ATTN: Creationists -- the twin nested hierarchy of taxa

exactly, we see a flow that seems to go up to the highest nesting, with no stops at "kinds."

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Wei wu wei

Green faeries

It isn't just the code though, it's everything else, such as arrangements, chromosomal banding patterns and so on. There are a whole ream of unrelated artefacts and pointers on the DNA that all correlate with one another, from chromosomal rearrangements, to Endogenous Retroviral Insertions, pseudogenes, transposon sequences and so on. To date, I don't recall a creationist ever really adressing these things, apart from a rather flippant "oh it is a common designer" approach... which falls apart, because why would a common designer, who has designed chromosomes with telomeres on the end and centromeres in the middle, change his mind and put telomeres in the middle of one of the human chromosomes, and make it look like the new human chromosome was made from two ape chromosomes that had fused together.

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MSci MSc ARCS DIC PhD..... yes, I am bragging.

Well, a quick and dirty explanation goes like this:

For a given pool of, for example, 30 taxa, there are over 10^41 different possible phylogenetic trees (heirarchical structures of classification). However, the nature of taxa is such that they naturally fall into a very specific phylogenetic tree (I'll explain how in a later post). This is incredibly statistically significant, and is precisely what we would expect if all species were descended from a common ancestor.

This is known as the "nested hierarchy". The twin nested hierarchy, however, is the real trump card.

This phylogenetic tree of taxa can be determined by examining the physical structures of known species. Thus, we can classify animals into vertebrates and non-vertebrates, vertebrates into mammals, birds, fish, and so on. No mammals are non-vertebrates, and no insects are vertebrates -- thus, we classify them first by vertebrate/non-vertebrate, since this is a lower-level criterion for differentiating between species than is hair, for example (hair appears only in vertebrates, so it naturally falls within the vertebrate branch of the tree -- it would be ridiculous to place vertebrate/non-vertebrate criteria within the "hair" branch of the tree).

The twin nested hierarchy comes into play when we attempt to classify taxa by other criteria, such as unique, unused genes within the organism. All organisms have genes that have no function, and those organisms can function perfectly well without those genes. Since these genes are entirely unrelated to the physical structure of the organism, we would not expect to find precisely the same phylogenetic tree as when taxa are classified by physical structure -- that is, IF species do not share common ancestry. If they do share common ancestry, we would expect to find precisely the same phylogenetic tree when classifying taxa by this method.

And, indeed, we do find the same phylogenetic tree when classifying by either physical form, or by junk DNA, or any other method of classification. Given that when classifying 30 different taxa, we could have any one of over 10^41 different trees, and given that for any method, the one tree out of those 10^41 is ALWAYS the same, we have a monumentally statistically significant situation here. The only way this could occur through special creation would be if (1) God used evolution to create, or (2) God decided to deliberately plant evidence to deceive us. Unless, that is, a YEC here can come up with an explanation for this evidence that does not require common descent.

Precisely. Specifically, the organisation in either case comes out exactly the same, despite the fact that there is a huge number of potential classifications we might discover when examining these features.

Yeap, I think this is a very important fact, since there are a number of chromosomal issues which are phenotypically completely unimportant, but the hierarchical nature of these matches both important genetic features and also morphological ones. In some ways I think that examination of DNA provides more than two matching hierarchies, since there are so many unrelated things that can happen in the DNA.

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MSci MSc ARCS DIC PhD..... yes, I am bragging.

What we have is a falsification of creationism. You basically explained why YECism and special creation are impossible. Creationism cannot explain the heirarchy of taxa, there are no reasonable YEC explainations, it is therefore false.

Option #1 is perfectly viable, evolution and Christianity are fully compatible.

I have never heard a reasonable one.

It is not a linear flow, but rather a branching flow. As mutations accumulate the code changes. As species become genetically isolated from one another, these mutations accumulate in different places. Therefore, the amount of divergence in genetic code reflects the time since divergence from a common ancestor. The stunning part is that phylogenetic trees (showing nested hierarchy) constructed by morphology alone have now been independently confirmed by the variation in each genome. HERV insertions and pseudogenes are great examples of how such a genetic tree can be constructed. If evolution were false, this relationship would not be seen. Saying "common designer, common code" doesn't work either because this relationship is refuted by convergent evolution.

You probably already agree with everything that I posted, just thought I would throw in my two cents.

Not "genetic" traits, Will, but DNA sequence! There are several amino acid sequences for each protein that will do the same job. The amino acid sequence is, of course, related to the DNA sequence by the 3 base code.

So, you would not expect the DNA sequence to have the same nested hierarchy as you get from morphology because you could have a completely different amino acid sequence for say, cytochrome c, between horses and zebras without affecting the morphology. The only reason you would have both the DNA sequence and morphology give the same nested hierarchy is by common ancestry.

Or God deliberately chose to deceive us and make it look that way when it isn't.

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"If sound science appears to contradict the Bible, we may be sure that it is our interpretation of the Bible that is at fault." Christian Observer, 1832, pg. 437

"Christians should look on evolution simply as the method by which God works." Rev. James McCosh, theologian and President of Princeton, 1890