Summations Only

Consider the plight of the pubic lice. Pocket gophers construct individual tunnel systems which one gopher will habitate; individual gophers rarely meet except to mate. Their lice are specialized, physically, for clinging to the hairs of their host; they are not highly mobile on other terrain. As a result, gopher pubic lice rarely encounter disparate individuals except when their hosts meet to mate.
From an evolutionary perspective, these ecological realities mean that gophers and their lice should undergo speciation in response to the same events; thus, we should see a large degree of convergence between the evolutionary histories of these organisms as their unrelated lineages speciate in parallel. That this prediction from ecology is satisfied by genetics is further support of the accuracy of evolutionary models.

I recommend you read the post, and the paper in Systematic Biology, in its entirety.

The Heterodoxus example shows that caution is needed when drawing conclusions about coevolutionary history from studies of extant species. However, valid generalizations can still be made. The case studies in Table 1 suggest that dispersal is a more fundamental barrier to host switching among related hosts than is establishment. Opportunities for dispersal appear quite limited in some systems, such as pocket gophers and their lice. To date, studies of parasite dispersal have been mainly inferential. A better understanding of the role of dispersal will require more direct data on dispersal frequency and distances.

OK, let us say this verrrrrry sssssssllllloooooooowly for you. Every topic (the software calls them "topics" here; minor point) is a discussion. And this is a debate site. Oh, I'm sure that you've spent some time on creationist fora where you can spout any amount of nonsense you want while anyone who would dare to ask you to support any of it will be banished immediately, but you're no longer in Kansas (meant metaphorically, though that state's history over the past decade or two might indicate otherwise).
How long have you been involved in this "issue"? Dr. Adequate and Theodoric have been here for more than half a decade and I have no idea how much time they've put in elsewhere. I've been involved since 1981, on-line since circa 1987.The point is that you are nothing new; we have all seen these new creationists come and go ... and they usually leave very abruptly never to be seen again. They have all been fed with creationist bullshit that they think is the greatest thing since sliced silicon and they're all fired up to "just blow those evolutionists away" with all this "new and unrefuted scientific evidences". Well, it's not new and it's not unrefuted. Most of the standard YEC claims have been around since before 1980 were refuted soundly around that time, only that's something that your creationist handlers will never tell you. You are nothing but yet another pathetic member of a long pathetic parade. Oh, sure, you say that you're not a "creationist" but rather an "IDist". Please don't try to bullshit us. We already know what you're doing. After Edwards v. Aguillard, 1987, the courts knew that creationism is nothing but religion (albeit a very narrow, false religion) so immediately creationists seized upon "intelligent design". After Epperson v. Arkansas, 1968 had found the 40+-year-old "monkey laws" to be unconstitutional and after a few more religious-based attempts, the anti-evolution movement, mainly through the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), came up with "creation science" which they falsely claimed to be "purely scientific and not the least bit religious." In reality, the ICR (the primary source of creationist materials for "balanced-treatment" public school curricula) just simply took their overtly and blatantly religious books and other materials and gave them a very superficial face-lift by removing Bible quotations and replacing "God" with reference to some "unnamed Creator". That approach had been aptly named "The Game of Hiding the Bible." Once that game had been exposed in 1987, the game then changed to "Hide the Creationism" by adopting the deceptive guise of "intelligent design." Well, more than half a decade ago, that deception was also exposed in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 2005 in which the "smoking gun" was the book, Of Pandas and People, which had started out pre-Edwards.v.Aguillard as a creationist textbook that used the term "creationist" and was then re-edited to be an "intelligent design" book with the same kind of superficial rewording that had "turned" overtly and blatantly religious education materials to "public school editions." The smoking gun was one instance of "creationists" in the text that was incorrectly changed to "design proponents" to produce "cdesign proponentsists" (see Not Found).In other words, you are not fooling anybody. Except maybe yourself. But then a primary concern of creationists has always been to keep themselves deceived. I had a friend at church who had gone through that. He once told me how he had been a fundamentalist Christian and how he had to live each and every day in deep, deep denial of and in self-deception about the obvious truths he would encounter in every-day life just because they contradicted his fundamentalist beliefs. Finally one day, he could no longer maintain the self-deception so he applied the Matthew 7:20 test on Christianity and it failed! Now he is, self-described, "an atheist and thorough humanist" and is so very much more happy and spiritually fulfilled and is a very active contributor to our church. Unitarian-Universalist, BTW.Another typical creationist ploy is to re-define terms; that is how they can get scientists' quote-mined quotes to say things that are completely contrary to what those scientists were actually saying. So when you want us to provide evidence for "macro-evolution", then you do really need to provide us with a definition for that term. Especially since it is not a very common term among scientists.And, despite repeated requests that you do please provide us with that requisite definition, you have ducked and dodged and avoided providing that really necessary definition. Typical dishonest creationist trickery.Remember, we've seen the same nonsensical crap pulled for decades. Gee, why are we not the least bit surprised?

