Let's talk about "speciation"

[Eloi]

That word "speciation" is mentioned a lot by evolutionists on the forum. It seems that it is the way they (the experts) call the transformation of a species into another, a diferent one. How a real ANOTHER SPECIES can the new animal be?

What are the real conditions for something like REAL new species coming out of previous species to occur naturally? Like: What real relationship can there be between a cow and a whale, other than an imaginary magical story?

Reading this

(...) the mountain of confirming evidence that has been collected and tested. (...)

all the time, but none of that "evidence" have been shown anywhere here ... Maybe we can see the real thing behind all these verbiage ...

[Difflugia]

[Replying to Difflugia in post #2]
Something else besides imaginary gene trees?

1. Why?
2. Like what?

I mean, at this point you're just asking for evidence other than the evidence. If you are genuinely interested in understanding the evolutionary relationships you mentioned in the OP, how robust the data are, and why scientists are confident in their conclusions, learning enough about molecular phylogenetics to do it yourself will more than get you there.

[Eloi]

[Replying to Difflugia in post #2]
Something else besides imaginary gene trees?

1. Why?
2. Like what?

I mean, at this point you're just asking for evidence other than the evidence. If you are genuinely interested in understanding the evolutionary relationships you mentioned in the OP, how robust the data are, and why scientists are confident in their conclusions they do, learning enough about molecular phylogenetics to do it yourself will more than get you there.

The data may be facts, what you do with it is something different. With the same data, under different programs you can have different results. That is not objective, it is subjective. It is like I said somewhere else: you'd be building skyscrapers on quicksand.

[Clownboat]

[Replying to Difflugia in post #2]
Something else besides imaginary gene trees?

A program (with the procedures you installed on it) will do what you want it to do with the data you enter on it ...It'll practically give you exactly what you want, and nothing else. A program will never give what happened in the real life; maybe an aproximation, or far from it just a fantastic result like the body with skin, facial hair and everything else from a simple bit of jaw.

Yes, yes... just like NASA and all its pictures tricking us in to thinking the earth is an oblate spheroid.
You cannot reason a person out of a position they did not reason themselve in to. Creationists, like flat earthers will die off eventually. They will not be reasoned out of their position.

To debate a flat earth is to give it attention is doesn't deserve it would seem. How is creationism any different? We will educate our children going forward and old beliefs will die off with those that believe them (the earth is no longer the center of our solar system afterall). It's just a matter of time until creationism is received like a flat earth is now...

It's also very powerful feeling to convince oneself that they actually have the right belief when it comes to the shape of the earth for one example. They then get to pretent that they are the actual experts and this is a powerful motivator. I don't see how creationism is any different since there is no evidence for either belief, just denial.

[Clownboat]

[Replying to Difflugia in post #2]
Something else besides imaginary gene trees?

1. Why?
2. Like what?

I mean, at this point you're just asking for evidence other than the evidence. If you are genuinely interested in understanding the evolutionary relationships you mentioned in the OP, how robust the data are, and why scientists are confident in their conclusions they do, learning enough about molecular phylogenetics to do it yourself will more than get you there.

The data may be facts, what you do with it is something different. With the same data, under different programs you can have different results. That is not objective, it is subjective. It is like I said somewhere else: you'd be building skyscrapers on quicksand.

To discount any and all evidence that is counter to a religious belief is to truly build a belief on sand. It is also just taking the easy route. Learning molecular phylogenetics for example is to do the work. There is no reason for you to put in the work to then just go with what your religion claims, so I understand your reluctance to learn, but I can't respect it. You being honest about having this stance is respected, so thank you for that.

On another note, I am more then willing to discount evolution as the mechanism for the diversity of life we see not just now, but also in the fossil record. I have no dog in the fight and will happily accept a better explination. This stance should be respected as it shows a belief held with integrity.

Your belief is still the true one though of course.

[Eloi]

And again: what are the criteria used by experts in taxonomically classifying a bone as belonging to a normal ape, ape-man, or a human?

I can ask it in parts... For example: how would they know that a Neanderthal is not just a human who ethnically has its own characteristics, as a modern human living isolated somewhere on the planet would have, and not an ape-man as they have classified it? Do they decide if it's one thing or the other just because that's what they want to believe?

If I were to say that Neanderthal is just a Homo Sapiens with different ethnicity and in a different epoch, based on the fact that some modern humans have "Neanderthal" genes... could I be right? Isn't speciation proportionally inverse with the possibility of reproduction between individuals under natural conditions?

[Jose Fly]

Learning molecular phylogenetics for example is to do the work. There is no reason for you to put in the work to then just go with what your religion claims, so I understand your reluctance to learn, but I can't respect it.

It's important to remember the price a Jehovah's Witness would pay were they to acknowledge the reality of evolution...an inquiry, banishment, shunning, loss of family....IOW, emotional and social ruin.

Learning might lead to understanding, understanding might lead to acceptance, and acceptance would lead to the above. Thus, for the Jehovah's Witness, it's far safer to never learn in the first place.

