ERVs and how Evolutionists bluff with the data

lifepsyop · Sep 8, 2015

Loudmouth said:
Category error. All cats are mammals, but not all mammals are cats. The same for ERV's and transposable elements. ERV's are transposable elements, but not all transposable elements are ERV's. This initial error hamstrings your entire argument from the start.

I didn't claim all transposable elements are ERVs. I said ERVs are transposable elements. Try finding an error before making a correction. This just makes you look desperate.

Loudmouth · Sep 8, 2015

lifepsyop said:
I didn't claim all transposable elements are ERVs.

You claimed that you were going to expose the ERV argument, and then went into a paper dealing with retrotransposons. The relationship was certainly implied.

lifepsyop · Sep 8, 2015

Loudmouth said:
This can't be stressed enough. This is the concept that lifepsyop fails to comprehend.

I've already addressed it repeatedly. You're dodging my rebuttal just like sfs.

Loudmouth said:
To put this another way, the closer you get to the common ancestor (where the branches meet in a phylogeny) the more ILS you will see. As sfs mentions, this is inevitable because ILS is unavoidable. Finding ILS close to the branching point of two lineages is what we expect to see.

Like sfs, you fail to grasp the fact that both the "common ancestors" and their subsequent branching events are hypothetical/imaginary data points. Molecular discordance found at the tips of the branches is automatically inferred to be the result of activity at the imaginary base of those branches. You are not "finding" ILS at the branching points. You have no choice but to infer that it must have happened there, in order to rescue the theory. This is what you clearly don't understand.

Loudmouth said:
What we wouldn't expect to see is ILS well away from those nodes. For example, finding that 10% of the human genome was more like the armadillo genome than the chimp genome would clearly falsify evolution.

Actually it would suggest that armadillos and primates are more closely related and chimp/human similarities are more the result of convergent evolution than direct relatedness. It would be a major upset for sure but if you think it would falsify evolution, then you simply don't understand evolution's explanatory capacity.

Evolutionists have proposed all sorts of strange relationships before. Recently it has been proposed with the Pegasofarae hypothesis that Horses (Perissodactyla) are more closely related to Bats (Chiroptera) than they are to Cows(Artiodactyla). This seems absurd and counter-intuitive given that horses and cows appear much more similar to each other than either is to bats.. yet this hypothesis obviously isn't going to falsify Common Descent.

lifepsyop · Sep 8, 2015

Loudmouth said:
You claimed that you were going to expose the ERV argument, and then went into a paper dealing with retrotransposons. The relationship was certainly implied.

Obviously, because it is related. The same argument applied to retrotransposons is applied to ERVs. They are transposable elements claimed to be free of homoplasy, which is why they are prioritized in phylogenetics studies.

Why don't you try actually addressing arguments instead of looking for cheap 'gotchas'

Not_By_Chance · Sep 8, 2015

JonFromMinnesota said:
You seem stuck on the probability in thinking "The odds are so insurmountable that I cannot comprehend a scenario where it happens" That is an argument from incredulity. The odds of winning the lottery are 1 in 175 million, but it happens all the time. The odds of being born are 1 in 400 trillion, but it happens every day. The odds of being struck by lightening is 1 in 750,000 but in rare occurrences some have had it happen more than once to them. Want to try an experiment. Take a deck of cards, shuffle them and spread all 52 out. The probability of this order coming out is
1 in 80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000, but it happened. You seem stuck on thinking that low probabilities mean impossibility. That is false.

No, it's not false. The lottery is not a like for like example because someone has to win at every draw, although given the odds against, it's unlikely to be you. Given the odds I quoted for part of Shakespeare's work, the event is NOT going to happen and bear in mind that the amount of information contained in Shakespeare's works is miniscule compared with the information required to form life from lifeless chemicals, make it reproducible and continue to develop. If you believe otherwise, you are in deceiving yourself.

