere question, and they have provided some of the most compelling observations that support the theory of evolution. I would like to take a different tack by offering a non-biologist’s perspective on why I have come to trust the strong conclusions my friends in the scientific community have reached about evolution. In other words, this is how I’ve come to “see what they see.”
Weather Forecasts vs. the Bible
The Bible very clearly teaches that God creates and controls the weather we observe:
When He utters His voice, there is a tumult of waters in the heavens,
And He causes the clouds to ascend from the end of the earth;
He makes lightning for the rain,
And brings out the wind from His storehouses. - Jeremiah 10:13
He has given you the early rain for your vindication.
And He has poured down for you the rain,
The early and latter rain as before. - Joel 2:23
Ask rain from the Lord at the time of the spring rain—
The Lord who makes the storm clouds;
And He will give them showers of rain, vegetation in the field to each man. - Zechariah 10:1
And there are dozens more passages depicting God’s command and control over the weather.
It occurred to me a few years ago that my behavior every morning was in seemingly direct contradiction to my profession of trust in the Scriptures. How so? I was seeking out and trusting the views of man’s understanding–weather forecasts–to determine how warmly to dress and whether to carry an umbrella. The forces of meteorology are not God’s will and power; they are natural phenomena such as the sun’s heat, the cooling effects of reflection, the dynamic flows of air that are modeled by mathematics beyond my grasp, polar vortexes, El Nino, La Nina, etc.
Jesus said…
You hear the sound of it [the wind], but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit.” - John 3:8
…but the meteorologists of the Capitol Weather Gang seem to contradict this by predicting the wind velocities in the DC area every morning. And I trust what the meteorologists say.
Most people never think about the seeming contradiction trusting the Bible and trusting weather forecasts. Someone might say, “I simply trust the Bible because the community of faith I identify with trusts the Bible, and other the other hand I trust the weather forecasts because (a) everyone I know trusts them, and (b) they are useful.”
I do not criticize people for tolerating dissonance between competing theories without complaint, but I am not one to just gloss over it when I’m aware of it. Something interesting is in play, and it’s worth pondering the situation carefully.
So what’s going on here? I think that with respect to the weather, all of us who trust the weather report have come to agree with the view of Scripture that Augustine of Hippo, the great saint and philosopher of the 4th century, stated:
“The Spirit of God did not want to teach people things that would be of no help to their salvation.”
“The Holy Spirit’s intention is to teach us how to go to Heaven, and not how the heavens go.”
Augustine and Galileo contend that Scripture is not intended to ask detailed scientific questions. How can I apply their view to meteorology (“impersonal forces generate the weather”) vs. the Bible (“God generates the weather”)? I can regard the Scriptures as pointing to God’s role as creator and upholder of a universe that contains the earth that has the weather, rather than as a guide for predicting tomorrow’s weather. Scripture and physics provide complementary, not contradictory, ways to explain the weather. Thus I realize that my trust in the Scripture does not contradict seeing the weather the way meteorologists see it, even if I do not understand their computer models that solve differential equations.
So acceptance of meteorological models can be consistent with the Scriptures if I view the Scriptures as guidance for faith and relationships, not guidance for physics. When the Scriptures speak of God’s control over the weather, I trust that they point to God’s divine wisdom in creating the universe and everything in it, His providence in upholding it continuously, and His sovereignty over every outcome from blizzards to warm, sunny days. I don’t fully understand the mystery that God is fully sovereign (a faith proposition) and, simultaneously, meteorologists can make good predictions without taking His sovereignty into account (a scientific proposition). I accept that both faith and science are true and useful, even if I don’t fully understand how.
Why have I described my understanding of how faith and science work with respect to meteorology? Because I can apply that same understanding to biology that I apply to meteorology. I can trust biologists in the same way that I trust meteorologists.
As humans we incessantly build models of how things work. Make people stay quarantined long enough, and a significant portion will coalesce on QAnon and anti-vaxx models of how society and medicine work.
Even this statement is built on models:
Did you see the models at work in this passage? If not, allow me to point them out. Our friend @r_speir has advanced two implicit models:
A literary model for reading the early chapters of Genesis. His model states that Genesis 1-3 is to be treated as a literalistic, journalistic account of six 24-hour days that occurred several thousand years ago. But there are several alternate models that are faithful with the Gospel, among them Augustine’s/Galileo’s and @swamidass’ Genealogical Adam and Eve.
