Baloo

I have found a new favorite default piece of evidence for common descent. The fact that cytochome c proteins which are identical in function, different in efficiency, and do not corrollate to phenotypical or environmental requirements of organisms, but rather to an organism's place on the independently established phylogenic tree, seems to place the most solid nail in the ID coffin that I have seen thus far.

That said, I do think there is one experiment that would soundly take the air out of the ID argument entirely. If an organism could have its cytochrome c sequence replaced by that of an utterly unrelated organism (this has been done to demonstrate functionality, by the way, when a human sequence replaced that of a yeast organism), but in such a way that the new organism held a distinct survival advantage over non-altered versions of itself. How could someone, confronted by such a scenario, still hold that the co-designer of both organisms was competent, or even rational?

Anyway, just had to get the idea out there... I'm still amazed that I've gone so long being unaware of this unbelievably powerful evidence for common descent.

Valentine Pontifex

You might be interested in the following link:
<a href="http://members.aol.com/SHinrichs9/descent/descent.htm" target="_blank">http://members.aol.com/SHinrichs9/descent/descent.htm</a>

lpetrich

There are numerous other gene and protein sequences now available, and they only add to this conclusion. Much molecular-level evolution appears to be -- and can sometimes be demonstrated to be -- genetic drift between equal-performing variants. This is what Motoo Kimura has called the "neutral theory" of evolution.

Molecular-evolution evidence also tends to agree with the better-established macroscopic-feature family trees, and it also gets a lot of use in trying to resolve otherwise-unresolved family trees, with some interesting and controversial results coming out of it.

This puts non-Gosse creationism into a serious quandary -- what's the purpose of creating molecular family trees that look so much like the results of evolution? The Gosse position is, however, that that was a natural way for God to create, even if the result looks like evolution.

"Designed" evolution is much less affected, however, since the design part may not affect the genetic drift that produces these family trees.