Hi Bill,
Science certainly does have some limits. In particular, it cannot speak to any divine causality or purpose that might stand outside the normal operations of the universe. I believe that God did create the universe, that God has made self-revelation to prophets and above all in a Nazarean carpenter turned rabbi, and that God upholds even the “normal” operations of the universe by the mighty power of what is sometimes called providence. None of my beliefs are based in science, but in other ways of knowing.
That said, science is extremely useful for understanding those normal, God-ordained operations of the universe. That you stand so doggedly against the work of scientists working in biology mystifies me; why should we not welcome the work of those who think God’s thoughts after Him, to paraphrase Johannes Kepler?
Neil Shubin, an evolutionary biologist, has explained the relationship between genetic mechanisms and major transitions quite brilliantly. His work was described to you in this post, which was accompanied by a link to detailed information.
If you possess some evidence of why Shubin’s (and many others’) work on HOX genes is wrong, by all means please share this evidence. And you might win the Finlay Prize while you’re at it. Otherwise, I am puzzled that you would repeat such an ill-informed statement about the work of biologists.
Scientists need a model with testable predictions. I am not aware of any model of separate ancestry that makes quantifiable, testable predictions. Are you?
In the meanwhile, statistical tests have been used to ascertain which genes were present in the LUCA population:
Nothing is stopping a genomic comparison of common ancestry (CA) vs. separate ancestry (SA) models other than the lack of a suitable SA model.
Given a suitable SA model, statistical methods can be applied to genomic data. A very interesting, peer-reviewed paper compared common ancestry of primates to three distinct SA models, and found that the CA model was astronomically more likely, given primate genomic data.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/evo.12934
If you cannot access this publication, the free prepub is available on BioArxiv:
There is only one thing preventing this technique from being applied more broadly: the lack of an SA model that makes sufficiently detailed predictions as to be testable with genomic sequence data.
Respectfully,
Chris Falter