Congratulations.
You have proven that with the aid of Ctrl-C/V and Chat GPT you can generate garbage faster than anyone can refute it, and with the aid of arrogance and dishonesty you can ignore refutations faster than anyone can type them.
If you think this is winning, then you’ve won.
You don’t seem to get this. The presence of historical archetypes at any level would create discontinuities in phylogenetic trees. If there was an archetype for the great apes, an archetype for horses, an archetype for wolves and dogs, etc, and we try to create phylogenies for these respective groups, there will be no links between these groups at a certain point in time. WE DON’T SEE THOSE DISCONTINUITIES and that makes common descent the only possible explanation for that observation. Having archetypes will produce an orchard (see diagram below) of trees and that’s not what we see in datasets
This is completely irrelevant to the discussion.
That’s completely false. If the designer created archetypes, when we go back far enough into the past using phylogenetic methods, we should find those archetypes and the trees would end there as there was nothing before those archetypes. We don’t see those breaks. You can’t even tell the predictions of your ideas.
Owen’s case and yours are built on the presence of archetypes in history. We don’t see evidence for those archetypes in phylogenies. Darwin won, case closed.
There are no non-random mutations (in the evolutionary sense, which is the only relevant sense here) and you are joking of you think saltations confirm your poorly articulated and hopelessly confused ideas.
That you would lie about what John said is an admission that you know you’ve lost. You are basically conceding defeat.
One might say that declaration of victory is the last refuge of the incompetent.
Debating creationists on the topic of evolution is rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon — it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory.
John is a reasonable guy who is trying to defend a model he has studied all his professional life that is most likely false. The model (quantum) you are proposing on the other hand is also very speculative.
The real issue here that you highlighted is there are multiple trees based on multiple origin events and I agree that is the most likely correct model. This is obvious when you look at the different chromosome and gene arrangements between species.
It is trivial to be the “most likely false” model when there is no alternative model that can begin to compete with it.
It’s not much of a model at all, really. There are no experimental data it uniquely accounts for, nor any logically entailed predictions that can be rendered from it. Its only proponent can barely produce a coherent statement about it, or about any of the subjects it allegedly touches upon, refuses opportunities to demonstrate any actual understanding of any of them, and liberally utilizes a gibberish generator to pad their own original meaningless technobabble with. Even the most speculative models the author pretends to be borrowing from have more merit than has been demonstrated by the author here.
Why do you agree that this is the most likely correct model? What data is this estimate based on?
You mean the sort that not only unambiguously and consistently points to common ancestry for an overwhelming majority of said gene arrangements, but also indicates the same tree of life in all but a statistically insignicant fraction of cases? Why do you reckon such data would make obvious any conclusion it so obviously conflicts with? This is like saying the sky is obviously green when you look at how blue it is…
In your dreams bruv. An excerpt from the lovely article below:
Uploading: Beyond Reasonable Doubt - Evolution from DNA Sequences by Timothy.pdf…
It may be the “last” refuge qualitatively, but serially, I fear it will be far from the final. I am astonished that Meerkat thinks his insane natterings have any value to anyone, especially when half of his words now appear to simply be quotes from a chatbot. “Hey, I’ve filtered my nonsense through a scrambler! That has GOT to make it worthwhile!”
But I have learned some things. In particular, while I had heard it said that if you think you understand quantum physics, you don’t understand quantum physics, I confess that until Meerkat I had never seen this point so convincingly demonstrated.
Creationism and postmodern woo have been converging for some time. One sees it in the cdesign proponentsists, and one sees it in such things as whatever-the-hell-this-is. Facts don’t matter, and the text is all there is, and the assumption is that facts are not needed. The object is to achieve some sort of rhetorical goal, a la Deepak Chopra. That doesn’t work even in Chopra’s case, but he does at least have the skill to sort of make it sound, in the absence of external rebuttal, almost as though he’s saying something real. In this case, it’s amateur hour at the quantum physics bar, and the universe, if conscious, is asking that it stop.
Funnily enough, one of the earlier sources Meerkat linked me to actually had Chopra among its citations.
Anyway, that Richard Feynman quote about understanding quantum mechanics I believe is actually somewhat overused. I wouldn’t try and speak on his behalf, but the way I’d interpret it is not a caution against a flavour of the Dunning-Kruger effect, so much as an expression of bafflement at some of the classically unintuitive features, or perhaps a comfort for students struggling with the intuitions they made the (in any other case innocent) mistake of not leaving at the door. “Understanding” here is used to refer to just this intuitive grasp, but that’s not to say that mankind (or the physics community, as it were) had no clue what to make of quantum stuff at the time, and even more certainly not at all times since. Our civilization is dominated by semiconductor electronics at this point, a technology we would have no control over, if what we thought we knew of quantum mechanics didn’t have at least an overwhelmingly strong overlap with how nature behaves in the relevant parameter regimes to within usefully tight margins of error. If instead of intuitiveness “understanding” is used to mean some capacity to predict and thereby make use of the thing, then certainly we have that nowadays, and there is no folly nor arrogance in asserting as much. The math works, and if that’s not the form of understanding of primary import, then frankly I’d struggle to find any area of physics to claim understanding of.
