Jack the Bodiless

This single nested hirearchy, supported by multiple categories of evidence, is overwhelming evidence of common descent. If God created all species, then it's abundantly clear that he did it by basing each new design on a modification of an existing one, at least as far back as the Cambrian Explosion. Since then, not a single "new" variety of organism appears in the fossil record without similar ancestors.

It is the fact of common descent that you have sought to deny. This would also involve denial of Theistic Evolution, as I have repeatedly pointed out.
...Except that it DOES require such a hirearchy, so you're just babbling here.

pz

Please, people -- I'm trying to be nice and give everyone time to move on, and to avoid closing it when someone is in the middle of making a reply. However, I am closing this thread in 20 minutes. You're all better off making the effort to start new, specific, precise, well-defined threads. OK?

Charles Darwin

Whether God based designs on ealier designs or whether those designs were predetermined is a metaphysical question. Your claim that the former is "abundantly clear" conveniently supports your evolutionary views, but is simply not true.

You needn't repeatly point out that the many weaknesses of the theory of common descent are also weaknesses of Theistic Evolution. We agree on that.

Either temporary high rates of evolutionary change of multiple abiogenesis events would explain the lack of a hierarchy. Both high rates of evolutionary change and abiogenesis are accepted in evolutionary theory. I'm sorry, but these are facts. You have denied these facts in an effort to support your evolutionary views.

Jack the Bodiless

What is this, some sort of "get the last word in" contest?

(I'll try to be brief!)
Charles: scroll UP. My response was to your request for evidence of common descent.
Pure baloney, already addressed.

You're just not bothering anymore, Charles, and neither shall I.

Goodbye.

lpetrich

Charles Darwin:
Hierarchies are also a characteristic of created things;

Please be explicit about this. And explain why in your own words, and not someone's quote-mined words.

I can easily point out several counterexamples. For example, chairs and tables are all "created", yet they do not fit a hierarchy very well.

and long before there were paleontologists or microscopes creationists predicted an orderly progression to creation.

Except that they had never predicted any such thing. A very common belief in early modern times was that no species had ever gone extinct, because God would not allow that fate to befall any one of his beloved creations. Fossils were often interpreted as belonging to still-existing species, and it was commonly speculated that even the more exotic fossil species have still-living representatives.

But around 1800, Georges Cuvier examined mammoth bones in more detail, and showed that they represented a species distinct from the still-living Asian and African elephants. He also noted that mammoths' great bulk makes them difficult to hide, and that nobody has ever claimed to have seen a live one, let alone caught one. He thus concluded that mammoths are now extinct.

He also examined the fossils of various other Pleistocene megafauna, like mastodons, giant ground sloths, Irish Elk, etc., and showed that they also had gone extinct.

Thus, Cuvier had demonstrated something totally unexpected.

They had no idea the fossil record would reveal, guess what, an orderly progression.

Except that they never predicted such neat family trees as the horse one.

GunnerJ

I'm going to risk responding to this thread which is about to die in order to comment that "orderly progression" is such a nice, safe, vague term. CD is wise to use it rather than something more precise.