The Difficulty with Detecting Design

Read the Romanes quote in the previous post.

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Almost certainly not. The odds against this would be incalculable.

No, you just do not understand the argument. Or science at all, for that matter.

Then why did Darwin himself draw a branching tree as one of the chief pieces of evidence for his hypothesis?

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Anyway, you are still avoiding the main issue:

Please construct a phylogeny of cars using the same methods and techniques that are employed by biologists when constructing phylogenetic trees of organisms.

Thanks in advance.

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Of course he is. He knows he doesn’t know how to construct phylogenies.

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@scd

It might help if you learn about dichotomous keys.

Dichotomous keys are a bit different from cladistic analysis and phylogenetics, but its a good way to get your feet wet.

Any used car website could provide some-one with information on thousands of vehicles each with details of dozens of traits ranging from the number of valves in the engine to the presence/absence of a rear window wiper.

All vehicles can be categorised based on drives. The major families would be
1)Animal/human driven : This would include cycles, bullock carts etc.
2)External combustion engines: Mainly trains running on Steam engines.
3)) Internal combustion engine driven: This would have sub categories such as
a)diesel engines
b) petrol engines: Petrol driven vehicles can be further categorised as two stroke and four stroke.
4) Electrical driven vehicles: Would contain all EV driven vehicles.

  1. Jet propulsion/gas turbines : Would include all modern planes and helicopters.

If you want to root the tree, it can be rooted in the animal/human driven vehicles and further branch forward into categories 2-5 which are automobiles (i.e generate power for motion from mechanisms within itself)
I don’t see how this is not a nested heirarchy.

One obvious problem is that two-stroke and four-stroke engines don’t nest within petrol engines because there are two-stroke and four-stroke diesel engines too.

But the real reason why you don’t see how this is not a nested hierarchy is that you haven’t attempted to represent it as a nested hierarchy, or attempted to fit examples of actual engine designs into it, you’ve merely asserted that it is one.

Until you or Sal actually constructs a nested hierarchy using appropriate techniques, rather than just asserting over and over again that it’s possible, there’s no reason to believe you and lots of reasons not to.

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Because you do not know what a nested hierarchy is. All you did was create 5 arbitrary categories. You have not shown how all vehicles can be grouped into each of the with no overlap between groups, nor how each category can be full enclosed in a series of larger categories, each one of which is also fully contained with no overlap between groups.

Stop wasting our time trying to talk about stuff you don’t understand. TIA.

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Show me a vehicle that creates an overlap without falling into the naive categories.

If categories based on drive are arbitrary, then so are categories such as mammals, reptiles etc.

First show me a sentence in coherent English that I can respond to.

And then empirical evidence can be used to show they all fit into a much larger series of nested hierarchies that can only be reasonably explained by common ancestry.

You haven’t even shown your arbitrary categories form nested groups at a single level, never mind that they fall into a hierarchy.

I bet you don’t even understand what I’m saying, do you?

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It’s not NESTED.

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The point of the nested hierarchy is that a classification based on an arbitrary criterion will be highly similar or the same for other criteria.

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What, another one? Four-stroke diesel engines weren’t a good enough example for you?

Of course they weren’t. No example ever would be, because you’ve decided that vehicles fit into a nested hierarchy just as well as animals do, and nothing will ever change that decision because it’s an assumption, not a conclusion.

But here is another overlap anyway. A vehicle with an internal combustion engine and an electric engine, which can be driven using either (or both). It’s fits in your category 3 and your category 4. It breaks the nesting. So do electric bicycles, bi-fuel cars and some trolleybuses.

It’s ironic that an engineer knows so very little about engines.

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so its simply means that the majority of traits will give us the same tree. right?

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There are similar overlaps in nature too. One example is ovoviviparous organisms like some sharks.

All the objections raised here could be applied to biological classifications also. By that criteria living organisms are also not NESTED.

Then you probably don’t know what “nested” means. Are you claiming that this sequence phylogeny is not nested?

Really? Why are they described as ovoviviparous, while we are described as viviparous?

Its the overall picture that is being discussed here. Every objection raised to the classification of vehicles can be raised for the overall classification of organisms into nested trees. And evolution needs to explain the entire tree.
The fact is that living organisms to do not fall into a perfect nested hierarchies. There is a lot of overlap.