Ignorance of Nested Hierarchies Abounds on Peaceful Science

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People's willful ignorance of nested hierarchies is just amazing. It is a miracle of nature as to how people can be that purposely obtuse.

Case in point, a new thread on Peaceful Science titled Nested Clades in Intelligent Design.

You still can’t come up with a reason why we should see a nested hierarchy over the other billions of other possible patterns of similarities and distances if intelligent design is true.- T aquaticus, ignoramus

One thing is certain, gradual evolutionary processes could NEVER produce a nested hierarchy. The existence of innumerable transitional forms would ruin any attempt to put organisms into distinct groups- as Charles Darwin noted:

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

Evolution does not have a direction. If any pattern is predicted it would be that of an asterisk *. It could produce any number of patterns seeing that each population could produce that * pattern, or not.

UC Berkeley Linnaean Classification

Most of us are accustomed to the Linnaean system of classification that assigns every organism a kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species, which, among other possibilities, has the handy mnemonic King Philip Came Over For Good Soup. This system was created long before scientists understood that organisms evolved. Because the Linnaean system is not based on evolution, most biologists are switching to a classification system that reflects the organisms' evolutionary history.

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*The standard system of classification in which every organism is assigned a kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. This system groups organisms into ever smaller and smaller groups (like a series of boxes within boxes, called a nested hierarchy).

Linnaean Classification was the product of thinking about life as from a common design framework. 

Se also Knox, Eric-  “The use of hierarchies as organizational models in systematics”, Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society, 63: 1–49, 1998.

A summary of the principles of hierarchy theory

Nested and non-nested hierarchies: nested hierarchies involve levels which consist of, and contain, lower levels. Non-nested hierarchies are more general in that the requirement of containment of lower levels is relaxed. For example, an army consists of a collection of soldiers and is made up of them. Thus an army is a nested hierarchy. On the other hand, the general at the top of a military command does not consist of his soldiers and so the military command is a non-nested hierarchy with regard to the soldiers in the army. Pecking orders and a food chains are also non-nested hierarchies.