Suppose a fossil is found in the future that is clearly a mammal, but has feathers. Would it falsify common ancestry?
I think scientists would just point to the similarity between two phenomenon and claim convergent evolution. And of course, those “crazy” creationists will be left arguing like you did above.
When there is no fossil evidence. Evolutionists will justify their story based on the lack of evidence and say evidence of this sort would falsify the theory.
When there is fossil evidence, they will tweak the story and the fossil evidence which was supposed to falsify evolution will become one of the champions of the theory.
This has been going on for 150 years.
Edit: Refer to people like Dawkins using convergent evolution as an argument for the inevitability of the phenomenon!
End of edit.
So I am clear that little things like mammals with feathers would never falsify common ancestry.
Your premise is that Evolution is wrong… and so any attempt to explain an anomaly must be an injustice.
And each time you dip your pen into some toxic ink, you keep coming up with a SINGLE anomaly… and what would we do about it?
What if I challenged you with a single anomaly … that you prayed to God the Father, and you heard his voice… just like he was in the room with you … and he said:
“Ash, don’t tell anyone… but I am known as both Yahweh and as Lucifer… for I am both!”
Would you quit the church?
What if your father was the one that had this single anomaly? And he DID tell someone, he told you?
Would you quit the church because of a story like this?
If you want a plausible and credible answer to your infuriating questions (no less infuriating than the ones I suggest in this post), you need to have a credible and plausible PREMISE! If all the world’s major scientists are convinced and invested in Evolution - - what do you think it would take to change the direction of something that looks pretty convincing?
Why not propose that we strike a 500 square mile region filled with fossils of mammals with fossils… dinosaurs above the KT barrier, and land-based predators that had the same signature bone structure as 4 legged proto-whales?
NOW you have a problem that would probably overturn Evolution as we know it.
You are pitching the idea that Evolution is like Phlogiston… a bizarrely wrong theory about how fire worked… which was studied and defended for 100 years. And then it was over-turned. But it was over-turned because of considerable and consistent evidence that showed there was a better explanation.
Read the history of it in the Wiki article and see what it took to convince scientists the truth that they were wrong. It wasn’t a vast global conspiracy. It is the nature of humanity and the search for truth.
And then promise me and @pevaquark that you will no longer propose “one or two anomalies” when you pose this question again. It is an unfair comparison and which would deservedly warrant heaps of ridicule on your head.
Then, please, if you would, read the article by Isaac Asimov (below) who writes about trends in truth … and how facts can be overturned all the time … but some truths become increasingly more reliable - - and thus change only in smaller increments.
George
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ The Truth that Phlogiston was Quite Wrong - - for a Century
Facts change all the time … but some Truths Hardly Change at All… (like Gravity!)
A long time ago I got to meet Isaac Asimov. I was the only college reporter there at the Boston Museum of Science. Asimov was there to receive an award and he hated flying. He drove in from New York. The weather was bad. Bad enough that I was the only college reporter to show. In fact, bad enough I was the only reporter to show!
For 20 minutes I got to ask Asimov all my private little questions about the future and the Earth, and Asimov was on a roll! He summed up a large part of his view that if the Earth was already exceeding its carrying capacity in total human population, then math would provide the answer: either the Birth Rate goes down, or the Death Rate will go up. Hooooo… that was a lot for a college boy to hear on a messy weather day. (Modern day pundits believe global human population will peak some time around 2050-2060 CE, and then slowly begin an awkward descent down to who knows where.)
Finally the reporter from the Boston Globe showed up and I let him catch up with Asimov as I jotted down notes from what Asimov said, and how he said it. The Globe reporter would eventually write an article about Asimov’s lamb chop sideburns. My treatment would ponder Asimov’s grim predictions and some of the sociological remedies that could help us grapple with the future.
I submitted the write up to the school paper at Eastern Nazarene College. Even though I didn’t attend there, I felt honor bound to give them an article … after all, it was ENC’s school editor who asked me to run out to Boston to do the interview for the paper!
About 10 years later, Asimov wrote this text (below) regarding this group’s favorite topic: Evolution vs. Creationism!
The article, “The Relativity of Wrong” (The Skeptical Inquirer, Fall 1989, Vol. 14, No. 1, Pp. 35-44), does an elegant job of explaining just why some bad ideas last a very long time:
The Relativity of Wrong, by Isaac Asimov
“. . . . what actually happens is that once scientists get hold of a good concept they gradually refine and extend it with greater and greater subtlety as their instruments of measurement improve. Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.”