Ok, I read the paper. I am not sure how it wipes out design completely.

idscience writes:I am not surprised but I am disappointing.

The gophers are still gophers and the lice are still lice. Now if one of lice turned into a gopher I would be stumped.

Look at the premise of your question. "that is not due to common descent". Common descent is not a fact, it is an inference from a predetermined bias that it did indeed happen.

Message 18: And are you aware of any evidence of such a shared component that is not due to common descent? Cite your sources for such evidence please.Now can you define macroevolution?

An unbiased question would be, do I know of any evidence that would tend to contradict a common ancestry.

This discontinuity is what I am talking about. Here we have species mating with other species. I thought the def of separate species was that they were isolated and unable to breed with each other.

Horizontal Gene Transfer seems like a work around for what was not predicted. It certainly isn't natural selection acting on random mutation and being passed on to descendants ...

... If you look at enough contradictions to predictions, at some point you need to step back and take a look. Evolutionists, won't do that because, the fixed dogma is that it happened, and they just have to figure out how it happened. That is the bias that blinds observation and discoveries like non coding DNA having function.

What is your evidence for common descent other than some paleo saying in his opinion it did? cite your sources. The fact that we are three pages into this and not one piece of empirical evidence has been brought forth tells me this may be troublesome to find.

Message 1: I am interested in todays best evidence for macro-evolution. ...

idscience writes:I am sure you said a lot here, but I didn't read it.

**Cough!** **Cough!** **Cough!** **Cough!**If I had been drinking something just then, I would have had to replace both my keyboard and possibly my monitor!Do you really expect evolution to accommodate such transitions? Seriously! What you just described is complete and utter nonsense. And if such a thing were to happen, it would seriously challenge evolution.So just why exactly do you expect that to be in accordance with evolution?Let's put it a bit differently. Design would allow for inventions elsewhere to be adapted to entirely different applications. That's the way engineers do work, isn't it? I am a professional software engineer, so I've seen this unfold far too many times. You have one product and you want to market another product and your (the marketer's) thought is that this new product is very much like an existing product and all it would take is a "minor" change in the software. As I had heard far too many hardware engineers say, "It's simply a matter of software." -- HINT: No it isn't! But we software engineers still are the ones left with making it work. OK, we do our job. We had something that did one thing, but now we've rewritten it to do something else.OK, I will let you into my world for a moment. In that kind of situation, we take what had previously been done by the code and rewrite it to work a bit differently, perhaps a bit more generally, or perhaps by detecting a few special cases that it had to deal with. The thing is that when confronted with an entirely new requirement for our software, we can respond in one of two ways:
1. write something completely different, or
2. somehow modify what we already have to be able to handle the new requirements.And at some point, it no longer becomes feasible to try to modify old implementations and we just plain have to use an entirely new and different design.You want to argue for design. What do you see? Novel new designs when it no longer becomes feasible to modify old implementations? No, that is not what you see. What you see is old designs being stretched to their limits in order to do what must be done.Here's a classic example, from Steven J. Gould. The panda has no thumb. A thumb would work really well in stripping a piece of bamboo, the panda's food source. The panda's sesamoid bone has become enlarged to enable it to use it as "a thumb" in handling its food source, bamboo. But it is not a "thumb".The point here is that design is design. If you want to bring some other piece of tech into a different design, then you are perfectly free to do so. But if you are trying to do it through evolution, then you cannot. In that case, you need to take something that's already there and put it to a different usage. In design, you are free to bring in anything you want to, but in evolution you are stuck with whatever is already there. So what do we see? Foreign tech being infused into new designs? Or existing features being put to different use? It is the latter, not the former, that we see.But I have still not addressed your initial bizarre misconstruance of evolution. Do you really believe that evolution requires that lice become gophers, or that gophers become lice? Really? That is not a rhetorical question! I am dead serious! Is that really what you think evolution is? Because what you are demanding is complete and utter bullshit!Because if that is what you really believe evolution is, then you have absoluti-fuck-ily no idea what you are talking about.And if that is the case, then why should we be wasting our time with a nimrod clueless pecker-wood like you?

Sorry, still haven't read your first one.

Curiously, I can't give you an example of macroevolution until I know what you think it is -- is that a difficult concept for you to grasp?