Posted: Nov 06, 2018 8:01 pm
Rumraket wrote:Fenrir wrote:I'm quessing you wouldn't know what a cladogram represents and couldn't generate one if your life depended on it.
Or how progression from sea to land to air is reflected in the age of fossils for that matter.
Creationism cannot survive the collision with an actual understanding of the methods of cladistics, taxonomy, and phylogenetics and their application to real data from comparative physiology and genetics.
It is impossible for a thinking person to learn how the algorithms of classification and phylogenetics actually work, then to see what results they give when applied to real biological data, and still maintain their strange creationistic ideas. One would have to be absolutely crazy and delusional to remain a creationist.
Thanks for that. This cladistics that you shake in my face brought back a faint memory from around 1978 when a botanist friend said something to me about cladistics. I remember he was intense about it, though I can't be sure now, I hope he had something bad to say about cladistics.
Because, while I was fishing around this issue of the possible flying origin of dinosaurs, I came across the Wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogeny_of_pterosaurs That has three main cladograms of progressively later date and each coding for more characters. What struck me was that they didn't look at all similar. If they were converging on the truth, I really couldn't have confidence about their rate of convergence. Indeed they told me squat and I even got a bit annoyed because they seemed to reflect "original research"; which is one of the corruptions Wikipedia is fighting so hard against infecting its encyclopedia.
So long as I was feeling negative about cladograms it struck me that as a graphic, they oddly miss the obvious dimension of Time. If you grow one with the stem at the bottom and if it is so well calculated as to be correct then its vertical axis seems to represent nothing so much as space to create the graphic without lines crossing. Well if you pinned the vertical coordinate of each species to the dimension of time, you would get the Tree of Life; that marvellous summary and symbol of the Creation.
So it seems to me that cladograms are sometimes non-robust tools (or weapons); it's no use shaking them in my face. And they are somehow like Frankenstein's monster; just working blind with characteristics of many species and without knowing anything about their time, a good algorithm will give you a reasonable facsimile of the history of life but wierdly distorted in time and somehow lifeless.
For one thing, leaving out the time dimension hides the dramatic extinction events that have been so formative in the creation.
The crippling effect of ignoring the time dimension in cladograms reminded me of how evolution enthusiasts are crippled by denying themselves the use of that useful word "Creation". Plus cognate terms like Learning, Teaching, Progress. Why? Just because of atheist ideology. But the story of the Creation is intrinsically to great that it must in the end break out of that straight jacket