The Argument Clinic

[Meerkat_SK5]

@T_aquaticus

So why do me and my siblings have common designs? Isn’t it due to common descent?

Let me first define it for you…

Common design: To create and develop animals through the common process of HGT for the common purpose of surviving, reproducing, and pioneering different environments.

Universal common designer: universal self-collapsing genetic code shown by the shared DNA among all living organisms (i.e., objective reduction).

Both common design and common descent are two different explanations that explain the same data, such as why you and your siblings have the same genes. However, they make different predictions and models.

@T_aquaticus

Also, a nested hierarchy does not point to common design. it points to common descent. Human designs do not fall into a nested hierarchy. Common descent is the only process that we know of that necessarily produces a nested hierarchy.

I have already showed you all the studies showing how HGT explains the same patterns

@T_aquaticus

So it is very misleading to pretend as if all ERV’s serve this function.

I am not pretending but predicting based on the model that 80% of ERV’s are functional.

@T_aquaticus

Nor is it required for different species to have the same ERV at the same orthologous base in each of their genomes in order to have this function. Only common descent can explain why we see a pattern of orthologous ERV’s.

Not true, God needs to use this common mechanism to carry out the same purposes.

For instance, a different study I gave you from Kazuaki Monde et al. also revealed that “the strict dependence of HERV-K on SOX-2 has allowed HERV-K to protect early embryos during evolution while limiting the potentially harmful effects of HERV-K retrotransposition on host genome integrity in these early embryos.”

@T_aquaticus

That’s how common descent works. More importantly, common descent necessarily produces a nested hierarchy when there is vertical inheritance. Common design is not required to follow a nested hierarchy. What do we see? A nested hierarchy.

@T_aquaticus

No, it doesn’t. For example, cars don’t fall into a nested hierarchy. There is absolutely no design reason why life should fall into a nested hierarchy other than common descent.

Let me explain it this way then….

Every living creature on Earth uses the same code, in which DNA stores information using four nucleotide bases. The sequences of nucleotides encode information for constructing proteins from an alphabet of 20 amino acids. Why were these numbers chosen rather than some other numbers?

Patel showed how quantum search algorithms explain why these numbers were chosen. [22] To summarize, if the search processes involved in assembling DNA and proteins are to be as efficient as possible, the number of bases should be four, and the number of amino acids should be 20.

In other words, to address a common set of problems faced by organisms possessing different characteristics and living in different habitats, a single optimal solution must be employed. This means that if we replay the evolutionary history of life, it would lead to identical or nearly identical outcomes. An experiment has revealed that this quantum search algorithm is itself a fundamental property of nature. [23]

So there is a reason why life needed to be this way. If things were any different, we would not even be able to ask the question in the first place because we wouldn’t exist.

[22] [quant-ph/0002037] Quantum Algorithms and the Genetic Code

[23] [1908.11213] The Grover search as a naturally occurring phenomenon

@John_Harshman

Again, nothing to do with the parasitism of ichneumon wasps on caterpillars.

What do you mean. It has everything to do with them because wasps on caterpillars are displaying animal death and carnivorous activity.

@John_Harshman

That’s not Owen’s archetype theory, which has no necessary connection to saltationism; it’s just that Owen was also a saltationist. Note again that saltational transitions do not deny common descent.

Yes, it is part of his theory John and saltations does involve sudden and discontinuous changes as the article suggested above:

Owen was a pivotal figure in the emergence of the evolutionary view of life forms as indicated by fossils. He was a strong advocate of the notion that the paleontological record is progressive, arguing in an anonymous Quarterly Review (1851) critique of Charles Lyell’s steady-state view of the geological past that the succession of fossils through time shows a distinct development from lower to higher. For Owen, this progressive change was a process guided by divine purpose. He believed in an orthogenetic-saltational process of organic unfolding, driven by an inherent tendency to change, not by contingent, gradualist, and external forces such as natural selection.

The phenomenon of metagenesis provided Owen with a visualizing aid for his notion of evolution. In the booklet On Parthenogenesis, or the Successive Production of Procreating Individuals from a Single Ovum (1849), he described the phenomenon of alternating generations in the reproductive cycles of, for example, aphids, jellyfish, or flukeworms. Characteristic of such metagenetic cycles is that the individual generations can differ in form from each other as much as different species or even genera, families, and orders do.

@John_Harshman

Also note that the fossil record shows missing transitions at the level of species, not higher taxa. And yet you claim that species within a kind share common descent while higher taxa do not, the opposite of what the fossils, naively interpreted, show.

