PsychoSarah
Chaotic Neutral
-_- you better not be asking that question if you don't have a real life example of it. Unfortunately, this site didn't represent what I typed previously very accurately, since I actually had variable amounts of space in between the numbers, so I am going to use the number 0 as negative space not representing any organisms, just distances between them.
However, the answer to your question is more complicated than a simple "yes" or "no", because the amount of fossil evidence we have between different lineages is not equal (as you are well aware). As a result, the oldest bat fossil is far less likely to be representative of how ancient bats are than the oldest hominid fossil is to be representative of how ancient hominids are. The more ancient the lineage we are talking about, the more wiggle room there can potentially be as well, since there is likely tens of millions of years between the different fossils found versus, say, the often less than 1 million between relevant fossils to human evolution. I'd say, based on the number of fossils we have and time between fossils, humans would be the modern organism with the least flexibility in terms of order of ancestry, and pretty much any jellyfish species would have a ton of potential to be pushed back.
That is, as our understanding of the lineage of an organism or group of organisms gets better, there's less flexibility for changes in their cladograms and ancestor order. I mean, when we have 1002000003000400050006 compared to
1002003040005006007089, you can see that the former has a lot more space for already discovered organisms to be shifted, as well as for new ones to occupy. However, this doesn't mean that nothing could change with the second one. 8 and 9 are so close to each other that even with a fairly large number of fossils for both it could be difficult to determine which came first if neither of them have a key trait that MUST come first. No other swaps in either representative sequence can be swapped, however, without being evidence explicitly against evolution.
After all, the organisms which precede 9 may not be direct ancestors of 9, but rather branches which share an ancestor with it and represent key traits of that ancestor. The more drastic the push back, the more evidence against evolution until an inevitable breaking point, such as a mammal predating amphibians or a human predating all other apes. However, if 8 genetically was demonstrably ancestral to 9, it MUST predate 9 just as much as my grandmother must predate me. As a result, the shifts in order are only allowable in lineages we know so little about that we honestly aren't all that certain as to the order to begin with.
-_- there are 8 great apes including humans, not 4. Your claim was a gene shared by humans and housecats, but not humans and any other great apes.
Additionally, you are ignoring that one of the major problems is time scale, and your cladogram either significantly exaggerates how closely related housecats and the great apes are, or it makes the great apes overly distant from each other.
ALX3 is a gene which predates reptiles. The oldest reptile fossil is over 300 million years old. Even with the most generous numbers and ignoring that you decided not to account for half of the great apes, the last common ancestor between humans, orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees existed less than 20 million years ago. Do you honestly expect that the type of deletion event you've provided evidence for that took over 300 million years across distant lineages to occur 3 times could also be reasonably expected to occur 3 times in less than 20 million years in lineages that are extremely close? I'm sorry, but you are wrong. If you weren't wrong, you'd actually present an example rather than presenting a hypothetical situation.
In fact, no more hypotheticals allowed. They don't provide evidence for anything, and they haven't proven to be constructive in the debates between us. Now is the time for reality only. What ACTUAL evidence do you have?
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