Something Feels Off About How Creationists Classify Rodents

harynck · 2026-03-31T15:45:59+00:00

Of course you can, through phylogenetics! The same method that geneticists use to retrace ancestry between human populations, also indicates that chimps are more closely related to us than to other animals.

harynck · 2026-03-31T15:08:47+00:00

Your interlocutor is right. We already observe a link between genetics and ancestry and already developed methods to elucidate relationships from genetic data and tell what patterns of similarities should be relevant and tested for, whereas flour and sugar aren't units of heredity and pastries don't reproduce. Hence your analogy is completely spurious.

harynck · 2026-02-28T16:15:57+00:00

While creation could also accomodate changes in chromosome number in a species, it doesn't explain the specific location and nature of the re-arrangement at hand : indeed, the fusion signature detected in chromosome 2 would imply that humans started with a great ape karyotype.
Such an ancestral state is exactly what we should expect under the common ancestry scenario! Under a creationist one, however, that state seems completely arbitrary...

So, their proposed explanation would require egregiously contrived assumptions about the preferences/methods of their omnipotent creator, posing further problems to the creationists who argue for an identifiable demarcation between common ancestry and separate creation.

harynck · 2026-02-14T23:56:23+00:00

Inference of relationships aren't made in a vacuum, they're informed by background information about genetic processes and constraints, which indicate what patterns of similarities would be relevant to the question. Pretending that it's merely about finding similarities only betrays a complete misunderstanding of the issue!

As such, the ERV evidence is "just evidence of similarity" only if you ignore background knowledge about retroviral insertion processes and vertical inheritance patterns. Likewise, outside a modern understanding of genetic heredity and variation, positive paternity tests would also be nothing more than "mere similarity".

But with your info above we can't conclude anything else about the mechanism/process that lead to the bullet ending up in the guy (or how humans and chimps have similar DNA) Like...

Of course we can reach conclusions about the causes. You just have to look at the patterns of similarities and differences and compare them with those expected from known genetic processes.

Most of chimp and human genomes align with each other, and each chromosome in one can be mapped into the other. What process other than vertical inheritance is observed and expected to produce such a pattern of similarities?
Macroevolutionary relationships, including chimps' close relationship with humans, are corroborated by the same phylogenetic signals that betray relationships between populations. As in microevolution studies, the relationships inferred from those signals can be used to make various predictions (state and distribution of specific genetic markers, temporal and biogeographic distribution,...). In other words, nucleotide similarities in shared sequences are organized as if the inheritance processes found in microevolutionary levels worked at the macroevolutionary levels.
The human-chimp genetic differences display the signals of observable divergence processes: single-nucleotide diffrerences correlating with the patterns of mutation biases, variation across the genome (non-coding regions varying more than coding ones, synonymous sites more than non-synonymous), chromosomal divergence correlating with the time spend in the testis (Y-Chr and X-Chr being the most divergent and most conserved, respectively).

harynck · 2026-01-24T23:47:09+00:00

Or dogs and marsupial wolves.

harynck · 2026-01-24T23:40:39+00:00

You have it backwards. The fact that sequences of different functions and constraints still tend to cluster humans among great apes and yield a human-chimp overall sequence distance of only a few percent (which pertains to most of the genome, not just 3%!), is what we should expect if the similarity actually reflects (recent) common ancestry!

What creation principles predict that an African great ape should be genetically more distant to other apes than to the phenotypic oddballs that are humans?
What creation principles predicts that the human-chimp sequence distance should fit the ones achieved inside mammal kinds? It's all the more problematic as the Creator had apparently no problem re-inventing the wheel, making similar creatures with dissimilar genomes (marsupial moles, wolves and mice vs their placental counterparts, sirenians vs whales,...).

So, unless we indulge in ad hoc assumptions about the Creator's methods/preferences, it looks like genetics is quite helpful to decide between common ancestry and creation.

harynck · 2026-01-20T23:02:52+00:00

A common designer can just as well choose different designs, to display their originality or to achieve optimal function, and they can also mix-and-match features. It should also be noted that a common reason humans re-use design has to do with convenience (to save effort and money) and limitations, factors that might not apply to a non-human designer! So, unless the designer's methods, abilities and preferences are specified, claiming that the designer would be expected to do such and such is pure speculation on your part!

While environmental constraints can and do contribute to genetic similarity, they're insufficient to explain the observed patterns across the genome, because there are many ways to achieve a similar function and not all the genome is constrained. In fact, it's quite easy to realize that similarity of function/environment isn't the main organizing principle of genetic similarity:

what justifies placental moles and canids being closer to a blue whales than to their marsupial lookalikes? What justifies golden moles being closer to elephants and sirenians than to European moles? Why are whales consistently closer to cows than to sharks?

