Isn't it time to junk common descent?

[richic]

First a story: Two martians travel to the planet earth in the year 2300 to document what they find and report back to the mother ship.

They don’t find any living beings, but there are a number of freestanding structures grouped together with smaller free standing structures seemingly associated near them. We will call the larger structures homes, and the smaller structures garden sheds and dog houses.

“ok” the one says, all the structures have common attributes. We will document these traits and call them walls, roofs, windows, and doors. There is a myriad of complexity in the larger structures, whether it be color, square footage, window style, roof pitch, etc. but they are all very similar. The simpler structures don’t have this same complexity.

In my report I will say that we have found a world of many like structures and there must be a relationship between them since they are similar so we will hypothesize that the doghouse evolved into the home through an unknown process. We’ll call it mutation.

“Ok let’s get back on the ship. We’re out of here”

Meanwhile, his partner has been nosing around the house and he finds the front door key under the mat. He goes in the door, and sees that there’s a lot more complexity that on the outside. He goes into the garage and there’s a can of green paint. He thinks, “Hey wasn’t the window trim and the dog house the same color” Maybe it comes from this material. He opens a drawer and there’s a roll of paper, a blueprint, that shows several views of the house with detailed specifications for all the home’s attributes. And there’s a signature on the bottom.

He runs out the door to show it to his buddy who is busy cataloging the outside features of the garden shed. ‘Hey I thinks these structures were designed. I have a blueprint and materials common between the structures.”

His partner says, “Well my theory came first and on Mars we’ll never decipher the signature of who wrote that blueprint, so let’s go with the doghouse evolution theory”

Why is it that just because we don't know who the creator is that we deny the obvious evidence for creation?

[ENIGMA]

First a story: Two martians travel to the planet earth in the year 2300 to document what they find and report back to the mother ship.

They don’t find any living beings, but there are a number of freestanding structures grouped together with smaller free standing structures seemingly associated near them. We will call the larger structures homes, and the smaller structures garden sheds and dog houses.

“ok” the one says, all the structures have common attributes. We will document these traits and call them walls, roofs, windows, and doors. There is a myriad of complexity in the larger structures, whether it be color, square footage, window style, roof pitch, etc. but they are all very similar. The simpler structures don’t have this same complexity.

In my report I will say that we have found a world of many like structures and there must be a relationship between them since they are similar so we will hypothesize that the doghouse evolved into the home through an unknown process. We’ll call it mutation.

“Ok let’s get back on the ship. We’re out of here”

Meanwhile, his partner has been nosing around the house and he finds the front door key under the mat. He goes in the door, and sees that there’s a lot more complexity that on the outside. He goes into the garage and there’s a can of green paint. He thinks, “Hey wasn’t the window trim and the dog house the same color” Maybe it comes from this material. He opens a drawer and there’s a roll of paper, a blueprint, that shows several views of the house with detailed specifications for all the home’s attributes. And there’s a signature on the bottom.

He runs out the door to show it to his buddy who is busy cataloging the outside features of the garden shed. ‘Hey I thinks these structures were designed. I have a blueprint and materials common between the structures.”

His partner says, “Well my theory came first and on Mars we’ll never decipher the signature of who wrote that blueprint, so let’s go with the doghouse evolution theory”

Why is it that just because we don't know who the creator is that we deny the obvious evidence for creation?

Why is it that people who are quite clearly ignorant about that of which they speak are so keen on demonstrating their ignorance for all to see?

First off, "evolution" does not work by an unknown process. It is quite simple, mutation plus natural selection. Basically create several genetic derivations (i.e. offspring) with mutations and pick the ones which have the ones that best enable survival. It's simply a practical application of the fact that living beings can imperfectly self-replicate in addition to the tautology of that which survives, survives. Even the creationists acknowledge that fact, but they consider it as being relatively trivial and designate it as "Microevolution", requiring that they shove such things as bacteria gaining a relatively thick bit of biological armor that stops antibiotics from doing their job as simply a minor mutation of no real significance.

Even putting aside, for the moment, that buildings do not reproduce, in your example, how would one go about classifying buildings? Color first? Roof-shape first? Size first? How would one even begin to establish a non-trivial tree of classification when any tree could be easily rewritten based on the researcher's whims? In evolutionary theory it becomes quite difficult to substantively rearrange things. How many animals are there which are composed of mostly prokaryotic cells? How about birds which are cold-blooded? I can quite easily go on, but there are a huge number of possible rearrangements of the current tree that would completely and utterly fail to work since the vast majority of new categories created would be completely empty.

Cars can be rearranged in a massive number of ways in a car lot.
Computers can be arranged in a decent number of ways in a computer store table.
Office Supplies can be arranged in many different ways on the wall of an Office Supply store.

Any object that is known to have been designed can be rearranged a large number of specified, non-trivially different ways.

