Ptaylor
Posts: 1180
Joined: Aug. 2006
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Preserving (because you never know), NickMatzke_UD's latest response to BSI77 on the latest Junk DNA thread:
| Quote | Thats not the research article, its the news article summary.
And either way, it has NOTHING to do with incongruence between phylogenetic trees! Do you even know what incongruence means? They used phylogenetic trees to do the study, for godssakes!
Bolding random parts of a news article about a research paper you dont understand is not an argument. These kinds of shenanigans are why I mostly just ignore your posts, and why the scientific community will definitely, and rightly, never take the kind of stuff you put out seriously.
Heres what the article was actually about using phylogenetic trees to test whether the most common mechanism of speciation was:
1. A matter of gradually building up many small changes which might be expected if natural selection of a long series of mutations was the major cause of lineage-splitting.
2. A matter of single, rare events which might be expected if dispersal to new regions was the major cause of lineage splitting, e.g. when a species on rare occasions gets over a mountain range, out to a remote island, etc.
#1 predicts that the lengths of the branches between nodes on the phylogenetic tree will have a normal (bell curve) distribution, since if you add up the waiting times of a large number of exponentially-distributed events, you get a normal distribution.
#2 predicts that the lengths of the branches between nodes on the phylogenetic tree will have an exponential distribution.
They found statistically more support for #2. Since a lot of biologists have had the opinion that geographic separation is the most common cause of speciation, this tends to support their position.
There are various criticisms one can make of the study, since e.g. estimating branch lengths is nontrivial, but thats neither here nor there.
In shortwhat am I, as a scientist, supposed to think about the shenangians you are pulling here? I know youre not doing it dishonestly, youre doing it out of the confidence that youre correct, and your eagerness to show it but thats almost worse! Imagine what it looks like to a scientist who is already predisposed to dislike religion. Heres a guy who calls himself bornagain77?, who goes around telling people that a major scientific theory is a total fraud, yet he cant even get the first thing correct about a recent scientific paper, and his doubling-down on the mistake indicates he doesnt even care enough to double-check his claim once he is criticized about it.
Im just amused, because Ive seen such shenanigans so many times from creationists, but a lot of scientists get pretty darn ticked off at the abuse of their work and their field by people who have high confidence, but no idea what they are talking about. This, not atheism, is what makes so many scientists so strongly opposed to creationism/ID. That and the fact that other creationists/IDists dont correct such mistakes, which are being made all the time.
And, if the goal is to convert people to evangelical Christianity, imagine how your behavior looks from the scientists perspective. Apparently, becoming born again involves throwing away your brain, naively misinterpreting the hard and careful work of scientists, and loudly proclaiming to the world that the scientists are wrong, when you dont even know what you are talking about. Thats about the last thing that will ever appeal to a scientist, or to anyone who values science.
Creationists are one of the biggest impediments to successful apologetics that exists in the modern world. |
As with criticism of Elizabeth Liddle I think Nick is also imparting a false sense of respectability to UDers' arguments. However, after this I get the feeling he won't be bothering to hang out over there much longer.
And while I am at it, who is IDiot ScottAndrews? He seems to be in the race with StephenB, Uppy and others to be the most arrogant in their ignorance.
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We no longer say: “Another day; another bad day for Darwinism.” We now say: “Another day since the time Darwinism was disproved.”
-PaV, Uncommon Descent, 19 June 2016
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