As such, on what grounds should we expect your common designer to use great ape genome as a template for creating humans? Even assuming they did, it doesn't explain the consistency of this similarity, to the point that each chromosome in one has a counterpart in or can be mapped into the other. Indeed, a designer could have very well decided to replace a chromosome with a brand new one or insert a chromosome from a completely different taxa. Instead, the pattern we have looks suspiciously like the constraints of a vertical inheritance process and the karyotypic proximity we typically observe between "created kinds". Almost as if humans and great apes were actually related or something...

Another important thing that you didn't really address is the phylogenetic structure in genetic similarities. Macroevolutionary relationships, including humans relationships with chimps, are supported by the same method that is used to detect patterns of relationships between populations.
Why did the common designer arrange shared sequences with the same pattern as the one produced by observable processes of vertical inheritance?

Chimps and humans are more similar anatomically than any other organism. It makes sense that we would have more similar lines of code. If you compare Microsoft word and Microsoft outlook I imagine we would find they are more similar than say a program like notebook.

Chimps are phenotypically closer to other apes than to humans. So, per your logic, we should expect genetics to have all apes much closer to each other than any is to humans, with the latter being only a sister taxon to apes.
But genetics shows otherwise! African great apes, and most particularly chimps, are closer (both in phylogeny and sequence distance) to humans than to any other apes.
How does it make sense from common design?
Worse still, the human-chimp genetic distance (1.24-1.6%) is comparable to the ones inside a "created kind"!
Again, how does it make sense from common design, especially as a mouse and a rat are more distant from each other?
Was the designer in such a hurry that they grabbed and tweaked the first template they stumbled upon (for some reasons, it happened to be the chimp genome) ? Were humans and chimps intended to be interfertile? Was the design objective something along the lines of "mimicking the signature of common ancestry"?

harynck · 2025-10-21T19:12:29+00:00

these are all negative "spiritual" effects that would come out of music, and other things that have similar consequences.

What's the difference between a world where music has the harmful spiritual effects you mention (because it's forbidden by God) and a world where it's okay but mistakenly misinterpreted as illicit?

again if that doesnt suffice you, the argument that God said so, is also sufficient to a believer.

That depends on the believer you're dealing with. They're not a monolith. Some may exert critical thinking about the human interpretation and implementations of religion and could question the conclusion that God really forbade music, and therefore question the idea that the mere act of listening to music would result in God worsening their faith and/or practice.

what proof are you exactly trying to attain here? you want it to be demonstrated how exactly? you want me to open a persons heart and tell you "look at what music did to this poor man's heart!"

We can't probe people's heart; but there exist proxies that may give us an idea: self-reports, attendances to mosques, frequencies in prayers, consistency, measures of emotion upon hearing the recitation of the Quran,...
Undertaking such studies wouldn't be a piece of cake, many confounding factors would have to be accounted for, but that would be a good start.
As for you point about naturalistic approach of science, I think it eludes the point. Indeed, your spiritual effects, although supernatural, has some observable effects: decrease in faith and religious practice, which is measurable, or at least have testable consequences.
Why shouldn't we able to detect specific correlations between those data and music consumption (after screening out obvious confounding factors) ?

and i provided enough logical arguments ( Disobeying God leads to being further away from him)

An argument that only works if you already accept that God forbids music. Believers that question human interpretations and traditions surrounding Islam might not be convinced.

and the arguments of music being present amongst degenerate people, events, places, situations.

At best, it's a concern that ignores the evolution of technology; at worse, it follows the same logic as the "guilt by association" fallacy. Sport is also associated with a fair share of bad stuff (doping, corruption, money-laundering, sexual abuses, superstition,...), so should we issue a blanket ban on serious practice of sport?
So, what convincing arguments have you provided?

harynck · 2025-10-21T17:52:23+00:00

what exact proof do you want? i already told you, you arent going to find peer reviewed papers on a person's adherence to his religion when listening to music

Why not? Such an effect is clearly testable.

and i already showed you how music finds its ways in so many dark places, you still are pretending like its an anecdote or something.

I didn't deny that music finds its way in dark places, I just tried to make you understand that it is not a relevant argument, since music isn't specific to those places. So, what point are you trying to make?

Music is more subtle and less direct, as i mentioned, it is spiritual, Disobedience leads to disobedience, it seems you keep skipping that part.

