Elizabeth Liddle- Proudly Ignorant of Nested Hierarchies

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Elizabeth Liddle is either very ignorant or very dishonest. Methinks it is both. She sed:

You have misunderstood the meaning of the term “nested hierarchies” then. Try “phylogenies” – it means the same thing, and they do not require discrete groups.

Imbecile, phylogenies are not nested hierarchies. They are NOT the same thing. Obviously you are ignorant of the concept.

Nested hierarchies require distinct groups. That is their trademark, just look at Linnaean Classification and all existing nested hierarchies- oops she doesn't know what they are!

Extinction has only defined the groups: it has by no means made them; for if every form which has ever lived on this earth were suddenly to reappear, though it would be quite impossible to give definitions by which each group could be distinguished, still a natural classification, or at least a natural arrangement, would be possible.- Charles Darwin chapter 14

and

There is another stringent condition which must be satisfied if a hierarchic pattern is to result as the end product of an evolutionary process: no ancestral forms can be permitted to survive. This can be seen by examining the tree diagram on page 135. If any of the ancestors X, Y, or Z, or if any of the hypothetical transitional connecting species stationed on the main branches of the tree, had survived and had therefore to be included in the classification scheme, the distinctness of the divisions would be blurred by intermediate or partially inclusive classes and what remained of the hierarchic pattern would be highly disordered.- Denton, “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis” page 136 (X, Y and Z are hypothetical parental node populations)

and

The goals of scientists like Linnaeus and Cuvier- to organize the chaos of life’s diversity- are much easier to achieve if each species has a Platonic essence that distinguishes it from all others, in the same way that the absence of legs and eyelids is essential to snakes and distinguishes it from other reptiles. In this Platonic worldview, the task of naturalists is to find the essence of each species. Actually, that understates the case: In an essentialist world, the essence really [I]is[/I] the species. Contrast this with an ever-changing evolving world, where species incessantly spew forth new species that can blend with each other. The snake [I]Eupodophis[/I] from the late Cretaceous period, which had rudimentary legs, and the glass lizard, which is alive today and lacks legs, are just two of many witnesses to the blurry boundaries of species. Evolution’s messy world is anathema to the clear, pristine order essentialism craves. It is thus no accident that Plato and his essentialism became the “great antihero of evolutionism,” as the twentieth century zoologist Ernst Mayr called it.- Andreas Wagner, “Arrival of the Fittest”, pages 9-10

Pathetic, just pathetic.