Dogs will be Dogs will be ???

it's not, that's why tens of thousands of taxonomists over hundreds of years have dedicated their lives to it; often just to focus one group of animals.It's also, terribly, terribly tedious unless you're turned on by counting the number segments in worms or have a mind like a librarian with a compulsive, obsessive disorder. (You can learn from this that taxonomy wasn't my favourite subject.)I think the point to note here Chuck, is that all this work has already been done and re-classifying all known animals and plants isn't something that an individual can ever hope to do no matter how driven.It's great to see you taking a real interest in the natural world though.

It's not really falsifiable in the way we talk about the way a theory or hypothesis is falsifiable Nested hierarchies aren't theories - they're observations of how the natural world is organised.If nested hierarchies didn't exist though, or if we found a animal like a horse but with - to be ludicrous - wheels where feet should be, or wings, or an exoskeleton, it would totally disprove common descent which IS a prediction of the ToE.

Nested hierarchies wouldn't be falsified, they just wouldn't exist :-)Nested hierarchies are simply the demonstration that one thing evolved from another - like in a family tree. Finding a horse with wheels or wings or that layer eggs, would be like finding a three legged martian as your great grandfather - it doesn't fit in the tree; doesn't belong.If all of life couldn't be categorised into families with similar features BUT WITH NO FEATURES FOUND IN NON-RELATED GROUPS (the nested hierarchy) then common descent could not possibly be true. The big deal is that nested hierarchies prove common descent.And, incidentally, they show that a designer is not necessary to produce the variety of life that we find on our planet.It also shows that if a designer was involved, then he made his design look like it happened via a process of evolution - not by design as a human designer would do it. (A human designer might well put wings on a horse or wheels on a pig - he'd take the best designs he had for say, an eye, and use that in every animal needing an eye - he wouldn't use sub-optimised parts if he had a better model; which is what we find in nature.)

Evolution happens by a series of small changes over time. The first wing would not have been a fully functional aerodynamic artefact - it would have been a slight modification of something that already existed. So why didn't the designer just make a fully formed wing? A human designer would if he could.Of course if you believe that the world is 6,000 years old and God created everything as we see it today, then that answer doesn't work for you. (But you then have to explain geology and the fossil record etc)But with special creation you then have to explain why the nested hierarchies exist - ie why do it that way?Why design several eyes when some are better than others? Why several wings? Why not put gills in whales? And so on. A human designer would pick the best design for the job and use that in all his basic models.We wouldn't be able to show nested hierarchies because the whale which gives birth to live young and suckles them and has a warm blooded circulatory system would have gills like a fish.But a fish (usually) lays eggs, has scales and is cold blooded. They wouldn't fit in the same tree. None of it would make sense.

cool :-)

Why not? Know your enemy and all that. Before Dawkins became known as an atheist, he was a pretty excellent biologist. I still think The Selfish Gene is one of the best books on biology I've ever read.