Common Descent Cladograms are all Fake, Convergent Evolution Explains Everything

Faith & Science Conversation
41

Let me guess. Populations get isolated. Changes get “fixed” in the population. Natural selection works on it… How many such sequences need to happen before a new species is created? And of course the main problem is that natural selection is supposed to improve reproductive fitness… How many generations would it take to resolve a bottleneck? I think it will be resolved quickly either way-out the population dies off or fills a niche
This scenario should not create the kind of changes we see between ,say reptiles and birds… atmost, it should result in speciation… say,fox becomes a new species of fox.
So, there should be a continuum of clustered species in between reptiles and birds to the extent that we should not be able to clearly say where the reptiles stop and the birds start…
This is not the case.
Almost, Darwinists can argue that speciation happens so fast, that the probability to leave fossils of intermediate species is low like Stephen Gould postulated.

Except that it doesn’t… That’s the problem.
What we do see is…
Textbooks with false/outdated information presented in a misleading manner.
Drawings with more art than science.

And a lot of circular reasoning. Can you point to a paper that actually proves how evolution leads to nested heirarchies as opposed to a continuum of species?

I am fairly satisfied that genetics doesn’t really support any particular evolutionary tree… the genome of the same organism points to a no: of different lineages. This itself should falsify common descent.

As for the fossil evidence… it’s a fact that there not nearly enough transitional species fossils… this is known. That’s why punctuated equilibrium is well accepted. .

What else is left?

42

@Ashwin _s

Are you running out of material?

If you can refuse out qualified used of the term Evolution (which is SUPPOSED to be the point of the qualifier), I can certainly refuse to argue about Darwin. He is irrelevant here. We do not promote Darwinism.

And I encourage all the other participants here not to get caught up in that topic either@

43

@Ashwin_s

I don’t believe I have ever said there is only one kind of nested hierarchies. Cladograms change depending on the hierchies selected.

You can make hundreds of nested hierarchies from the same millions of years worth of fossil subjects.

The fossils and species examined are snapshots … they never change.

The final step is checking your work against genetic findings of the LIVING exemplars of your cladogram.

44

Wow that is a beautiful diagram for its own sake. Thanks.

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45

I didn’t bring the subject up. Fossils neatly falling into nested heirarchies were presented to me as a prediction of Darwinism by people here. The claim is that, fossils which belong to one nested group having features of another nested group (which is not an ancestor) would falsify common descent (specific example being mammals/humans with feathers).

I Just pointed out it was circular reasoning.

By the way, which parts of Darwinism do you reject?
Natural selection, or inherited change?

46

So how is that genetics supporting fossil evidence?
It’s just cherry picking the results that match the evidence as understood at the time the study was conducted.

47

How many generations does it take for languages to diverge when populations split? After all, the children simply speak the language of their parents so how do you get such different languages that are clearly derived from some common root language?

I think this series by @Joel_Duff is an excellent one to go through, using the example of the horse and its undeniable common ancestry with zebras and donkeys and more(I believe this is part 2 of his series on it):
https://thenaturalhistorian.com/2013/03/25/horses-are-horses-the-limits-of-genetic-kinds-baramins/

Alright so you choose ‘pretend it doesn’t exist.’ That’s one of the options I listed that people take and you are free to use this one.

I hope that you haven’t drunk the Haekel coolaid that many are still drinking (unless you meant something else). Wow it seems that the Discovery Institute is still writing articles about them in 2015. As a side note, it is quite bizarre to me but our heart’s development literally follows the evolutionary history:

You seem to have an impressive quality of ignoring large amounts of information regarding nested hierarchies, many of which have already been posted in this thread.

There’s not enough? You do realize that phylogenies that have been made solely from bones have been verified using comparative genomics… we’ve already discussed this. Also, here’s another nice sequence, one of hundreds and hundreds.

Well when you ignore and dismiss mountains of evidence against your idea (what is your idea again exactly?), there’s nothing else to discuss. Have a good one then Ashwin.

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48

How do you explain paleontologists who successfully use the theory of evolution?

