Journalist Tom Bethell writes to ask:
Reptiles exist in the same way that invertebrates exist. The problem arises for both groups when the are said to be ancestral to some other group. As in this 4-word sentence:
“Vertebrates evolved from invertebrates.”
It is an (inconspicuous) assertion that vertebrates evolved. Back-up evidence is seemingly provided by naming the ancestral group: Invertebrates.
But it doesn’t take a genius to see that the ancestral group is (improperly) defined by the absence of the character that defines the descendant group. What appears to be a factual statement with evidence attached turns out to be a truism. Rewriting it more plainly:
“The first vertebrate had parents that were not vertebrates.” (Duh.)
This was pointed out some years ago by the late Colin Patterson, chief paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Patterson then boldly went on to say that ALL ANCESTRAL GROUPS ARE DEFINED BY THE ABSENCE OF CHARACTERS. Which characters? Those that define the descendant group.
An influential group of systematists called Cladists drew attention to this problem. Patterson was supported by some paleontologists at the American Museum of Natural History, notably Gary Nelson (Ichthyology) and Norman Platnick (one of the leading experts on spiders). The founder of cladistics was Willi Hennig, from East Germany. He called groups “defined” (i.e. ill defined) by the absence of character “paraphyletic.”
How does this apply to reptiles? They are ill-defined in the same way.
There is a broad group of organisms defined by the presence of an amnion, an envelope that shields early cells in the development of the organism. These organisms are called amniotes. Among them are two well defined groups: Birds and Mammals. But there are other amniota that are neither birds nor mammals. These are the ones we call reptiles. So they are non-mammalian, non-avian amniotes.
Therefore (problem solved) reptiles — non mammalian, non avian amniota — are ancestral to birds and mammals.
Aristotle called such ill defined groups confused and the cladists supported Aristotle. The function that such groups play in evolutionary theory is to serve as ancestral groups, thereby seeming to confirm Darwinism. They tell us which are the ancestral groups in the “tree of life.” They occupy the nodes in that tree.
I believe that nodes in the tree of life are always empty. Can anyone falsify that?
But I believe the tree of life is itself a fiction, as Craig Venter pointed out at a conference at Arizona State Univ. in 2011. Dawkins was there and was flummoxed.
The same problem exists with apes. They are defined as non-human hominoids, So guess what are they said to be ancestral to . . .
The overall problem brought up by the Cladists was discussed at length by the late David Hull, in his book. Science as a Process (1988).
Readers, thoughts?
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I see something in common with this article:
Engineering Tradeoffs and the Vacuity of “Fitness”
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....f-fitness/
What does it mean to say “Vertebrates evolved from invertebrates.”
It means the person saying it is stoned or deluded. 😉
Just another rider on Darwin’s merry-go-round.
The problem as I see it isn’t the lack of a character between the groups, it is that, at such a large-scale level, it is irrational to say that any large group evolved from any other large group.
It’s irrational to say that birds evolved from dinosaurs, for the simple reason that neither “birds” nor “dinosaurs” is an evolvable group. They are not interbreed able with each other, and therefore cannot evolve as a group.
You cannot say that “lizards” evolved to “mammals” for the same reason. “mammals” are not an evolvable group any more than lizards are.
If evolution occurred, then there must have been some population in which it took place. Therefore, you need to identify the population, or at least posit a population that could theoretically handle it. If you look at the lizard to mammal “transitional forms”, you find that each one has *different* sets of intermediate attributes. This means that there was no one lineage that lead there – the lineages each have different sets of attributes. There are only a few conclusions that can be drawn from this:
a) the intermediate forms are independent groups which have no lineage with other groups (i.e. independent creations). They are more mosaic than intermediate.
b) the intermediate forms are the result of hybridization between existing groups (i.e. mammals and lizards pre-existed the intermediate forms, and somehow managed to produce viable offspring). This would explain why the different lineages have independent sets of mammal/lizard combination features.
c) Evolution is teleological, and the transition from lizard to mammal was the result of a pre-existing drive. That is, they already had the information to make the transition. Therefore, multiple lineages made the transition simultaneously, because they were all exposed to the same trigger (be it time or environment) which caused the change.
In any case, when someone is talking about the “evolution” of a large-scale group, they are either snowing you, or they are talking about a teleological evolution. Darwinism is not capable of evolving large groups.
The first microbial mats 3.9bya we’re not related to each other. Mats popping up all over. Inevitable. Inexorable. Creation is Awesome. More Creations followed. Sea Creatures. Land Creatures. Man. Then Earthly Creation stopped.
“Universal Common Ancestor” will be dustbin’d soon enough. Victorian Era Thinking. People will back on the 150 years or so when UCA was science and scratch their heads. “How could people believe that??”
Saying “Vertebrates evolved from invertebrates” is saying a lot, in part because “inverts” aren’t a natural group. On the other hand, saying we evolved from (other) chordates is saying quite a lot, because it helps understand the order in which those vertebrate features evolved.
What Bethell doesn’t seem to understand is that systematists used shared-differences to define groups. That there is no natural group equating to our traditional idea of “reptile”, or a version of “ape” that doesn’t include our species is really niether here no there .