[Eloi]

The truth is that they do not even have any arsenal of semi-human animals as they want to make it seem. They have barely invented a few classifications for each of these so-called ape-men. They are these, if I am not missing any:

Homo neanderthalensis,
Homo floresiensis,
Homo heidelbergensis,
Homo antecessor,
Homo erectus,
Homo ergaster,
Homo habilis,
Homo rudolfensis

... the whole family ... and when you see the pictures, each of them seems to be a different race/ethnicity . So: how do they know?

[Clownboat]

The truth is that they do not even have any arsenal of semi-human animals as they want to make it seem. They have barely invented a few classifications for each of these so-called ape-men. They are these, if I am not missing any:

Homo neanderthalensis,
Homo floresiensis,
Homo heidelbergensis,
Homo antecessor,
Homo erectus,
Homo ergaster,
Homo habilis,
Homo rudolfensis

... the whole family ... and when you see the pictures, each of them seems to be a different race/ethnicity . So: how do they know?

The truth is, they don't have what I'm now going to provide a list for, because they have it after all.

• Look, I don't understand the pictures, so how could they?
  
  Sums up your post IMO.

[Difflugia]

The data may be facts, what you do with it is something different. With the same data, under different programs you can have different results. That is not objective, it is subjective.

That's not what "subjective" means. By codifying a set of rules, the process becomes objective, even if it's wrong. Maybe it's wrong. I personally don't think so, but then again, I know how it works. I'm offering to help you learn how it works, too.

It is like I said somewhere else: you'd be building skyscrapers on quicksand.

And we're back where we started. You have no idea how any of it works, but you're utterly confident that it's wrong. Not only that, but I'm offering to teach you how it works and you're making excuses for why you don't want to learn.

And again: what are the criteria used by experts in taxonomically classifying a bone as belonging to a normal ape, ape-man, or a human?

Broadly, the paleontologist will take as many measurements as possible for different "characters" of the remains. When talking about a bone, these can be simple things, like absolute length, width, and their simple ratios, but also things like ratios, angles between different parts of the bone, points where muscles attached, curvatures, and things like that. If I handed you a hundred assorted chicken femurs, a hundred duck femurs, and a caliper, I'd bet that it wouldn't take you very long to come up with a list of characters that would allow you to distinguish whether the next femur I gave you came from a chicken or a duck. I found an Open Access paper that gives a list of characters used in one particular cladistic analysis.

I can ask it in parts... For example: how would they know that a Neanderthal is not just a human who ethnically has its own characteristics, as a modern human living isolated somewhere on the planet would have, and not an ape-man as they have classified it?

It's a statistical process. If there's just one, they don't know for sure and when species are closely related, that's often the direction that scientific arguments go. Once one has a bunch of neandertal remains and a bunch of anatomically modern human remains, then one can make a statistical decision about relationships.

Neandertals aren't "ape men" by any definition, by the way. Most scientists now considert them to be the same species as modern humans, Homo sapiens, but a different subspecies: Homo sapiens neanderthalensis vs. Homo sapiens sapiens.

Do they decide if it's one thing or the other just because that's what they want to believe?

Heh. I'm just going to just leave this here because it's funny.

If I were to say that Neanderthal is just a Homo Sapiens with different ethnicity and in a different epoch, based on the fact that some modern humans have "Neanderthal" genes... could I be right?

Actually, that is already sort of right for the reason I already gave. As far as "different epoch," though, we have Homo sapiens sapiens remains contemporary with the neanderthalensis remains.

The crux of your question, though, is how sure can one be that you're telling the groups apart? Again, that's a statistical argument. If your list of characters is such that, say, 99% of each group fits the range of measurements, then you can be roughly 99% certain that you've at least identified which group a new specimen belongs to. Of course, there's always the question of whether or not a particular grouping was accidentally created by the researcher, particularly with closely-related species. The solution to that is to make sure that your dataset is large enough that it's statistically improbable that the measurements overlap.

That's actually the biggest benefit of molecular data. Each nucleotide or amino acid position represents a single character and each gene represents dozens or hundreds of characters. If someone else does the actual sequencing, you or I could generate a cladistic analysis based on thousands of characters in a few hours with free software and a web browser.

Isn't speciation proportionally inverse with the possibility of reproduction between individuals under natural conditions?

I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but the answer is "I think so." Speciation generally takes place when a population becomes two separate populations of the same species. If they're reproductively isolated from each other long enough, then they'll eventually become incompatible. This often happens with some sort of physical boundary, like happened with camels and llamas when Africa separated from South America, for example, but can also happen for other reasons, like with cichlid populations in African lakes, where different populations inhabit varying depths of the lakes.

[Difflugia]

A program (with the procedures you installed on it) will do what you want it to do with the data you enter on it ...It'll practically give you exactly what you want, and nothing else. A program will never give what happened in the real life; maybe an aproximation, or far from it just a fantastic result like the body with skin, facial hair and everything else from a simple bit of jaw.

I just noticed that you added to your answer after I quoted it, so I'll answer your further objection.

When you say that the procedures "practically give you exactly what you want," how do you imagine that the software works? Do you think that it can recognize every possible gene and somehow know where I'd like it to go in an imagined phylogenetic tree? Once again, let me teach you how it works. Not only are the algorithms published, but the software's open source and you could read the code yourself to see if there's something tricky hidden in there.