The Current Status of Ewert's Dependency Graph of Life

Like what? You never brought this up.

No, I did explain this as well. The material mechanism of HGT in the form of viruses explains the existence of ERV and psuedogenes because they are the result of that process. For instance, God created and designed viruses in order to act as a defense mechanism against incoming harmful viruses and the ceRNA hypothesis explains the other teleological reason.

Ewert’s model is a scientific hypothesis defining how design might appear (the form in could take - a dependency graph) and how it could be detected using accepted scientific methods. If supporting evidence were found, this would comprise positive evidence for an ID hypothesis. This is IMPORTANT because it’s the first example of an ID researcher putting their ideas to a scientific test. (There are other example fromID critics.) Ewert correctly posed a testable scientific model and I applaud the effort.

It’s also wrong, falsified. No harm in that - MOST scientific hypotheses end up being wrong, in the whole or in part. This is how science progresses, discard the models that are wrong, refine the models that aren’t completely right. Rinse and repeat until we have a model with nothing left that needs to be fixed.

“All models are wrong, but some models are useful.”
–George Box

(And Winston, if you are reading this, I really don’t mean this as faint praise. You are the first real ID researcher in history.)

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@Meerkat_SK5 Found it!

Related thread search here.

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[quote=“Rumraket, post:117, topic:3735”]

I not aware of any work on this by RTB now.

I bring it up constantly. You just ignore it. We know enough about phylogeny to say that there is only one “basic type”. We know this from molecular data of various sorts, from morphological data, and from the very good fit of stratigraphic data to the phylogenetic tree. You can’t even identify one basic type, on the other hand, nor can any of the creationists you keep appealing to.

It doesn’t, you know. HGT doesn’t cause pseudogenes, and it doesn’t even cause ERVs. (But retroviruses can be vectors for HGT, which is quite a different thing.)

But it doesn’t. HGT doesn’t explain how that works. Nor does explain why ERV insertions fit the standard phylogeny so well, as do their sequences. It’s just an ad hoc hypothesis with no justification.

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I agree, except I would say that it is the appearance of only one basic type or LUCA that HGT created

Again, fossil discontinuities and sudden appearances in the fossil record would be examples of basic types for the model I present.

Studies show the opposite, actually:

Phylogenomic conflict coincides with rapid morphological innovation | PNAS

Fossil Discontinuities: Refutation of Darwinism & Confirmation of Intelligent Design - Gunter Bechly - YouTube

I am really not following you here. Are you telling me that the ceRNA hypothesis and ERV’s don’t involve viruses or RNA? If your answer is No, then you will be conceding my point.

No, it does:

“RNA viruses can be engineered to interact with the host miRNA pathways, and miRNAs can be used to control viral tropism.”

RNA viruses and the host microRNA machinery | Nature Reviews Microbiology

God/ Orch-OR theory would be genetically engineering RNA viruses to those processes. The mechanisms that confirm this claim are well-established. I argued this in the topic “would this origin of life model work”.

I have one for you:

A = Ω

:wink:

Okay. Cool story bro. Keep the faith I guess.

All I can say is that you’re deluding yourself in part by your inability to fully grasp and deal with the totality of the big picture. Dependency relationships, or biased HGT, do not explain the consilience of so many different types of data.

Instead of a single coherent framework that makes sense of all of the data from molecular biology and biochemistry, development/embryology, behavior, physiology and anatomy, geology and stratigraphy, and so on(changes in the isotopic composition of the rock and atmospheric records, during the rise of oxygenic photosynthesis for example, can be shown to correlate with phylogentic reconstructions of the evolutionary origin of photosynthetic organisms), you are focusing on only a small handful of examples and invoking very disparate kinds of ad-hoc explanations to try to account for them.

You don’t actually have any coherent theory of design that involves these concepts, you just have a collection of disconnected and undeveloped, totally hopeless rationalizations that you regurgitate and describe by name only in response to calls for a better explanation for the data.

One could spend a lifetime listing and explaining examples that NONE of your hypothetical future creationist models have any explanation for. I barely know where to even begin. Try the ability of scientists using phylogenies to infer and recreate ancient ancestral genes, show their ancestral functions, the mutational pathways through which they diverged and evolved into extant genes, and their correlation with environmental changes in the geological record.

But all organisms are related, not just those that share common ancestry in the recent past. Also, you’re honestly not making any sense. Aren’t you supposed to argue against common descent by positing the dependency graph as a superior explanation to the tree of life? If you’re only restricting the dependency graph explanation to organism that share recent ancestry, doesn’t that mean you reject even recent ancestry? What shares ancestry, then, if anything, and how do you know? If consistent hierarchical signal is not, in your view, evidence for common descent, because you want to say a dependency graph makes for a superior explanation for this hierarchical signal, then how do you propose to even determine what, if anything, shares ancestry?

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If you really look at it, this scenario doesn’t hold up. So what you would say is not compatible with the data.

Then the basic types are species. Get your story straight. There are very few cases in the fossil record of smooth transitions between species.

Sigh. Yet another study that doesn’t say what you think it says. Please stop citing papers you haven’t read that don’t say what you imagine.

What basic types does Bechly identify? How? Did you even watch the video?

No. I’m telling you that pseudogenes don’t result from horizontal transfer and neither do ERVs.

So? Nothing to do with horizontal transfer. Nothing, in fact, to do with how gene regulation works in chordates. You persist in citing articles that don’t say what you think they do. And this has nothing to do with phylogeny either.

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Intelligent Design Creationism is not marketed towards people who can think properly. Bill is paradigmatic of its target audience.

Yeah, great for him. And by his refusal to acknowledge the falsification of his hypothesis he only further demonstrates that ID Creationism is, through and through, an exercise in deception. So that’s another valuable service he has provided.

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What evidence do you have that his theory is falsified?

No time or patience for your sealioning today, Bill. The answer has already been given.

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Where or by who?

As if we needed further confirmation that you do not pay serious attention to a single thing people say here


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The issue may be what you mean by falsification. To you it may simply mean someone like @John_Harshman said there are problems with the theory.

If someone pointing out that there are problems with the theory is the standard for falsification then someone like @Paul_Nelson1 could easily falsify universal common descent as a overall theory.

Hi Bill,

This assertion is precisely wrong. Such a model has in fact been published recently:

Best,
Chris Falter

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Hi Chris
Thanks for posting this. I don’t see how the model gets from non coding NC DNA to a functional gene through reproduction and natural variation. Without this the reasoning is based on historical extrapolation appealing to similar sequences in NC DNA.

Do you see it differently?

Then you have a problem no-one here can help you with.

Well yeah, making scientific predictions are a matter of faith. So what’s your point?

I agree, it’s the universal common design model as a whole that explains all the data. HGT and the dependency graph are just aspects of that overall model to make it robust and better than common descent because HGT does not go far enough to explain the phylogenetic patterns.

All organism appear to be related phylogenetically according to the Universal common design model. Again, we can explain it a different way based on what I presented in the Origin of life model we discussed before.

No, I have never presented my argument in the same fashion as ID theorists, which is what I think is the reason for this disconnect.

Instead, the question is whether evolution was a guided ( universal common design) process by a Divine mind or unguided ( universal common descent) process by natural selection. That being said, my model does accept a limited form of common ancestry BUT I can’t tell you yet which groups of organisms share designs versus share ancestry because an OEC version of Baraminology has not been fully developed yet .

Now, here are some of my model’s differences from Universal common descent:

(A) Functional/sequence convergence (i.e. dependecy graph)

(B) Widespread examples of convergent evolution

(C) Functional pseudogenes and ERV’s