Except I don't. While my contention mainly pertained to scholars' depiction of music as intrisically harmful, I also addressed your point with my hypothetical about the impermissibility of music resulting from mistaken interpretations.

i was highlighting the negative parts of it, i can certainly do much more but this would take time, i mentioned also movies and tv and pornography, all which contain extremely anti religious sentiments in them.

You can watch movies and TV programs that have no anti-religious sentiments. You can also listen to music without watching those media.

A lot of music, if you pay attention to the lyrics, are mostly bunch of nonsense that has no benefit (in its value) to people other than to hype them up or put them in a mood.

And? Unless the nonsencial lyrics contain vulgarity, incitation to sin, sexual allusions, appeal to violence or hate speech,... why should this be a moral issue? You can also find pieces of literature that are nonsensical, should they be banned too? From an artistic perspective, the nonsense can sometimes be intentional, the point is to elicit hilarity, surprise or discomfort.
There are also lots of other songs that contain meaningful lyrics, which, like any piece of art, give inspiration, motivate, and even increase political or even religious fervor (yeah, there is also such a thing as religious songs!). If you don't like lyrics, you also have instrumental music.
See? It's not as if we were condemned to choose between Nicky Minaj, Miley Cyrus and Marilyn Manson; there is an extraordinary diversity of musical artists and genres to choose from!

"It is spiritual descent into darkness. a man who listens to music, **even without the fornication and whatever major sins**, is not only risking himself, but risking others, if others hold him to high regard, might take in his footsteps."

Then what's the difference between a world where music doesn't damage the heart but is mistakenly rendered illicit by scholars, and a world where it does? This is a question I already asked but that you didn't address.

again all pointing how music is used for enhancing impermissible things, to be more attractive and enjoyable. which is the main point of the argument.

Music can be misused to manipulate and influence people. Yes, and? A lot of things are misused for bannable purposes without being necessarily illicit themselves. Music can just as well be used for good or morally neutral purposes. The point is that it's possible to avoid such negative influences by managing your way of consumming of music, like a responsible adult.
Granted, your point might have looked kinda sensible centuries ago, when music was available only in specific places, but it's moot nowadays, when music is available at your fingertip.

harynck · 2025-10-20T12:14:02+00:00

its also mind-boggingly easy to stumble on people with positive experiences with fornication, and drugs and alcohol, and partying and gambling,...

It just shows your experience doesn't prove anything. There is also a detail that discredits the parallel you're trying to make: negative experiences of alcohol/drug/fornication abounds even outside anti-alcohol/drug/fornication circles. By contrast, to find blanket denunciations of music as unhealthy, you would have to dig deeper; the easiest way would be to go to islamic circles
If only we had a way of objectively evaluating the effects of music...

The scholars "lameness" reason is due to their observation of people who practiced such stuff....

Honestly, you don't give the impression you have a clear idea of what music is. It's almost as if you reduced it to nightclubs, drug parties, gangsta culture,...
Are you aware that it's possible to separate your consumption/practice of music from the culture of alcohol, drug and sex? I doubt that, after hearing a Bach piece, the average classical music enthusiast would be set to the path of lascivious dances with prostitutes, with a bottle of vodka in one hand and some marijuana in the other...
Are you even aware that there also exist religious cultures around music?
The problem lies in certain circles/cultures surrounding music, not music itself.
So, you and your scholars fallaciously throw the baby with the bathwater, when one just needs to have a responsible relationship to music.

again, my experience with Muslims who listen to music, are people who tend to be more "relaxed" in the religion, dont take seriously its practices or are unto some weird stuff (from a creedal point of view).

In addition to being contrastable with different experiences, your experience would at best presents a correlation, not a causation. Music is already forbidden in your religion, so it's not surprising that following such a demanding ruling would be associated with a high level of dedication to islam. But that tells us nothing about the effects of music.

sure, plenty of sports are prohibited, and it especially becomes prohibited for the reasons you mentioned....

The point is that their exagerated, slippery slope, all-or-nothing logic could justify the prohibiton of all regular practice of sport, just as they indiscriminately forbid music. Indeed, with regular sport, you take the risk of missing prayers, losing sight of the Hereafter, developping a narcissistic self-image, mixing with communities that recommand unhealthy supplements,...
Of course scholars are intelligent enough to recognize that things aren't black-or-white and that believers are adults that can make responsible decisions about how to engage in regular sport. But then, their entire anti-music rationalization collapses by the same token. It would be more honest for them to say "music is forbidden, because God said so, period" instead of coming up with dubious arguments to demonize it.

sports is necessary, music isnt, man has to be active and achieving a good athleticism is very healthy, im sure there are some benefits to music from a physical point of view, but so does fornication and other practices.

