Nested Biological Hierarchies

What I'm saying is that its completely subjective, especially when no one has never witnessed this convergence in order to verify it. Put in another context. Suppose that you agree that a Creator exists and that He created all sorts of kinds of animals, as Augustine described it being, "a manifestation of His each individual thought." Out of those millions of species, aren't some going to look more alike than others? Suppose we looked alot like what we classify as Ursine, but only because our schematic most closely resembled a bear. Would an evolutionist say that we and bears shared Ursine stock? Probably. But then suppose the resemblance just so happened to spark an interest in a percieved lineage just based off certain characteristics. This is what I mean by it being subjective and speculative to the eye of the beholder. Could we be closely related to simians? I certainly don't flame Darwin for his theory. As I've stated before, its not a stupid theory. I just believe as time goes on and as qw are acquiring better technology that we are finding a divergence not convergence. As I stated above, at some point somthing is going to look more closely related than something else, but this does not mean that we are in anyway related to one another. I think you mssed the purpose of my previous statement. It appreciate the taxanomy classification for a variety of reasons, but it really doesn't matter what we call an animal or we, as humans, decide where it goes. Cetaceans resemble fish more than it does any other mammal. I think that goes without saying. If you were to ask any child that is currently ignorant of the taxonomy classification, what a Dolphin is, their basest instinct tells them that its a fish because it lives in the water and fins (flippers). Its only on the field trip that they learn this animal breathes air from a blowhole, births live young, is endothermic, and so on.But what does the evidence spell out if the end result or the intermidate steps to take us there has never been witnessed? Its an assertion. And for however many traits we share with another organism its still speculative as to whether we diverged or converged froma common ancestor. I just think its totally subjective if we have never witnessed any macroevolutionary process. Let me give you another example. Suppose that automobiles were living and could procreate. Also suppose that they've always been here with us and that we didn't create them. Two kinds of pickup trucks look very similar because they share much of the same design. We would suppose that all pickups are related because they share so many characteristics. But actually, the innerworkings of the vehicles mean more when we look underneath the hood, than the does the frame of the vehicle. One pickup is more closely related to a Ford sedan, while the other is more closely related to a Chevy van. Does that make sense? The evidence is subjective because its humans that get to classify where things go. And if a Creator did in fact create all life, then at some point, some things are going to look more alike than others, even if they weren't related at all. And as I shared earlier, as technology increases, we are shifting further and further away from the typical ToE. For instance, chimps don't have as closely related DNA to humans that was once previously believed. As it turns out, we just didn't know as much about DNA or their markers in the past that we do now.

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“Always be ready to give a defense to
everyone who asks you a reason for the
hope that is in you.” -1st Peter 3:15

You must not read the same articles I do, then. With the sequencing of the chimp genome the differences and similarities are coming ever more precisely known - and we share many, many genes that are totally inactivated, particularly in our odod-sensing systems. Many of them are still active in, say, Old World Monkeys who still rely more on smell than we (great apes) do. I think that the recently reported lower percentages of similarity are due to the fact that slightly different measures of the difference are being used. Can one of you biologists clarify?In whatever case, we are more closely related/have more similar DNA to chimps + bonobos than to anything else alive. Our DNA is more similar to chimp DNA than that of the house mouse. Mus musculus, is to another member of that genus, Mus spretus. It wouldn't spell out things as clearly as it does here in the real world, where they just keep digging up fossils of proto-whales and not-quite-modern-human primates, and keep finding genes that anatomically related groups like artiodactyls and primates share within group to the exclusion of other groups. "Nested hierarchy," they call it.

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What I'm saying is that its completely subjective....

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Yes, that is what you are saying, but you are wrong. It is not subjective. The same pattern arises regardless who does the classification. That is the entire point of this piece of evidence. If the classification were subjective, whereas the theory of evolution predicts a nested hierarchy that is not subjective, then it would count as a falsification.Do you realize that you are making a claim here that other creationists do not make? Does the fact that the other creationists agree that the hierarchical classification pattern is independent of the person doing the classification make you wonder about your claim here? At any rate, if you want to provide evidence against common descent, you now have a way to do it. When you go to college, study biology. Become a taxonomist. Then show the world how you can come up with a new, very different hierarchical scheme for classifying the species. You can revolutionize biology!

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Suppose that you agree that a Creator exists and that He created all sorts of kinds of animals.... Out of those millions of species, aren't some going to look more alike than others?