Look at what a statistician has to say, plus another comment below:-

"“If there is a chance that something can happen, and the exact same situation happens an infinite amount of times, will that possibility have to happen?”

Ask a statistician: no it doesn’t *have* to happen. A probabilist would say that it happens “almost always”. If I toss a fair coin the chance of a head is 50%. If I toss a fair coin an infinite number of times the probability of getting at least one head is 100%. However there is no physical or mathematical reason why I can’t toss an infinite number of tails, and no heads. In fact this is as equally likely as any other sequence of heads or tails. Take all sequence of length N (number=2^N) and then consider the number of them that have no heads(=1). Then the proportion with no heads =1/2^N which approaches 0 as N approaches infinity. But there is always 1 sequence of length N with no heads.

Hence 100% probability means “almost always”, it doesn’t mean “it has to happen”.

steve l says:
August 3, 2013 at 1:35 pm
This is the most nonsensical meme floating around the Internet.

Consider the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, …

There are infinitely many of them … so 2 must show up more than once, right? Manifestly wrong.

But say we are talking about states of matter in a finite region. This would be modeled by using finitely many numbers, 1, 2, 3, say, and making an infinite list.

1, 2, 3, 1, 3, 1, 3, 1, 3, 1, 3, …

You say 2 must appear again … but it doesn’t. If you have finitely many states and infinitely many trials, all you can say for sure is that at least one state must reappear infinitely many times. But any particular state, such as the state that defines “you” or a pink elephant or a galaxy; might appear zero, one, 47, or infinitely many times.

It’s amazing how many otherwise smart people are fooled into thinking that “in an infinite universe, everything must happen.” This is manifestly false." [my emphasis]

Also, consider that the universe is apparently not infinite, which severely limits the chances even more.

Here's another slant on the same subject. As I said, you do have a lot of faith if you believe this is possible...

"The probability of the chance formation of a hypothetical functional ‘simple’ cell, given all the ingredients, is acknowledged2 to be worse than 1 in 1057800. This is a chance of 1 in a number with 57,800 zeros. It would take 11 full pages of magazine type to print this number. To try to put this in perspective, there are about 10 to the power of 80 (a number with 80 zeros) electrons in the universe. Even if every electron in our universe were another universe the same size as ours that would ‘only’ amount to 10160 electrons.

These numbers defy our ability to comprehend their size. Fred Hoyle, British mathematician and astronomer, used analogies to try to convey the immensity of the problem. For example, Hoyle said the probability of the formation of just one of the many proteins on which life depends is comparable to that of the solar system packed full of blind people randomly shuffling Rubik’s cubes all arriving at the solution at the same time3—and this is the chance of getting only one of the 400 or more proteins of the hypothetical minimum cell proposed by the evolutionists (real world ‘simple’ bacteria have about 2,000 proteins and are incredibly complex). [Note added 2013: see update to How simple can life be?] As Hoyle points out, the program of the cell, encoded on the DNA, is also needed. In other words, life could not form by natural (random) processes.

Evolutionists often try to bluff their way out of this problem by using analogies to argue that improbable things happen every day, so why should the naturalistic origin of life be considered impossible? For example, they say the odds of winning the lottery are pretty remote, but someone wins it. Or, the chances of getting the particular arrangement of cards obtained by shuffling a deck is remote, but a rare combination happens every time the cards are shuffled. Or the arrangement of the sand grains in a pile of sand obtained by randomly pouring the sand is extremely complex, but this complex and improbable arrangement did occur as a result of random processes. Or the exact combination and arrangement of people walking across a busy city street is highly improbable, but such improbable arrangements happen all the time. So they argue from these analogies to try to dilute the force of this powerful argument for creation.

You probably realize there is something illogical about this line of argument. But what is it?

