If you think that the immune system is simply intracellular, you really shouldn’t be making any claims about it. Perhaps you should read up on it before pontificating? We’ve understood the basic mechanism for decades.
The sickle-cell allele doesn’t create a new protein-protein interaction.
Alpha actin and beta catenin are essentially the same for all vertebrates. Fully interchangeable. In this case the hierarchy is also not nested.
Winston showed that software design will generate a nested hierarchy.
The problem is evolution has a very difficult time explaining how similar gene sequences that live in almost infinite mathematical space can evolve independently. This is argued in the paper that Dan posted. The Howe diagram is essentially the smoking gun.
He actually didn’t, as he had to delete and edit stuff to make it appear, and hasn’t shown the “modules” have no other uses or dependencies in other software.
And he has no explanation for sequences.
That hasn’t happened. Give an example or retract the claim that we need to explain something that never happened.
What does the Howe diagram have to do with any of that? There are no “modules” nor any similar gene sequences with independent origins in that diagram. Don’t tell me you still don’t understand what it shows?
And that’s because software design often uses descent with modification. Unlike hardware - where all you can copy is the design - you can directly modify the source code to create a new version. And that is often done.
It’s not surprising that the design processes that most resemble evolutionary processes will have an outcome more closely resembling the outcome of evolution. Even so, it’s not close enough to justify a conclusion that life is designed - but it is close enough to convince me that descent with modification is even more of a factor in the history of life,
As a single piece of evidence I agree with you that it is not enough to show life is designed. What it does show however that a tree structure is not an adequate test of common descent.
Baloney. That’s like saying DNA evidence can’t be used in court because God could have planted it at the crime scene.
There is no reason to expect a nested hierarchy as the result of design. However, a nested hierarchy is the expected outcome of evolutionary mechanisms. It is a valid test. Even Ewert agrees that it is a valid test:
Ewert specifically states that design should produce many design units that violate a nested hierarchy.
False. The hierarchy remains beautifully nested. That’s one of the most powerful points for evolution and against design, as a designer has no reason to make changes that don’t change function.
Ah, shifting the goalposts, eh? But you still, after all this time, have no clue about what that diagram shows. In fact it consists entirely of orthologous genes, and orthology would not be recognized if not for sequence similarity. The diagram is explained by both gain and loss, but there are no cases in which independent gain is necessary. The overwhelming majority of the genes are explained either by a single gain or by a single loss. The rest can be explained either by two losses or by one gain and one loss.
And independent origin of a similar function is vastly different from independent origin of a similar sequence.
Are you changing your tune suddenly?
Nobody said everything depicted on that diagram is due to deletions alone. So now you’re going to have to give examples. What exactly is it you think has multiple independent origins on the howe diagram? Enough with the mindless references to the diagram, start speaking specifics.
What function? What genes? What sequences and in what organisms? Put up or shut up.
Of course the evidence is more than just the nested tree structure. But when that is the expected outcome of common descent and there is no serious design hypothesis that fits equally well it is a quite telling point,
For design to become scientific it must offer an alternative hypothesis that does account for the pattern at least as well. But even software design does not do that.
At best, that is just an artifact of using a common JavaScript library for limited programs. Try getting from “Hello World” in assembler, to a moon shot written in Fortran, to Call of Duty, by way of a bifurcating tree. You cannot, and that means your statement above is far from general and requires considerable qualification, and such qualification would serve to demonstrate why software design is not analogous to biological common descent.
The problem for evolution is much bigger. The pattern is violating the nested hierarchy in such a way that common descent alone cannot explain it. @John_Harshman demonstrated this when he was forced to make exceptions with his marked up trees.
Now you need a model to show how the violation of the nested hierarchy could have happened. This is not feasible with the currently understood mechanisms IMO. As I said above the pattern does fit Behe’s method of design detection.