49

@Ashwin_s

Yes, the way you describe it, it certainly is. You describe the context poorly.

Nested Hierarchies are illustrations of common descent. And when designed well, they
can demonstrate the Forensic Evidence in such a way there is no other conclusion available,
short of saying: “God used a miracle to make it look like there is common descent.”
And a researcher can make a specific cladogram for any set of traits important to an
evolutionary scenario. Cladograms are a single slice, a single dimension, of a multi-factorial
reality. The reality never changes. The illustrations of that reality are custom crafted to
demonstrate a truth.

Look, all you have to do is find an Cladogram, or “set of nested hierarchies”, presented in a
peer reviewed paper, and show us how it is circular. But you can’t just do it with words:
you have to do it with full awareness of the underlying genetics. Any sentence in the English
vocabulary is circular if all you do is look up the definitions in the dictionary.

Genetics is the prover - - not the schematic diagram. The fact that humans and
chimps share a broken gene for Vitamin C is not conclusive. What is conclusive is that the
“broken gene” is in the same chromosomal region and broken in the same way - - while
broken vitamin c genes in other branches of the animal kingdom are located elsewhere,
and are broken in different ways.

With that evidence, one is able to conclude three things:

  1. that the Vitamin C gene is not hard-wired into a specific location for all animals;
  2. that broken Vitamin C genes do occur in more than one branch of the animal kingdom;
  3. and that the 2 sub-branches that show the same location for a broken vitamin C
    gene (Human & Chimp) happen to be the 2 sub-branches where converging genetic
    evidence supports the idea that the 2 populations share a recent common ancestral
    population.

Conclusion: it is highly unlikely that Chimps and Humans coincidentally experienced
the same mutation, in the same spot, mutated in the same way, compared to the likelihood
that they received the mutation by descent.

There’s nothing circular about this, @Ashwin_s, if you take the evidence to its underlying biological detail.

This is the same process by which CSI scientists evaluate whether a victim (or a perpetrator) is related or not to a shared grandparent, or to a shared parent. If it was a purely tautological exercise, this kind of evidence would never be admitted into court.

EDIT: Item ‘3.’ has been revised for clarity, with a conclusion added.

50

You did not answer my question.
Language is used by intelligent people to communicate with each other. It mainly changes through creative means. People coin words, invent slang, etc… it’s not a natural process.
Evolution will not lead to nested heirarchies
I asked you for a paper showing how evolution leads to nested heirarchies and you send me a blog on horses!
Let me give you a hint. You will easily find papers on how a limited kind of randomisation can lead to nested heirarchies. However all of these assume design.

I studies Haeckel’s drawings when I was in school. It was a strong persuader for evolution and one of the enduring memories of what I learned. And when I read a few years back that it was a fraud, and known to be one for decades. It was disappointing to say the least.
Compare this to what I learned about Newtonian mechanics in school. The same equations were valid in college and even now.
If evolution is so established, I wonder why educators have to resort to fraud to convince students.
There are still other such presentations kept in the textbooks more for their persuasive powers rather than their veracity. For example:, the Urey miller experiment.

There is another side for his story. The comparison of the hearts of birds and human beings. If morphological features are compared, it’s possible to hypothesise that birds and human beings share a common ancestor while reptiles don’t.
There was a paper listing this by Gauthier et Al.
So nowadays, evolutionary biologists mainly take cues from fossil morphologies to tell them what are “homologous” features.
An evolutionary tree made based on comparing heart morphology would result in a tree which is totally different from that from morphological similarities in bones/skulls etc.
I suggest you read published papers to better understand what is going on.

Playback read my replies to them I have repeatedly sited papers which make my point.
Phylogeby is based on identifying what are called “ortholog” genes (genes transmitted by common descent). If you compare similarities between other genes, you get a totally different story (such as bats and whales being in the same group of non-synonymois genes of Prestin are compared).
But, even comparing ortholog genes do not give the same result. Many studies show,the hippo and whales share a common ancestor and whales are more distant from the cow than the hippo.
Others show the opposite and claim the cow is closer.

