N.Wells
Posts: 1836
Joined: Oct. 2005
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| Quote (cryptoguru @ Feb. 17 2015,17:58) | N.Wells: last thing on the bird topic for now ...
| Quote | | while in the exact same post you made the completely subjective but objectively totally wrong statement |
That is my point, if I wanted to I could use cladistics to assert that Archaeopteryx is directly related to Hoatzin. I can do what I like with cladistics ... it'll only be an "accepted answer" if it supports the pre-existing evolutionary assumption of common descent.
Cladistics is just terminology that means "hey this looks like this and does the same sort of thing, therefore one of them morphed into the other over time" ... but tries to make it sound like proper science. Actually Phylogenetic Systematics sounds even more sciency doesn't it, you should probably use that next time to convince the ignorant creationist that you're doing some really heavily objective analytical stuff.
Ancestry is assumed, therefore it is circular reasoning whether you use a Consistency Index or a Retention Index.
It's just fancy language designed to make it sound like you're doing something way more advanced than pointing at animals and saying "cow goes moo" ... "sheep goes baaa".
Let's get back to the genome discussion, which is much less slippery. In my last post I put forth a coherent argument for why I think evolution of multi-cellular organisms is impossible ... explain how I am wrong without either just saying "you are wrong" or "you don't understand evolution" ... or doing what McOgre does and linking to articles without explaining how they apply to the argument. e.g. "here's 5 articles I'm linking to, if you read them all you will see I'm completely correct and you are completely wrong"
You keep assuming Common Descent in your argument, which is circular reasoning ... I don't accept CD for the origin of different kinds of living things. I believe in variation within a kind, which is what we observe. We see dogs become hugely variant different types of dogs (in that case artificially bred by humans), not by evolution but by standard Mendelian genetics. We don't see them becoming something other than a dog ... the genome restricts the limit of variation. You may want to call them new species of dog because they look different, but they are still dogs and my toddler could identify that.
Your assumption of evolution has led you down the path that you have to be able to explain the morphology of one kind of animal to the next ... we don't see that in the fossil record, or happening now. Sure you can pick an animal out that looks similar to another and claim it's an ancestor, but you have absolutely no evidence for this assertion except for the fact you believe the rock layers denote different ages of history and you believe that all living organisms on earth came from one blob of soup.
So my point stands, claiming one thing evolved from another because they look similar is begging the question ... you have to assume Common Descent, and even with that assumption you can't prove that fossil you're holding ever had any offspring. |
"That is my point, if I wanted to I could use cladistics to assert that Archaeopteryx is directly related to Hoatzin." Then you made your point unbelievably badly and you do not understand cladistics. You made a noncladistic assertion that was wrong, without any evidence. Cladistics does not work the way you say: it is a statistical analysis of similarity akin to cluster analysis and in its fundamental form without shortcuts no assumptions of ancestry are needed to perform the analysis. Cladistics would (entirely legitimately, if pointlessly) pair hoatzins and the Archaeopteryx as sister groups if and only if you had no other birds (even an enantiornithine) and no other maniraptorans in the analysis (for example in an analysis of a beetle, a newt, an elephant, Archaeopteryx, and the hoatzin). Otherwise, you would need to lie and make up or delete data in order to create a desired outcome, but that would be obvious the moment anyone checked your data or redid your analysis.
If you pay attention to my words, I never claim "direct ancestry" when dealing with fossils, precisely because that cannot be known. I claim degrees of similarity from which I infer degrees of relatedness, and I use words like "structural intermediate" and "stem members" and "basal forms", and I will say that one animal is the closest candidate that we currently know of to the ancestry of a group. If you are going to argue over something, get your facts right and don't argue about strawmen.
In the same vein, you are apparently under a delusion that change through recombination does not constitute evolutionary change (even below the level of speciation). Again, you might try arguing with argue with real issues, rather than your misunderstandings of them.
Your claim that the Archaeopteryx is a "Mendelian variant" of the hoatzin is a more extreme assertion of ancestry than anything I care to make. However, if you could show that you could get from the one to the other by genetic recombination you would in fact have lost your war: you would have just demonstrated an easy transition across a very large morphological/anatomical distance (did you not understand the lists that OgreMvK and I provided?) and you would have demonstrated that evolution is much easier than I think it is, let alone than you think it is.
Edited to add: I want to add to something Doc Bill said. You keep saying that biologists assume evolution, and people keep replying that it's a conclusion, not an assumption. Just as in day-to-day physics people do not go about re-proving Newtonian mechanics and the electron theory of electricity, biologists find the evidence in favor of evolution to be so overwhelming that they spend very little time directly testing the overall idea and instead spend most of their time trying to expand on the theory of evolution and to test its predictions and implications and find some new wrinkles. In that sense one could say that there is a sort of an assumption of evolution. However, evolutionary theory has passed so many tests that biologists see it as proven. Also, if it were false, standard ongoing research would be generating endless quantities of enigmas and contradictions each year, and that is just not happening. The fact that there are people who must reject the evidence because of their religious beliefs and because they clearly don't understand it does not enter into the calculation. Geographers do not put off making maps while awaiting yet another test of the spherical earth theory just because there are still a few vocal flat-earthers out there. Until you show that your criticisms are founded in knowledge rather than ignorance and blindness (or, somewhat more likely, until fundamentalist republicans get their act together to the extent of defunding the sciences they don't like), your objections are not going to be relevant.
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