In all the analogies cited above, there has to be an outcome. Someone has to win the lottery [note added Feb 2013: even with lotteries where the prize jackpots if no-one gets the exact set of digits drawn, the number of digits to guess is adjusted in line with the number of tickets likely to be purchased to make sure that there will be a winner frequently and there are always lesser prizes for getting less than the full set of digits]. There will be an arrangement of cards. There will be a pile of sand. There will be people walking across the busy street. By contrast, in the processes by which life is supposed to have formed, there need not necessarily be an outcome. Indeed the probabilities argue against any outcome. That is the whole point of the argument. But then the evolutionist may counter that it did happen because we are here! This is circular reasoning at its worst."

Loudmouth · Sep 8, 2015

lifepsyop said:
I've already addressed it repeatedly. You're dodging my rebuttal just like sfs.

Inventing hypothetical responses from hypothetical scientists is not a rebuttal. It is pure fantasy.

Like sfs, you fail to grasp the fact that both the "common ancestors" and their subsequent branching events are hypothetical/imaginary data points. Molecular discordance found at the tips of the branches is automatically inferred to be the result of activity at the imaginary base of those branches.

The discordance occurs at the base of the tree between closely related nodes, exactly where we would expect ILS to occur. The LTR retrotransposons used in the study were also carefully selected for looking at the K/T extinction even when birds went through rapid speciation:

"In addition to these factors that make independent insertions very rare, the LTR retrotransposons studied here have a low copy number (e.g., 3,138 copies in the zebra finch genome), were active only for a short time period around the neoavian radiation [10], and show no target site preference among thousands of reconstructed ancestral target sequences of inserted elements (S2 Fig)."

They purposefully picked markers that were the most sensitive to ILS at the root of the neoavian tree, and as expected they were limited to the root of the tree:

" Nevertheless, if homoplasy was prevalent in our RE markers, we would expect to see an equal distribution of RE incongruences across all of the sampled clades of Neoaves. While we find dozens of presence/absence markers with incongruences affecting the short branches within the neoavian radiation (S1 Table; e.g., the core landbirds and core waterbirds clades), there is not a single RE incongruence in our presence/absence matrix (S1 Table) affecting well-accepted internal relationships within postradiation taxa, such as passerines, parrots, eagles, penguins, the woodpecker/bee-eater clade, the hummingbird/swift clade, and the flamingo/grebe clade."

You are not "finding" ILS at the branching points.

We are finding incongruences that are consistent with ILS, as the paper you reference discusses at length.

Actually it would suggest that armadillos and primates are more closely related and chimp/human similarities are more the result of convergent evolution than direct relatedness. It would be a major upset for sure but if you think it would falsify evolution, then you simply don't understand evolution's explanatory capacity.

Again with your made up fantasies about hypothetical scientists and evidence that doesn't exist.

lifepsyop · Sep 8, 2015

Loudmouth said:
Hypothetical scientists making conclusions about hypothetical data does not trump real scientists who have made real conclusions from real data.

This is another dodge I see you use often.

What is being discussed are real constraints (or the lack thereof) to Evolution theory, using real evolutionary explanatory devices. There is nothing hypothetical about that.

And as far as hypothetical data... a discussion on Potential Falsification is impossible without bringing up Potentials, i.e. Hypotheticals. Try and understand that simple fact.

Loudmouth · Sep 8, 2015

lifepsyop said:
This is another dodge I see you use often.

What is being discussed are real constraints (or the lack thereof) to Evolution theory, using real evolutionary explanatory devices. There is nothing hypothetical about that.

The discordant data are not found at the tips of the branches, as your own references show.

"While we find dozens of presence/absence markers with incongruences affecting the short branches within the neoavian radiation (S1 Table; e.g., the core landbirds and core waterbirds clades), there is not a single RE incongruence in our presence/absence matrix (S1 Table) affecting well-accepted internal relationships within postradiation taxa, such as passerines, parrots, eagles, penguins, the woodpecker/bee-eater clade, the hummingbird/swift clade, and the flamingo/grebe clade."
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002224

What the theory could not accommodate is incongruences between the distal points in the clade. You try to refute this by making up stories about how scientists would ignore such incongruences, but it is just that, made up. Those incongruences don't exist where the evolution model says they should not exist.

