ericmurphy
Posts: 2460
Joined: Oct. 2005
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| Quote (afdave @ Oct. 02 2006,11:33) | Ah yes. I see I may be confusing you by talking about "moving left on the chart."
I do understand that sunflowers and penguins, for example, are NOT in the "human branch" or "trunk" or whatever you call it. |
Dave, I know I'm wasting my time on you, but let me see if I can at least clear up some confusion for the lurkers, who seem to be getting a lot more out of this than you are.
None of the organisms that you are talking about are on the "'human branch' or 'trunk' or whatever you call it." Do you have brothers or sisters, Dave? Or cousins? Are any of those people on the "Dave branch" or "trunk" or whatever you want to call it? No. You're not descended from any of those people. In the same way, humans are no more decended from "worms or fish" than they are sunflowers or penguins. You're totally looking at this the wrong way, Dave, and until you can get clear what the phylogenetic tree looks like, it's impossible for you to get anywhere with this discussion.
What you need to understand is this. The only difference between sunflowers, penguins, worms, and fish is how far back in time you need to go to find the common ancestor of each of them and humans. None of them is an "ancestor" of humans (or of anything else alive today).
If you go back in time, you'll find that penguins and humans diverged from a common ancestor at some point. So we don't get into quibbles about "deep time," let's just call that x years ago. Now, if you go further back in time, you'll find that humans and fish diverged from a common ancestor at an earlier time, say, x + y years ago. At that point in time, there were no humans or penguins, or anything that looked like either one. There were fish, and that was it for that particular branch on the phylogenetic tree.
Now, if you go back further, you'll find the common ancestor of humans and worms, at a time = x + z years ago, where z > y. You'd have to go back further to find the common ancestor of humans and sunflowers.
But none of these organisms—sunflowers, penguins, worms or fish—is directly ancestral to humans. How could they be? They're no more ancestral to humans than your brothers or sisters or cousins are ancestral to you. And that's the part where your misunderstanding of evolutionary theory really trips you up. You seem to believe that evolutionary theory proposes that at some point, fish stopped evolving, except for those certain fish that continued to evolve towards humans. It doesn't work that way, Dave, and that's a fatal flaw in your understanding of evolutionary theory, and will prevent you from ever constructing an argument against it that won't be immediately shredded and, more to the point, wrong.
You need to get this clear in your head RIGHT NOW, Dave, if you have a prayer of arguing the topic: no organism alive today is in any sense "ancestral" to humans. Or to any other organism, for that matter.
And the sad fact is, Dave, if you'd read the Theobald article I sent you five months ago, you'd already understand all of this, and you could be discussing evolutionary theory with some hope of making any sense. Right now, you're not criticizing evolutionary theory at all: you're criticizing your own misapprehended version of it that has essentially nothing to do with the real theory.
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2006 MVD award for most dogged defense of scientific sanity
"Atheism is a religion the same way NOT collecting stamps is a hobby." —Scott Adams
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between ancient bacteria and modern bacteria vs. human and ancient bacteria would be the same. I did not say that we have such a "true" molecular clock up to the task.
