RufusAtticus

This is a reply to ex-robot from another thread. (It's to keep that thread sort of on topic.)

Yes, very limited form of common descent based upon folk definations, for which they can give no testable criteria. I have asked YECs many times to give me usable criteria for determining whether two organisms belong to the same immutable kind. I have yet to receive any. A major problem with kinds is that humans and chimps must be separate kinds, despite the fact that they can be shown to be more similar genetically than many of the species often placed together in other kinds. For instance, you and Bubbles the Chimp are more genetically similar than horses and zebras (Horsey kind) or dogs and foxes (Doggie kind).

Although it is a possibility, in my experience YECs do not agree with my description or any of the other similar ways evolution can be defined. The main problem with YECs is that they completely disagree with the consequences of such definations and would rather argue against their cartoon versions. I know one in particular who loves to say "We have no problem with variation. It's evolution for which there is no evidence for." <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

Creationists love to make baseless claims that mutation only degenerates the genetic code of organisms. Furthermore, to maintain "kinds" they have to argue that there are barriers that mutations cannot cross so that a dog will always be a dog. Mechanisms for that type of phenotypic screening do not exist. YECs completely dissagree with the existance of mutations and/or the consequences.

Not from my experience. Evidence is either brushed off as pertaining to "variation" or the YEC just denies it. You know a YEC is desperate when they try to claim that the emergance antibiotic/pesticide resistance is not evolution. <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

You are quite right, novel features are characteristics of an organism or populaion that did not exist in the ancestral populaion. In phylogical analysis they're known as derived traits. The issue with YECs is that "kinds" must limit derived traits or they won't be immutable anymore. In other words, the descendents of a dog must always remain dogs, and thry must only have ancestors that were also dogs. If YECs acknowledge that it is possible for the descendents of a dog to loose or gain diagnostic features, such that they no longer appear to be dogs, then there is no possible way for the "kind" hypotheisis to rule out that dogs and cats do not have a common ancestor. The concept of novelity is clearly dammaging to the typical YEC view of biology.

-RvFvS

ex-robot

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Fair enough if the majority of your encounters with yec are the whack jobs on the net. When I speak of yecs, I speak of them as more of a whole/off-line and sometimes mainly the yec scientists and organizations.

I don't think of of it as desperate at all. It's just the hate of a word and its association. All they are saying (in my experience) is that it doesn't prove humans and chimps share a common ancestry which of course is what most lay people think of "evolution". Eugenie Scott on ncseweb.org even states for an article, "In this paper, when I use the term evolution, I will be speaking about the concept of shared ancestry of living things, of descent with modification." Thanks. I'm not sure if they do or not.

xr