"This can be pointed out in many cases other than just the shape of the earth. Even when a new theory seems to represent a revolution, it usually arises out of small refinements. If something more than a small refinement were needed, then the old theory would never have endured. "
"Copernicus switched from an earth-centered planetary system to a sun-centered one. In doing so, he switched from something that was obvious to something that was apparently ridiculous. However, it was a matter of finding better ways of calculating the motion of the planets in the sky, and eventually the geocentric theory was just left behind. It was precisely because the old theory gave results that were fairly good by the measurement standards of the time that kept it in being so long. "
"Again, it is because the geological formations of the earth change so slowly and the living things upon it evolve so slowly that it seemed reasonable at first to suppose that there was no change and that the earth and life always existed as they do today. If that were so, it would make no difference whether the earth and life were billions of years old or thousands. Thousands were easier to grasp. "
"But when careful observation showed that the earth and life were changing at a rate that was very tiny but not zero, then it became clear that the earth and life had to be very old. Modern geology came into being, and so did the notion of biological evolution. "
"If the rate of change were more rapid, geology and evolution would have reached their modern state in ancient times. It is only because the difference between the rate of change in a static universe and the rate of change in an evolutionary one is that between zero and very nearly zero that the creationists can continue propagating their folly. "
We know that it is convergent evolution because the mutations which alter gene expression are different in each lineage, as are the sequences of the genes with altered expression.
It is because feathers evolved in the dinosaur lineage after the mammal and dinosaur lineage split. Horizontal genetic transfer is extremely rare in eukaryotes, so adaptations that evolve on one branch can not move over to other branches.
Those wings are an example of convergent evolution. As you can see, the details of each wing are very, very different. They are analogs, not homologs.
Those same genes are also shared by humans and many other mammals that don’t have echolocation. Also, when you compare the whole gene sequence for the Prestin gene you get the expected phylogeny:
“Indeed, the same misplacement of dolphin is observed in the Prestin tree reconstructed with only nonsynonymous nucleotide substitutions (Figure S1B); but, when only synonymous substitutions are used, dolphin and cow are correctly grouped with 100% bootstrap support (Figure S1C).” reference
If there is another mechanism that will necessarily produce a nested hierarchy then now would be the time to describe it. As shown elsewhere, design is not limited to a nested hierarchy and regularly produces designs that don’t fall into a nested hierarchy.
Being warm blooded is not a physical feature. It’s a bit like saying that you should group a fruit fly, bat, and bird together because they can all fly.
The point is that the differences that led to feathers in dinosaurs and birds evolved in that branch, and those adaptations can’t jump branches on the tree.
One example would put common ancestry in serious doubt. Multiple examples would falsify common descent.
We have fossil evidence. All of the fossils fall into a nested hierarchy which was predicted by the theory of evolution. We continue to find new fossil species, and they continue to fit into the same phylogenies as expected.
The comment you pointed to from the paper just shows that, mutations which lead to change in amino acids sequences indicate a different family tree from those which do not lead to a change in amino acid sequences.
This is essentially a falsification of the principle by which common ancestry is arrived at, i.e that similarity at the genetic/molecular level points to a common ancestor.
However, here we have a case of the same set of genes pointing in two different directions/evolutionary pathways.
The final comments in the paper cited by you are:
Blockquote
Our findings suggest that the high-frequency acoustic sensitivities and selectivities of bat and whale echolocation rely on a common molecular design of prestin. Because prestin function can be studied in knock-in mice and in cell lines [4], a functional analysis of the parallel amino acid substitutions identified here could shed light on the structure-function relationship of prestin and the molecular underpinnings of the acoustic adaptations in echolocation. It could also help answer why the prestin of bottlenose dolphin is particularly similar to that of Rhinolophidae and Hipposideridae bats
Blockquote
The same observation with respect to phylogenic tree based on synonymous substitutions Vis a vis non synonymous substitutions is verified in other genes related to echolocation for dolphins and bats also. This compounding the problem.
The theory of evolution will predict a continuum over time rather than vested heirarchies clearly differentiated from each other…
Clearly differentiated separate groups such as mammals, reptiles, birds etc should be impossible. There should be a broad swathe of animals connecting the various taxon… and they need not just be fossils, but also living beings. Though there are a small trickle of such organisms, its no where near the no: predicted by evolution.
