Re: Co-optation Today

Treus wrote:
John Harshman wrote:
Treus wrote:
John Harshman wrote:
Treus wrote:
The
situation would be very different if you downloaded a collection of
text documents whose minor variations could be arranged in a nested
hierarchy. What conclusions about sequential transcription errors
could you make there?
The same conclusions. Unless you would care to present an alternative
theory of how a nested hierarchy could arise.
Well, there's the difficulty. I don't recall anyone observing an
applicable complex nested hierarchy arising. Maybe you can think of
something.
Why is it necessary to observe it happening in order to know that it
exists and how it arose? You have agreed that hand-copied manuscripts
exhibit common descent, but you didn't observe that happening either.
The most obvious general example is the periodic table of elements.
Example of what? It's not a nested hierarchy.

Sure it is. Sodium is 1) an element that is 2) a metal, specifically
in 3) the alkali metal series.

This is not a real nested hierarchy. Metals and non-metals, alkali metals and other metals grade into each other. And even if we were to concede the nesting, it's not much of a nesting, surely nothing to be compared with a phylogenetic tree.

Of
course, the current explanation for that is also evolutionary, though
with a critical difference. The array of observed atomic species was
entirely predictable through demonstrated principles given the
hypothetical starting state without need of extrapolation from
incremental phenomena to presumed (and untested) causal sufficiency
for categorically dissimilar effects. This does not mean it actually
happened as described, but we do have a possible causality which fully
accounts for all the necessary details at every stage of the process.
If you're trying to say that we can't know anything about phylogeny
until we have a theory that predicts from first principles every species
we see in the present, that's absurd. If you're trying to say something
else, I don't know what.

I'm not saying you can't know anything about phylogeny, just that your
theory still does not have enough credits to graduate from a
classification scheme to an empirically founded formulation of
causality. Your situation would be greatly improved by a demonstration
of just one new trait, on the scale of novelty attributed to
phylogenesis, produced through your proposed mechanism.

I have no idea what you mean by that. Most of the unclarity resides in "new", "on the scale of novelty attributed to phylogenetis", and "your proposed mechanism".

(In fact I do have an alternative theory: somebody consciously attempts
to fake common descent by creating such a hierarchy. But I don't think
it reasonably applies in any of the cases before us. How about you?)
You mean a Piltdown Man situation on a very large scale? That hardly
seems feasible.
That's why I said it doesn't reasonably apply. I note that you have not
come up with any alternative process that can result in a nested hierarchy.

No one I've encountered has a theory ready for prime time on the basis
of empirical evidence, including me.

But common descent is based on empirical evidence.

As far as instantiating the causes of nested hierarchy, your
manuscript example bears a curious resemblance to the allegory of the
typing monkey. Is there evidence these transcribing monks could have
eventually produced, say, a history of painting in the 20th century by
accumulating copy errors? That is what is required for the sort of
extrapolation you are attempting.

Nonsense. You have conflated many features of biology here that are easily separable. The existence of a phylogenetic tree says nothing, necessarily, about the causal origin of adaptation. Nor do you have to know the causal origin of adaptation in order to have confidence in a phylogenetic tree.

Again, all that's required for a phylogenetic tree to produce a nested hierarchy is that organisms reproduce with inheritance leavened by errors, that some of these errors become fixed within a population, and that populations sometimes split into two. (Oh, and one more thing: that the rate of fixed errors at any one site is not unduly high.) That's all. And all of that is easily observed to happen.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Junk Dna!
    ... "Artificial nested hierarchy" ... In the case of biological organisms, there are, of course, several ways ... Or, more properly, with a designer who didn't use common descent as his ...
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  • Re: Does similarity indicate descent to have occurred?
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  • Re: Junk Dna!
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