It’s irrational to say that birds evolved from dinosaurs, for the simple reason that neither “birds” nor “dinosaurs” is an evolvable group. They are not interbreed able with each other, and therefore cannot evolve as a group.
Huh? Evolutionary biology says birds and the various non-bird dinosaur groups are distinct lineages that can be traced to a common ancestor. Once populations start evolving separately they soon loose the ability to interbreed, but I don’t know why that should that be taken as evidence they don’t descend from the same population?
If you look at the lizard to mammal “transitional forms”, you find that each one has *different* sets of intermediate attributes.
You mean synapsid to mammal, but do you have a citation for this? I’ve never heard this claim before.
wd400: On the other hand, saying we evolved from (other) chordates is saying quite a lot, because it helps understand the order in which those vertebrate features evolved.
No it doesn’t. It just helps understand the variety of features of different animal types possessing vertebrates.
All else is Darwinian imagineering.
I believe that nodes in the tree of life are always empty. Can anyone falsify that?
No.
“Common Ancestors” and Nodes between major taxa exist only as imaginary abstract data points. Nothing in evidence suggests they represent real organisms and lineages.
But birds are dinosaurs, cladistically speaking.
Cladistics Made Easy: Why an Arcane Field of Study Fails to Upset Steve Meyer’s Argument for Intelligent Design
Stephen Meyer – Responding to Critics: Matzke Part 1 – video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jY2B76JbMQ4
Stephen Meyer – Responding to Critics: Matzke Part 2 – video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZWw18b3nHo
Responding to Critics: Matzke Part 3 – video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77XappzJh1k
Stephen Meyer explains why the use of cladistic analysis — stem groups, crown groups, cladograms, ghost lineages — fails to satisfy.
“In order to compensate for missing fossils, we have to postulate more missing fossils. So I don’t think that this really solves the problem of the missing fossils. I think it actually accentuates it.”
Stephen Meyer
A One-Man Clade – David Berlinski – July 18, 2013
Excerpt: The relationship between cladistics and Darwin’s theory of evolution is thus one of independent origin but convergent confusion. “Phylogenetic systematics,” the entomologist Michael Schmitt remarks, “relies on the theory of evolution.” To the extent that the theory of evolution relies on phylogenetic systematics, the disciplines resemble two biologists dropped from a great height and clutching at one another in mid-air.
Tight fit, major fail.7
No wonder that Schmidt is eager to affirm that “phylogenetics does not claim to prove or explain evolution whatsoever.”8 If this is so, a skeptic might be excused for asking what it does prove or might explain?
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....74601.html
If birds are dinosaurs, cladistically speaking, then cladistics is for the birds.
wd400:
It says you are deluded
Are they artificial or supernatural- maybe pre-natural or non-natural?
Unless those other chordates were human it says that you are deluded.
Yet it doesn’t tell us how or even if they did evolve.
lifepsy,
When do nodes on trees start being “imaginary”?
The so called “Mitchondrial eve” is but a node on a tree, but few people would say she never lived. Most folks here think Neanderthals were just part of normal human diversity, which pushes the “human” node back much deeper than eve. Creationists in general can’t quite decide which fossil species are human and which are non-human apes (though, they are usually confident such a demarcation exists…), but any more inclusive definition of human requires a yet deeper node to have existed.
Moving away from humans, most creationists are happy to call great swaths of biology a “kind”. The common ancestor of dogs, wolves and foxes, for instance, is “abstract” too.
So, what’s the different between an imaginary node and a real one?
Thanks for that Joe, a post containing all the insight, explanation and usefulness we’ve come to expect form your contributions…
Seriously, what do you think these naked assertions of yours achieve?
wd400, ‘naked assertions’ are the bread and butter of Darwinian ‘science’.
Do you have any evidence for that BA, or are you just…. asserting it to be true?
wd400- what do you think your d assertions achieve? What insight, explanation and usefulness do your posts serve other than to expose your agenda and double-standards?
The evidence for bornagain77’s post is in the fact that you can’t even model natural selection producing anything beyond a change in allele frequency
I do wonder sometimes, Joe. Mainly a post here as it’s interesting to see where ID objections come from and how they relate to evolutionary biology as it is practiced (rather than than the version many people object to).
But, I should really know there is no point in talking to your or BA, so I’ll leave it there.
sure wd400, I have evidence ‘for that’.
Neo-Darwinists claim that evolution is an observed fact on par with the observed fact of gravity. But very contrary to their claims, the plain fact of the matter is that there are ZERO observed instances of neo-Darwinian evolution building up functional complexity:
Four decades worth of lab work is surveyed here, and no evidence for neo-Darwinian evolution surfaces:
Michael Behe talks about the preceding paper in this following podcast:
How about the oft cited example for neo-Darwinism of antibiotic resistance?
That doesn’t seem to be helping! How about we look really, really, close at very sensitive growth rates and see if we can catch almighty evolution in action???