The current fossil records were not predicted by evolution. Rather, the theory was modified to suit the fossil record (refer punctuated equilibrium).
As usual, it’s a story change after the fact, to explain the fact… and now said fact is a prediction.
Of course, I am sure my evolutionary friends will ignore the point i made and send me more pictures showing how whales evolved from small land loving mammals with a measly 5-6 so called intermediate species in between… of course it’s not sure whether they really existed before whales evolved.
Also, pls understand that fossils fit well in various groups because of the success of taxonomic classification which is much older than Darwin’s theory. Nested heirarchies are not the result of evolutionary studies… they are the result of classification based on similarities… since Darwinism is false and inherited change is not a gradual, continuously accumulating process as suggested by natural selection, we have taxons.
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Is being warm blooded a mental construct perhaps? Aren’t there clear models of how it’s achieved and corresponding systems of genes/bio molecules working to achieve this phenomenon?
Besides, in evolutionary terms, being warm blooded is something that can be selected for.
Saying, “it’s not a physical feature” is a lame reason to differentiate between feathers and being warm blooded.
You get the expected phylogeny when you include nonsynonymous mutations from the prestin gene.
That is false. Darwin predicted nested hierarchies from the beginning. This is from Darwin’s own notebook, and the moment when he drew in these phylogenies marked the beginning of his theory:
Separate species do not exchange DNA, so how can there be a spectrum? Inheritance is vertical, not horizontal.
It is simply a measure of metabolic rate. It makes no sense to organize animals by their metabolic rate, just as it makes no sense to organize animals by how fast they run.
In defense of Ashwin here, George, there are good questions (or at least better questions than I would be able to ask) being asked of @T_aquaticus, that are becoming the occasions for T giving very good, explanatory answers that are helping my own understanding grow. I agree with you that so far it would seem as if everything Ashwin has brought up has been well answered (to the extent that I’m capable of evaluating what seems to make sense --and T’s explanations go a long way toward helping me even understand the question.) I can’t speak for you of course, but I don’t know enough about genetics to even be able to ask questions like Ashwin is, even if many of them still represent misunderstandings in their own turn when exposed to yet more illuminating expertise. Every classroom needs participants willing to ask questions. And those willing to keep poking and asking are valuable participants in that regard.
One thing I can help expand your horizon just a bit more on, @Ashwin_s , is on the general question of prediction. Of course it’s always “sexier” if a prediction happens ahead of actual discovery, and while that may be the popular definition used by the man-on-the-street, science does actually have a wider (and quite legitimate!) usage of this word. If I develop a theory that helps explain already existing data, then we can speak of my theory as actually predicting such data. The triviality that chronology might be reversed does not detract from the power of any theory that still successfully explains any data (whether future or past data). And evolution, so far as I can tell, has done both in spades.
Don’t let anybody here scare you away when you still have challenges that need answer.
Where did you get this statement? How do you measure “continuum”? What is your definition for this? How do you even evaluate it the correctness of this idea?
Is the platypus not a clear example of a confusing species with old and new traits? It is an egg-laying mammal with a bird-like bill on its face, that feeds its young milk.
I just posted [above] on the Tiktaalik… which was determined to be a true fish… which also had a head on a “neck”, and 4 legs. Another confusing species.
But then you double-down with this attempted refutation by objecting to differentiated groups generally!
But notice the traits that are being featured in this cladogram…
How do you have a creature that is “intermediate” between having Radial Symmetry and Bilateral Symmetry?
Between having no body cavity and having a body cavity?
Between a body cavity made from a cell mass, vs. a cavity as an extension of digestive plumbing?
Other charts feature “no vertebrate” vs. “vertebrate”.
Doesn’t all of this have a lot to do with context? Early on when we have blobby forms of life, each new distinction seems to be pretty dramatic… and easy to describe.
Later on, creatures that are on the “tetrapod” branch - - sure, EVERYONE’s got 4 limbs… big deal…
Things get a little fussy, don’t you think? Let’s take a look at this dinosaur:
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.
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Ha! - - I fooled someone, right? It’s a Dimetrodon! And it is not a dinosaur!
This creature is even earlier than the first age of dinosaurs! He existed in the Permian Age, just before the Triassic.
