Zachriel
Posts: 2560
Joined: Sep. 2006
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It looks as if Zachriel is subject to a silent bannination. This was posted 21.5247 hours ago and has now been deleted.
| Quote | | Quote | | Collin: I don’t know what you mean by ’singular’ and ‘objective’ but automobiles certainly do form nested hierarchies. |
Zachriel: Vehicles can be formed into any of a number of nested hierarchies depending on the traits chosen. The most obvious classification is by make, brand, model and year. But we could group them by heavy truck, pickup truck, sedan, roadster, motorcycle. Or by accessories, radio, brakes, air bags, fuel injections.
When an innovation occurs in vehicle manufacture, it quickly spreads across the lineages. If Ford gets a radio, soon Chevy and Dodge will have radios too. And we can mix-and-match; so a car and a pickup makes a Ranchero. Or put different tires on it, or an engine from another line.
Life doesn’t work like that. New traits have to be modifications of existing traits in the same line. It’s as if there is a separate designer for each lineage who can’t see what anyone else is doing. And lineages branch off with most stems going extinct, just what is expected of blind tinkering.
The nested hierarchy for life applies to nearly every trait, morphological, genomic, embryonic, even the succession of fossil through time. Even the exceptions are instructive. Consider the hydrodynamic shape of dolphins. Aquatic like fish, yet they are clearly mammals (heart, lung, embryonic hind limbs, not to mention mammary glands). In fact, their hydrodynamic shapes supports adaptation, and we can therefore predict that they had ancestors with reduced hind limbs.
The nested hierarchy is a very powerful pattern. If you say you have an organism with mammary glands, we can predict it will have a complex eukaryote cell structure with organelles such as mitochondria, that it ingests other organisms for nourishment, has bilateral symmetry, an alimentary canal, a bony head at one end with an array of sense organs, vertebrae protecting a nerve cord, integument, jaw, ribs, four limbs during at least at some stage of life, neck, neocortex, endothermic, internal fertilization, four-chambered heart, lungs with alveoli and a muscular diaphragm, two eyes, three ear bones in each of two ears, hair or at least hair follicles at some stage of life, sebaceous glands, most probably will have heterodont dentition.
All that from mammary glands. These are not trivial correlations, but among the most fundamental relationships in biology.
You might say a designer could make it look that way. But humans don’t. When we consider a Centaur, we can say with some assurance, it could never have existed as a natural organism. Half-man, half-horse, six limbs, it has no plausible evolutionary ancestors. But it does have the signature of design.
Finally, this pattern is exactly what is expected of an uncrossed branching process. We can even reconstruct a nested hierarchy from the stems if all the variations are random. |
Accepting Collin's concerns on good faith, it can take some time to provide a detailed answer. Nevertheless, the post was deleted. They must have a serious problem with mammary glands.
Several other comments were deleted including a response to this doozy:
| Quote | Zachriel: Well, fossils have been used to argue that dinosaurs once roamed the Earth.
Joseph: And the absence of fossils cannot be used to argue that humans did not exist during the age of dinosaurs. |
As well as deleted replies to Collin's quote-mine about Punctuated Equilibrium. Strangely enough, they allowed a correction to a deleted post.
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The struggle against ignorance is to the end of time. But it is said that if you die in tard, you will be reborn in Tardhalla.
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