No, my model claims species within a kind share common descent genetically or biochemically and It does not make specific predictions about the fossil record.

@John_Harshman

@Meerkat_SK5

In contrast, my particular common design model is a hypothesize that makes new predictions, but still flows out of that overarching theory. The separate creation of orders and families is one of those new predictions.

And that’s a prediction falsified by the very fossil record you appeal to.

We actually don’t know whether this is true yet according to the common design model. For further research, evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, ecologists, and molecular biologist will need to look for morpho-molecular dissimilarities and/or lack of fossil intermediates among order and family level taxa. Then, they need to use the two-step ecology criteria I described to confidently conclude common design, which would suggest they evolved separately .

@John_Harshman

That has nothing whatsoever to do with your claims except that it includes a few of the same words. You really unerstand almost nothing of what you read, and that’s a problem.

@John_Harshman

@Meerkat_SK5

As I mentioned, Richard Owen’s theory involving a saltational process explains these “strikingly divergent results.”

It doesn’t, you know. It has nothing to do with those results.

I am going to have to rely on Hugh Ross to explain it to you better then:

A fundamental tenet of all naturalistic models for the history of Earth’s life is that natural changes in the genomes of life will be responsible for the observed changes in the physical body structures (morphology) of life. Consequently, evolutionary trees developed from the observed patterns in present-day genomes and the presumed natural rates of change of those genomes (molecular clocks). Assuming that strictly materialistic processes are responsible for the changes occurring throughout the history of life, the phylogenetic trees should match the morphological changes and the timing of those changes observed in the fossil record .

The same kind of match between the paleontology and phylogenetics can be realized if God intervened throughout life’s history. However, apparently only supernatural interventions can explain significant mismatches between phylogenetic and paleontological trees.

@John_Harshman

@Meerkat_SK5

As I mentioned, Richard Owen’s theory involving a saltational process explains these “strikingly divergent results.”

It doesn’t, you know. It has nothing to do with those results

No evolutionary change punctuated by rapid biological innovations matches the patterns predicted if a common design/archetype accounts for life’s history and diversity.

This is because instances of high gene-tree conflict (discordance in phylogenetic signals across genes) in mammals, birds, and several major plant clades correspond to increased rates of morphological innovation.

@John_Harshman

That’s a non sequitur followed by more non sequiturs that claim to support it. This is hopeless.

You are conflating deductive reasoning with inductive ; yet scientific investigations rely on induction, not deduction. There is nothing wrong with concluding, when using inductive reasoning, that the designer is probably human because I am making use of induction (as do all scientists), not deduction.

@Dan_Eastwood

This is evident. There have been many efforts to explain this to you, and you do not grasp the significance. Rather than repeat all that, I’ll take the Socratic approach:

HOW IT SCIENCE THE SAME FOR EVERYONE?

Then, all I can say is that you are wrong. There are researchers on this forum that do think the framework can lead to successful research:

@colewd

@Meerkat_SK5

I don’t view them as the same kind, but two separate created kinds.

Ok so how did you determine this? If you can generate a reasonable standard for determining this that would be a huge step forward.

@Winston Ewert: The Dependency Graph of Life

An interesting and signficant article was published at the Discovery Institute, by @Winston_Ewert : The Dependency Graph of Life, DOI: 10.5048/BIO-C.2018.3. [NOTE: This thread has special rules; read and follow them or there will be consequences] This article is being drummed up by a past interlocutor of @vjtorley and myself (@Cornelius_Hunter) here on this forum thread: It has always been known that the common descent model fails, both from a long list of particular examples, as well as in systematic studies. But what might a better model be? Winston Ewert’s new paper (Ewert 11) presents a dependency graph model, inspired by computer science. The paper uses model selection methods, and shows that the dependency graph model is a far superior model compared to common descent. New Paper Demonstrates Superiority of Design Model - Scientific Evidence - The BioLogos Forum I thought it would be worth discussing this in …

@Mercer

For instance(s), I have moved between fields several times in my career, covering developmental biology, physiology, neuroscience, mouse genetics, cell biology, biochemistry, and cardiology. This idea that competent scientists are constrained is nonsense.

No no no, I did not mean it like that. I mean it is not going to appeal to Christian researchers for emotionally reasons NOT intellectual ones. They would be constrained by how much passion they may have for a particular subject within that field of expertise over another. This is why science cannot be the same for everyone. We all have particular biases that drive us to a particular subject within a field. But, intellectual reasons would play a part in it as well.