God Fearing Atheist

I just loved the part about provrial integration being "quite specific" Charles. Certainly, there is some degree of *preferential* targeting, according to base sequence, nuclear localization and, in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, domains of silent chromatin.

But saying these sorts of things show shared ERVs to be indicative of something other than common decent is a serious misunderstanding. What are the odds, Charles, of the *same* ERV being found at the *same* locus, even if they perfer to insert near some sequences over others? Creationists love probability calculations, so here's a good one.

-GFA

Happy Wonderer

This is quite amusing, Charles. A few pages ago you were disputing cladistics for horses, and now you are reduced to quibbling about C. aurantiacus? FYI, that is a bacteria! Should we throw out the whole clade for mammals, then?

hw

Doubting Didymus

That would only work if the explainations for mismatches were bad explanations, ad hoc confabulations and unfalsifyable speculations.

Horizontal gene transfer, for example, happens. We have seen it happening in a variety of organisms. Among organisms that do this, we'd expect molecular phylogenies to be unreliable. You wish to dismiss this as ad hoc, but in fact anyone can see that it is perfectly reasonable.

Not misquotes, perhaps. How about "malquotes" then? Your quotes are mainly about problems that phylogeneticists have encountered, or about new data updating less reliable data and refining specific parts of the tree. All your quotes are without context, and are generally useless when we are asking for specific instances of problematic mismatches. Later, for example, you are moving on to expand on one of the quotes that seemed to suggest significant mismatches, and we find you're only having a bitch about horizontal gene transfer.

Very tiresome, charles. We only expect this to happen in species where horizontal gene transfer actually happens. We have seen horizontal gene transfer, in fact, I saw some just last wednesday. I'm not kidding. Our lab was having a look at hybrid backcrossing in australian plants. Given this, why is it such a terrible thing to find evidence of it in phylogenetic trees of organisms that do it? You seem to have some sort of strange objection to explanations of any kind, and completely ignore the question of whether the explanation is good or not. If it's your contention that any particular scientific theory must explain everything it touches without exception and without any hypothesis testing in any case where it doesn't perform as well as it should, you might as well waltz home in victory now shouting "I disproved molecular phylogenetics by pointing to a species it doesn't work on! Also, I'm suing the kitchen knife industry because I can't cut titanium alloy."

Then, confronted with an exposition of one of your other malquotes, you move into that old time empty rhetoric I was talking about earlier. Observe:

Me (paraphrased): "Your quote is not talking about mismatches. It is about more accurate data (molecular analysis) updating less accurate data (morphological comparison). Note that the new data doesn't actually conflict with the old, but closer inspection reveals that morphological comparisons should have yeilded the new tree in the first place"

Rather than actually address the explaination, you descend into this:

These are the desperate antics of one who has utterly failed to make any sort of case at all. You might have struck a terrible blow to the theory of evolution, if only this were a strange paralell universe where your opponents are not allowed to explain things. If one ignores your assertions to the effect that explainations prove unreliability, as they very well should, then what emerges is actually a robust piece of evidence for common descent, the objection to which disappear under a moments light scrutiny.

Charles Darwin

Not by happenstance? Was it directed? Happenstance, in fact, is precisely how the evolutionary process is supposed to work. Remember, no teleology or final causes. You say the process is complicated. Fine, make it as complicated as you like, there still is to be no external guidance. The cheetah 'just arose'; whether by millions of years, billions of years, whatever, random biological variation struck upon the cheetah. Natural selection could not have caused any of that variation. You must believe that there is a gradual path from the microbe to the cheetah, and random variations found it.

Charles Darwin

You're the one making the claim that evolution is a fact. I'm just trying to figure out what's behind it.

Wow, I give. I think I'm beginning to understand now. Anyone who believes that "no evidence to the contrary has ever been found in any field of science in the history of time, ever" is certainly entitled to hold the position that evolution is a fact.

Charles Darwin

I hadn't heard that. Why then are evolutionists calling for a different kind of evolution (horizontal rather than vertical) in the early days to explain how the 1st 3 branches formed?

Charles Darwin

Yet another religious thinker has joined (and I thought that was for the GRD forum). Like the others you obviously have strong personal religious beliefs, which I cannot argue with. Clearly, evolution is a fact for you. (but not a "scientific" fact).

Doubting Didymus

That's just silly. Strongly suggest that you not make statements about things you are completely ignorant about.

Doubting Didymus

More empty rhetoric. Are you here for a discussion, or a baloon-filling contest?.

Doubting Didymus

Is it then your opinion that medical textbooks on cancer can be accurately summed up by the sentiment "cancer just arises"? Does that adequately illuminate the causes and processes that must be undertood in order to comprehend and battle cancer? Of course not.

And yes, I beleive that there is a gradual path from protozoans to complex metazoans. Thats not relevant to the question of whether evolution can be properly called 'random'.

In your opinion, are all processes not guided by an intelligent mind 'random'? Ocean waves sort pebbles by weight, for example. Is that a random outcome or not? Note that I'm not drawing any comparisons between evolution and something so simple as basic physical processes, but the point remains that natural processes can have nonrandom, predictable outcomes.