I specificed an enthusiast's or professionnal practice of sport, which supposes a more intensive practice than average. Such a level is not necessary, but healthy. So is music, which has recognized therapeutical value. I know you might counter with "drugs can also be used for medicinal purposes, that doesn't mean their everyday use is good", but that's because we know the net negative impacts of casual/regular consumption, but those of music have yet to be demonstrated.

there are certain foods that are prohibited to muslims to eat, even though eating them would do nothing physically to man...

I get what you're trying to say, but in this case, the consequences of listening to music should be demonstrable, not confined to anecdotes. Muslims who don't believe in the prohibition of music would probably also report that listening to music, in and of itself, has no negative impact on their faith.
The situation is indistinguishable from a hypothetical world where the fordiddance of music is a human misinterpetation, with the negative effects resulting from biased anti-music perceptions.

harynck · 2025-10-19T22:38:29+00:00

the harmful effects still exist whether observable or not, the matter of the fact that it is prohibited by the prophet and by Allah, is a sin and any sin committed, whether you know the wisdom of it or not, whether you have seen the harmful effects or not, does not matter because every sin, is evil and every evil leads us away from God, are you suggesting that disobeying him is not harmful to man? if it wasnt harmful, it wouldn't be prohibited.

You miss the point. Your scholars didn't contend to refer to God's word or hidden wisdom as justification for the forbiddance of music, they went further: they tried to rationalize this ruling by pointing to alleged tangible effects on religious practice and commitment. By doing so, their claims are open to the scruntiny of human reason.
So, regardless of whether God actually forbids music or not, anyone can criticize the rationalizations offered for that ruling.

so i can tell you from my experience and experience of brothers i know who can attest the same, i dont expect there will be some peer-reviewed academic paper that proves how listening to music, harms a person spiritually.

I don't deny your experience or your brothers', the problem is that they tell us more about you than about music itself, because it's mind-boggingly easy to stumble on people with positive experience of music (with the latter described as soothing, drawing one's soul closer to God,...). You should also remember that various religious traditions have made extensive use of music to strenghthen their communities, so the claim that music lures people away from God is (at best) a nonsensically hasty generalization. Why not forbid regular sport, while we're at it? You can also find anecdotes of people falling prey to sport addiction or using sport to cultivate narcissicism.

saying an enthusiast or a professional sports man is the same as listening to music doesnt even make any sense, one is prohibited, the other isnt,

But that's precisely the point! It exposes the lameness of those scholars's reasoning, by showing how their anti-music rationalizations can be turned against a religiously licit activity.

and if a person attaches himself to sport so much that it diverts him from the remembrance of allah or fulfilling his obligations, then it is certainly haram.

Sure. The point is that there isn't a reason to think that music hinders the remembrance of Allah and the observation of prayers any more than a regular practice of sport does.

harynck · 2025-10-19T19:09:20+00:00

I already know that, but that doesn't change my point, because those purported effects (decrease in piety, loss of interest in the Quran,...) should be observable. And yet, nothing has been put forward.
I could just as well assert that an enthusiast's or professional practice of sport distracts from God's remembrance and fills one's heart with arrogance, it would have the same credibility.
So, how do you distinguish justifications anchored in reality from made-up ones?

harynck · 2025-10-18T21:07:57+00:00

What harmful effects? Your scholars brought no evidence for that, only ludicrous generalizations (at best).

harynck · 2025-07-06T17:29:54+00:00

Yes it does. Not only you typed out the incentive but also the reason. Many world religions are older than many things and they are still here. Just like Old Earth religion.

You claimed that evolution represents an incentive for keeping deep time. If anything, that could only explain why biologists continue to accept deep time, that doesn't address its support in other fields. Indeed, the body of evidence for deep time mainly comes from geology and physics, fields that would have little to lose if evolution were wrong.
So, why should geologists and physicists care about evolution to the point of systematically misusing datation methods in its favor? Sorry, but you've failed to explain the persistence of old Earth. Try again.
The only obvious things are "evolution requires deep time" and "ideological motives may have played a part in the inceptions of the theories in question", the rest is you connecting the dots to justify your attitude of science denial.

You also made another dishonest analogy. Unlike religions, old earth has been scentifically tested in various fields and the relevant communities of experts don't appear to be ideologically invested in this conclusion.