And as far as hypothetical data... a discussion on Potential Falsification is impossible without bringing up Potentials, i.e. Hypotheticals. Try and understand that simple fact.

And you have been told time after time that incongruences between distantly related distal points in a phylogeny would falsify evolution. You try to fool everyone by acting as if closely related lineages at the root of the tree are the same thing. They aren't.

crjmurray · Sep 8, 2015

lifepsyop said:
I've already addressed it repeatedly. You're dodging my rebuttal just like sfs.

Like sfs, you fail to grasp the fact that both the "common ancestors" and their subsequent branching events are hypothetical/imaginary data points. Molecular discordance found at the tips of the branches is automatically inferred to be the result of activity at the imaginary base of those branches. You are not "finding" ILS at the branching points. You have no choice but to infer that it must have happened there, in order to rescue the theory. This is what you clearly don't understand.

Actually it would suggest that armadillos and primates are more closely related and chimp/human similarities are more the result of convergent evolution than direct relatedness. It would be a major upset for sure but if you think it would falsify evolution, then you simply don't understand evolution's explanatory capacity.

Evolutionists have proposed all sorts of strange relationships before. Recently it has been proposed with the Pegasofarae hypothesis that Horses (Perissodactyla) are more closely related to Bats (Chiroptera) than they are to Cows(Artiodactyla). This seems absurd and counter-intuitive given that horses and cows appear much more similar to each other than either is to bats.. yet this hypothesis obviously isn't going to falsify Common Descent.

Some subsequent molecular studies published shortly afterwards have failed to support it.[2][3][4] In particular, two recent studies, each combining genome-wide analyses of multiple taxa with testing of competing alternative phylogenetic hypotheses, concluded that Pegasoferae is not a natural grouping.[5][6]

Hmm

lifepsyop · Sep 8, 2015

Loudmouth said:
The discordance occurs at the base of the tree between closely related nodes, exactly where we would expect ILS to occur.

You have it backwards. The data is assumed to be ILS at closely related nodes because there is discordance.

Loudmouth said:
They purposefully picked markers that were the most sensitive to ILS at the root of the neoavian tree, and as expected they were limited to the root of the tree:

" Nevertheless, if homoplasy was prevalent in our RE markers, we would expect to see an equal distribution of RE incongruences across all of the sampled clades of Neoaves. While we find dozens of presence/absence markers with incongruences affecting the short branches within the neoavian radiation (S1 Table; e.g., the core landbirds and core waterbirds clades), there is not a single RE incongruence in our presence/absence matrix (S1 Table) affecting well-accepted internal relationships within postradiation taxa, such as passerines, parrots, eagles, penguins, the woodpecker/bee-eater clade, the hummingbird/swift clade, and the flamingo/grebe clade."

We are finding incongruences that are consistent with ILS, as the paper you reference discusses at length.

Why are you underlining the fact that parrots are most similar to parrots, eagles are most similar to eagles, penguins to penguins, etc.? Are you really trying to pass this off as a demonstration of Evolution theory's predictive power?

lifepsyop · Sep 8, 2015

crjmurray said:
Some subsequent molecular studies published shortly afterwards have failed to support it.[2][3][4] In particular, two recent studies, each combining genome-wide analyses of multiple taxa with testing of competing alternative phylogenetic hypotheses, concluded that Pegasoferae is not a natural grouping.[5][6]

Hmm

Yet the Pegasofarae clade hypothesis was accepted as a possibility without any hint of falsification of Common Descent.. Hmmm...

Loudmouth · Sep 8, 2015

lifepsyop said:
You have it backwards. The data is assumed to be ILS at closely related nodes because there is discordance.

Since that is where ILS would occur, it makes sense. They ruled out homoplasy earlier in the paper, so that leaves us with one known mechanism that would produce those patterns, which is ILS.