Shoot that doesn’t seem to be helping either! How about if we just try to fix a ‘beneficial’ mutation:
Well that certainly didn’t help. How about if just try to help evolution out a little and saturate genomes with mutations until we can actually see some ‘evolution’?
How about if we try to force bacteria to evolve to adapt to a new environment?
Shoot that doesn’t seem to be helping either! Perhaps we just have to give the almighty power of neo-Darwinism ‘room to breathe’? How about we ‘open the floodgates’ to the almighty power of Darwinian Evolution and look at Lenski’s Long Term Evolution Experiment and see what we can find after 50,000 generations, which is equivalent to somewhere around 1,000,000 years of human evolution???
Now that just can’t be right!! Man we should really start to be seeing some neo-Darwinian fireworks by 50,000 generations!?! Hey I know what we can do! How about we see what happened when the ‘top five’ mutations from Lenski’s experiment were combined??? Surely now the Darwinian magic will start flowing!!!
Now something is going terribly wrong here!Tell you what, let’s just forget trying to observe evolution in the lab, I mean it really is kind of cramped in the lab you know, and now let’s REALLY open the floodgates and let’s see what the almighty power of neo-Darwinian evolution can do with the ENTIRE WORLD at its disposal? Surely now almighty neo-Darwinian evolution will flex its awesomely powerful muscles and forever make those IDiots, who believe in Intelligent Design, cower in terror!
Now, there is something terribly wrong here! After looking high and low and everywhere in between, we can’t seem to find the almighty power of neo-Darwinism anywhere!! Shoot we can’t even find ANY power of neo-Darwinism whatsoever!!! It is as if the whole neo-Darwinian theory, relentlessly sold to the general public as it was the gospel truth, is nothing but a big fat lie!!!
“What does it mean to say “Vertebrates evolved from invertebrates.”
It means the person saying it is stoned or deluded. “
It is nice to see that Joe G. is keeping an open mind.
Yours is so open that it fell out
The OP has confused a few issues (it might be that the full text makes things clearer). First, it’s worth pointing out that taxonomists don’t consider “reptiles” a meaningful group, and also that humans are considered apes.
What underlies this is the issue of paraphyly, which the OP defines incorrectly. What Hennig was promoting was an explicit tree-based approach to classifying living organisms. The ideas was that we can classify them in tree. Any group of organisms descended from one node in the tree is called a ‘clade’. We can, of course, name clades. So we have the mammal clade, the bird clade etc.
Part of this approach is to say that if we name a clade, every member of the clade is classified with that name. So everything in the bird clade is a bird. But it’s also possible to classify groups in a way that breaks this. For example, the group of organisms that fly. If we put them in a clade, then we see that it would have to include non-flying species too: a clade containing bats and birds would also include humans and dolphins. The technical term for a group such as “flying things” is “paraphyletic”.
Paraphyletic groups are perfectly possible but they make a mess of classification, and this is where the issues in the OP come in. The easiest way to define a paraphyletic group is by saying “all species in this clade, except those ones”. Then one has to outline the characteristics of “those ones”. And in practice the easiest way to do this is through absence of characters. So, if we don’t want to say that birds are dinosaurs, then we have to make the dinosaurs paraphyletic. We can do this by defining birds as “the part of the clade that include dinosaurs that can fly”, and thus define dinosaurs as “the part of the dinosaur clade that can’t fly”.
In practice, this creates problems for groups like reptiles, as they were defined in a way that makes them paraphyletic. Thus, one either expands the group to make it monophyletic (as was done with birds and dinosaurs), or one abandons the classification as being taxonomically valid, as has been done with both reptiles and invertebrates.
Real life is messier than systematics, so even though both categories aren’t taxonomically valid, they are still used in practice. So for a taxonomist “Vertebrates evolved from invertebrates” is meaningless, because invertebrates aren’t a valid taxonomic group. More informally, what it means is that vertebrates (which are a valid taxonomic group) evolved from a clade (the metazoa) that also includes species that don’t have backbones.
Humans are considered apes by deluded people. Also clades are assumed based on shared characteristics. Any ancestor-descendant relationships are assumed from that. And vertebrates evolved from invertebrates is meaningless because it cannot be tested.
BTW that is the claim of evolutionism- that some invertebrate(s) gave rise to some vertebrate(s). But as I said that is meaningless because it cannot be tested.
Also known as “evolutionists”. 😛
WD400
It is really easy to explain the similarities lets try the differences…..
The problem is that cladistics is totally subjective, why should a bat be classified as a mammal and not a bird? Why should a bats breasts be more important than its wings?
Because bats also have hair, teeth (and, in fact, different kinds of teeth), inner ear bones, lips, placentae and many many differences in their DNA which they share with other mammals.
wd400:
huh?
Do you mean bats have many similarities in their DNA that they share with mammals?
Wd400,
Why should we consider any of those more important than wings, you have just subjectively chosen those things that are similar to other mammals but I’m sure I can give you a list of things that the bat has that are just as simular to birds.
Kiwi’s apparently have “hair-like” wings, some extinct birds apparently had teeth, birds also have ear bones.
Bats and birds have feet, they both have a head, both have eyes, etc.