Claptrap. Now there’s a word I haven’t heard in a long time. I love it…
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ENV (and CRI and AiG) have similar articles every time pretty much every time someone publishes a new alignment between Human and Pan (Chimpanzee) DNA, so every year or two. We see different numbers for measuring the similarity, but this never indicates the Human and Pan are less closely related than we previously understood. It’s not like Human are now more closely related to shrews or cantaloupes or something else, Pan are always the closest living relative to Human.
To overturn our understanding would require a new finding that is substantially different, for example Humans and Gorillas now being ranked as closer relative than Humans and Pan. THAT HAS NOT HAPPENED, but if it did it still wouldn’t help the YEC cause, it would only change our understanding of the evolutionary relationship.
Humans and cantaloupes tho … that would turn some heads. 
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Yes. To put that more specifically: It remains the case that our last common ancestor with chimpanzees existed more recently than did our most recent common ancestor with any other species now alive. The most that would be changed by differing degrees of similarity is the estimate of when that MRCA existed.
It is really a sorry state of affairs that creationists have to resort to so many errors and lies, all in an attempt that, even if successful, still wouldn’t debunk common ancestry.
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Assuming this is true (and @jeffb has done nothing to deny this), I just don’t see the point. There is nothing remarkable about consuming nothing but material designed to reinforce a particular view. Someone who spends all their time reading flat Earth literature could convince themselves the Earth is flat. Someone who reads nothing but UFO conspiracies will convince themselves aliens are visiting the planet.
It would be more interesting to see if Jeff has the awareness to recognize this cognitive bias and step away from that to actually assess what he is consuming in a more objective fashion. But based on what has been posted so far (boilerplate creationist soundbites), I can’t imagine we’ll get to that point.
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On this note, have any creationists ever constructed phylogenetic trees to test their ideas? Especially the notion that designed objects would result in trees that mimic natural evolution.
I can’t recall ever seeing creationists put this to the test.
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“trcuk”
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Oh yes, I’ve seen that and have been through that thread a number of times. I applaud you for testing different ‘design’ scenarios and demonstrating the difference in phylogenetic trees versus via from evolution.
I find it curious that we don’t see the same from creationists, in putting these ideas to the test. While I’m not expecting your average lay-creationist to do so, I would think the professionals should have enough knowledge to be able to generate some phylogenetic trees. Certainly the software is available to do so, including using character set matrices as a data source.
I can only speculate that some of them have tried this and when they didn’t get the results they expected, they declined to publish the results. The best I’ve seen from the professionals is drawing fake phylogenetic trees of designed objects while making unsupported claims. I suppose they know that your average creationist won’t really care whether those ideas have been rigorously tested or demonstrated.
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There are published examples demonstrating how this could, and should, be done. There are newer examples now, but these were the first ones I because aware of.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09014
The first two are “throwing down the gauntlet” for IDC researchers to test their own ideas, and showing how it is done. The third goes into why we don’t see more such articles.
A very reasonable speculation. There is a story (somewhere on PT, I think) about Anne Gauger’s experience with one of her own experiments evolving in the lab.
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Two points:
First, as your third article postulates, I think the reason we don’t see more formal tests of common descent is the same reason we don’t see more formal tests of the number of protons in a carbon atom. It’s just not scientifically interesting to test a well-established fact.
Second, every phylogenetic analysis showing strong hierarchical structure in the data is an informal test of common descent. The most common evidence of structure is high bootstrap support for most nodes.
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This is where I see a contradiction in the creationist view of phylogenetics. Most creationists would accept phylogenetics relationships within families (e.g. Canidae, Felidae, Ursidae, etc.).
If you were to use the same data sets and methodology to create a phylogenetic tree showing relationships both within and between those families, creationists would typically consider the latter is invalid.
At the same time, I don’t see creationists offering any means to distinguish between valid or invalid phylogenetic relationships.
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Some years ago there was a young Ph.D. (in a relevant scientific field) at Answers in Genesis who surprised everyone by quietly leaving. No explanation was ever officially given and he has remained mum over the years. But a couple of semi-insiders I knew told me that the actual reason was that he wanted Ken Ham to line-item some funding for actual research projects of that sort and Ham had absolutely no interest. He got so frustrated that he left.
Yes, that is not a lot more than hearsay but it certainly fits the “atmosphere” that I recall from my YEC days of long ago. There were deep-pockets Christian businessmen who would have donated big bucks for whatever projects the key YEC celebrities requested—yet they always seemed to allocate the money to feeding the promotional beast and putting out more printed materials. They never seemed interested in helping sponsor scientific research. I remember conversations where I said, “Why not put in the work, publish the results, and show the world that your ideas are not only Biblically-based but scientifically sound?” I got answers like, “The issues have already been settled. Didn’t you read The Genesis Flood carefully enough?”
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Can you guess a reason creationists don’t do more research?
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Which is exactly the challenge I put to @jeffb 4 years ago.
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Don’t have to guess. Already know.
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… outside of what the Bible says. The one, critical relationship which is invalid by definition, is between humans and anything else. If you suggest otherwise, you cannot remain as a ‘person in good standing’ in a Creationist organization. All else is negotiable.
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The practical problem this poses for creationists is that any scientific method used to demonstrate “kinds” (defined as organisms related thru descent from a common ancestor) either connects humans to chimps, or results in a huge number of “kinds,” many of which are so similar to each other that it beggars belief to say they are unrelated, and which could not conceivably have all fit on an ark.
I predict that, in 20 years, YEC’s will be no closer than they are today to solving this vexing problem.
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It’s not vexing if you stick to hearsay and rigorously avoid examining evidence for yourself.
The curiosity seems to have evaporated.