More Evidence of Evolution - Geomyidae and Geomydoecus

Our charming banter is so much fun, but I really do wonder what on Earth you think any of this has to do with the topic.Do you have a reply to the OP, or not?

This isn't the first time he's injected nonsense into an otherwise interesting thread, no. Maybe I was harsh but I have a fairly limited tolerance for people who produce nonsense and then act like I'm the one with the problem for not being able to see the Emperor's new clothes.HM's response to correction is to spew ad hominem attacks and accuse his opponents of ankle-biting. His most recent assertion that "genes deterministically adopt strategies" is just more of his opaque word-salad approach to debate.

Ah, so now the problem with English seems to have disappeared. No such calculations have been made. Nowhere in the paper does it refer to mutation. It's been explained to you what was being referred to by the word "chance". How was the explanation insufficient?Your objections to the material are not based on an understanding of it. Why is this a problem you refuse to correct? Hardly relevant. Random mutations do occur; this has been proven in thousands of experiments and is not something that can be denied. Random mutation is not the source of speciaction events. Speciation occurs in response to environment and population structure. I don't know what "nomogenesis" is, but it's been explained to you how this research disproves creationism and lends support to evolution. It cannot be reconciled with intelligent design or with any kind of directed evolution, as has been explained. What about that explanation was insufficient? If you're not prepared to address rebuttals to your position then I think it's necessary to rethink your participation in this thread.

Preferential mating is, by definition, selective.Is it really necessary for you to be confusing people in this thread with your science gaffes? And I have yet to see the relevance of these remarks to the topic.

Well, that's 2-3 things for you to respond to, then. Every thread is allotted 300 posts, total. What I'd like is to reduce the number of such posts that are wasted on nonsense. My wife does phylogenetic analysis with many of the same tools, so yes, I'm fairly aquainted with them. Nonetheless remarking on how we're familiar with the science and you're not doesn't, to my mind, constitute a meaningful rebuttal. In fact it doesn't speak well to the veracity of your position. I can't make heads or tails of what you're trying to say here, and it certainly bears absolutely no relationship to anything anybody's been trying to tell you. You've completely misunderstood what Percy is trying to tell you. Absolutely false. The figure in the paper means that, if you were to compare the phylogenies of two species chosen completely at random, there's a less than 1% chance that their histories would converge in this manner. It has nothing to do with mutation, which, again, is not even a word that appears in the paper.

What the admin said.

I have a sense that four pages wouldn't be sufficient to correct your misunderstandings. But, I'll try.p=0.01 refers to the chance of two randomly-generated phylogenies matching to the extent that the phylogenies developed for Geomyidae and Geomydoecus groups matched. In other words - the convergence has less than a 1% chance of being due to chance. They list them in the paper. We've been giving this simple explanation throughout. Percy was the first to do it but this explanation has appeared in nearly every post to you in this thread. The problem is that you saw the word "chance" in the paper and in our posts and assumed we were talking about mutations, when we were not. We've been explaining that for several pages, now. The question is - why did it take you so long to listen?

By any means. By generating them at random. By picking a species at random and generating its phylogeny. What you term the "first" and the "second" are just saying the same thing in different ways.The odds of two species converging by chance are less than 1%. Therefore we know that convergence in this case is not due to chance, but rather, because these two organisms have been ecologically constrained to speciate together. I don't see why it's necessary to do so. How would it help? I suspect this is just further confusion on your part.

This example disproves internal forces.If organisms speciated according to internal forces - pre-programming - then there would be no convergence of these two groups of organisms, because they would speciate on their individual schedules, unaffected by their ecological relationship. Rather, the convergence confirms the evolutionary view that speciation is the result of natural selection and random mutation. It affirms the Darwinian view that organisms are shaped by their environment.

No, it doesn't. It's not clear what you think you're talking about, here. What you describe is definately not convergence, and we're not talking about organs or structures in this example. The mechanism in this case is the close ecological relationship of the two groups of organisms; so close, in fact, that the population structure of the pocket gophers restricts the population structure of their lice. I'm not sure how you can claim that, given that you still don't understand the topic of discussion. Your view that this is about organs or something is proof of that.

Interesting. Apparently it's one of those "debate" websites where they try as hard as possible to prevent the participation of evolutionists; as soon as I registered and identified as an atheist I found that I was not only unable to reply to the thread, I wasn't able to even read it anymore.Seth - I'm curious why, if you had questions, you didn't pose them in this thread, where I could try to answer them. Nonetheless, I'll see if I can help you understand:

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I found this on another forum and I must apologize ahead of time for clipping this here but I read this several times and still don't think I have the faintiest idea what in world he's talking about. smile.gif
I've read a lot of evolutionary material in my time but for whatever reason this has got me scratching my head. How exactly is this lending support for the theory of "goo to you"?

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I don't know what "goo to you" is, but I'll assume you're referring to the evolutionary model that posits that all existing lifeforms on Earth are the descendants, ultimately, of one common ancestor. (I don't know that there's any scientific consensus on whether that ancestor was gooey or not.)This specific example doesn't substantiate that position, except indirectly (as I'll explain); moreover I never claimed that it did.The reason that the scientific consensus has concluded common descent is because of evidence from molecular phylogeny. That's the scientific discipline that concerns itself with using genetic information found in individuals to establish putative evolutionary histories and ancestor-species relationships. Like, paternity testing. The basic lab techniques are identical and the data analysis is mathematically sound.Now, opponents of evolution such as yourself claim - perhaps implicitly - that the basic idea of molecular phylogeny is flawed; that the "evolutionary relationships" generated by those techniques are basically noise. Like cloud shapes or faces in a TV's static.The example of these two groups of organisms - the pocket gophers and their lice - prove that your position is inaccurate, by virtue of the convergence of the evolutionary histories.Does that make sense? When we read the species ancestry contained in the genes of the pocket gopher, we see a certain pattern. (The pattern is the tree diagram in the paper I linked to. Did you read it?) And when we read, independently, the species ancestry contained in the genes of the gopher's pubic lice, we see the same pattern.If the techniques of molecular phylogeny produced only noise, there would be no reason to see the same pattern. Random static is just that - random, and you would not expect it to be likely to get nearly the exact same pattern in two unconnected instances. It's like the same six numbers winning the lottery, two nights in a row. You know something's up.Something's up, here. If the results of molecular phylogeny produce accurate information about the ancestry of species (and these examples prove that it does) then the greater conclusions of molecular phylogeny are valid - such as the conclusion that all life on Earth evolved from a distant common ancestor.

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But I'm getting the sense that they're assuming, again, that this "can" cause an isolation of species to eventually become a seperate species altogether.

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It's not assumption. We've directly observed how the processes of natural selection and random mutation, accumulating under a condition of reproductive isolation, can lead to new species. Moreover, since the validity of molecular phylogeny is predicated on that fact, and since we've just independently established the veracity of molecular phylogeny, that's further proof that our conclusions about what leads to new species are correct.

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Evolutionists use what I call the "insistence method" to prove their theory.

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Your interlocutor is cute. I've noticed that creationists tend to use what I call the "denial" method to pretend that there's no evidence of evolution, even though hard-working scientists keep finding more and more of it.Hopefully that answers your questions, and I hope you'll find this forum - where people aren't restricted from participating because of bigotry against their irreligious beliefs - more condusive to the answers you seek.

Doesn't make much sense, does it? I mean absolutely none of the organisms common to human ancestry would be found in any of today's zoos.

Well, a commonly-cited list is this: Observed Instances of Speciationand this: No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/speciation.html

Speciation isn't the same thing as morphological change, so your comments don't make any sense.