It involved counting – not very sophisticated math. Just counting how many instances there are of different kinds of genetic differences. It achieves what I wanted it to achieve: it tests a prediction of common descent.
There was no formula to derive.
This leaves you with a problem, or rather a choice. What I presented is one of the simpler pieces of genetic evidence for common descent, described for a broad audience (trust me, a technical description for publication would be much harder to understand). This is the evidence that you claim you understand and that you claim to know is preposterous (or whatever terms you’ve been using). But it’s also evidence that you don’t understand. Your choice is this: you can do the work (I said it would not be trivial) of understanding this piece of evidence. It’s not actually that complicated, and @T_aquaticus has offered to walk you through the logic of the evidence. Or you can stop attacking evolutionary biology that you don’t understand.
Well, no. A simple genetic test will tell you that two people are close relatives, but it may not be able to tell you if they’re half-siblings or aunt/nephew. So what? We don’t need to know the details to determine the accuracy of the conclusion.
I would appreciate a more charitable treatment by you. Saying that some people have become so focused on the principles of individual evolution that they have become blind to the implications when evolution involves communities and social relationship is NOT an example of labeling any other participants of this forum as blind. Just saying… all the best to you.
Mitchell, I am happy to discuss and disagree with you respectfully in a “face-to-face” discussion in a single conversational thread. Here you, in an entirely different topic conversation, misrepresented my viewpoints to others “behind my back” in a manner in which I could not respond, and then called me “blind” over the straw man you created. I am happy to let a moderator judge whether this was fair and charitable.
I think it would be obvious to anyone looking at the topic area you referred who was involved. Anyways, I don’t care if you didn’t name the person, referring to ANY forum participant in such a way behind their back in a different conversational thread is not gracious or fair to them.
No, you suppose or assume that. it fits your preconceptions. It is all you can think of. And that is the summation of Evolutionary theory as it stands. You think it all fits and cannot possibly see any flaws. You do not look for flaws and refuse to identify any that are suggested. You play on your own playing field with you own rues about what can or cannot be deemed accurate and declared as fact. But these rules are not the ones that govern reality and fact. In any other field of study. Before a conclusion is made, all doubts, discrepancies, and especially unknowns are removed. There are so many unknowns in TOE, yet you claim absolute certainty. (And try to gag or belittle any, and all who refuse to abide by your rules about theories and conclusions.)
I will not be gagged by you or anyone else. Neither will I submit to your “superior” knowledge.
You cannot answer my challenges about physiology and anatomy. You just divert to Genetic manipulation as if it is a cure-all. And you refuse to see any chasms in your precious inheritance from microbe to human. I do not care about the 2%. That one I might even give you, But I will not give you your history of birds, not the “creation” of Mammals, Nor the “creation” of reptiles, or amphibians. And I definately will not give you a fish that sprouts legs whether a mudskipper can survive for periods out of water or not. (yes, I know it can)
That is Ichthyostega. Four limbs, gills, lungs, and other transitional features.
We also have . . .
Acanthostega
And then . . .
Tiktaalik roseae
A closer look at an illustration of the forelimb
If evolution is true, then there is no such thing as an incomplete mammal, reptile, or amphibian. Those divisions are man made, to begin with. We can draw the line wherever we want. The only division that exists in nature is at the species level.
But all of that history is recorded right there in the genetic code, where we find the coding for features no longer used as well as unused code which has no reason to be the same unless it was inherited from the same common ancestor.
It shows how little you understand your own criticisms. You seem to think that if you can call two species by the same name then there was no evolution between them. You also think orders, families, classes, etc. are real things in nature. They aren’t. Those are man made divisions. We could just as easily put humans, chimps, gorillas, and orangutans in the same genus as in separate genera, as one example.
The one objective pattern in biology is the nested hierarchy, which evolution explains in spades but separate creation can not.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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Why can’t you tell us what level of biology you studied? ‘A’ level? And what you studied to teach for your B. Ed. You’ve never read a non-textbook by a biologist but you are qualified somehow to dismiss some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century on their subject.
Again, tell us how Haldane’s rule isn’t science and how evolution doesn’t make sense of it for me, because you know that I’m wrong.
They have all been answered. But for an enjoyable and accessible read, I would recommend these two books by Donald Prothero, which should put your concerns to rest. Most of his fossil examples focus on transitional forms which demonstrate how life developed from prior forms.
