Creationist inconsistency when inferring relatedness

This is my first post and hopefully it is not redundant; I didn't see other threads explicitly dealing with this issue but I may well have missed such a thread. Anyway, my point is this: Creationists are inconsistent in their use of morphology to assess and infer relatedness.Evolutionary biologists look at the morphology of organisms to infer relatedness. This is a robust method that is pre-ToE and that produces results that are almost always consistent with more recent molecular evidence of relatedness. Creationists are inconsistent in their application of this method because, while they accept it as a valid way of inferring relatedness among "kinds", they arbitrarily decide that it is invalid for assessing relatedness more broadly. If morphology can be used to reliably infer relatedness in the Cat "kind" for example, why can the same method not be used to infer that cats are more closely related to canids than artiodactyls?I have posed this question to creationists in several other venues and have received no substantive answer. The bar seems to be set a little higher here so I'm hoping to get a satisfactory response.

I'm not sure I understand your first question, but I'll take a crack at it. I suppose there's no intrinsic reason that morphology must necessarily be a indicator of relatedness unless one already accepts that at least some organisms are related. Because both creationists and normies accept this, it seems like a non-issue in the context of this thread. But there is good reason to infer relatedness from morphological similarity, a familiar example being the resemblance seen in families. In this case you know unequivocally that you are related to your mother and father and an examination of your facial features, proportions etc. would yield the same story.As to the second question, I'm assuming that by "under what parameters" you mean what results of a morphological analysis would support ToE and what results would support YEC. The results we get from such analyses are what you would expect if ToE were true i.e. a nested hierarchy. If YEC were true and there was only limited relatedness rather than universal common ancestry, we should not expect morphology to allow us to group things into statistically-supported nested hierarchies the way we can.I hope that answered your questions sufficiently.

I too am perplexed by the contradictory notions that large-scale change absolutely doesn't happen but that fairly massive evolutionary change would be required to produce the current biodiversity from a few kinds.I'm aware that creationists don't accept the validity of inferring relatedness morphologically on a broad scale because of the starting premise that certain things simply can't be related. I'm hoping we can get some creationists in here to defend the limitations they impose on what they otherwise consider to be a reliable method. I admit that my knowledge base is focused primarily on vertebrate paleontology; plant taxonomy and morphology are not my strong suits, so I can say very much about the utility of using morphology to classify plants. It's true that there have been taxonomic shifts in light of new findings, but I think with plants and certainly with vertebrates the groupings that were produced by studying morphology alone have been much more in accordance than not with more recent studies. I wouldn't go so far as to say that morphology is a 100% reliable way to infer relatedness, but it has nonetheless so far been shown to be a robust method.

I very much agree, but in this thread I'm hoping to get a creationist to attempt to specifically articulate a justification of the logic. Based one previous experience I admit to being doubtful that this will come to pass.

This has been my experience. This is almost certainly because there is no logical answer, but I'm hoping someone will take a shot at it. Too bad Aaron didn't; his posts on whale ativisms were pretty good. It seems like he would have been the most likely source of a cogent answer if there were one to give.

Well I guess I was overly-optimistic in hoping a creationist would rise to the challenge here. I guess it is easier to ignore one's logical inconsistency than defend it. Oh well.

Yes, I've been following that. It is indeed a prime example. Nice work on that thread. I like how you're now point blank asking him to explain such things as why independent methods display such consillience. When you're really focused like that it makes his evasions and cognitive dissonance more explicit.At the very least I'm hoping this thread will produce some novel absurdities, but maybe an industrious creationist might post something of worth. But not even an attempt yet. Is Mindspawn the only evolution-denying creationist around these days?

Excellent! Case closed. Thanks for stepping in so that the evolution deniers didn't have to strain themselves.

Wow, that's even more egregious. To deal with such strong dissonance he has appointed himself the arbiter of what is real science and what is not. I guess we know without marc9000 even posting on this thread what his answer to my question would be. As the self-appointed authority on what is real science and what isn't, he would just say that using morphology to infer relatedness within kinds is true science but applying it more broadly is mere "metaphysical searches for support of the atheist worldview".

It is a sad state of affairs when it is so difficult to distinguish satire from sincerity. Being new here I was unfamiliar with your views and I was halfway through your post before I realized you were joking.

Thanks, glad to be here. I appreciate the italics too. I'm sure with practice your Poe will be the envy of creationists and normies alike.

The conversation seems to be veering a bit into discussions of the moral responsibility of science, which is interesting but not relevant. Taq and others are doing a good job at explaining the patterns of genetic similarity we see and why are valid ways of assessing relatedness. But let's not forget that the consilience between morphological and molecular methods of assessing relatedness is a major point that has not been addressed and seems in danger of going by the wayside. Why should two flawed methods produce such consilience?That is a good argument for the reliability of using morphology to assess relatedness but the main issue here is the inconsistency of creationists when they accept morphology as valid in one situation and invalid when applied in the same way to assess the same thing.AndrewPD doesn't seem to have actually argued that he doesn't consider morphology useful to any degree, so perhaps that should be clarified. AndrewPD, do you accept morphology as a valid way of assessing relatedness in certain cases, i.e. within "Kinds"?