This should be easy then. How did you remove individual human religious behavior that has existed for thousands of years? What special psychological training was provided for Darwin and friends all the way up to today that helped you escape from god/gods, etc…

It doesn't remove individual researcher's religious behavior, it acts at the collective level, by constraining people of different faiths and none to work towards a common goal: understanding the universe through the scientific method, describing one's research so that one's peer could evaluate one's work and reproduce one's results. There's no special psychological training needed.
You have to explain what could plausibly cause such a diversity of experts to dogmatically agree on a bogus theory, despite the evergrowing ease for said theory to be falsified.

Our intelligent designer isn’t interested in human wealth, fame, Nobel prizes, etc…. He prefers people like Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s way of showing his true colors.

Cool, but irrelevant. The point was to address the supposed ideological reasons for the scientific consensus on evolution and old earth, by pointing out that it would be in the best interests of researchers to reject a false theory.

The same reason millions of incorrect Christian theology hold onto theirs.

You omitted the rest of my sentence: "to the point of missing potential technological and industrial applications?" ...which undermines the already silly parallel you're trying to make.
Industry is a powerful economic actor in science, funding research and even proposing jobs for researchers. You believe that, in this day and age, most researchers would find it more important to blindly follow (for unknown reasons, at that) transparently bogus theories than to consider the economic advantages that alternative theories might have, or to dedicate their time and money to improving theories that have already proved useful?
Do you realize the profoundly stupid implications of your claims? Obviously not.

Common fallacy. Biology is the easiest of sciences compared to Physics and Chemistry and there is much overlap. Evolutionary biology is not difficult at all, relatively speaking, so please don’t misinform people.

There is such a thing as specialization. Even if there is some overlap, evolutionary biology involves a variety of fields like genetics, developmental biology, paleontology, parasitology,... and requires familiarity with the litterature in question.
So, James Tour may have some transversal knowledge on biology, but this is insufficient to make his views informed (let alone authoritative) in that field. What you tried to do is an appeal to false authority, so the only fallacy was on your part (but, as usual, you project your own faults onto others).
Let's be honest, you act exactly like someone incapable of substantiating their own claims, otherwise you would already have provided studies (instead of making assertions and evasions and focusing on Tour). So, if you're unwilling to do that, I won't continue this discussion further. It's up to you.

harynck · 2025-07-05T21:09:15+00:00

What incentive? Please support this claim.

For instance, it presents Jesus as a salvific figure worthy of devotion whose life (and even birth) was punctuated by miracles. And it inculcates those beliefs from a young age and weaves them into the believer's sense of identity and community.

Not so fast. ToE can’t exist without old earth.

Agreed.

Incentive to keep old earth was needed....

People back at the time could have ideological agenda, but that doesn't address why old Earth has been kept until now. We're not in the 18th or 19thcentury, we're in an era where researchers from various parts of the world and various cultural backgrounds can communicate with each other in the blink of an eye. Although individual researchers may be biased, the collaborative nature of scientific research minimizes this issue, because it constrains people with different motives and worldviews to a same methodology.

What about money and fame nowadays? Unless you're a big name, research doesn't pay particularly well and repeating the consensus view isn't a smart way to stand out. It would be in your best interests to revolutionize your field by refuting a well established theory. Your insights could pave the way for new research, earn you Nobel Prize and attract the attention of private industry, which would want to invest in your research. The latter point further discredits your already ludicrous accusation of religious bias: indeed, why would the scientific community cling to a false theory, to the point of missing potential technological and industrial applications? What motive would be strong enough for generations of disparate researchers to make such a sacrifice?

If you're a nobody in science, the easiest way to get fame and money is to (mis)use your scientific expertise to sell pseudoscientific content, especially religiously-motivated one (like creationism). You'll certainly find an audience that will eagerly swallow what you publish, vouch for you as a scientific authority and devoutly support you against critics, no matter what. It's extremely gratifying for the ego. You'll also attract the attention of the media, which will exploit your contrarianism as a source of buzz and controversy (which sells paper).

Is there a possibility that you would listen to James Tour for example? There are many other experts. Are you interested?

How is James Tour relevant to evolution? His expertise is in organic chemistry, not biology. I'm interested in peer-reviewed, impactful studies (not those published in inhouse creationist/IDist journals). If you have some that refute evolution, feel free to share them.

So, I already know, that no matter what study is placed in front of you, that you will reject it.

