Convergent Evolution - Reasonable conclusion? or convenient excuse?

A curious fantasy. What "exceptions"? But this "more reasonable conclusion" is false --- it does. The occasional bit of convergence (an obvious prediction of evolutionary theory) is absolutely swamped by all the other traits one might consider. Show your working. Oh, wait, you haven't done any, have you? Explanations involving magic are rarely "reasonable". But this is, of course, not true. The connection between humans and chimps is based on the honest scientific method of looking at all the data, whereas the connection you wish to establish between bats and whales is based on the dishonest creationist method of looking at one single tiny piece of evidence --- one single protein --- that you can misinterpret if you ignore all the rest of the evidence. Because evolutionists look at all the evidence. ... writes the man who just ignored the entire bat genome and whale genome with the exception of one single gene.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

One point that perhaps should be made is this. Creationists are quite happy with taxonomy and the methods of taxonomy up to a certain level (or perhaps I should say an uncertain level.) When they want to identify cats as one "kind" and humans as another, they've got no problem with the results produced by real scientists, or with the taxonomic methods favored by real scientists to identify.They do not, for example, focus in on one single isolated feature like eye-color, and declare that the concept of a "kind" is incoherent because some cats and some humans share the property of being blue-eyed, and that this is an "exception" to their concept of a "kind". No, in that case they'd be quite happy to look at all the data, because they have no religious objection to the conclusion they'd come to by doing so.But because they have a religious obligation not to accept all the results of taxonomic methods, they also need a way to misunderstand these methods when it suits them ... i.e. when one is considering any clade larger than a "kind".This seems to me to be stupid, hypocritical, dishonest, and, in a word, creationist.

Taxonomic trees predate Darwin. True. For example, I have blue eyes and so does a Siamese cat. This suggests that I am a member of the "cat kind", and so falsifies baraminology ... oh, wait ... you didn't want that to be false, did you? Yes it is. That's kinda why biologists, who, unlike you, know about biology, are so certain of their conclusion. This is, as Mr Jack points out, the reason why biologists have classified organisms in a nested hierarchy since the eighteenth century, before evolution was even thought of. You know, repeating a failed argument doesn't make it more convincing. To be more precise, there is a lot of evidence that creatures with recent common ancestors will share similar genes whether they are morphologically similar or not, and that creatures with superficially similar morphology but more distant common ancestry (for example the wolf and the marsupial wolf) will be more genetically dissimilar. Yes it does --- it is a prediction of the theory. And it's true. You know, like all the other predictions of the theory.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Yeah, it's like the odds against two balls on the same slope independently rolling in the same direction and ending up in the same place.---Sonar is better when frequencies are higher. So of course natural selection must favor similar adaptations in any species using echolocation. This is not something that happens at long odds, it's a certainty.What would take long odds would be the independent production of analogous organs and genes for this purpose so similar that they appeared homologous; which, of course, has not happened. Because the selective pressure is only so high in species which use echolocation (because shorter wavelengths resolve finer details). Oh look, it's the Argument From Undesign! The ramshackle, hit-and miss process of evolution should have produced your idea of perfection. But it didn't --- it produced something you think is inadequate and imperfect, which we should therefore ascribe to a perfect, all-knowing, and benevolent God.---The fact is that evolutionary adaptations to the genotype are unlikely to produce a perfect phenotype. There will usually be a trade-off. In this case, it seems reasonable to guess that adaptations to prestin making it better for the detection of high-frequency sounds make it worse for the detection of low-frequency sounds.But that's just the evolutionary explanation. Obviously the creationist view would have to be that God's screwed up again.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Though apparently less "evident" to atomic physicists and astronomers than it is to you. Well, if we imagine a designer who is at once all-powerful and (from our perspective) infinitely capricious, then I guess he could have done anything. "Last Thursdayism", for example, becomes a theoretical possibility. We become unable in principle to rule out "common design" because we have absolutely no concept of what such a thing would look like.However, while such a hypothetical supernatural being might have done anything, evolution can only do a circumscribed set of things: and we find that those are the only things that we actually observe.Now, how are we to account for this?(a) By a complete coincidence, God's whims always led him to create just those things that the theory of evolution would predict.(b) God deliberately created the living world in such a way as to fool biologists into thinking that it was the product of evolution.(c) Evolution happened.

Two questions come to mind:The first is: if you know that, then why advance a hypothesis which you know to be contradicted by the facts?The second is the question you ducked the first time I raised it: why should there be a naturalistic explanation that predicts the facts so perfectly?

I mean that you attribute the success of evolution to an ulterior atheistic motive, and then immediately admit that you know that many evolutionists aren't atheists. So you know that the evidence shows that your explanation is false. Whereas the people most familiar with the facts do. If "special pleading" did start to outweigh the evidence, then I'm sure scientists would agree with you. But there is a great mass of evidence and no need to add things ad hoc to the theory.---Contrast that with creationism, which is no more than one ad hoc explanation after another. Take radiometric dating, for example. The idea that Noah's flood managed to screw up all the radiometric dates in such a way as to be consistent with the expectations of evolutionists does not follow from the Book of Genesis or from the concept of a global flood. It's an unevidenced hypothesis brought in to save the appearances.If radiometric dating had confirmed a 6000 year old Earth, would "flood geologists" then be explaining to us that this data was worthless because the flood would have screwed up all the dating techniques?No, of course not. And nor would any sane person be able to rebut them by suggesting that this was so: because this is just a fantasy without evidence invented to get creationists out of a hole.

Another piece of ad hoccery. "YEC" does not expect that. Two hundred years ago people reading the same Bible as you would have told you that species did not decay and indeed could not go extinct, and pointed to that as evidence of divine creationAlso, as I have pointed out, we do not observe this decay.Also, it would not explain what you're trying to explain. This imaginary "decay" would produce a deterioration of an initial elegant and clever solution; it would not produce an inelegant and stupid solution, which is what "kludgey" means.Take, for example, our eyes. Deterioration in the genome could have reduced the number of our rods or cones, or eliminated one of our primary colors, or left us all short-sighted. But what it could not do is unhook our nerves from the back of the retina, re-attach them to the front of our retina, giving us a blind spot, and then rewire our brains so as to automatically fill in the blind spot with a best guess. That is a kludge. What we have there is not a clever solution which has deteriorated, but a solution which works quite well but is clumsy and stupid.It is not a degenerate form of a superior eye any more than this ... ... is a degenerate form of a superior potato peeler.

Yes, they can.The evolutionary prediction goes beyond just saying that we can make a nested hierarchy. We might summarize it as follows:* If we construct two trees using two different largish randomly-chosen data sets the trees will be in good agreement.* The larger the data sets, the closer the agreement.* This will also agree with the trees that we would sketch out if we did so only by considering the intermediate forms in the fossil record (where available, for example in vertebrates).You might like to read my article on taxonomy, especially the section on robustness.

Testing ...Presently when I click on "All Topics", I just get the World Cup thread, that being the last thread I commented on / the last thread anyone commented on.I'm just posting here to see if I get the same result with this thread before I contact Percy.This has nothing to do with convergent evolution, do carry on.