Home » Intelligent Design » The Sound of a Nested Hierarchy Shattering

The Sound of a Nested Hierarchy Shattering

November 28, 2006 Posted by Dave S. under Intelligent Design
36 Comments

Chromosomal sex determination in the platypus discovered to be a combination of mammal and bird systems. The resemblance to birds is now more than just superficial.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6568

  • Delicious
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Twitter
  • RSS Feed

36 Responses to The Sound of a Nested Hierarchy Shattering

1 2
  1. 31
    DaveScotNovember 30, 2006 at 5:09 am

    Smidlee

    Well sir, an omnipotent creator could theoretically be creating a brand new universe, in place, with modifications, once every nanosecond or even more often. But if he is he’s sure doing a good job in making it look like it’s been here a long time and evolves according to a self-consistent set of natural laws – one of those laws being the law of biogenesis. How do you rationally determine when and how many special acts of creation there were? Occam’s Razor would have us make those acts of special creation as few as possible. I count only one that was strictly required – the universe itself but I think life was created once too for a grand total of two separate acts of special creation.

  2. 32
    JosephNovember 30, 2006 at 9:47 am

    It should be noted that the MYTH that nested hierarchy was evidence for Common Descent (meaning all extant living organisms owe their collective common ancestry to some unknown population(s) of single-celled organisms) was duly exposed in Chapter 6 of “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis”.

    The botom-line is Common Descent can live with it or without it. Darwin was well aware of that.

    Extinction, as we have seen in the fourth chapter, has played an important part in defining and widening the intervals between the several groups in each class. We may thus account for the distinctness of whole classes from each other- for instance, of birds from all other vertebrate classes from each other- by the belief that many ancient forms of life have been utterly lost, through which the early progenitors of birds were formerly connected with the early progenitors of the other and at that time less differentiated vertebrate classes.

    IOW if all the alleged transitionals were still alive such distinct categories would not exist.

    What nested hierarchy does demonstrate is that the same evidence can be used for two opposite PoVs- both Mayr and Simpson recognozed that:

    One would expect a priori that such a complete change of the philosophical bias of classification would result in a radical change of classification, but this was by no means the case. There was hardly and change in method before and after Darwin, except that “archetype” was replaced by the common ancestor.– Ernst Mayr

    (“the hierarchy looked the same as before even if it meant something totally different.” – Simpson)

  3. 33
    PatrickNovember 30, 2006 at 12:43 pm

    OE needs more content so if you’re a student (or a UD mod) feel free to jump into a related topic:

    http://www.overwhelmingevidenc.....omment-193

    http://www.overwhelmingevidenc.....omment-428

    Oh, and personally I’d interpret that “Bushes in the Tree of Life” referenced in comment #3 by Jehu as possibly supporting multiple LUCAs.

  4. 34
    Robin LevettNovember 30, 2006 at 6:17 pm

    Various posters here have refererd to “front-loading”; can anyone give a potted explanation of the term, together with references to some research papers for further reading?

  5. 35
    DaveScotNovember 30, 2006 at 7:39 pm

    Robin re front-loading

    http://telicthoughts.com/?cat=12

  6. 36
    BettawrekonizeNovember 20, 2007 at 3:23 am

    http://forums.christianity.com.....tm#2872770

    Here I go into great detail describing why UCD does not predict any alleged nested hierarchy. Namely, if you look at humans within its own specie we see violations all over the place. It’s possible for someone to have a trait (or genetic sequence / gene), have a brother that doesn’t have this trait, yet have a cousin that has this exact same trait (or genetic sequence). This produces a violation. It’s possible for someone with a much more distant relationship to also have this trait that the two brothers don’t share. Within a specie we see violations all over the place, nowhere do we see any such nested hierarchy. Evolution does not produce any such nested hierarchy within the human specie, likewise it would not produce any such hierarchy when they speciate. We see violations all over the place within a specie and those violations won’t just disappear when the specie speciates. Despite the fact that UCD does not predict this alleged nested hierarchy, this alleged nested hierarchy resists horizontal gene transfer as being a significant factor in producing and spreading genetic variation (ie: new traits). It makes it much more difficult for evolutionists to explain away genetic diversity through horizontal gene transfer, which they would do if the data allowed it. The evidence was designed to resist naturalistic explanation. For more details, see the above link and read my posts (for this post is just very very general, I go into far more details within that link). Also note, much of this reasoning has been inspired by the book, “The Biotic Message” by Walter James ReMine, who, like I, believes the evidence was designed to resist naturalistic explanation.

1 2

Leave a Reply