If I didn’t realize how they were using the term (for years and years) … I think the odds are that when Cladograms started to come into use the practitioners literally had no other term in their heads.
It’s only now that there is an organized desire to stop using the term transitional… and replace it with the last available English word:
Intermediate. !!!
Once I learned what exactly was being done with cases and cladistics… I developed a mild distaste for the whole discipline.
There are so much less confusing and more persuasive lines of evidence.
No adjective in front of evolution is necessary. The science is the same for atheistic evolution, theistic evolution, evolutionary creation, Darwinian evolution, Neo-Darwinian evolution. Just say EVOLUTION and that will be taken to mean the entirety of our present (2018) understanding of the theory of evolution.
George, do you happen to be aware of the “Pattern Cladists”, who on logical grounds refused to use cladistics to support common descent, but as an exercise in parsimony, and found they got better results when they did so. Colin Patterson of the British Museum of Natural History is maybe the most famous example.
An inside story by one of the early followers of this model of cladistics is told by Olivier Rieppel in ther unpromising-sounding Turtles as Hopeful Monsters. It gives great insight into the science of turtles itself (as a specific example), and more interestingly the human processes of science which get us there, not sparing the imponderable questions, disagreements, axiomatic disciplinary assumptions and power politics.
But for the purposes of this discussion, it is another reminder that nested hierarchies are compatible with common descent, but not determinative of it - and that the comparison of features morphological or genetic, however carefully done (as in cladistics) will inevitably yield tree patterns because they are tree-building methodologies.
Patrick I don’t know what your damage is… But you have no sense of what communicates the correct information to some of these Creationists.
@Ashwin_s is particularly difficult to work with if you don’t precisely distinguish which kind of Evolution I mean… and even then, he complains about this or that not being valid.
As for the Science being the same … gosh… have you noticed we aren’t arguing over whether the Science is the same?
We have been disputing the difference in the THEOLOGICAL implications.
No… I had not heard of this group. And I feel vindicated!
@Marty will certainly remember the day I came into the digital meeting area… slowly shaking my keyboard from side to side… so very disappointed to learn what Cladograms INTENTIONALLY are made to do.
Frankly…im going go avoid those schematics like the plague in the future!
I am aware of this stream…thanks to @jongarvey for reminding me of them again.
As to the more mainstream cladograms based on descent, I think they are an important part of science… atleast they tell us how difficult it is to classify organisms in “trees”. I personally believe an experiment that fails is as important to science as one that succeeds. Without phylogenetics, we wouldn’t have understood that genes do not fall into a strictly tree like pattern.
As you are aware, I also do not take tgeir finding a as proof of common descent. However, I appreciate their systematic approach to the question of descent.
I’ve tried to understand what Patterson and Co were getting at, apart from epistemological purity, which is sufficient reason in itself. Patterson himself believed in common descent, and wrote against “Creationists” taking his statements that cladistics does not endorse evolution to mean that … cladistics does not endorse evolution!
I guess (reading the Pattern Cladist Rieppel’s book as that of a stickler for truth within professional constraints) that they conclude that the cladograms disagree with any tree-type phylogeny sufficiently greatly and frequently to suggest that common descent is significantly less than the whole story.
That’s important, because it contradicts those who say that “Extended Synthesis” mechanisms, not to mention things like ID or special creation without a seat at the table, are simply minor noise that can be disregarded in comparison to the Truth of population genetics.
I guess that would also leave wriggle room for your “directional nudges” to be visible in the evidence, if not subject to proof. It certainly provides justification for using terms like “macroevolution” and “microevolution”.
For Rieppel himself, as his “Turtles as Hopeful Monsters” title suggests, the question of evolutionary mechanism is still very much open. That’s true for me, too - but once alerted, I can’t help noticing how, despite the “tree of life is done and dusted rhetoric”, every time I look at an actual taxon in detail, it’s full of doubts and contradictions about origins.
To parody the common type of argument heard at BioLogos, “Why would God give life the appearance of disrupted common descent if he wanted us to believe in common descent?”
The irrelevancy of cladograms to proving common descent seems reasonable… though there are no doubt a few well-considered schematics that don’t over-reach and follow the pertinent genetic traits acceptably well.
Think if it as: an artist’s painting can’t PROVE who someone is related too… but it can give information or insights to the observor to help him or her look more efficiently.
Getting back to “Common descent”… are you a fan of the idea of speciation of Ark survivors into presently known lufe forms as the animal diaspora radiates into multiple empty ecological niches?