If you see dog tracks going through the woods you don't conclude that space aliens flew in and created fake dog tracks. You conclude that a dog made them. This is no different. The evidence is completely consistent with the patterns that ILS would produce.

Why are you underlining the fact that parrots are most similar to parrots, eagles are most similar to eagles, penguins to penguins, etc.? Are you really trying to pass this off as a demonstration of Evolution theory's predictive power?

The LTR retrotransposon incongruences don't occur in the more distal groups, just as the theory of evolution predicts.

Loudmouth · Sep 8, 2015

lifepsyop said:
Yet the Pegasofarae clade hypothesis was accepted as a possibility without any hint of falsification of Common Descent.. Hmmm...

A clear falsification would be if 10% of human and sloth DNA were more similar than the orthologous chimp [and human] DNA. Care to show us anything approaching this level of incongruence?

ecco · Sep 8, 2015

Not_By_Chance said:
Hmm, you might want to read the following text about the probability factors and then re-evaluate why you think life is possible without God. If you can still accept that idea then you sure have a lot of faith!
The math isn't important except to understand that the odds against evolution constitute an impossibility.
The probability of a non-living amino acid producing the special structure of living matter by chance is one in 10 to the 123rd power, that is, it is mathematically impossible.

By the same logic, YOU are mathematically impossible.
1. YOU are the end product of 1 in 100,000,000 sperm from your father fertilizing an egg.
2. YOUR FATHER was the end product of 1 in 100,000,000 sperm from his father fertilizing an egg
3. HIS FATHER was the end product of 1 in 100,000,000 sperm from his father fertilizing an egg.

12. HIS FATHER was the end product of 1 in 100,000,000 sperm from his father fertilizing an egg.

Going back just 12 generations, it took over 10 to the 123rd power of the exact sperm/egg combinations to create YOU.
YOU are mathematically impossible.

Yet, here you are!

lifepsyop · Sep 8, 2015

Loudmouth said:
Since that is where ILS would occur, it makes sense.

Yes, so now you understand that discordance is always necessarily shifted to hypothesized events occurring at base nodes. That's what I've been saying for the last 2 pages. It isn't "found" there like you have been alleging.

Loudmouth said:
If you see dog tracks going through the woods you don't conclude that space aliens flew in and created fake dog tracks. You conclude that a dog made them. This is no different. The evidence is completely consistent with the patterns that ILS would produce.

This analogy doesn't even begin to make sense.

Loudmouth said:
The LTR retrotransposon incongruences don't occur in the more distal groups, just as the theory of evolution predicts.

Right... Parrots are most similar to Parrots. Eagles are most similar to Eagles. Penguins are most similar to Penguins. Who would have ever predicted these patterns but evolutionists? What a theory!

USincognito · Sep 9, 2015

lifepsyop said:
There is little to no real evidence for Common Descent.

Of course you think that. The actual evidence says otherwise. Heck, the universal use of DNA alone is a powerful indicator of common descent.

lifepsyop said:
There are certain things that *seem* like they could be pointing to common ancestry, yet at the same time, if those things were completely different it wouldn't disprove common ancestry either. It is a pseudo-theory, designed to accommodate extreme variations and contradictions in data.

Yeah, this is where we get into your usual shtick of hand waving away evidence and appealing to imaginary scientists making imaginary discoveries and coming up with imaginary explanations for them. My favorite was your thread last year where you tried to tell us that bird feathers on mammals wouldn't falsify the theory of evolution. Your appeal to some feather gene in a shared Amniote ancestor 300 million years prior was quite the jaw dropper.
http://www.christianforums.com/thre...cientific-theory.7832934/page-8#post-66021194
and your later response:

lifepsyop said:
Case in point: mammal feathers could either resolve as a common ancestor between birds and mammals, or as convergent evolution of feathers.

lifepsyop said:
Meanwhile the basic idea of a fish being able to transform into a human over hundreds of millions of years via "ecological niches" remains just as stupid and superstitious as ever.

