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Illusions of Phylogeny
- Thread starter lifepsyop
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Black Akuma
Shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die...
Organizations like AiG and ICR get millions of dollars of funding each year. That theme park of Ken Ham's didn't just spring up out of nowhere. Those guys from evolutionnews you're fond of linking to? I assure you, they get paid, and paid to do a lot less than most scientists do. Typically, you get funding when your work actually starts producing results or is shown to have merit. When was the last time creationists actually came out with research that had any real practical application?
This idea that scientists are all secretly supporting creationism and would only switch over if not for the money is a bit silly.
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Yep, it's hard to avoid studying something you've defined as 'change over time'.
Maybe if your theory wasn't built on total equivocation you wouldn't be fooling yourselves into thinking every time a mutation occurs that its evidence that a human and a snail share a common ancestor.
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Yea, gee, what am I talking about? Nobody uses these groupings anymore.
Google Scholar search for the term Reptiles: 495,000 results
Google Scholar search for the term Invertebrates: 755,000 results
PubMed search for the term Reptiles: 31,870 results
PubMed search for the term Invertebrates: 448,317 results
And they certainly are no longer presented to the general public:
Reptiles, the class Reptilia, are an evolutionary grade of animals, comprising today's turtles, crocodilians, snakes, lizards, and tuatara, as well as many extinct groups. A reptile is any amniote (a tetrapod whose egg has an additional membrane, originally to allow them to lay eggs on land) that is neither a mammal nor a bird. - Wikipedia
Invertebrates are animal species that do not possess or develop a vertebral column, derived from the notochord. This in effect includes all animals apart from the subphylum Vertebrata. - Wikipedia
And those specific groupings don't even matter, they were just examples. The argument was based on the nature of paraphyletic groups in general, which you seemed to have no comment on.
Good try though, sfs. It almost sounded like you were making a point.
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EternalDragon
Counselor
I agree. It runs much deeper than that.
And I never said "secretly supporting creationism". You don't have to even be religious to disagree with many of the aspects of evolution as many have done.
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sfs
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You didn't make an argument, so there's really not much to comment on. Yes, some traditional taxonomic groupings, like reptiles and invertebrates, do not reflect evolutionary relationships. Not really surprising, since they've been in use since before Darwin. Evolutionary biologists have recognized that they don't, and have developed an entire taxonomic system that does away with this kind of grouping, and they're slowly but steadily moving the larger biological community toward adopting it. And according to you, this situation is the fault of evolutionary biology because, uh, huh?
By the way, I see you still haven't provided any explanation for the great deal of phylogenetic consistency we do see between different molecular markers. Nor have you offered any evidence for your repeated claim that mammalian clades were first formulated based on transposons. Nor have you explained why trees based on one transposon should mirror those based on another. Nor have you explained how scientists are pushing discrepancies to the root of the tree. Nor have you offered any reason to think that incomplete lineage sorting undercuts common descent.
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Split Rock
Conflation of Blathers
The goal of this thread is to help pull back the curtain a little bit on the language and imagery used to sell the illusion of phylogeny to the public.
Phylogeny refers to the supposed evolutionary relationships among all living things.
NESTED GROUPS / HIERARCHIES:
This is a method of creating "Groups" and disguising them as ancestral lineages in order to pretend that they say something about the origins of certain types of organisms.
For example, in the image below from TalkOrigins:
We can say that an ancestral lineage of Vertebrates gave rise to a lineage of animals with Jaws, which gave rise to a lineage with Digits, which grave rise to the lineage of Amniotes, which gave rise to the lineage of animals with Hair and Endothermy, which gave rise to the lineage with a Placenta, which ultimately gave rise to the lineage of Humans.
It seems I have said a great deal about the Human's evolutionary past. But in fact, all I have done is given a self-fulfilling definition of how a Human is defined and classified. A Human is an endothermic placental with hair, classified as an amniote, with digits, jaws, and vertebrae. A Human is all of these things, by definition. But I have not said anything about actual lineages or ancestors. The supposed "Ancestors" are only conceptual nested groups.
Furthermore, a "Group" does not reproduce. An "Amniote Group" can not give rise to a "Placental Group". The group is only a simplified abstract idea. The actual species that fall within these groups are incredibly physiologically diverse. By referring to their supposed ancestors as "Groups", it becomes a way of deleting diversity. Focusing only on simple Groups nested within Groups helps sell the illusion that actual ancestral lineages are being identified, when they only exist as an abstract idea.
The abstract character or group creates an imaginary data point. The group: "Placenta" creates an imaginary ancestral lineage of "placental mammals", that all other placental mammals have descended from over time. The data point is imaginary, yet it seems as if an actual ancestral lineage of placental mammals has been identified.
In a similar way, the abstract character or group also deletes data, or deletes diversity. Placental mammals consist of an incredibly diverse array of real animals: (mice,dogs,rabbits,elephants,giraffes,apes,bears,seals,bats, etc. etc.) Yet by simply naming the Group "Placental Mammals", it provides the illusion that I have identified an ancestral lineage to all of these animals, while ignoring the incredible diversity found between individual types of placental mammals. I have stripped all of the information that would confound my imaginary lineage.
