I read his point there as saying that if there is no mechanism, then there is no reproduction, because he sees reproduction as obviously a mechanism.
And now comes the miscommunication.
Here @Timothy_Horton interprets @colewd as denying that reproduction is involved, while @colewd is actually insisting that if there is reproduction then there is mechanism.
There’s no miscommunication. Claiming common descent itself is a mechanism is like claiming footprints are a mechanism. Walking on soft soil is the mechanism which produces footprints but the footprints themselves are not the mechanism, they are just the result. Bill is flat out wrong.
I don’t know why @colewd thinks it important to see common descent as a mechanism. That seems like a silly argument.
The miscommunication is that he is then being criticized for denying that reproduction is involved. But he wasn’t doing that. He was insisting that reproduction is involved, which he sees as making it mechanism.
Neutral evolution is a mechanism, and it is widely accepted, even among creationists. Combined with common descent neutral evolution makes several predictions about DNA that are, in fact, validated in spades.
No. No one said reproduction isn’t involved. Bill claimed common descent itself is a mechanism then tried to bait-and-switch by bringing up reproduction. That’s why he was criticized, for the rather ham-fisted attempt at moving the goalposts.
Uh no. its not just species. its all of biology that is claimed to end up in a common descent.
It simply, simply, is looking at biology and from traits making a conclusion that there was, at any stage backwards, a parent(s) from whence branches flowed from. Then this was carried to a great spectrum that all biology is from some original parent(s). Its a line of reasoning that just would include accurate lineages. One could say common descent is inaccurate sampling as used by modern evolutionism.
This shows there is a excellent point about this that only recently has become popular.
For so long evolutionists, and thier victims, would convince that THE ONLY WAY for similar traits in biology to have appeared is from a common descent. New populations from a parent poulation and this going back to very primitive original biological population(s).
Common design however would demonstrate this too. That there is another option for why biology looks alike! its not demanding that there is only one option. this is a recent accomplishment of creationists of all species. It never came from old school evolutionists. its novel.
We can say a creator created biology EQUALLY with eyeballs etc and they are the same type and its not evidence they all evolved from a common descent population parent.
THEN we can add specialities. that after the main blueprint was made THEN there can be great speciation and when complete one can LOOK at them and say its common descent. And so extrapolate backwards. yet we are not contradicting ourselves. its a special case.
this subject gets heaps of threads/posts because its a future subject that the public will be introduced to.
The thoughtful public aware of common descent claims will be interested and persuaded, for some, that common design is as good or better an idea to explain alikeness in biological organisms.
could it be this is breakthrough in these subjects and to the gain of creationism??
Gentlemen lay your bets.
what about the possibility that god took a genome of an existing creature and made a new creature out of it? after all he did the same with eve (ave was made from adam genome and not from scratch). so why not with other creatures too?
Common on @Robert_Byers1 “For so long evolutionists and their victims” Victims of what? Evolutionary scientists are curing cancer. Show some respect for the science and the people who have contributed to your long life expectancy.
Why would he do that consistently for all of life, arranged in a nested hierarchy? This is omphalos again.
Eve. And nowhere in Genesis does it say anything like that. She was made from his rib. You’re saying that she was his clone? If so, that cuts down the original genome to one diploid, not two. Possibly only one X chromosome. Talk about inbreeding.
This is exactly right. Common descent in itself is an attempt to explain the pattern we are observing. It may not be a mechanism but it is a mechanistic claim. It is a claim that reproduction caused the pattern. If you want to make it a non mechanistic claim you can call the observation common biochemistry.
We already have a natural explanation for the nested hierarchy. Parsimony removes supernatural explanations once we have a natural explanation. If we can propose a supernatural explanation that exactly mimics natural processes then we might as well throw science out the window.
Common ancestry, descent with modification, and vertical inheritance are the mechanisms. If those mechanisms are in operation then we will see a nested hierarchy. That’s the hypothesis. Testing for a phylogenetic signal is a test for those mechanisms.
I love the phrase “evolutionists and their victims”! And Robert is right not to give credit to “evolutionists” who are developing medicines to keep him alive. He’s sensed the real truth – we are just keeping him alive so as to suck his blood. [Cackles maniacally with echoes from the dark corners of the castle].
There are many mechanisms known to produce noise such as homoplasies, convergent evolution, incomplete lineage sorting, gene loss, and lack of species. The noise has been explained.
I don’t think you can sell this. You need to explain how multiple types of eyes separately came into existence. You need to explain how a circulatory system along with a brain, central nervous system, and muscle and skeletal system all irreducibly complex came into existence. There is too much noise here for hand waving.