I have an idea why biological organisms cannot be rearranged in such a manner in terms of biological characteristics.

How about you?

[richic]

Cars can be rearranged in a massive number of ways in a car lot.
Computers can be arranged in a decent number of ways in a computer store table.
Office Supplies can be arranged in many different ways on the wall of an Office Supply store.

Any object that is known to have been designed can be rearranged a large number of specified, non-trivially different ways.

I have an idea why biological organisms cannot be rearranged in such a manner in terms of biological characteristics.

Exactly.

We're not talking about how we arrange and describe things we're talking about how we make things.

How we arrange of computers on shelves tells nothing about how they are made. The Bill of Material, the design specification, and the manufacturing process does.

Think in terms of a relational database rather than a nested hierarchy. You show me one company that makes things that does it by beginning with one product then making successive gradual enhancements to it until wala they have a brand new product, with new form, features, and functions.

You design and build a product, get feedback from the market for enhancements to tweak it along the way and when it stops selling you junk it.

A new product begins with what you've learned from the previous design and may include many of the same components, but it often will include new components, design enhancements, and a new shape.

[Lotan]

You show me one company that makes things that does it by beginning with one product then making successive gradual enhancements to it until wala they have a brand new product, with new form, features, and functions.

Microsoft?
Seriously, that's a great argument against creation.

[ENIGMA]

Cars can be rearranged in a massive number of ways in a car lot.
Computers can be arranged in a decent number of ways in a computer store table.
Office Supplies can be arranged in many different ways on the wall of an Office Supply store.

Any object that is known to have been designed can be rearranged a large number of specified, non-trivially different ways.

I have an idea why biological organisms cannot be rearranged in such a manner in terms of biological characteristics.

Exactly.

We're not talking about how we arrange and describe things we're talking about how we make things.

How we arrange of computers on shelves tells nothing about how they are made. The Bill of Material, the design specification, and the manufacturing process does.

I would disagree. Lets take for example, a computer:

Now there are many different models with many different purposes in mind. With this in mind, how does one classify them? By processing power first? Then you have the odd pair of a High-End Gaming Machine and a low-end server sharing the same classification bracket. By Graphical Abilities First? Then you have the High-End Server and the E-Machine that is mainly used to connect to the Internet being oddly classified in the same bracket. Etc. When sifting by two criteria, such as first by price, then by graphical capabilities, then you find that there is not a massive number of empty brackets when one has a wide distribution of products.

That means, that whatever person or process designed them, designed them specifically for the task that they are intended to do, without being constrained by previous models of of general purpose computers with little such specific purpose in mind. They were developed more or less independantly, and while they may share some of the same components they are not forced to start from a previous design.

As stated previously, one has far less flexibility in rearrangement of organisms by biological characteristics, since even though it has a wide distribution of different types of organisms, attempting to rearrange it and reclassify by other means will result in a large number of empty categories. This implies that any design process was constrained by the characteristics of previous models, which happens to fit perfectly with the notion of common descent.

Think in terms of a relational database rather than a nested hierarchy. You show me one company that makes things that does it by beginning with one product then making successive gradual enhancements to it until wala they have a brand new product, with new form, features, and functions.

You show me one company that has products that can't be so easily reclassified by whatever whims the store manager or the buying public wish.

You design and build a product, get feedback from the market for enhancements to tweak it along the way and when it stops selling you junk it.

Except for God, since being a perfect designer makes feedback superfluous.

A new product begins with what you've learned from the previous design

Learned? How does an all-knowing deity Learn?

and may include many of the same components, but it often will include new components, design enhancements, and a new shape.

Which, would inevitably be included in the original if they were available at the time, correct? Does this mean God has a supply problem?

[gluadys]

First a story: Two martians travel to the planet earth in the year 2300 to document what they find and report back to the mother ship.

They don’t find any living beings, but there are a number of freestanding structures grouped together with smaller free standing structures seemingly associated near them. We will call the larger structures homes, and the smaller structures garden sheds and dog houses.

Well, the first problem with the story is that you have not shown that the smaller structures are either children or ancestors of the larger ones. Common descent is not indicated where there is no descent at all.


We see that even without referring to manufactured things. Look at natural things which do not reproduce. Elements, stars, minerals, chemicals, volcanoes, mountains, glaciers, etc.

We can observe their similarities and differences too, just as we can with living things. And we can classify them on that basis. But do these classifications (e.g. periodic table of elements) look anything like a tree of common descent?

“ok” the one says, all the structures have common attributes. We will document these traits and call them walls, roofs, windows, and doors. There is a myriad of complexity in the larger structures, whether it be color, square footage, window style, roof pitch, etc. but they are all very similar. The simpler structures don’t have this same complexity.

In my report I will say that we have found a world of many like structures and there must be a relationship between them since they are similar so we will hypothesize that the doghouse evolved into the home through an unknown process. We’ll call it mutation.

