I would argue there is no such thing as a distinctly different animal since all animals share physical traits of varying degrees in common. There is no clear break points in phylogenetic relationships between taxa.
I also don’t know what you mean by “unique” in the context of biological features. Unique in terms of categorical traits, physical anatomy, genetic sequences, something else?
It’s based on statistics.
I don’t know what you mean by this.
If your word salad can be interpreted, you are saying that we would not expect convergence or homoplasy to result from evolution. But this is grossly wrong, at the most basic level.
No, it’s inferred based on there being no other explanation for the observed pattern.
When was there ever anything that you could make sense of mathematically or any other way? Don’t confuse your personal inability to understand with anything more general.
Claiming no other explanation is based on methodological naturalism.
Again, you’re the only one that doesn’t make sense of the molecular data, which you have never been able to comprehend and have seldom even tried to.
What explanation do you have, based on anything you like?
And to add to the above, does the explanation in question offer anything beyond “designer-did-it”? Because that is currently where ID ends.
That animals were created in their current form.
Explaining the origin of a novel animal population is beyond natural science. In the same way that the origin of life and matter is beyond the reach of natural science.
But that doesn’t explain the nested hierarchy. It doesn’t in fact explain anything. And it contradicts a great many observations in addition to the hierarchy, e.g. the fossil record.
Oddly enough, natural science persists in being able to explain such origins. Go figure.
Which is the “designer-did-it” response I pointed out above. Does ID offer anything beyond this?
As an example, can ID explain why whales and fish have different undulation of their movements in water?
Evolutionary biology explains this by way of how whales evolved from terrestrial mammals. If instead whales were created from scratch, what is the explanation?
What exactly is a “novel animal population”?
When?
(also: How?)
It does not contradict any of this evidence where universal common descent does. It explains genes in zebra fish and humans being shared. It explains innovations like echo location being shared in very different animals. It explains flight being possible in mammals and birds. It explains the fossil record having animals that are in completed functional form.
It generates a model that population genetics can work with. The model that methodological naturalism is forcing does not.
But how does ID explain these things? “Designer did it” isn’t really an explanation.
For example, how does invoking a designer explain the differences in bird and bat wing anatomy? While both are modified forelimbs used for flight, the underlying anatomy is not the same between birds and bats.
Hi E
ID only tells you that natural science has hit a wall. This is a limited explanation but at least you know you are at a wall and you don’t continue to push a model that you cannot reconcile.
Except that natural science hasn’t hit a wall. Evolutionary biology has actual mechanisms, processes, reconstructions, etc., as to how things have evolved and the drivers of said evolution.
I can use evolution and shared ancestry to explain why the motion of whales is different from the motion of fish.
I can’t use ID to give me an explanation. ID is a dead end that never moves beyond “designer did it”.
I agree evolutionary biology has many useful tools. They are useful in explaining changes to existing populations.
The model should support this capability.
Cf Adams, Milne, Orwell, Grahame, O’Brien, …
It’s more than that, as I’ve repeatedly illustrated by pointing out that evolution can explain the difference between whale and fish movements, owing to the evolution of whales from terrestrial mammals.
How does ID explain the difference between whale and fish movement?
It would be weird if it explained changes to non-existing populations.
We know from empirical observations, that phenotypic traits of a mature organism can differ from those of their closest empirically confirmed relatives because of difference in the DNA of the cells they grew out of. We know from empirical observations, that the genome is what influences the phenotype, for it is present in the organism’s cells long before many of the phenotypic traits arise, and scarcely changes between those two times. We know that DNA is a chemical substance that can and does carry heritable traits from parent to offspring. DNA is a very long polymer, the monomers of which have a degree of freedom in what nucleotide base pair they are comprised of.
None of these observable facts are in any sort of dispute whatsoever, and none of them are based on any philosophical presuppositions. None of them are logically or physically necessary.
Now we are faced with a large array of populations of organisms whose genotypes share traits in a nested fashion, where some subsets are more similar internally than they are to anything outside, naturally providing for a genus-differentia-definition of the clade in question.
Because the sharing and passing on of genotypic traits is inheritance more or less by definition, the conclusion is that the nested tree of features within the substance of inheritance is, indeed, a family tree.
Along comes Bill Cole, The Incredulous. 'Tis a bias, he proclaims. To conclude that the inheriting of heritable traits reflects an inheritance based relationship is folly, surely, enabled but through some spiritual commitment to capital-M Methodological capital-N Naturalism.
Silly assertion. Of course it contradicts the fossil evidence. We see a pattern in that evidence that shows new species appearing in connection with prior, similar species. The biota changes over time in a quite systematic way.
No it doesn’t, because it explains nothing. In order for a hypothesis to explain data it has to entail expectations of what will and will not be observed. Predictions, if you like. Separate creation of species gives us no expectation that zebrafish and humans will share genes, or that they won’t. But if you recall, common descent gives us the expectation that gene gain and loss will fit the same tree more often than not, as I have repeatedly shown you. Common descent wins on the evidence.
No, it explains none of that, since there are no expectations of separate creation. In fact, separate creation would seem to suggest that there should be no such higher groupings of species as “mammal” or “bird”. Why should one species resemble another? What connection do they have?
So, of course, does evolution, as any animal not in a functional form is dead. But of course that depends on what you mean by “completed”. If modern birds are “completed”, what about Archaeopteryx? Does “completed” even mean anything at all to you other than whatever happens to exist in a species?