Calling Zachriel's Bluff- Nested Hierarchy and Common Descent

OK Zachriel, here it is. The key to your posting privileges for Intelligent Reasoning is being placed in your hands.

Your next post will be regardless of what you think I know or don't know, understand or don't understand about nested hierarchy and/ or set theory. It will be for our reader's benefit. It will also prevent you from continuing to waste bandwidth on my blog.

Here is the deal to the key:

1) You have to respond in this thread.

2) Your response must demonstrate that a nested hierarchy is an expected result of Common Descent*.

3) It must also demonstrate why Common Descent would be falsified if we did not observe a nested hierarchy.

4) And it must demonstrate why, if all the alleged transitionals that would have had to have existed in a Common Descent scenario were still alive, we would still observe a nested hierarchy.

Nothing else from you will be posted on this blog, in any thread, until you comply.

Scientific references would be nice. You know like the reference I posted that demonstrates that evolution can take any direction. (see below added via edit)



*Common Descent refers to the premise that all of the extant living organisms owe their collective common ancestry to some unknown popuklation(s) of single-celled organisms.

common descent refers to the premise that I am directly related to my parents and my children. There are subsequent degrees of separation in both directions, each with varying degrees of genetic connectivity.

My only argument is using nested hieararchy as evidence for Capital C capital D, ie Common Descent. Especially when it is obvious that it can also live without it.



Now Zachriel you can call this a "banning" if your dishonest little heart so deems necessary. However I call it a shit scraper. All your posts will be held until you comply with the above 4 conditions.

Good luck, and good night...


Added via edit:

As should have been obviously clear from the title of this blog (ie thread), this is for ZACHRIEL to answer.


However, The MAIN reason NH is NOT an expected outcome of common descent- NO ANCESTRAL OR TRANSITIONAL FORMS CAN BE PERMITTED TO SURVIVE (page 136 of "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis"). For if they do that would do away with the nice neat distinctive divisions as then the classes and traits would be blurred due to overlapping.

pg 136 in "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis":

"There is another stringent condition which must be satisfied if a hierarchic pattern is to result as an end product of an evolutionary process: no ancestral or transitional forms can be permitted to survive. (italics in original)

Confirmed by Darwin:

Extinction, as we have seen in the fourth chapter, has played an important part in defining and widening the intervals between the several groups in each class. We may thus account for the distinctness of whole classes from each other- for instance, of birds from all other vertebrate classes from each other- by the belief that many ancient forms of life have been utterly lost, through which the early progenitors of birds were formerly connected with the early progenitors of the other and at that time less differentiated vertebrate classes.

Everyone knows the alleged "tree of life" is just a methaphor, IOW a piece of imagination. And even on that imagined tree all we have to observe are the imagined twigs.

Agassiz:

What we call branches expresses, in fact, a purely ideal connection between animals, the intellectual conception which unites them in creative thought. It seems to me the more we examine the true significance of this kind of group, the more we shall be convinced that they are not founded upon material relations.

Denton in Chapter 6 of "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis":

Whenever classification schemes are drawn up for phenomena which fall into a continuous or obviously sequential pattern—such as climatic zones from the artic to the tropics, subspecies in a circumpolar overlap, the properties of atoms in the periodic table, series of fossil horses, or wind strengths from breeze to hurricane—class boundaries are bound to be relatively arbitrary and indistinct. Most of the classes defined in such schemes are inevitably partially inclusive of other classes, or, in other words, fundamentally intermediate in character with respect to adjacent classes in the scheme. Consequently, when such schemes are depicted in terms of Venn diagrams, most of the classes overlap and the schemes overall have a disorderly appearance.

A quite different type of classification system is termed hierarchic. In which there are no overlapping or partially inclusive classes, but only classes inclusive or exclusive of other classes. Such schemes exhibit, therefore, an orderly “groups within groups” arrangement in which class boundaries are distinct and the divisions in the system increase in a systematic manner as the hierarchy is ascended. The absence of any overlapping classes implies the absence of any sort of natural sequential relationships among the objects grouped by such a scheme."

Denton page 122

"Biological classification is basically the identification of groups of organisms which share certain characteristics in common and its beginnings are therefore as old as man himself. It was Aristotle who first formulated the general logical principles of classification and founded the subject as science. His method employed many of the principles which are still used by biologists today. He was, for example, well aware of the importance of using more than one characteristic as a basis for identifying classes, and he was also aware of the difficult problem which has bedeviled taxonomy ever since: that of selecting the characteristics to be used and weighing their relative significance."- bold added

Carrying on with Denton- Page 131:

“While hierarchic schemes correspond beautifully with the typological model of nature, the relationship between evolution and hierarchical systems is curiously ambiguous. Ever since 1859 it has been traditional for evolutionary biologists to claim that the hierarchic pattern of nature provides support for the idea of organics evolution. Yet, direct evidence for evolution only resides in the existence of unambiguous sequential arrangements, and these are never present in ordered hierarchic schemes.

Of course evolutionary biologists do not look for the direct evidence in the hierarchy itself but rather argue, as Darwin did, that the hierarchic pattern is readily explained in terms of an evolutionary tree.”

Can evolution make things less complicated?
Scientists suggest cell origins involved a forward-and-backward process:

"Instead, the data suggest that eukaryote cells with all their bells and whistles are probably as ancient as bacteria and archaea, and may have even appeared first, with bacteria and archaea appearing later as stripped-down versions of eukaryotes, according to David Penny, a molecular biologist at Massey University in New Zealand.

Penny, who worked on the research with Chuck Kurland of Sweden's Lund University and Massey University's L.J. Collins, acknowledged that the results might come as a surprise.

“We do think there is a tendency to look at evolution as progressive,” he said. “We prefer to think of evolution as backwards, sideways, and occasionally forward.”

and again:

To anyone else reading this- I refer you to chapter 6 of "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis" for a thorough scientific refutation of nested hierarchies as evidence for Common Descent. IOW you don't have to listen to me. However it should be obvious by now that there is no way anyone should listen to Zachriel.



note to blipey: What part about-

As should have been obviously clear from the title of this blog (ie thread), this is for ZACHRIEL to answer.

-don't you understand? There are several other blogs that deal with nested hierarchy. You can post your drivel** in any of those.

** drivel- as in all of your posts to Intelligent Reasoning to date. And since I am sure you will NEVER substantiate anything in support of the anti-ID position, every subsequent post you make.