Meanwhile, we have a fossil called pakicetid which does not look anything like a cow or a whale. It looks more like a dog!
This kind of mixed results should make scientists question their base assumptions such as common descent, bifurcation etc.

When you post sequences, I suggest you look into them before hand… for example, how much of the drawing is based on bone morphology and howmmjch is imagination…
Besides, you need at least hundreds of intermediate fossils between say reptiles and birds… do you have them?

51

@Ashwin_s (@pevaquark)

Don’t you see how nuts you sound?
You have come to a place where we have highly trained professionals who actually make a living
with these issues that you say are not real… that science and the scientists who do them are doing it
all wrong.

Do you see how “mad” that is? And to see you keep coming back with the same flawed logic,
day after day … and not paying attention to the points people agonizingly lay out for you.

Nested hierarchies are descriptions of aggregations where changes are cumulative over time.
Languages and Mutations are cumulative. There’s no randomization after each generation.
Each subsequent generation makes its new changes based on where the last generation ended up.
There’s no way around it.

How can Evolution/Sequences of Mutations NOT make nested hierarchies?
If a dinosaur population separates into light boned dinosaurs and really heavy boned dinosaurs…
which one has the potential of taking advantage of air currents?
Only the light boned dinosaurs will have the benefit of a mutation that would otherwise wouldn’t help heavy dinosaurs at all. So feathers do not become important to dinosaurs that are shaped like armor covered tanks, right?

Traits build on traits… and whenever that is found, whether it is language or evolution … you will (and virtually always will) get nested hierarchies.

52

@Ashwin_s (& @pevaquark)

Why do flight instructors still spend so much time on Bernoulli’s principles of Air Pressure?

image

It is not the only source of lift. In fact, an alert stunt pilot who is only taught about Bernoulli’s principles would never ever try to fly the plane upside down… because Bernoulli’s Principles would not sustain an upside plane !

Angle of Attack is just as another important source of lift, and it is the ONLY source of lift if you are upside down!

image
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.
.

But not only is angle of attack frequently not taught with the same zeal as Bernoulli’s principles of Air Pressure, but they aren’t even explaining Bernoulli’s Principles correctly!!! Take a look at the air pressure diagram again, and then read this summary of the “FALSE EXPLANATION BASED ON EQUAL TRANSIT TIME”!

image
image1023×403 42.1 KB

Please note, that not only is the explanation incorrect, but it even violates Newton’s 3rd Law of Motion!

So… here we are with really big planes… flying all these people a few miles up in the air … and instructors can’t even get the basics correct about what actually keeps the plane in the air! Peoples lives are at stake… and still the errors are taught … each and every day. Do you think there is some “Aeronautical Scientist Plot” to wipe out hundreds of people a day through intentional faulty instruction? No. Of course not.

But then you arrive here, and start fixating on drawings that Haekel drew over a century ago… which he used to defend one of his pet theories. He was a zealot about his pet theories… and it clouded his judgment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryo_drawing#Haeckel’s_proponents_(past_and_present)

You make a good point about why would anyone even want to use century old drawings if they are still “not quite right”… the answer is complicated… and it comes down to whether a teacher thinks he should be teaching Facts vs. Truths, and whether he thinks the truth of most of the drawings outweighs the errors in some of them… Or: habit… OR: indifference… OR: budget problems…

SO… why do you think every problem you find in the field of Evolution is a conspiracy to defraud Creationists? Humans are flawed. And science is sometimes degraded because of it. But we could also talk about how flawed humans degrade religion every Sunday … and sometimes on days in between. I’m still willing to go to Church, despite Evangelical error about the most important thing in the Universe: their Religion. I assume you ARE still willing to board an airplane knowing that we’ve been flying millions of people through the air and we still can’t teach people the correct science…
.
.
.
.
.
…

53

Let me explain how nested heirarchies work.
If there are ten, variables in a product/process. Then if some of the variables, say three are kept constant without change, and incremental random changes are made in the other 7, you will get a nested heirarchy with the point of similarity being the three variables being kept constant.(the technical term for this is restricted randomisation).
This is a concept regularly used in design of experiments.
In the design scenario, the three variables are kept constant by an intelligent agent by design. It involves teleology.
In evolution, this job must be done by natural selection. Frankly no natural process can do this. This is why evolutionary scientists ascribe near miraculous powers to natural selection. Because it must do something that only an intelligence can.