A decision model for resolving conflicts between the Scripture (as he understands it) and science: Mathematically refined, peer-reviewed observations of the world around us are not to be trusted if they contradict the literalistic model of Genesis, according to @r_speir.
Confronted with competing interpretations of a large body of observations, I know of no logical way to decide between them without models. For example, prior to LeMaitre’s ground-breaking publication of the “big bang” theory in 1932, physicists (including Einstein) held a static, non-expanding, eternally existing model of the universe. LeMaitre’s competing model made certain predictions that contradicted the previous “steady state” model’s. Physicists were able over time to compare the expanding body of observations to the predictions and proclaim LeMaitre’s Big Bang victorious.
Note: they accepted the Big Bang theory even though it does not perfectly predict all observations. Today as you are reading this, astrophysicists are trying to figure out how to refine the theory to more perfectly match the observations. This is a normal scientific process.
Biologists follow the same scientific process as physicists. And if you want them to consider an alternative to evolution, be prepared to set forth a specific model that makes specific predictions. This is why the question of defining a kind, for example, is so important. Are dogs and wolves a single kind or two? Are housecats and lions a single kind or two? Are canines and cats a single kind? Are bears, cats, canines, hoofed ruminants, and equines a single kind or five or dozens? Until this is settled, there’s no point in discussing whether genomic evidence is more supportive of YEC or of evolution, because there’s no reasonable way to connect the evidence to the predictions of a YEC model.
This is also why @swamidass’s analysis of design vs. common descent predictions regarding genomic similarity is so helpful. He describes a plausible design model and its predictions alongside common descent predictions, then he examines the evidence to see which is better supported.
Signal vs. Noise
Like many scientific theories such as quantum mechanics and climate science, evolution makes predictions about statistical trends and aggregations; it does not and cannot predict every detail.
This necessarily implies that the evidence will contain considerable noise–i.e., individual observations or even mini-trends that seem to contradict the predicted global trend. Let’s take a look at how this works in physics and climate science:
Physics: The half-life of C14 is 6000 years, but if I use liquid scintillation counting on a recently cut sliver of wood, I can detect beta emission from C14 atoms that have existed for only a month. Isn’t that one month vs. 6000 years a big contradiction? Doesn’t my ability to detect beta emission month-old C14 atoms contradict the theory of C14 radiometric dating? The answer is not at all; the theory predicts a probabilistic, statistical distribution of beta emissions over time. The theory does not and cannot predict the timing of every beta emission from each and every C14 atom. In other words, there is noise in the observations; it is only over a large number of observations that we are able to detect the signal, the statistical distribution of the observations across time.
Climate science: the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) predicts an overall warming trend over time compared with the pre-industrial baseline. Nevertheless, February 2021 is much cooler than usual in the Washington, DC area. A senator from Oklahoma could throw a snowball on the floor of the Senate and say it shows the climate scientists are all wrong! Would that be a valid criticism of AGW? In a word, no; the theory predicts a statistical trend, not a uniform, linear trend that is identical at every GPS coordinate. It’s colder in D.C. this month, but it’s warmer than usual in Siberia. The cold D.C. February is noise, and the AGW model expects noise to occur. It also predicts a signal of long-term warming across the globe, and indeed the signal can be discerned when aggregating billions of temperature observations across decades and global coordinates.
Since the theory of evolution predicts noise such as incomplete lineage sorting and convergent evolution, it is not useful to regard every homoplasy (i.e., incongruent tree) as a contradiction of the theory. Instead, it is better to ask: Is the signal of common descent seen across very large numbers of observations?
A different way of thinking
We’re not accustomed to thinking the way scientists think. If I’m a member of a jury on a civil case, I’m putting the evidence for each side on a scale and trying to discern which side the preponderance of evidence favors. It’s a binary decision process and every contradiction counts heavily.
But that’s not the way scientists evaluate a complex, stochastic theory like evolution. The theory predicts an overall signal (pattern) amid considerable expected noise. So we have to think differently: Is the signal observed? If so, then the theory is probably, approximately correct as a way of understanding the natural world.
And that’s all you can ask of a scientific theory.
not necessarily. most fishes for instance, are probably indeed more similar to each other than to mammals, since they indeed live in the same environment, and thus share more things in common. this is logical to conclude similar morphology (and needs)= simillar genetics.