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Now you are missing the point -- this is similar to other creationist arguments, but this argument does not understand the point. It is not similarities that are important, it is the pattern of the similarities. Dolphins do not just share a couple of random characteristics with mammals. Dolphins bear live young, the embryos gestate in a uterus, and they are connected to the mother via a placenta, dolphins lactate, they have a backbone, a four-chambered heart, a brain that has a definite mammalian shape and definite mammalian regions, the inner ear contains three small bones, their flippers contain exactly the same bones in your arm in the same places (just shorter), and so forth and so on. They do not have bird-like feathers, they do not have lobster-like legs, they do not have jellyfish-like stingers.-

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Cetaceans resemble fish more than it does any other mammal.

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They don't. They resemble other mammals much, much, much more than they resemble fish. That is why they are classed as mammals, not fish. Any taxonomist, anywhere, cutting open a dolphin to examine the inner organs and the skeleton will come to the same conclusion: this creature is a mammal, this creature is much more like a human being than it is to a cod.-

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If you were to ask any child that is currently ignorant of the taxonomy classification, what a Dolphin is, their basest instinct tells them that its a fish because it lives in the water and fins (flippers).

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Yes, and if you ask a child, she will probably tell you the sun and the stars go around the earth -- they also have to be taught that in actual fact the earth rotates on its axis and goes around the sun.-

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But what does the evidence spell out if the end result or the intermidate steps to take us there has never been witnessed?

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The intermediate steps have been found; however this is irrelevant to the point. It doesn't matter whether the intermediate steps have been found or not; the hierarchical classification is evidence all by itself. According to the theory of evolution, we should be able to arrange the species in a nested hierachical pattern, and this pattern should not depend on who does the classification (that is, it should not be subjective). The species can be arranged in a nested hierarchical pattern, and different people using different sets of characteristics all come up with essentially the same pattern. This is a confirmation. On the other hand, if different people did come up with completely different patterns, then that would have been a falsification. But that hasn't happened. At least, not until you study taxonomy and show us all how it can be done.-

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Suppose that automobiles were living and could procreate.

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If automobiles were living and could procreate, if the replication was very good but not perfect, and if we started with only a couple of different kinds of automobile (maybe only a single one), then we should see that there is a single, non-subjective hierarchical classification for automobiles. But automobiles don't reproduce, they were each designed by humans, and the designers took good ideas from one kind of automobile and used them in others to produce automobiles that mix and match all kinds of characteristics with no real pattern. That is why different people, if they were to classify automobiles, will produce different nested patterns. In fact, if Genesis were true I would expect (perhaps naively) that the creator would have mix and match various characteristics together in such a way that a single nested hierarchical pattern would not be evident. For some reason, the creator decided to match camera eyes with the retina behind blood vessels with backbones, uteruses with lactation, four-chambered hearts with warm bloodedness, and so forth and so on.-

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For instance, chimps don't have as closely related DNA to humans that was once previously believed.

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How closely related are the DNA? How closely related do you think the DNA should be? The fact is, the chimp DNA is more closely related to human DNA than to any other animal (except the bononbo); human and chimp DNA are each more related to gorilla DNA than any other animal; chimp, human, and gorilla DNA are more closely related to elephant DNA than to any non-mammal; any mammal's DNA will be related to any reptile (or bird) DNA than to any non-vertebrate; and so forth and so on. The theory of evolution predicts that genetics should replicate the traditional taxonomic classification, and it does.

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"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the same sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
-- H. L. Mencken (quoted on Panda's Thumb)

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"cladistic analysis of cars will not produce a unique, consistent, well-supported tree that displays nested hierarchies. A cladistic analysis of cars (or, alternatively, a cladistic analysis of imaginary organisms with randomly assigned ch aracters) will of course result in a phylogeny, but there will be a very large number of other phylogenies, many of them with very different topologies, that are as well-supported by the same data. In contrast, a cladistic analysis of organisms or lang uag es will generally result in a well-supported nested hierarchy, without arbitrarily weighting certain characters (Ringe 1999). Cladistic analysis of a true genealogical process produces one or relatively few phylogenetic trees that are much more well-s uppo rted by the data than the other possible trees."]

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Here, I feel that Theobald is being honest, but I get the feeling that he is beginning to lean toward punctuated equilibrium in that if the phylogenic data represented does not show a cle ar and concise stepwise trend, instead of question whether or not such a broad evolution took place, they make an appeal that we just might not be able to see it as clearly as one would desire.

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This is incorrect. The question of "smooth" vers us "jerky" transitions is not addressed here. The point at issue is whether we can objectively construct one or a few phylogenies that have much better support from the data than th e many alternatives.PE is not introduced to deal with the mode of transition because thqt issue is not examined at this stage.

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There is one caveat to consider with this prediction: if rates of evolution are fast, then cladistic information can be lost over time since it would be essentially randomized. The faster the rate, the less time needed to obliterate information about the historical branching pattern of evolution. Slowly evolving characters let us see farther back into time; faster evolving characters restrict that view to more recent events. If the rate of evolution for a certain character is extremely slow, a nested hierarchy will be observed for that character only for very distantly related taxa. However, "rate of evolution" vs. "time since divergence" is relative; if common descent is tru e, then in some time frame we will always be able to observe a nested hierarchy for any given character.

