CeilingCat
Posts: 2363
Joined: Dec. 2007
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Cornelius has a new tactic - the bald faced lie: | Quote | | The species do not fit into an evolutionary tree of life. The fossil record does not reveal this, the anatomy of the species does not reveal this, their embryonic development patterns do not reveal this, nor does the DNA reveal this. |
Oh wait ... that's not new at all. Never mind.
Edited to add: NickM does a great takedown: | Quote | NickM Apr 6, 2012 01:26 PM
Just the usual incompetent hackery on display here. What Hunter isn't telling you is that the treeishness of a dataset can be measured, and the degree of difference between trees can be measured. When this is done on multicellular organisms, we get a really shockingly high amount of congruence between datasets. The occasional reported incongruence doesn't change this, even though sometimes scientists get quite excited about specific examples. "Incongruence" is not an all-or-nothing thing. When one branch disagrees between two trees, and all of the other branches agree, this is a very high amount of statistical agreement. Arguing that this kind of disagreement falsifies common ancestry is like arguing that the difference between estimating the age of the Earth at 4.5 billion years vs. 4.6 billion years falsifies the age of the Earth, because "100 million years is such a huge difference."
When you get to single-celled organisms, which are eating each other and which don't have isolated germlines, and which are known in some cases to eat DNA floating around in the environment, and thus have a higher chance of lateral gene transfer, you actually *still* have an awful lot of tree signal. This is why, for example, people who do environmental genomics can take a scoop of soil or seafloor mud, sequence everything in the sample, and then sort the genes into any one of 20-some prokaryote phyla. It's not quite perfect in all cases (the most shocking one is LGT between some hyperthermophiles between archaea and bacteria in hot springs), but it's pretty damn good.
Scientific explanation: DNA is mostly inherited vertically, as can be observed in the wild and in the lab in any organism you care to look at, but rarely is laterally transferred, as also can be (rarely) observed.
Cornelius Hunter's stated better explanation: [wind whistling through a ghost town]
Cornelius Hunter's actual explanation: invoke a near-infinite number of free parameters (i.e. epicycles) in the form of "God did it through magic, any sequence pattern we observe is the way it is because it was God's good pleasure to do it that way, any human questioning of this explanation is impertinent and is metaphysical religion masquerading as science." |
And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is how we do that. Good job, NickM!
Edited by CeilingCat on April 06 2012,19:01
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