No not kidding at all. I considered THIS tree and concluded it is not valid to explain phylogenetics. It is wanting o so many ways.
Do not know this "Walter Brown" guy and I DO believe in evolution just not everything "evolutionists" say about it. And the tree in this case was produced for our perusal by a non-creationist So the purpose and reason for your comment eludes me.
Universal common descent by exclusively naturalistic means has no exceptions, it's an a priori assumption. If you do not make the first assumption of Darwinian natural history the second assumption automatically kicks in the you are ignorant of science. Any argument contrary to that tree is considered an argument from incredulity which is a nice word for ignorance.
“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.” (Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species)
This proposed null hypothesis for Darwin's theory of natural selection, which by the way, he called, 'On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life'. Included various species (varieties, races) of man.
I see no molecular basis for the origination of any of them, including cellular organelles. A contemporary of Darwin's, that is now known as the father of genetics, developed and ultimately produced at least three laws of science (Segregation, Independent Assortment, Dominance). At the dawn of the 20th century it became a mathematical model that propelled chromosome theory and the hunt for the DNA ahead by leaps and bounds for half a century. Darwinism inspired various social, legal and political theories including Social Darwinism. Darwinism is far more the a theory, it has never had a real inverse logic so it doesn't even qualify as an hypothesis, it's the formal doctrine of universal and perpetual change:
In his rejection of natural law and natural rights, and with it a liberal constitutionalism of limited state power, Holmes laid the groundwork for the contemporary era of jurisprudence, where judges came to look to their visions of the future more than to documents and doctrines of the past, and thus to take on a new and far more active role in the constitutional order.(see
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR. and the NATURAL LAW)
Liberal and conservative are terms whose meaning is relative to change, a conservative judge would be a strict constructionist for example. So, what on earth does this have to do with taxonomy you may well be wondering. This philosophy, aka pragmatism and Darwinism, was the underlying theme behind decisions like the one permitting eugenics:
We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . .
Three generations of imbeciles are enough. (Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Buck v. Bell, a 1927 Supreme court case upholding a Virginia law that authorized the state to surgically sterilize certain “mental defectives” without their consent.)
(
USA)
Notice in this thread the complete abandonment of the substantive arguments or evidence surrounding comparative genomics. In addition to derailing the subject matter of the OP, do note the seething contempt for anyone who so much as questions the validity of the universal common ancestry, Darwinian tree of life. There is a reason for that, it's because an inference of theistic involvement is categorically rejected.
This is the most important thing, even if you don't invoke God as Creator or Designer. To question the presuppositional logic of Darwinism is viewed with contempt across the board, in academics and science.
I didn't start the Culture War, Darwinians did. I just made a past time of considering their arguments and found them to be riddled with fallacious rhetoric where they should be appealing to evidencial reasoning.
This isn't about science, or the phenomenon known as evolution. It's presuppositional logic in it's purest and most mutually exclusive form. BTW, thanks for the OP, it was refreshing. Fossils and radiometric dating give us the burden of proof with regards to developing traits. Comparative anatomy and genomics give us the basis for evidencial proofs and logical disproofs. Ultimately, Genetics is the prize. Do not be discouraged, the answers you seek are evident and will become obvious if you are determined to find them.
Grace and peace,
Mark