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Furthermore, we know empirically that different characters evolve at different rates (e.g. some genes have higher background mutation rates than othe rs). Thus, if common descent i s true, we should observe nested hierarchies over a broad range of time at various biological levels."

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And here, I feel my suspicions are confirmed. While he does n ot outright mention PE, his description spells it out quite nicely. In other words, he is giving us abstract reasons for why macroevolution should be actual rather than present some actual evidence

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Again you are incorrect. The point is independant of PE, and it is not produced instead of evidence, rather it is explaining what we should expect to see if evolution is true. That is the purpose of the "Prediction" subsection from which the quotes were taken - as the title indicates. The actual evidence is discussed in the "Confirmation" and "Potential Falsification" subsections following on.fEdited by PaulK, : Minor tidying-upo

Why should they? Is your creator so limited that he has to repeat himself? Why aren't there millions of unique species?

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Just a monkey in a long line of kings.
If "elitist" just means "not the dumbest motherfucker in the room", I'll be an elitist!
*not an actual doctor

Suppose, though, that we look under the hood and find that they're similar there, too. And then we look at the model histories and see that, based on the blueprints, you can devise a phylogeny of ancestors back to a common shared ancestor for both models. And you have ten different people generate these phylogenies based on whatever specific characteristics they see fit, and each one of ten come back with largely the same phylogeny.Wouldn't that prove common ancestry and decent with modification over time? That's what we have in the natural world - we've got gross surface characteristics (called "morphology"). We're looking under the hood with genetics ("molecular phylogenetics".) And we can look back at the history of living things on Earth and devise phylogenies based on fossils (that's the field of "paleontology.") And each time we do these things, the phylogenies we develop are pretty much the same.Doesn't that prove that these phylogenies are not subjective, but rather several different ways to arrive at one single objective history about living things on Earth?

[i][quote]"The often-quoted statement that we share over 98% of our genes with apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans) actually should be put another way. That is, there is more than 95% to 98% similarity between related genes in humans and apes in general. (Just as in the mouse, quite a few genes probably are not common to humans and apes, and these may influence uniquely human or ape traits.) Similarities between mouse and human genes range from about 70% to 90%, with an average of 85% similarity but a lot of variation from gene to gene (e.g., some mouse and human gene products are almost identical, while others are nearly unrecognizable as close relatives). Some nucleotide changes are “neutral” and do not yield a significantly altered protein. Others, but probably only a relatively small percentage, would introduce changes that could substantially alter what the protein does.[/i][/quote]" -Lisa StubbsHuman Genome Project Information Site Has Been UpdatedThis is the crux of the argument: The traditional evolutionary phyolgenic tree of life was first based on the similarity of physical characteristics. Things that look alike must be closely related to a common ancestor, they surmise. But the basest criteria used for determining such lineage, either percieved or actual, is subjective and arbitrary. The presumption that the data should take primacy in placing a species somewhere in our minds may be welcomed by some, but it glances over the obvious point. If the answer were easily gleaned from nature nobody would have a problem with speciation. But this isn't what we see. We have yet to see any macroevolutionary process. So, again, its conjecture. Based on inference? Yes. Its not a terrible guesstimate, but at least recognize that its nowhere concrete.The endeavor for classifying speciation has intensified with the introduction of molecular research, but it just adds to the speculation. For instance, a conglomerate of DNA/RNA and Hox and such, is going to determine the morphology of any given body plan. That doesn't mean that one came from the other. It could very well mean that they are the progeny of a Creator and at some point, some organisms are going to more closely resemble another, while another one appears to look nothing alike. No they don't. They keeping digging up partial remains of different creatures and speculate that they are somehow related. These proto-whales you mention are full of anamoles. If the Mods permit us to speak about that further, I will gladly do so.Edited by nemesis_juggernaut, : Italics

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“Always be ready to give a defense to
everyone who asks you a reason for the
hope that is in you.” -1st Peter 3:15

This is surely wrong.Firstly, the Linneaus classification was made well before evolution had been considered, so the classification was done without concern about a common ancester.Secondly, the classification was not based on superficial similarity of physical characteristics. Rather, it emphasized characteristics which were indicative of physiological processes.

Read what I wrote again, Nem: I'm not even referring to the relatedness of mice and men (to coin a phrase). I'm saying that M. domesticus and M. spretus, two mice, have less similarity in their DNA (based, however, on just 12,000 genes or so) than do Homo sapiens and Pan paniscus.Enard, et al., Science, 296, 340-343, (2002).

