Discussion of Phylogenetic Methods

I just wonder why evolutionists always bring up cytochrome C but never cytochrome B. Is there a reason for that?

So in other words.... cytochrome B isn't something you want to show off when trying to sell evolution to people... so you cherry-pick cytochrome C instead.Makes sense I guess from a marketing standpoint.

This is a really interesting subject, but don't you find it strange that evolutionists are so quick to wander into teleology when making their case for common ancestry? I thought it was strictly all about the science with you guys?I seems in every defense of evolution I've heard, within 3 or 4 posts the evolutionists are always making implications about what God would or wouldn't do...

So the "template" would be inferred as features uniting Marsupials or features uniting Eutherians.Cladistics actually works just fine without assuming common ancestry.

Potentially, sure.But I think if an individual coder designed many variations of a web browser in short span of time, then it could pretty easily be interpreted as an evolutionary pattern.

I accepted Taq's response. He said cytB has "higher variation" than cytC.Higher variation = increased deviation from a phylogenetic signal or pattern.This is essentially an admission that cytochrome B data does not reinforce the preferred evolutionary relationships very well, or at least would not look as convincing when making a case to the public.This is why evolutionists, when trying to make their case, always focus on cytochrome C instead.

Only if you assume shared traits are the product of common inheritance. The traits themselves don't show you that. Honestly I have no idea what you're talking about. Are you under the impression that templates can only be used exclusively of each other? You can't use more than one when building something? That would be a bizarre thing to assume from a design perspective. I haven't said anything about creationist models, but it sounds like you're suggesting that one cannot group objects by shared traits (cladistics) unless those objects are related via common ancestry. Is that really what you're saying?

I thought this would be obvious. If a coder wants to design, say, a hundred variations of a web browser program, he would probably work off some sort of common coding base for the basic program and then add/remove/tweak various peripheral features in order to generate variety.Such a collection of programs would easily fall into a nested hierarchy, and would have the effect of a phylogenetic signal similar to evolution. Not necessarily. Evolutionists might simply argue the species are still closely related but the genes were not conserved in their lineages.There is just a bit of ad-hoc maneuvering here.If the genetic signal does not reflect a preferred narrative of how closely or distantly related particular species are, then evolutionists will simply argue that the genes in question were either more conserved or less conserved, thus accommodating the discordant data. Phylogenies are not objective. For example, subjective weighting of characters as either homologous or independent convergences is a huge issue in systematics. Yes, if you assume common ancestry is true, then that's exactly what phylogenies do. Nobody ever had to assume that people leave physical markings where they've traveled. To be honest that was a ridiculous analogy. Crude example: start with a vertebrate template, and from a vertebrate template generate a vertebrate-tetrapod template and a vertebrate-fish template, and so on.I'm not sure what your obsession is with this hypothetical mix-and-match scenario. I may as well be disparaging the common ancestry assumption because evolution could potentially have evolved different lifeforms at different times and it didn't. Well then you have problems because you don't have an objective phylogeny.

Yes. You could also spill beer all over the keyboard.I don't think you should take the analogy quite so literally. Human programmers change design scope on the fly and obviously screw things up all the time, usually like you say, not anticipating what kind of effect a new feature will have on the rest of the program.If you set this fallibility aside then my point still stands, a dominant "evolutionary" pattern emerges.

Let the record show that the evolutionists here were the first to start talking about gods and designers in this discussion. (as usual)I think it's pretty much a rule at this point, if you're looking for a philosophical presentation on deities or intelligent design, just ask an evolutionist to make his scientific case for common ancestry.

Sure, depending on how ambiguous you want to get with those terms you could also say a wood furniture set is made up of modified descendants of a common ancestral oak tree.

I assume whatever you're driving at is universal to all phylogenies, right? You wouldn't be cherry-picking primates would you?

I did not invoke creation/intelligent design as any part of an argument. I just anticipated the evolutionists would and then they did.

So when sequence data reinforces a preferred evolutionary relationship you assume it was well-conserved.And when the sequence data contradicts a preferred evolutionary relationship, you assume it was not well-conserved.Then when making your case to laypeople, of course be sure to only focus on the "well-conserved" sequences, because they make evolution look better.Is that about right?

Yes, but nothing in that statement necessitates evolutionary history.That's just the way you automatically think about traits when you assume evolution is true.