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Author Topic:   nested heirarchies as evidence against darwinian evolution
Jaderis
Member (Idle past 3452 days)
Posts: 622
From: NY,NY
Joined: 06-16-2006


Message 137 of 248 (452317)
01-30-2008 1:58 AM


Attempt at clarification
Lemme see if I can clear up something for randman.
If I am following his argument correctly, randman is wondering why no "new phyla" have emerged since the originals that appeared during the Cambrian.
What I would like to point out is that each representative of the phyla under discussion was at one time an individual species. Of course, we weren't around to call them anything back then and because of their place in evolutionary history, they are representatives of phyla today. This is because they were the first (more or less). But, again, they were individual types of organisms which ultimately diverged into classes, orders, families, etc. They diverged and their descendents diverged and so on. They weren't some magic super-organisms. They were just the first in a long line that has been divided up by us for ease of classification.
If an organism appeared today that had the template (so to speak) for a new bauplan we would still classify it according to its history (and we wouldn't know about the new bauplan bit until possibly millions of years in the future, at which point it might be considered a new phyla...who knows how our classification system will evolve!).
This is basically what the others have been trying to point out, but presented in a slightly different way
I hope that clears things up a little (probably not, tho )

"You are metaphysicians. You can prove anything by metaphysics; and having done so, every metaphysician can prove every other metaphysician wrong--to his own satisfaction. You are anarchists in the realm of thought. And you are mad cosmos-makers. Each of you dwells in a cosmos of his own making, created out of his own fancies and desires. You do not know the real world in which you live, and your thinking has no place in the real world except in so far as it is phenomena of mental aberration." -The Iron Heel by Jack London
"Hazards exist that are not marked" - some bar in Chelsea

  
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