Comparative anatomy is combined with other evidence, such as fossils, DNA, and nested hierarchies. But wait – aren’t they all just patterns that we are also predisposed to recognizing too? Well if you look at it that way, yes. Except if they are not all related, these separate lines of evidence should not have to fall into the same pattern – the evolutionary hierarchical tree. Each other pattern could be spots, or stripes, or snowflake. Or in fact, they needn’t follow any pattern at all. But they do. And they’re all the same.

I feel this needs some elaboration.

If you look at morphology (anatomy, but in the broadest sense), you can see that various organisms have various degrees of similarity and difference.

If you group organisms according to their common features, they naturally fall into a set of patterns that form hierarchies of hierarchies (or nested hierarchies). For example, taking a moth, a butterfly, a housefly, a woodlouse (sometimes called a pillbug, although it is not a bug), a dolphin, a cow, a chimp and a human, you can group them according to similar features (do they have an internal or external skeleton? Do they have articulated limbs? How many limbs do they have? Do they have lungs? Do they lay eggs or give birth to live young? Do they have wings? How many wings do they have? Etc.), and these groups will quite naturally fall into a groups-within-groups pattern.

In my example, the dolphin, cow, chimp and human have an internal skeleton and give birth to live young, whereas the woodlouse, housefly, butterfly and moth have external skeletons and lay eggs. Only the housefly, butterfly and moth have six jointed legs, whereas the woodlouse has (I cannot recall how many legs a woodlouse has, but let’s call it 14 for the sake of argument). The housefly has only two wings, whereas the butterfly and moth both have four. On the other side, the dolphin has no limbs as such, whereas the cow, chimp and human each have four. And so on.

If you examine many organisms and classify them according to their anatomy, you get a large structure of relationships that looks a bit like a tree (branches that branch and branch again over and over). However, you only get one or two patterns out of billions of possibilities (i.e. you always end up with the chimp and the human next to each other, and in the same broader group as the dolphin and the cow). There’s no reason that the pattern you end up with has to be the way it is unless something makes it that way – by comparison, you can group cars, for example, in a similar way, but there are many millions of hierarchical patterns that would fit for cars. The pattern you get in classifying organisms this way is a genealogical one, and for good reason.

If you then analyse the sequences of conserved genes in all the same organisms, you get the same pattern.

The only possible explanation for the correlation of the two patterns is that there is a genuine hierarchical relationship, i.e. that closely similar species are closely related by sharing a relatively recent common ancestor, whereas less similar species are more distantly related and share a distant common ancestor.

Oooooooooh, Phil, I think you’re on wobbly ground here. After all your enthusiastic posts on pareidolia, it’s pushing things to take two images with similar characteristics & suggest cause & effect. For the record, I’m not a creationist but I am aware that we’re a species with a very strong inclination to pattern recognition. Thanks for a blog that always stretches my mind.

I don’t think anyone takes these photos as a serious argument for evolution. It’s, y’know, just a bit of fun.

I’d say Creationism is both – although if anything more political than scientific.

There is very little if any real “science” in creationism and lots of politics & religion trying to force stuff that is NOT science into a science classroom and create a public misunderstanding that Creationism / Intelligent Design / Religious mythology has some scientific validity.

I guess it depends on the context within which you are looking at it.

Certainly, evolution is science and not political in any way.

Creationism that contradicts the science is plain old wrong.

The activities of creationists are very often political in nature, since they often try to influence decisions that will dictate policy to other people.

After species B splits off, species A would also keep changing; depending on how much change it accumulated, the result might be species B evolving after splitting off from species A and species A changing over the same period and becoming into species C. I’m a biologist and my impression is that this is far more common than species A remaining static while species B changes, though I’d have to check the literature a bit before making too strong a comment. A good (and relevant) example is the fact that chimps seem to have undergone more directional selection than we have since our common ancestor, so neither modern species is likely to resemble the common ancestor very much.

Yeah, that seems most likely.

I guess the only way a species will remain static for long is if its environment (including such things as predator strategies) remains constant.

And even then, there’d be a pretty fair chance of change due to genetic drift.

I’d be a lot more interested in the political topics if the analysis were any good, but frequently it’s not.

Eh?

What does a post about evolution and how wrong creationists are have to do with politics?

Often it contains glaring logical fallacies (ad hominem, straw man, non sequitur, you name it),

Specific examplwes needed here.

rash generalizations, and conclusions that are far too strong for the evidence that is presented. That appears to be your style of political argument, and if that’s the case, then I’ll keep skipping those posts. It does strike me as odd for someone who is so intelligent in the hard sciences to have such an inferior intellect for social science.

But what if Phil isn’t making those arguments, but instead reporting and commenting on arguments made by others?

Then, his writing style makes perfect sense.

This article is incorrect and creationists are partially correct – humans did NOT descend from apes.

But the fact is, humans ARE apes.

This is both right and wrong.

Humans are apes indeed. Anatomically, the biggest differences between us and chimpanzees are that they have more hair, are stronger, and are better suited to climbing trees, whereas we are better suited to long-distance bipedal running. And making spaceships and particle accelerators.

On the other hand, our ancestors are also apes. All of our hominid and Australopithicene ancestors are apes too, as is the ancestor species that we share with bonobos and chimps. And the ancestor species that we and chimps and bonobos share with gorillas and orang-utans. So we are indeed descended from apes.

Also, more prosaically, if your parents are apes then you are descended from apes.

Why the random attack on Creationists?

Random?

What’s random about it?

So, taking your question to be “Why the attack on Creationists?”, I can think of a few answers:

1. It is not an attack on them as people, but an attack on the specious arguments they make about evolution.
2. They are either evil or misguided, because they propagate lies about science.
3. They refuse to live and let live (as rational people had done for so long before creationists started spreading their lies about science), so any attack on creationism is simply a strong defence.
4. It’s not an attack, it is a correction.
5. Why not? Do you berate creationists for their attacks on tried and tested science? IOW, what’s your agenda here?

I’m sure another half-hour’s thought would produce another half-dozen answers.

To whoever is moderating these comments, let me say that you don’t advance science by silencing critics. Your decision to silence critics serves only to reveal insecurities; it does nothing to promote the search for truth.

Right on, bro!

You sure fooled Phil with this one. How did you slip a comment criticising the moderation strategy through the censorship system? Any vigilant censor would censor out comments criticising the censorship strategy, right?

Unless . . . the moderation is only that – moderation – and not censorship.

they ask silly things like, “Well, if we evolved from gorillas, how come there are still gorillas walking around?”

An even simpler refutation of this is to point out that, if a person is descended from their grandparents, how come their grandparents are still alive.

(Of course, this works best if that person’s grandparents are still alive.)

What is funny is, the anti-evolution crowd doesn’t realize that animal breeding for desired traits is a form of evolution, only guided by humans.

Ironically, this indicates they have never read the theory they presume to criticise, since Darwin makes a pretty big deal of this in the early chapters of TOOS.

Then again, I have seen creationists claim that variation “within a kind” is simple and obvious, and permitted, but I’ve never seen one provide a satisfactory definition of “kind”, nor propose any kind of mechanism that can prevent small variations accumulating over time. Die-hard creationists dismiss the “evolution before our eyes” experioments as variation “within a kind”.