It is referred to as a “mammal-like” reptiile! Doncha hate it when another straw man burns down?
So why is this creature “mammal-like”? Well, frequently the distinction is described as having a Hole in his Head … or rather, just ONE hole (so they are known as Synapsids). Whereas the other reptiles had developed two openings in their skulls (so they are called Dyapsids).
And this comes to the heart of this discussion: having one or two holes in the skull didn’t change the way these creatures lived … at least, not yet. There were some other changes too, in teeth and so on… but basically, it was just a change that didn’t seem to have much meaning. The only important meaning of the time was that it was an internal Dividing of the Ways between two branches of reptiles. As new genetically supported changes were built onto skull changes, it became increasingly unlikely that these different populations would ever switch teams! Once a synapsid, ALWAYS a synapsid… for millions of years!
There were still dead-ends for some populations. But other synapsid populations developed sophisticated inner ears from the jaw bones they no longer needed - - because of the unique design of their skulls… and once the dinosaurs were cleared out of the way, then the mammal form of synapsids radiated into all sorts of new ecological niches… taking on dramatically different forms… from Elephants to Mice!
Pls read the paper… you don’t get the expected phylogeny when non synonymous mutations are considered.
Blockquote
Using maximum likelihood (ML), maximum parsimony (MP), and neighbor-joining (NJ) methods [5], we reconstructed the prestin protein tree. Surprisingly, all methods group the dolphin within the bats — specifically with the green-labeled families of Rhinolophidae and Hipposideridae in Figure 1A — rather than with the cow, its true closest relative in our data, and this unexpected grouping has a significant bootstrap support (Figure 1A). Furthermore, as recently reported [6], unlike the species tree where microbats are paraphyletic [7] (Figure 1B), the prestin tree clusters the ten microbats in exclusion of the three megabats with a moderate bootstrap support, resulting in the misplacement of two purple-labeled microbats
Blockquote
It’s interesting because, non-synonymous mutations have a higher chance for natural selection to work on it.
Since synonymous mutations do not lead to changes in amino acid sequences, there should be no selection pressure at all…
Like I said, Darwin did not predict nested heirarchies. He was trying to work with them. Even in his time, Taxonomy was well developed and he knew organisms could be classified based on similarities into nested heirarchies. It was Linnaeus who showed that life could be classified as nested heirarchies.
You cannot predict something already known. You can try and explain it.
However, his theory itself does not explain the reason for nested heirarchies very well.
The logical sequence of your arguments is as below:
Taxonomy was well defined and it’s established that living organisms exist in nested heirarchies well before Darwin’s theory.
Darwin’s theory attempts to explain nested heirarchies (which was a well established empirical fact a 100 years before Darwin).
Fossils falling into nested heirarchies prove Common descent…???
This is circular reasoning. Or even lack of reasoning.
Edit: Another reason why pointing to fossils falling into nested heirarchies as proof of common descent is circular reasoning… is that one of the assumptions of modern cladistics is common descent. So when people show me pretty evolutionary trees as proof of common ancestry… It leaves me scratching my head. We need to look deeper.
There is nothing circular about saying: these creatures have vertebrate… those blobby things over there do not have vertebrate. And so at the level of “vertebrate hierarchy”, we have 2 nests. And within each of these 2 nests, we find more distinctive features clumped into more unique nests…"
The circularity you seem fixated on is the normal “circular” or “tautological” nature of language.
Back up… start over.
We have seen this word game here on a quarterly basis…
You add this comment:
It is not that there are nested hierarchies that proves common descent. How could it? Nested hierarchies, at a fundamental level, show “differences”.
The evidence for Common Descent comes from nested hierarchies that correlate with genetics!
And that’s the deal maker right there.
And when you can then correlate time elapse with the degree to which genetic correlations become more diffuse, you have convergence of evidence that Common Descent passes on qualities of nested hierarchies… and over time these genetic qualities drift further and further away from the hypothetical Common Ancestral Populations.
Playing with linguistics will not create conditions that disprove Evolution. Only knowledge of genetics will give you that ability. But by then, I can only hope you will have learned so much, you will have become a Christian supporter of Evolution!
I think you should give @Ashwin_s a concrete example of a set of “known facts”. We should not assume he will know which sets of “known facts” are the ones we think are important.
