Adam, Eve and Population Genetics: A Reply to Dr. Richard Buggs (Part 1)

Just to expand on this, some argue that homoplasy is evidence against common descent.

Convergence is a common characteristic of life. This commonness makes little sense in light of evolutionary theory.
Convergence: Evidence for a Single Creator by Fuz Rana of RTB
http://stag.reasons.org/explore/publications/facts-for-faith/read/facts-for-faith/2000/09/30/convergence-evidence-for-a-single-creator

The pervasive pattern of homoplasy, which is the term evolutionists use for similarities that cannot be explained by any conceivable pattern of common ancestry, undermines the logic of the argument. Common design explains all similarities, both homologies and homoplasies, but evolution cannot explain the pervasive homoplasies.3 The camera eye, evolutionists say, must have evolved independently six times! Labelling such things as due to ‘convergent evolution’ is pure circular reasoning and lacks any explanatory power.
Is evolution true?

Well, we see homoplasy in human variation, which everyone agree arise from common ancestors (at least down to 4 alleles). In fact, we see much more homoplasy in human HLA alleles than we do between species. That means we expect to see homoplasy in species level variation too.

This is hardly evidence, then, against common descent. It is what we expect from non-neutral evolutionary processes.

For those who have been following this for a while, we also see homoplasy in cancer too (https://biologos.org/blogs/guest/cancer-and-evolution), but we refer to it by a different name. We call it in cancer biology “recurrent mutations,” but we could just as easily call them homoplasies. The prediction from common descent is that DNA falls into nested clades, for the most part, but not exactly. We know there are processes that break this pattern.

Most DNA will fall into nested clades, but some will not. The structure of the biological world is nested clades, but not perfect nested clades. This not just a circular reasoning rescue for evolution, because we can see this arise in both cancer and human variation. So this is just an empirical and theoretical expectation of evoultion.


This, also is very closely related to some prior conversation with @Cornelius_Hunter about what common descent predicts vs design.

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Signal and Noise - #19 by Swamidass

Notice that Remine argues that a common designer means natures should be in perfect nested clades (high CI). However, Fuz Rana argues that convergent evolution (which breaks the nested clade pattern) is evidence of a common designer (low CI). Instead, we find out that evolutionary theory (with common descent) can tell us why some features break the pattern, and others follow it.

The data fits neither Fuz or Remine’s model of a creator. Instead we find that God designed us through a process of common descent. Or at least the evidence looks that way. This is not evidence against design, but it evidence that God’s design principle was common descent.

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