And of course, you guys legitimise this by overturning the limitations of natural selection by invoking God.

An evolutionary process should not have any particular variable kept constant. Mutations can happen anywhere. For example, if a mutation happens in mammals which cause it to develop feathers in a cold environment, then there should be nothing stopping that according to the evolutionary process.
There is no reason, in terms of evolution for mammals not to have scales, feathers etc…

54

I will pay you $100 if you can produce a single peer-reviewed article, in English, that makes these wildly off-based claims about nested hierarchies - - proves these claims. And that’s my bond.

You are in no position to explain nested hierarchies … if you can’t apply the nature of nested hierarchies - - as found in the area of language evolution- - to the parallel discipline of Evolution, then Nested Hierarchies are actually too complicated for you to understand.

55

Here are 29 tests for common descent:

Common ancestry is easily tested using the scientific method.

56

It’s a pretty easy concept to understand. Mutations that happen in one lineage will most likely not happen in another lineage. Therefore, lineages will have specific mutations that are specific to that lineage. They will also have the DNA they inherited from ancestors shared with other species. This leads to shared features and lineage specific adaptations. That is a nested hierarchy.

Why will mutations be different in each lineage? It is due to probabilities. Let’s take the human genome as our example. There are 6 billion bases in the diploid human genome, and each human is born with about 100 mutations. What are the chances that the same mutation will occur in two people? Those chances are quite low, something like 100 in 18 billion mutations due to the fact that there are 3 possible mutations at each base. Therefore, the chances of the same mutation occurring in two populations and also having that mutation become fixed in the population is quite low.

On top of that, there is very little to no horizontal genetic transfer among eukaryotes. Adaptations that occur in one lineage can not move horizontally across the tree of life to another lineage. Again, this leads to a nested hierarchy.

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57

Let’s use your example and see how it works. Let’s use mammals and birds and see if it works.

The three features we will keep the same are a backbone, four limbs, and a cranium.

To keep things a bit more tidy, we will have three features that mutate randomly which are mammary glands, feathers, and middle ear bones.

Species A: mutated three middle ear bones, mutated feathers, mutated mammary glands.

That species would easily violate the predictions made by the theory of evolution. That species would falsify common descent.

Where can mutations happen in any mammal genome that can lead to feathers? The reason that we don’t see feathers in mammals is they lack the genetic background to evolve them. There are also tons and tons of other adaptions that they can evolve for cold weather, as shown by all of the mammals currently living in frigid environments.

However, a designer could easily put feathers on a mammalian species, so why don’t we see any mammal species with feathers?

58

Bushes not ladders:

It doesn’t work like this:

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@Ashwin_s

You haven’t proved anything. All you have done is demonstrated the variegated elements that can be harvested to display intermediate forms.

As I’ve said before, you are treating these diagrams as “intended to prove” … when what they are doing is presenting information graphically… to along with an analysis that “proves”.

You have proved nothing other than you don’t know how to work with the tools that Evolution scientists work with… and you think you know better than 40 year professionals in the field. You know zip about the images you review and dismiss … like potato chips.

POSTSCRIPT: Cladograms display clades. Clades frequently include forms from populations outside of the direct lineage. This is the logic of intermediate form analysis. You set up your strawmen, and then you knock them down. Accomplishing nothing.

60

I know what nested heirarchy means…

I have mentioned this to brooks before.
If you want a nested heirarchy in an animal, product, process anything. The following has to happen.
Out of all the variables that can bring change, some will have to remain constant while others change.
So a nested heirarchy needs two things to explain it -

  1. A method/process by which the variable that are to be changed undergo change in a seemingly random manner.
  2. A regulatory mechanism by which specific variables are kept constant throughout the process.
    To get the next cluster, you change the variables that stay constant…

Evolution doest explain 1 very well… and doesn’t explain requirement 2 at all.