Baloo

One of the things that bothers me most about "well-educated" YEC's is their cavalier dismissal of the unrefuted fact that variations of the cytochrome c DNA are distributed amongst organisms with an overwhelming statistical match to the independently-derived phylogenic tree. I can only assume that this dismissal results from an incomplete understanding or appreciation for the unlikeliness of the observed distribution. More to the point, I fail to see how anyone with a complete understanding of this distribution can avoid arriving at one of the following 2 conclusions:
1) all life on the planet has a common ancestor or
2) a deceptive designer created life in such a way to "fool" observers into thinking all life has a common ancestor.

I mean, let's look at this from the perspective of a designer. You are contemplating the desing of life on earth, and you realize that any living being requires the protein cytochrome c. You've already worked out the basics of coding protein synthesis into DNA sequences, and so you start working out the sequence that will be necessary to make cytochrome c. Of course, as an omniscient intelligent designer, you realize there are literally millions of different sequences that will do the trick, and that of these, no sequence has any significant advantage over the others. Here we reach the dilemma: the designer has the following options (if this is a false polychotomy, please feel free to insert other options)

1) Choose one of the millions of sequences for which there is no better, and use that sequence for all organisms (this falls right into the "same designer, similar design" pattern ascribed by creationists to other "designed features" of life on earth).

2) Decide that, doggone it, things are just more aesthetically pleasing if you take all of the possibilities and distribute them randomly throughout the life-forms you are creating.

3) With an impeccable omniscience, determine that at an almost undetectable level, there are minor differences such that some sequences under some conditions (i.e. cold aqueous environment vs. hot arid environment) are more efficient than others. Therefore, opt to distribute the sequences according to the primary environmental conditions expected for any given organisms.

4) Realize that if life had evolved, the distribution of the sequences could only look a certain way (which would be vastly different from any of the first three approaches). Mischieviously distribute the sequences in exactly that fashion, and sit back and laugh at those pesky scientists when they think they've found "proof" for evolution (thinking to yourself "shit, this is almost as funny as that one time I buried all of those 'dinosaur' bones for them to find...hehehehe").

Again, none of the first three options even closely relate to what we see in the actual distribution of cytochrome c sequences. Only two theories seem to predict the given sequences: common descent and option 4. However, I have yet to see a YEC either
1) Concede option 4 or
2) Offer another option that explains the distribution of cytochrome c sequences (i.e. demonstrate that the cytochrome c sequence is not truly independent of the previously derived phylogenic tree) in the context of a Creator.