The discussion is about convincing creationists many who are not limited by methodological naturalism and do not see the origin of traits and the origin of species as separate issues.
How do you convince people to drop a dogmatic belief that is actively protected against falsification and contradictory evidence?
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For example, the simplistic idea that there are:
This idea isn’t supported by the evidence; it’s a prediction of your design hypothesis that is objectively false.
How do we get someone who ignores the evidence to give that up, Bill?
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So you seek to hide behind unnamed other folks, disclaiming all opinions of your own. That isn’t really an effective tactic. Aren’t those creationists who fail to see those issues as separate just wrong? And doesn’t methodological naturalism have nothing to do with it?
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The discussion was with Neil and the motivation for creationists skepticism about affirming common ancestry of primates including humans.
There are two sides to the discussion and at this point I believe the creationist position is more coherent as inference from a pattern is at best a partial test of the claim unless you invoke methodological naturalism.
Almost all of the creationists I have talked to agree that if evolution is true then we should observe a nested hierarchy. They claim that separate creation will also necessarily produce a nested hierarchy which is completely incoherent.
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I remember back to when I was around 4 years old. I was looking at a dog. And I wondered “Are we just animals”. I concluded that we probably were.
A few month later, I was taken on my first visit to the zoo (or the first that I was old enough to remember). And it was clear that, as animals go, we were far more like monkeys than like other animals.
That was probably a better inference from a pattern than anything that comes from creationists.
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Claiming that a position is more coherent in the middle of an incoherent sentence is not a good look. And you dodge the point. Do you actually think that the origin of species and the origin of traits are the same question?
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It gets even more obvious when you look at our ape cousins.
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It depends of the specific claim and the rules for interpreting that claim.
If you are claiming that two species share a common ancestor by biological reproduction and associated variation due to geographic isolation then yes you need to explain how this process generated the new traits in order to completely support the claim.
How do you support the claim if you ignore the cause of the appearance of the new traits? How would you eliminate special creation (or different starting points) of some kind?
“If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell”–Carl Sandburg
Since you are arguing against the rules of the scientific method you apparently don’t think the facts are on your side.
We already have explained it. Mutation, neutral drift, and natural selection.
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Not an answer, just an avoidance of answering, and an incoherent one. More incoherence follows. Nobody claims that variation is due to geographic isolation, and if they did that would be a claim about the origin of traits, not the origin of species. Species share common ancestry by biological reproduction, period. How or why lineages change over time is irrelevant except that the changes provide us with clues about relationships.
What claim? If it’s the one in the preceding sentence, that already conflates the two separate questions, and so is merely another instance of your core confusion.
Easy: We would not expect special creation to produce a nested hierarchy. We would expect common descent to produce a nested hierarchy. We see a nested hierarchy. What can you conclude?
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Mutations generate new traits. Its that simple.
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As I have already tried to explain to @colewd : Phenotype is not even necessarily relevant to this question.
If we were evaluating “genomes” randomly generated by a computer algorithm, we could determine whether or not they were related by common ancestry by testing whether they fall into a nested hierarchy.
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I wouldn’t expect randomly generated genomes to produce a largely consistent nested hierarchy since one can get an uncountable amount of trees from any sequence data.
I personally don’t think the nested hierarchy is powerful enough own its own to determine cause(s).
In using the scientific method in industry I never saw a root cause identified simply because the data could be fit into a tree.
Hence my previous comment.
How do you convince people to drop a dogmatic belief that is actively protected against falsification and contradictory evidence?
There are a lot of flat earthers that aren’t convinced by the evidence for a globe earth, and yet the Earth is still round.
That loud slapping sound you hear is a million hands hitting a million foreheads.
Is this your argument now? If something is evidence then it needs to be evidence for every single hypothesis in existence?
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Perhaps your experience is inadequate to the purpose. Perhaps someone who actually does exactly this sort of thing might be a better guide. Do you know anyone like that? And in fact I doubt you have ever “in industry” seen any data that fit a tree.
And when you say “cause”, what are you talking about the cause of? I think your central confusion between types of causes — of nested hierarchies and of traits — is hiding in that word.
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Not to be too nitpicky, but I don’t think this can just be dismissed as a straw man. Ahmed is making an argument based on the RNA world hypothesis, not just redefining the RNA world hypothesis into a straw man.
Ahmed, the extinction of RNA-based life is entirely consistent with natural selection. If their DNA-based descendants were more metabolically and reproductively fit, they could have outcompeted their RNA-based ancestors to extinction.
Why is this not a plausible and satisfactory explanation?
RNA-based protocells being “resilient and successful enough to ignite the evolutionary engine beyond the Darwinian threshold” may not have been enough to outcompete their more metabolically fit DNA-based cousins. If you don’t agree, then you would have to argue for why RNA-based protocells would necessarily be more successful than their DNA-based counsins.
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Ahmed is making an argument based on the notion that the RNA world hypothesis predicts/assumes/requires “RNA-based autonomously living organisms”. Since it does no such thing, he is in fact redefining it and creating a strawman of the RNA world hypothesis.
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