And yet we have a slam dunk from genetics and the different globin genes found in modern vertebrates.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22846683

The functional diversification of the vertebrate globin gene superfamily provides an especially vivid illustration of the role of gene duplication and whole-genome duplication in promoting evolutionary innovation. For example, key globin proteins that evolved specialized functions in various aspects of oxidative metabolism and oxygen signaling pathways (hemoglobin [Hb], myoglobin [Mb], and cytoglobin [Cygb]) trace their origins to two whole-genome duplication events in the stem lineage of vertebrates. The retention of the proto-Hb and Mb genes in the ancestor of jawed vertebrates permitted a physiological division of labor between the oxygen-carrier function of Hb and the oxygen-storage function of Mb. In the Hb gene lineage, a subsequent tandem gene duplication gave rise to the proto α- and β-globin genes, which permitted the formation of multimeric Hbs composed of unlike subunits (α(2)β(2)).

USincognito · Sep 9, 2015

lifepsyop said:
Actually it would suggest that armadillos and primates are more closely related and chimp/human similarities are more the result of convergent evolution than direct relatedness. It would be a major upset for sure but if you think it would falsify evolution, then you simply don't understand evolution's explanatory capacity.

Please explain to us, in detail, how your imaginary scientists would explain a 10% genetic similarity between humans and armadillos by convergent evolution. You do realize that genes are heritable elements subject to random mutation and aren't something like a gross physical structure (like wings), right? Either way, please, do go on. Tell us how convergent evolution would give two very distinct species more genetic similarity than two very similar species.

lifepsyop said:
Evolutionists have proposed all sorts of strange relationships before. Recently it has been proposed with the Pegasofarae hypothesis that Horses (Perissodactyla) are more closely related to Bats (Chiroptera) than they are to Cows(Artiodactyla). This seems absurd and counter-intuitive given that horses and cows appear much more similar to each other than either is to bats.. yet this hypothesis obviously isn't going to falsify Common Descent.

Oh this is quite hilarious basing relatedness on the most superficial of characteristics. Pinnipeds generally look like Sirenians so it's crazy to suggest the seals are related to bears or manatees are related to elephants. And don't get him started on elephants, manatees and hyraxes.

lifepsyop · Sep 9, 2015

USincognito said:
Yeah, this is where we get into your usual shtick of hand waving away evidence and appealing to imaginary scientists making imaginary discoveries and coming up with imaginary explanations for them.

Wrong, that's just how you must falsely characterize my argument in order to avoid dealing with the actual lack of explanatory filters of Evolution theory.

USincognito said:
My favorite was your thread last year where you tried to tell us that bird feathers on mammals wouldn't falsify the theory of evolution. Your appeal to some feather gene in a shared Amniote ancestor 300 million years prior was quite the jaw dropper.
http://www.christianforums.com/thre...cientific-theory.7832934/page-8#post-66021194
and your later response:

Of course feathers on mammals would not falsify the theory evolution. That's why none of you have ever been able to explain how it would. Such findings would merely "shed new light" on mammals' complex evolutionary relationships with other amniotes.

USincognito said:
And yet we have a slam dunk from genetics and the different globin genes found in modern vertebrates.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22846683

The functional diversification of the vertebrate globin gene superfamily provides an especially vivid illustration of the role of gene duplication and whole-genome duplication in promoting evolutionary innovation. For example, key globin proteins that evolved specialized functions in various aspects of oxidative metabolism and oxygen signaling pathways (hemoglobin [Hb], myoglobin [Mb], and cytoglobin [Cygb]) trace their origins to two whole-genome duplication events in the stem lineage of vertebrates. The retention of the proto-Hb and Mb genes in the ancestor of jawed vertebrates permitted a physiological division of labor between the oxygen-carrier function of Hb and the oxygen-storage function of Mb. In the Hb gene lineage, a subsequent tandem gene duplication gave rise to the proto α- and β-globin genes, which permitted the formation of multimeric Hbs composed of unlike subunits (α(2)β(2)).

