Andy Schueler's Devastating Refutations of My Claims

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I said:

As for nested hierarchies- LoL!. The fact that the theory of evolution posits a gradual change, which means there would be many, many transitional forms, it is clear that the theory does not expect a nested hierarchy based on traits. Transitional forms by definition means there would be organisms with a mixture of defining traits, which would ruin a nested hierarchy based on traits.

Andy replied:

 Ergo, you were completely and utterly clueless about what nested hierarchies are just two months ago, and anything you might know about it has been learned within this timeframe. I on the other hand studied Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics and study phylogenetic trees (which requires an understanding of nested hierarchies) regularly at work since roughly five years (if I count the time since I started working mostly independently) and my work has been published in peer-reviewed journals.

Evidence for those claims can of course be provided and I´ll happily provide you with copies of my academic certificates and publications (and my bank account of course).

Now I hope you honor your commitment and thanks a lot for ten thousand bucks!
 

That's it! Nothing that actually even addresses what I wrote. Just a bald declaration tat I am wrong.

I also understand trees. Over 30 years working in information technology designing network topologies, computer directory trees and server access trees. All of that requires knowledge of trees, hierarchies and nested hierarchies.

I have archives on this blog loaded with discussions of nested hierarchies. No one has ever disputed that wrt transitional forms.

Now along comes Andy and just baldly declares I am wrong, even though Darwin and Denton agree with me?

If you read what Andy writes you can easily see that he conflates hierarchy and nested hierarchy. He's totally clueless.

Further down it continues:

And I am correct- transitional forms, by their very nature, contain a MIX of defining characteristics. THAT violates a nested hierarchy.


He does come back with this non-response:

Dude, this is about the single dumbest thing that you could have said about this subject, seriously – I really could not imagine a more outrageously stupid comment about nested hierarchies. Let me walk you through that reeeaaal slow. You seem to think that mixing features violates a nested hierarchy. If this would be true (hint: it isn´t), then the very existence of nested hierarchies would be a logical impossibility, because the only collections of entities where there is ZERO mixing of features, are collections where all entities are either exactly identical or completely different.

 

Mixing DEFINING characteristics, you moron. Of course there will be shared characteristics throughout. That is the basis of a nested hierarchy- similarities. However the organisms in different sets cannot share DEFINING characteristics. Mammals do not have feathers. A mammal with feathers would ruin the existing scheme.

The asshole can't even follow along. What kind of publshed scientist is he?

Nested Hiearchy- Potential Falsication:

It would be very problematic if many species were found that combined characteristics of different nested groupings. Proceeding with the previous example, some nonvascular plants could have seeds or flowers, like vascular plants, but they do not. Gymnosperms (e.g. conifers or pines) occasionally could be found with flowers, but they never are. Non-seed plants, like ferns, could be found with woody stems; however, only some angiosperms have woody stems. Conceivably, some birds could have mammary glands or hair; some mammals could have feathers (they are an excellent means of insulation). Certain fish or amphibians could have differentiated or cusped teeth, but these are only characteristics of mammals. A mix and match of characters like this would make it extremely difficult to objectively organize species into nested hierarchies. Unlike organisms, cars do have a mix and match of characters, and this is precisely why a nested hierarchy does not flow naturally from classification of cars.

If it were impossible, or very problematic, to place species in an objective nested classification scheme (as it is for the car, chair, book, atomic element, and elementary particle examples mentioned above), macroevolution would be effectively disproven. More precisely, if the phylogenetic tree of all life gave statistically significant low values of phylogenetic signal (hierarchical structure), common descent would be resolutely falsified.

 

Does Andy also think that Theobald is stupid?