Creating Information Naturally, Part 1: Snowflakes, Chess, and DNA

[Ashwin_s]

@Lynn_Munter

So long as the starting population of the diverging species is small, there’s really nothing to say one way or another what happens to the bulk of the population or closely related species. At the risk of sounding like I’m making up stories, let’s think about what happens as soon as the transition to a fully aquatic animal happens: all of a sudden they can travel the whole world, but nothing prevents their semi-aquatic brethren from staying put right where they’ve been all along. Or just because a species figures out how to exploit a new ecological niche, and adapts to a different lifestyle in a number of ways, doesn’t mean the old ecological niche that they were well adapted to before isn’t there anymore.

This runs into the old argument, if humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? The answer is simply that evolution branches like a tree, easily and often.

I don’t know what to say to this. It’s as if once biologists decide something is a transitional species, then they will make up stories as much as possible to hold on.
You are painting a scenario where 4-5 species evolve into different transitional species ending up finally as a whale in a few million years while not leaving behind no evidence they existed before the whales were formed!
Is this still science?

@Lynn_Munter

This might be true to a certain extent, but I don’t think genetically constructed trees assembled by computer programs that map extremely well to morphologically constructed trees are products of bias.

Actually genetically constructed trees are worse. Based on the original assumptions
and the genes that are compared, you can get practically any result. I am attaching an article that explains the problem and points to a solution…

New Algorithms Force Scientists to Revise the Tree of Life

Guess what the solution is… Cherry pick the genes to compare to ensure you get the “right tree”.