Here is a second difference. In living things mutation is not an unknown process.

He runs out the door to show it to his buddy who is busy cataloging the outside features of the garden shed. ‘Hey I thinks these structures were designed. I have a blueprint and materials common between the structures.”

His partner says, “Well my theory came first and on Mars we’ll never decipher the signature of who wrote that blueprint, so let’s go with the doghouse evolution theory”

And that is a third difference. We don't have features jumping from one category of life form to another without a mechanism of descent, nor do we have a signed set of blueprints.

Why is it that just because we don't know who the creator is that we deny the obvious evidence for creation?

Why do people have a problem with the obvious fact that the Creator chose evolution as the means of creating a diversity of living things?

[gluadys]

Exactly.

We're not talking about how we arrange and describe things we're talking about how we make things.

We are also talking about how the possible arrangements of things provides clues as to how they were made.

How we arrange of computers on shelves tells nothing about how they are made.

It tells us that they did not evolve.

Think in terms of a relational database rather than a nested hierarchy.

The nested hierarchy is not a classification pattern imposed on the orderly arrangement of living things. It is the pattern that always results when living things are classified by morphology, fossil record, DNA sequences, embryological development, you name it.

You don't get a parsimonious orderly arrangement of living things that is not a nested hierarchy.

Manufactured things on the other hand can be arranged in many ways.


That is the difference between design and common descent.

[richic]

Microsoft?
Seriously, that's a great argument against creation.

Good point. I knew I should have left that out.

[richic]

Now there are many different models with many different purposes in mind. With this in mind, how does one classify them? By processing power first? Then you have the odd pair of a High-End Gaming Machine and a low-end server sharing the same classification bracket. By Graphical Abilities First? Then you have the High-End Server and the E-Machine that is mainly used to connect to the Internet being oddly classified in the same bracket.

This is all true but and I would say that this attempt at classification by feature and function can be arbitrary and its useful for selling the computers but it tells us very little about how these computers were created.

That means, that whatever person or process designed them, designed them specifically for the task that they are intended to do, without being constrained by previous models of of general purpose computers with little such specific purpose in mind. They were developed more or less independantly, and while they may share some of the same components they are not forced to start from a previous design.

But if you actually look under the hood at the Bill of Material amongst all the models you'll find a lot of commonality even amongst computers of different class. They can use the same memory, hard drive, many of the integrated circuits, LEDs, etc. It's essentially a repackaging and reprogramming effort of the firmware to create a brand new model. It just takes a good designer to be able to know how to put all the components together.

As stated previously, one has far less flexibility in rearrangement of organisms by biological characteristics, since even though it has a wide distribution of different types of organisms, attempting to rearrange it and reclassify by other means will result in a large number of empty categories. This implies that any design process was constrained by the characteristics of previous models, which happens to fit perfectly with the notion of common descent.

But when dealing with how things get made, why do we classify by biological characteristics? Shouldn't we be classifying solely using genetic classifications? Isn't this where we get the programming information, and the unique biological material that makes this organism distinct from another?

You show me one company that has products that can't be so easily reclassified by whatever whims the store manager or the buying public wish.

All companies do this because its easy to slap a different name on the same product or provide an "OEM" version with some subtle tweaks. Now the only way you can do this is by having a sophisticated design to manufacturing system so you don't lose control.

I would also say that we tend to see movement in the classification of biological organisms, and some don't always fit well in the category they're placed in. Why can't we be more exact?

Except for God, since being a perfect designer makes feedback superfluous.

In my analogy the feedback is natural selection which is essentially environmental feedback saying this or that trait should be dominant. I think God planned it that way. It also allows for extinction when that product or organism is pulled from the shelf.

Which, would inevitably be included in the original if they were available at the time, correct? Does this mean God has a supply problem?

I meant this would be a new design, a new organism. The nice thing about God's system is he's not really in the manufacturing business. His organisms will reproduce themselves so he doesn't have to run his own procurement operation. He can focus just on design.

[richic]

Here is a second difference. In living things mutation is not an unknown process.

I agree its known but we don't know how it works and it accounts for the big mental leap in common descent.

And that is a third difference. We don't have features jumping from one category of life form to another without a mechanism of descent, nor do we have a signed set of blueprints.

But we do. I've heard often how humans share 98% of the genetic material and makeup of 'x' organism. The blueprints are the genome. We have these and we understand them extremely well.
There is no mechanism of descent. Instead you have an intelligent designer putting these things together.

Why do people have a problem with the obvious fact that the Creator chose evolution as the means of creating a diversity of living things?

I believe that once the living things were created that natural selection drives the diversity and the success of living things. We can prove that genetically.
The problem I have is common descent makes absolutely no sense to me and I think it holds back scientific discovery and thus a better understanding of our Creator.