And behind this wall of jargon we have the same tired old assumption that similarity shared between vertebrate animals means that all vertebrate animals are related.

lifepsyop · Sep 9, 2015

USincognito said:
Please explain to us, in detail, how your imaginary scientists would explain a 10% genetic similarity between humans and armadillos by convergent evolution.

I already did. Let's just say that similarity patterns between humans and other primates were totally chaotic. This would be explained, (as it is in actual studies of discordant phylogeny), by sourcing the problem at the "common ancestor" of humans, primates, and other mammals. The lineages leading to Humans and primates would be placed on separate branches stemming from this common ancestor. Subsequent Human and Primate morphological similarities would be explained as convergent evolution. This would be acclaimed as powerful evidence of environmental niches and functional constraints driving the independent evolution of 'primate-like' body-plans, and would also explain the molecular discordance between Humans, Primates, and other mammals.

USincognito said:
You do realize that genes are heritable elements subject to random mutation and aren't something like a gross physical structure (like wings), right?

Evolution theory posits that strong selection pressures and functional constraints will conserve genes and drive similar functional output of those genes.

"Many animal toolkit proteins, despite over 1 billion years of independent evolution in different lineages, often exhibit functionally equivalent activities in vivo when substituted for one another. These observations indicate that the biochemical properties of these proteins and their interactions with receptors, cofactors, etc. have diverged little over vast expanses of time...
...The deployment of homologous transcription factors in similar roles reflects that some parts of genetic regulatory networks (GRNs) present in a common ancestor were conserved in descendant lineages. The existence of common regulatory inputs acting in a similar manner in the development of structures that are not directly related by common ancestry (that is, not homologous) has been referred to as “deep homology”...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867408008179

As I stated before, the existence of "mammal feathers", would be interpreted as independent activation of the same 'protein toolkit' that existed in the common amniote ancestor of birds and mammals.

USincognito said:
Either way, please, do go on. Tell us how convergent evolution would give two very distinct species more genetic similarity than two very similar species.

According to evolutionists, the shrew on the left is more "closely related" to an elephant than it is to the shrew on the right. Here you have two extremely similar animals, similarity which was originally held as satisfactory evidence of their close relatedness, but was casually dismissed as "convergent evolution", when evolutionists were forced by molecular data to place them in distinct groupings.

USincognito said:
Oh this is quite hilarious basing relatedness on the most superficial of characteristics. Pinnipeds generally look like Sirenians so it's crazy to suggest the seals are related to bears or manatees are related to elephants. And don't get him started on elephants, manatees and hyraxes.

Not sure what you're getting at here. Again this study shows how the Evolutionary community had no problem with accepting the possibility that a horse is more closely related to a bat than a cow, despite the overwhelming morphological similarity between ungulates. These are not "imaginary scientists" like you keep claiming. It is a clear demonstration of Evolution theory's ability to potentially rescue extremely contradictory results. Yet evolutionists pretend they are always making precise predictions, and that their theory would be shot to pieces by a single piece out of place. It's a sham.

Evolution is a fog that settles around the shifting landscape of data.

Loudmouth · Sep 9, 2015

lifepsyop said:
Yes, so now you understand that discordance is always necessarily shifted to hypothesized events occurring at base nodes.

Discordances at the distal parts of the phylogeny could not be shifted to the base nodes, as already discussed. That's what you continue to ignore.

Right... Parrots are most similar to Parrots. Eagles are most similar to Eagles. Penguins are most similar to Penguins. Who would have ever predicted these patterns but evolutionists? What a theory!

Then tell us why special creation would produce these phylogenies for comparisons of retrotransposons in those groups.

ERVs and how Evolutionists bluff with the data

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