Which is why Linneaus initially put humans and chimps together in the genus Homo.

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I appreciate the taxanomy classification for a variety of reasons, but it really doesn't matter what we call an animal or we, as humans, decide where it goes. Cetaceans resemble fish more than it does any other mammal. I think that goes without saying. If you were to ask any child that is currently ignorant of the taxonomy classification, what a Dolphin is, their basest instinct tells them that its a fish because it lives in the water and fins (flippers). Its only on the field trip that they learn this animal breathes air from a blowhole, births live young, is endothermic, and so on.
  —nemesis

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Okay, you're talking about classification of animals based on their morphology or their DNA sequences. Certainly a child would carry out this kind of classification worse than would a trained biologisgt, but I get your point. I suspect that a bright child with access to a lot of corpses and a dissection kit might realise that whales are not so similar to fish. The similarity between the two groups is, as you say, the result of our basest instincts (i.e. ignorance).

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But what does the evidence spell out if the end result or the intermidate steps to take us there has never been witnessed? Its an assertion. And for however many traits we share with another organism its still speculative as to whether we diverged or converged froma common ancestor.

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Now you're distinguishing between classification based on contemporary characters of organisms, and a historical process that we can not observe with our own eyes. Given that we only live for 70 years or so, you should bear in mind that we can nevertheless rely on things like the fossil record to give us the historical "process" documentation that we need.It seems to me that you would have to show that the classification of contemporary species based on their morphology and DNA is inconsistent with the historical fossil record, if your argument is to be very convincing. I don't really want to focus on whales as they have been discussed in detail elsewhere. Just to give an example of what you need to provide - show that the morphology and the molecules state that rodents evolved within a nested clade of mammals more recently than alligators evolved within a nested clade of reptiles, while the fossils state otherwise. Find a rodent fossil prior to the origin of alligators. Something along those lines would be needed.The fact is that the contemporary classification of organisms based on morphology , even if it was performed without knowledge of evolutionary theory (i.e. the way Linneaus, or your conjectural children, might do it) DOES agree rather well with the historical fossil record; and both of these are wholly consistent with evolutionary theory but not consistent with any other theory that has been proposed other than a "prankster god".MickEdited by mick, : Corrected a typo in the bulletin board code

I thought it was actually based on "kinds" originally ...
Palaeos: Page not found The irony is delicious.

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Hello! I am new here to the forum, and I hope contribute to a rational discussion.Anyway, I've been reading over this thread, and I think I should just give my own input. Some of you have mentioned how evolution might predict this structure, as according to the theory, all life descended and speciated from a common ancestor. I don't argue that the ToE predicts this, but I think I see a way creationism might "predict" the nested hierarchy apparent in taxonomy, at least to an extent.Inferring from the biblical story of creation, God intended man to be able to comprehend the world around him. If this is true, we would not expect to see, as Chiroptera said, "species with a mix-and-match set of characteristics that would have confounded any attempt at finding an objective... pattern." Rather, there would need to be some form of apparent pattern among the different species for humans to be able to make sense of the immense biological diversity. It just so happens that we are able to interpret this pattern as a nested hierarchy.I'm just saying that you should not use taxonomical structure as "confirmation" of evolution, since such a pattern can also be expected assuming intelligent design.

Hello, Scrutinizer, and welcome to EvC.

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Inferring from the biblical story of creation, God intended man to be able to comprehend the world around him.

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I guess I don't inferr that from Genesis myself; but that is the problem with these types of interpretation of the texts; the exact interpretation of deep meaning is subjective.-

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Rather, there would need to be some form of apparent pattern among the different species for humans to be able to make sense of the immense biological diversity.

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Why does the immense biological diversity need to make sense? If all the different kinds were specially created, then there is no sense to make of it; things just exist because the creator decided that they would exist. The nested hierarchical pattern does not make any sense of the immense biological diversity, since there is no sense to be made of it, other than they were simply created as they are. In fact, the nested hierarchical pattern becomes an unnecessarily misleading phenomenon.The difference between the theory of evolution and literal Genesis creationism is that if no one knew about the Linnean classification system, someone would have predicted that such a nested hierarchical pattern should be found if common descent were a fact. On the other hand, no creationist would have thought of a nested hierarchical pattern based on Genesis alone; this is a fact that needs to be explained after the pattern is discovered.

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"The monkeys don't want to die./ So the monkeys make up gods/ And then they worship them./ Then the monkeys start to argue over whose made-up god is better."
-- Ernie Cline

You certainly make a case for it being explainable under an assumption of Intelligent design, but I'm not sure you have really shown why it would be expected any more than a number of other possible patterns that could have been produced.TTFN,WK