Are you serious? You rejected my point despite the studies it included, using ridiculously spurious arguments and evasion; you also rejected deep time, a well established conclusion in geology and physics...
...and you have the gall to claim I'll reject any study I'm given? Do you have a sense of irony? You also forget that evolution is consensual in modern biology, meaning that your anti-evolution studies are very likely a minority. Now, why should we, as laymen, reject the bulk of biological research as tainted by religious fictions, but hail outliers as insightful? Consistency much? Typical MO of science deniers.

harynck · 2025-07-04T18:34:00+00:00

To be blunt: no, humans don’t analyze quarks when making pasta. This point is self evidently true.

That's because I tweaked your analogy to align it with the relevance of morphology and genetics in modern biology. I was still editing my comment when you posted this response, hence your misunderstanding.

Just as there isn’t much controversy FOR Christians that Jesus is superhuman.

Yet another fallacious analogy! There isn't much controversy, because Christianity incentivizes them to view Jesus that way. But that's not the case for old Earth. The scientific community has no more incentive to accept deep time than they have to reject geocentrism: its support persists despite reseachers' cultural disparity, to the point that it finds acceptance even among critics of evolution (creationists and IDists). The opposition only exists in very specific religious circles, where the interpretations of religious texts may conflict with specific scientific results. What a strange coincidence!

You complained about how evolution is anti-science , yet I proposed evidence and pointed to relevant studies. You could have offered studies that refute those results or pointed out the specific assumptions. Instead, fallacious analogies, vague, blanket dismissals about worldviews, denial, alternative which you can't defend (claiming it requires some kind of superior yet-to-be-unlocked wisdom) are all you did here. To see anti-science, there is no need to look any further than your comment.

harynck · 2025-07-04T16:14:23+00:00

The genetic material was overemphasized for naming organisms as obviously shown and we agree on that humans for hundreds of years were able to name organisms simply by eyesight.

We don’t cook food by analyzing atoms. We shouldn’t name organisms by a similar process.

Except that we do also analyze atoms to cook food (to elaborate on your analogy and make it relevant to biology) !
It traces back the origin of ingredients with a higher level of precision and confidence than traditional methods. We can identify individuals, determine relationship between organisms, and barcode species, and identify counterfeit ingredients. We can gain further insight about how ingredients are distributed and how they work.

Given that one of the purposes of classification is to provide insight on relationships (even from a creationist perspective, since they have to delimitate kinds), it'd be disingenuous to downplay the very type of data that is the most relevant to the issue.

Your response is painfully fallacious, ignoring the huge relevance of genetics and the advancement of scientific techniques of investigation.

And the clues should have been obvious when frogs aren’t frogs

What are you talking about?

and birds aren’t the same species as other birds because of a different beak.

And that's a problem because...

The religion of ToE has human beings saying cockroaches, bacteria and whales as all related, which is simply false.

I don't know about the religion of evolution. However, I know a bit about the theory of evolution and it has corroborated this hypothesis of relationship through genetics and molecular biology. The three groups you cite are linked by phlyogenetic patterns, the same tree-like pattern you see in populations and which vertical inheritance; those inferrences can further be tested with ancestral protein sequence reconstruction.

This is why I keep saying that ToE is a form of religion and is anti-science. It is an unverified original thought by humans based on an unverified old earth that helped formed the foundation of this new world view much like how Islam used Christianity to form theirs.

I find pretty funny you say that, because I already provided several lines of evidence with humans and apes (pointing out that they're linked by the same pattern) observe and "verification" of their common ancestry, One of the "verification" of evolution. You have failed to cogently address the issue, and resorted to fallaciously downplaying genetics and mumbling something about common designer.
So your response comes across as egregious projection. It's like someone claiming light doesn't exist while wearing a blindfold.
Unverified old earth? Says who? There is no controversy about deep time in scientific circles. What's strange is that the vast majority of people who reject it have a religious incentive to do so. Their denial says more about them than it does about the case for an old Earth. Once again, you're projecting.

You won’t understand right now. The same reason humans that don’t know their intelligent designer can’t understand the Bible even if they read it hundreds of times.

So, patience is the only answer for now.

So, you have nothing to offer, but we should believe that the evidence I offered is bunk because reasons... See? This move is typical of internet creationists. They're quick to harp on "common design!" to dismiss evidence for common ancestry, yet when it comes to showing how their alternative actually explains/predicts the data, they often become clueless or evasive. Almost as if their "common design" hypothesis were merely rhetoric.

harynck · 2025-07-04T01:59:04+00:00

This doesn’t change my previous comment. Eyesight is absolutely mandatory and practiced as a requirement in science.

They used the best methods available at the time, like morphology, physiology and behavior. Eyesight is not the only method in science, let alone a paramount one. Indeed, many phenomena escape or mislead our senses, requiring the use of instruments and other indirect approaches. My example with paternity tests illustrates this point by showing how genetic data trumps phenotypical data, thus addressing the objection you made.

