Phylogeny - Help me see what you see

its not realy true. we can get different trees base on different methods:

https://www.nature.com/news/phylogeny-rewriting-evolution-1.10885

Looks to me like Peterson has a rooting problem. That’s all. The two trees are otherwise identical.

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scd you missed this part in @Roy comment: “ essentially the same tree ”. Not surprisingly, the juxtaposed tree diagrams in the article fairly agree, but are incongruent on several branches which is not surprising.

Casey Dunn did a review on the use of miRNA for phylogenetic analysis and the results are pretty striking. Take a look:

@Joe_Felsenstein and @John_Harshman care to comment on Casey’s analysis and do you know the progress so far with miRNA-based phylogenetics?

PS: what I perceived as incongruent between the “miRNA-based” and “traditional” phylogenies is not really incongruent. See my later comment on this.

You might find this short article helpful:
“Beware of Nuts & Bolts: Putting Evolution into the Teaching of Biological Classification”
(I can’t find a working full text link but if you google the title the first result works).

It explains the differences between trees made with organisms versus designed objects. Key points are the congruence and nested hierarchy that emerge in the former, but not the latter.

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We’ve already been over that before numerous times and the popular press article you link doesn’t reflect what’s in the papers by the author. That article exaggerates for effect. It’s bad science journalism, and the scientists themselves are partly to blame for sensationalizing their results.

I find it troublesome that not only don’t you appear to understand the subject matter, you also have a poor and very selective memory. Go make your tree of “jetfighters”, “trcucks”, and “bicicles”.

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They aren’t incongruent at all, just rooted in different places. They are identical except for the position of the root.

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Any set of data can be forced into a tree. What separates biological species from other groups of objects is that there are just a handful of well supported trees for species compared to the millions or trillions of possible trees.

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Oh I see your point. The “traditional” phylogeny used the elephant as the outgroup, while the “miRNA-based” phylogeny used mouse and rodents as the outgroup. Regardless, when you look at the branching patterns, both are the same. Thanks for the correction.

I will note that later analyses of miRNA data with a larger taxon sample recover the standard tree. See Fig. 6.

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Can you explain how the existence of the fusion would have been predicted by a creation model without common ancestry? And then why, despite your explanation, creationists didn’t predict it?

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there is still a debate about that topic (using mirna in phylogeny) but its not so irrelevant. we can get many different trees even by looking at morphological tree vs genetical one:

(Morphology And Molecules Give Fundamentally Conflicting Results For Lizard Phylogeny – Anole Annals)

or this case:


(https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-phylogenetic-tree-of-artiodactyls-produced-by-morphological-characters-versus-a-tree_fig7_303792194)

so this is not realy solve the problem and we do get different trees by looking at different data.

Sometimes. But these are uncommon exceptions, notable for that reason. The more usual result is congruence among trees. And this should be obvious: some data sets and some histories are easy to analyze, while others are more difficult. It happens, interestingly, that primates are easy, which is why you never bring them up.

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Sometimes, people don’t know who their great grandparents are.

Therefore, we can’t say that all humans are related to one another.

You think?

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For those interested in more recent work making progress to resolve Squamate relationships:

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We’ve been over all that. Fifty times by now. Nobody says the trees are always identical, and the trees don’t have to be identical. In fact we frequently expect them not to be identical for multiple, empirically well-founded reasons. Variations in rates of molecular vs morphological evolution, saturation, homoplasy, horizontal gene transfer, and incomplete lineage sorting are all things that demonstrably occur in observational reality, and which can force different pieces of the data to yield incongruencies when trees derived from these different data sets are compared. What matters then are the magnitudes of incongruence between different parts of the data, and how many parts of the data disagree.

Is some future possible where this elementary concept can find rest in your mind?

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If we could not get him to abandon his flawed self-replicating robot argument against evolution, I doubt this could happen.

Per the article cited by @John_Harshman, the miRNA-based phylogenies now match “traditional” phylogenies. Any major debate left is only in your head.

You are fond of citing papers showing puzzles or problems existing at or close to the time of their publications. You don’t look for subsequent papers that show empirically-based solutions or attempts to solve those puzzles. This indicates you are not truly searching for what is evidence-based.

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They say it’s not a fusion. I’ve listened to the explanation.

Did common ancestry predict it? Was there a prediction that there would be two more chromosomes before it was discovered among primates? That would be interesting to know.

Well, it is. There is centromere and telomere sequence in the arms of the chromosome which is smoking gun evidence for a fusion.

The prediction was that we would find evidence of a fusion.

Frankly, I don’t understand why creationists are trying to act as if fusions don’t happen. There are humans with different chromosome counts in the modern human population, and they are doing just fine.

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@scd is the guy that keeps complaining that the mechanic hasn’t fixed his car, after taking it in for the 20th time because he filled it with diesel.