You make a good point about intuition having a role in science–the generation of testable hypotheses.
A more refined claim about faith in God, intuition, and science would be this: intuitions about God do not yield hypotheses that can be tested by the scientific method.
There is evidence in the Bible for this claim. Job’s friends, for example, tried to treat God’s activity as something that could be reduced to rules. Their hypothesis didn’t fare so well!
The claim is simple. Darwin’s theory predicted nested heirarchy.
The fact is that scientists knew that organisms exist in nested heirarchies 100 years before Darwin was born.Nested heirarchies are an observation that evolution needs to explain… And it does not do that.
A large no: of fossils would have been extremely difficult to classify as any known type/grpup if evolution was true. This is not the case in Darwin’s time… and it’s not the case now.
I am not playing a word game.
This is just not true.
Like I have shown before, what the phylogenetic tree says depends on the sequence selected to compare.
For example:, if you compare based on sequences related to Preston in echolocation, bats and whales would be closely related and clumped together.
Other studies show the common ancestor of whales and hippos to be the same.
Still others, show whales share a common ancestor with cows…
All this proves is that genes don’t tell the story that evolutionists do. This kind of increased similarity in genes of nested groups with significant similarity with more distant species is more supportive of design.
Yes, it does give a very plastic tool to evolutionary scientists to fit “evidence”… Out of the many stories told by genes, a few can be used to collaborate the fantasies of Darwinists…
Neither does evolution. Descent with incremental modification over time should result in a continuum of organisms of increasing complexity.
Not a nested heirarchy. The “nested” part is the problem.
I think only people who assume evolution is true can understand the theory and see how the data fits. This is because, it’s full of circular reasoning and tautologies (such as natural selection/survival of the fittest).
Design is far better explanation.
When an ecosystem is designed, we see all the following-
Nested heirarchies.
Standardisation- interchangeable components to support the ecosystem. For example screws come inside tandardised sizes so that people can use them with ammonium no: of tools.
Similarly, there needs to be common materials/compounds/biomolecules in a ecosystem to facilitate life. For example: if carnivores and heribores were made of different base stuff, the would die).
similar systems to solve problems across nested heirarchies…
Etc etc.
Edit: @pevaquark, @gbrooks9,@bill_II, @T_aquaticus,
Many of you argued that science involves experiments to falsify hypothesis/theories…
Surprisingly, common descent is one of the basic assumptions of major evolutionary studies such as cladistics (making evolutionary trees)… And other fields such as paleontology also assumes evolution…
I don’t see how science can actually falsify something it just assumes to be true…
There are other well established theories like the theory of gravity, relativity etc… however, no on seems to assume them to be true and people work relentlessly to come up with better theories that topple these old ones…
It seems as far as evolution is concerned. Most scientists have stopped doing science… and that’s disturbing to say the least.
This is again a common misunderstanding of evolution.
I’m sorry, but it does quite naturally create nested hierarchies. Perhaps you are imagining the population of all species at any given time never becoming reproductively isolated from one another. If that was the case, which it is not… ever… then you will always get nested hierarchies.
Sigh… the model of common descent has undergone so many different challenges! Many outlined above- I shared a few in my second attempt to explain what could falsify common descent.
When all your different fields of observation keep converging on a single hypothesis- for decades upon decades- what do you do? Pretend it doesn’t exist? Shout things at scientists that display your lack of knowledge? Slap them with ‘you dummies, God just poofed all this?’
I thinking that what you are getting at here is that it feels shocking to you, and many other anti-evolution creationists, how science is not converging in on ‘there’s an intelligent designer.’ Again, your proposed test for one is not an actual predictive hypothesis that also still misunderstands the actual scientific model (as pointed out in the ‘Advice for Creationists’ blog post I shared above). The explanation of ‘well God just did stuff and you will NEVER figure it out’ is no scientific explanation at all! As I said many many posts ago, type of mentality has failed in every other area of inqruiry and should be rejected by Christians who affirm that He put such exquisite and creative laws of nature in place.
Does the parallel with the human social and genetic nations of the French, Maori, Masai, help with picturing nested hierarchies? YEC acknowledge these with Adam as common ancestor. Maybe this is too simplified.
Do you mean like with looking at languages and their nested hierarchies? If so, I highly recommend the analogy for thinking about populations and how different features/languages evolved over time and shared a common ancestry with various common ancestors!