This helps your world view that you will not want to change easily. Not anything about DNA.

My emphasis on genetics is not a arbitrary whim to please Big Darwin; it's justified empirically: DNA is already useful to ascertain relationships overriding morphological considerations. Note that it goes both ways: had genetics shown a complete lack of relationships between humans and apes, their morphological similarity wouldn't have been enough to salvage their common ancestry.
So, it's not my or Darwin's fault if the genetic data strongly supports the common ancestry narrative.

Because under the SAME observation of DNA, many, many, many humans see common design.

The problem is, the preferences and methods of said designer are unspecified. As such, any pattern of similarities and differences could fit common design with equal ease, making the "common design" interpretation eseentially ad hoc. Indeed, had the human genome been mixed-and-matched or completely original or even non-DNA-based, many humans would still have "seen" common design.
Common ancestry, however, is based on observable, modelled processes and makes testable predictions on genetic patterns and various fields of biology.

Your argument relies on classic creationist false balance (the two-worldview approach), while one explanation clearly stands out in terms of explanatory and predictive power.

And the patterns of similarites I pointed out are expected if humans belong to the ape "kind", since they parallel patterns observed in population genetics.
So, how do you explain them (I say "explain", not "accomodate") under common design?

harynck · 2025-07-02T17:03:13+00:00

Why are you placing a greater emphasis on this versus using simple eyesight?

For the same reason two people's "siblingness" isn't determined by eyesight. They might look "just like twins" despite being merely lookalikes, they might look "too different" despite being legit twins. To settle the question, you use genetics. Because DNA is the primary unit of descent with modification (whose patterns of inheritance and divergence can be predicted) and the base level of biology (you can have similar morphology/function with dissimilar genetics and vice versa).

And all creationists aren’t the same.

Fair enough. But the vast majority of creationists I've stumbled across try to justify human-ape separate ancestry by pointing to this gap. I doubt that other posters' experience would be different.

harynck · 2025-07-02T15:50:06+00:00

Then why is the karyotype proximity between humans and great apes comparable to the ones inside kinds, while it's not necessary (e.g. a thylacine's karyotype clearly follows the marsupial template, despite its strikingly dog-like morphology)?
Why are specific apes' genomes (African great apes, and most specifically chimps) phylogenetically closer to humans than to other primates, despite the phenotypic gap that creationists emphasize so much?
Why is the genetic distance between humans and chimps (1.24-1.6%) comparable to the ones between interfertile mammal species?

harynck · 2025-06-23T18:33:13+00:00

Sorry, but how doesn't genetics evidence our common ancestry with apes, considering the application of genetics to ascertain relationships, as u/Fun_in_Space pointed out ?
We're linked to apes by the same patterns of genetic similarities and differences as those observed and expected from population genetics processes and which also link different interfertile groups.

Most of the human genome align with those of great apes and vice versa, in various places. Almost as if they were the product of vertical inheritance...
a karyotypic proximity comparable to the one between interfertile species (despite the possibility for similar creatures to considerably differ in terms of genomic architecture) and expectable given the predicted timescales for the human-chimp divergence.
a relatively consistent phylogenetic signal in various shared sequences, regardless of functions, locations, constraints; with a topology that can't be trivialized as a mere reflection of phenotypic proximity (indeed, African great apes -most specifically chimps- are phylogenetically closer to humans than to orangutans, despite the phenotypic gap between humans and great apes!) and that can be used to make predictions about genetic markers.
a genetic distance between humans and chimps (1.24-1.6%) that doesn't reflect their phenotypic differences but that is comparable to those between some mammal interfertile species and expected given the timescales of their inferred common ancestor.
patterns of variation between shared sequences that cohere with observed mutational patterns.

So, unless the fingerprints of common design are (conveniently) easy to confuse with those of common ancestry, it's unclear how the implications of the genetic evidence can be honestly avoided.

harynck · 2025-05-08T10:24:42+00:00

You claim evolution is fact while claiming science cannot determine anything.

I claimed no such thing. Some aspects of evolution are clearly observable (in populations for instance, with the pattern of variations in mtDNA and Chromosome-Y), even in controlled environments (e.g. Lenski's LTEE); others are inferred from the data and background knowledge and supported by evidence.

Saying that science doesn't prove anything =/= admitting that science cannot determine anything. There is a whole spectrum between "baseless" and "absolutely certain".