As for @Meerkat_SK5… while they did say that in order to make their case they needed to have a “basic” understanding of the subject, they never expressly stated that they had said basic understanding. Considering how evasively they reacted to a rather generously wrapped opportunity to prove that they did - much more lenient than what actual beginner students would get - one could charitably conclude that they do not, in fact, believe that they understand said basics to any intersubjectively appropriate seeming extent whatsoever.
I would disagree. Whilst you might take that meaning from the following sentence, taken in isolation:
When you combine it with the following sentence:
… they clearly mean that the “difference” is that they do “know the basics of quantum physics” and that they have “read enough about it online to make [their] case”.
This claim is of course clearly nonsense (as is practically everything else they have written on this forum), as @Meerkat_SK5 has demonstrated no “basic understanding” of this field, nor have they specified any “online” (or other) source that can be credibly be expected to bestow on them such a “basic understanding” of quantum physics.
It occurs to me that a considerable amount of the problem with @Meerkat_SK5’s defective “basic understanding” of science is that what vestigial understanding they do have is rhetorical not analytic – words not concepts.
This contributes to the ‘Cargo Cult’ nature of much of their discourse, that I have commented on before. Things like “predictions” are just words to them, not deeper concepts. This means it is enough for them to simply state that something is a prediction, rather than for it to either meet the scientific (or even basic English) definition of a prediction, let alone fulfill the purpose that a prediction has within the scientific process.
The odd thing is that it is not clear that such a lack of understanding is disqualifying in a Creationist Apologist. It is not at all clear to me that the likes of Ray Comfort and Kent Hovind have a better understanding of science than @Meerkat_SK5 has. But to follow their route to success @Meerkat_SK5 probably would need to do the following:
Keep their claims well away from any actual scientists.
Develop a thick skin for being laughed at by anybody with even a modicum of scientific understanding.
Hardly surprising, since his main sources (the actual ones, not the ones he pretends he’s using) are AIG, RTB and ENV, who do ‘science’ by quoting opinions.
Well… yeah… of course that’s the most obvious on-the-face-of-it reading. And I have in the past argued the same. I was just trying to be maximally charitable, and reference once more the opportunity to regain some credibility.
This, except that I would include data in addition to concepts under the analytics heading. AFAIK, meerkat has not cited even a single datum.
^^^^^^This.
What do mean statistically significant? When you see two vertebrates with different gene arrangements how do you statistically test if they came from a common ancestor? How would you do the same test for different chromosome arrangements.
Methods for testing hypotheses using phylogenetic data have been discussed previously on these forums. I seem to recall you participating in some of those discussions.
More, you can use such data to test hypotheses for Common Descent, for Multiple Origins, or even insertion of de novo design into existing species. So far such tests strongly favor Common Descent. ID researchers could and should be using these methods to support or reject hypotheses for Design, but that never happens. Go figure.
It’s been pointed out to you many times that you can’t do it with two species. Tests work with phylogenetic trees of many species. Also not sure what you mean by “gene arrangements”.
Typically, genomes are enormous data sets, even for modern computers to deal with. Mechanisms by which they change over evolutionary timescales also do very little to ensure size constancy, let alone global alignment. Consequently, genomes cannot be directly compared codon by codon (assuming they have been sequenced fully like that to begin with), but must rather be sequenced in chunks, cut and edited to align large sections. You can think of it as comparing two versions of, say, a text document on a computer. Text editors, too, do very little to prevent a user from deleting, duplicating, or inserting parts of basically arbitrary lengths between two versions. So if a comparison is to be made at all, one cannot commence it character by character, but must instead first identify sections that show overall similarity, align those, and then look at differences.
Identity and difference is therefore only quantifiable at first on a per-chunk basis, with statements about the whole pair of genomes only possible with some statistical analysis. Some compared segments will be shorter than others, some will be more similar, others less similar, and such fluctuations can be quantified by what’s mathematically known as moments of distribution.
Of course, it is not enough to have two genomes to assert without knowing of any further data that they therefore share a common ancestor, or how many generations in the past of each lineage that ancestor would have roughly lived at. Two genomes are insufficient to construct family trees either. My claim is not that any such first analysis would reveal either result. However, knowing how many different loci there are for a mutation to occur, and what it takes for them to spread in a population if they do, and by having access to many, many genomes, we can begin mapping out which changes would have occurred in which lineages and in what order. How, you ask? Well, there is this thing called a likelihood function. It is a means by which confidence can be assigned to a set of competing hypotheses. It tells you how likely it is that one set of assumptions would be consistent with the data set. Generally speaking, and with few exceptions, that the exact same change in the exact same location should occur in several independent lineages is (orders of magnitude) less likely than that the opposite change occurred once in the one lineage that appears to be the exception. Therefore sequence quirks common to more species place these species in a larger category, whereas quirks common to smaller subsets unite them in correspondingly smaller ones. If all organisms of the less represented quirk happen to also share the defining quirk of that larger set, then, without assuming artificially that they must not belong despite meeting the defining criterion, their smaller set is left a subset of the larger.
This analysis naturally produces a nested hierarchy of sets within sets within sets with ever more specific criteria for the finest of subdivisions. What my claim was, is that this branching structure not only occurs for basically any gene one might try and compare over the whole collection of available genomes, but also happens to be almost completely the same structure for all the other genes one subjects to this analysis, with discrepancies occurring at a rate below the confidence the likelihood estimation would have warranted to begin with. That low rate of occurrence, a “signal” that does not rise above what one might rightly call “noise” is what I call “a statistically insignificant fraction of cases”.