Nested Groups both create imaginary data, and delete real data, in order to help sell the illusion of phylogeny.
I don't see any data deleted here. Show me some deleted data which, if included, would confound the tree in question. Also, show us how creationism better explains these nested trees. While you are at it, you can also explain why this tree fits the fossil evidence so well. Why is it, for example, that jawless fish first appear earlier in the geological column than fish with jaws?
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As explained in the OP, I am elucidating the way in which Evolution is sold to the general public, with misleading language and imagery. Paraphyletic groupings are one of those methods. It helps create the illusion that ancestral lineages have been identified.
All you've done so far is wave your hands and kick up dust. Taxonomy is always being shifted around and tinkered with. That is irrelevant.
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All animal attributes are deleted except for the character traits listed. That is a lot of deleted data. I'm not suggesting it is feasible to create such a diagram, I'm simply showing how the gross simplification of nested hierarchies works as an illusion.
The trees are independent of Evolution or Creation. They are simply nested groups of some basic character traits found in animals. But when you look at something like this and think you are seeing a picture of Evolution. That's the illusion at work.
The tree is made of self-fulfilling definitions.... (A human is a placental with hair and endothermy) It is not expected to be confounded. That would be like looking for brown-eyed people in a group defined by the presence of blue eyes. It is a self-fulling condition.
There are however characters found outside the nested groups. A mammalian-like placenta has been discovered in a skink lizard, for instance. It's just automatically called convergent evolution.
Feathers are nested only within birds, but if we happened to find a feathered mammal, it would simply be called Convergent evolution. Evolution is well insulated against such pattern breakers with these rescue devices.
The nested groups are basically arranged by the fossil record. It's not an independent data set. For instance, if digits happened to appear in the fossil record after the ability to lay eggs on land (amniotes), then those two characters could simply be switched around. If hair happened to be found on reptiles and amphibians, the 'Hair' group could be pushed down near the digits.
That helps show its overall illusory nature. This type of nested group hierarchy could accommodate many different data sets. Yet, the way it is presented, people think it would somehow be "broken", or difficult to arrange into nested groups, if Evolution were false.
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Black Akuma
Shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die...
Please, don't let me stop you. Regale me with your indepth analysis.
How do you define 'many'? Because, for the umptenth time, at best you have about 5% of scientists on your side, and probably less than that. The vast majority of them are, in fact, religious. So I'd like to see what your basis for this statement is.
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It's funny for someone whose camp loves to cry "THERE ARE GAPS" to intentionally leave huge gaps in the presentation of their so-called argument.
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Black Akuma
Shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die...
It just always strikes me as an odd tactic. I was watching this Janet Folger video the other day, and she started off saying that evolution was 'the view of a scientific minority'.
That's just false. I mean, whatever you might think about the evidence or the science or whatever...that's wrong.
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They aren't trying to make an honest, truthful scientific argument. They are more interested in erecting a facade to make it look like their views are supported. There will always be creationists who will never look past the facade.
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Split Rock
Conflation of Blathers
Phylogeny makes use of shared characterstics. That is the whole point. If there were no shared characteristics, then phylogeny wouldn't work. I think it funny that you expect us to instead to use a diagram that you claim isn't even feasible.
No, what it shows is that evolution explains these nested hierarchies that were apparent even before evolution was accepted by biologists. That is the power of the theory at work. What does creationism explain?
No. If brown-eyes were a shared trait, then it would appropriate to use. Since it is not a shared trait, then it is not appropriate to use. This isn't rocket science.
I am not familiar with this example, but I am sure it is like the platypus's "bill." A platypus's bill may look similar to a bird's bill, but it is morphologically and developmentally completetely different. The similarities in this case are superficial, and thus quite correctly seen as an example of convergent evolution. If this skink had a true mammalian placenta, then you would have a valid point. We don't have such chimeras in the real world, however.
If a mammal were found with something that was superficially like a feather, then that would be considered convergent, yes. If a mammal were found with feathers just like a bird, then you are wrong. Such an occurance would be a real problem for the theory.
No. The nested groups were created at a time when there were very few described fossil species. That is one reason why there continue to be problems in classifying extinct species that are not closely related to any living species. One of the triumphs of the theory is that it explains what we find in the fossil record very well. I used the example earlier of jawless fish first appearing before jawed fish, and how that fits in well with the hiearchy.
It would. Try and fit automobiles into a nested hierchy. Yes, one can talk about the "evolution" (in general terms) of automobiles over time, but if you tried to put them into a nested hierarchy, you would wind up with many different phylogenies that conflicted. What traits do you look at, when human engineers are free to cut and paste between car types at will? God (or the "intelligent designer") could have done that with life on earth, but apparently did not. He could have put birds wings on flying reptiles and hair on frogs, but we never find such species. Evolution explains why.
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Split Rock
Conflation of Blathers
Don't forget engineers. Engineers seem to tend to be creationists... maybe because they are used to thinking in terms of intelligently designed things.
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