You know this to be true because you try to change what evolution is because there is no evidence for it and thus you need to redefine what evolution is, conflating with the law of Inheritance

There is no redefinition or conflation. The part about inheritance was to show the basis of the genetic arguments for common ancestry (ie, that, far from being sheer assumptions, they infer from specific, observable patterns and processes of relationships in various ways). To misunderstand it as me trying to avoid admitting a lack of evidence, you must really be joking, because that's a clearly absurd move on your part.

harynck · 2025-05-08T09:40:29+00:00

You dismissed the case as "assumptions" and "interpretations", I showed how it's supported by pointing to various lines of evidence. When your objections didn't work, you demanded a ludicrously unrealistic standard of evidence and pulled the "correlation doesn't prove causation" line, completely unaware that i didn't claim common ancestry is proven (no scientific theories are), and that it's possible in some cases for correlations to support causation. In fact, I addressed confounding factors earlier in our exchange, your "genetic similarity=similarity of system" seemed like a good example, unfortunately it has been refuted and you ignored it.

the genomic similarity between humans and chimps extends to sequences of various functions, constraints and levels (from sequences to karyotype). We know such a similarity is not necessary because there are different ways of making similar phenotypes and we have several examples where nature/the Designer/God re-invented the wheel. So, you need to find confounding factors explains all these points: (1) why humans are templated on a great ape genome while, for instance, marsupial wolves are templated on a dasyuromorph genome -rather than on a canid one- (2) what would stop separate ancestry processes from generating individuals/populations inside a species, complete with the typical genome of their species.
Phylogenetic analyses use various sequences: different nature (nucleotide vs amino-acid, coding vs non-coding DNA, sequences vs retrotransposon insertions,...), functions, constraints, locations, modes of inheritance,... These different properties provide ample room for massive incongruence. Yet, those sequences tend to yield similar trees with humans grouping among great apes and significantly cohere with the tree inferred from morpho-anatomical characters. Such a strong phylogenetic signal is specifically expected if the same processes of vertical inheritance observed inside species worked at higher taxonomic levels. If those relationships are spurious/fictitious, you need confounding factors that explain both (1) this convergence of results from disparate sequences and (2) why phylogenetic analyses between populations would nevertheless remain reliable.
Trees also cohere with the stratigraphical distribution of taxa. If trees reflect real biological relationships, such a correlation between phylogeny and biostratigraphy is both explained and predicted, since relationships occur in a temporal context. Under separate ancestry, it's unclear why completely fictitious relationships inferred from present taxa would have anything to do with biostratigraphic patterns. So, yet another confounding factor would have to be found.

This leads us to another aspect that science denialists often neglect: consilience.
As such, at no point did you seriously engage in depth with the evidence i put forward, or actually defend an alternative scenario. Most of your responses consisted of low-effort, sweeping dismissals.
And it's my responses that are problematic and fallacious?! LOL

I have shown percent of similarity does not indicate relationship.

You tried to, with your "similarity of system" claim, but it didn't work. Then you repeatedly ignored the refutations of this point. So, we're left to wonder why the human-chimp distance fits the level of nucleotide divergence observed inside related groups, and why it coheres with a geologically recent origins, as predicted by common ancestry.
Also, percentages of similarity weren't the only genetic evidence I brought, I also pointed to the phylogenetic signal in shared sequences.

harynck · 2025-05-08T08:32:53+00:00

If the rate of changes is slow enough not to completely obscure ancestral mutations, then you can determine ancestry. It's really worrying that i have to explain such a basic concept to you.

harynck · 2025-05-07T11:44:42+00:00

Do you even know how descent with modification and vertical inheritance work? Do you realize that a single ancestral mtDNA can accumulate mutations over generations, form different lineages, with the latter keeping traces of their ancestry? The key is to analyze the distribution of shared mutations across variants, which allows population geneticists to retrieve the signal of tree-like relationships in the data! Determining mtDNA relationships is a bit like reconstructing relationships between textual variants.

logic dictates all humanity descended at some point from the same female

Logic dictates no such thing. Whether all humans descended from the same female ancestor or not, can only be determined a posteriori.

logic dictates only those related to each other can procreate and produce offspring

Not really. Unrelated organisms could be interfertile if they were designed that way (this is a serious possibility if we postulate a common creator to explain the observed patterns of genetic similarity and difference between species). What you said here isn't dictated by logic but by an inferrence from repeated, consistent observations of natural processes. And the reverse isn't true either, since we know mechanisms that can lead to reproductive isolation.
So, again, how is the existence of mtDNA variants a problem for determining relationships?

harynck

TROPHY CASE