Look, for normal people this is a fairly simple question to answer.
6days is claiming that "
Common ancestry is an idea that has not contributed to a single new technology...nor a single advancement in medicine."
Ok, how would we potentially falsify that claim? The answer is obvious....we present an example of evolutionary common ancestry contributing to technology or medicine, and if we find either the claim will have been proved false.
Now, why evolutionary common ancestry would contribute to technology is kind of a weird thing to ponder. Other than
genetic algorithms, which are models of biological evolution used to generate solutions to things like engineering problems, I'm not sure how biological evolution would really even apply to "technology".
So that leaves us with seeing if evolutionary common ancestry has contributed to medical science. And as I've posted many times,
THIS PAPER is a clear example of exactly that...
Protein Molecular Function Prediction by Bayesian Phylogenomics
Abstract
We present a statistical graphical model to infer specific molecular function for unannotated protein sequences using homology. Based on phylogenomic principles, SIFTER (Statistical Inference of Function Through Evolutionary Relationships) accurately predicts molecular function for members of a protein family given a reconciled phylogeny and available function annotations, even when the data are sparse or noisy. Our method produced specific and consistent molecular function predictions across 100 Pfam families in comparison to the Gene Ontology annotation database, BLAST, GOtcha, and Orthostrapper. We performed a more detailed exploration of functional predictions on the adenosine-5′-monophosphate/adenosine deaminase family and the lactate/malate dehydrogenase family, in the former case comparing the predictions against a gold standard set of published functional characterizations. Given function annotations for 3% of the proteins in the deaminase family, SIFTER achieves 96% accuracy in predicting molecular function for experimentally characterized proteins as reported in the literature. The accuracy of SIFTER on this dataset is a significant improvement over other currently available methods such as BLAST (75%), GeneQuiz (64%), GOtcha (89%), and Orthostrapper (11%). We also experimentally characterized the adenosine deaminase from Plasmodium falciparum, confirming SIFTER's prediction. The results illustrate the predictive power of exploiting a statistical model of function evolution in phylogenomic problems. A software implementation of SIFTER is available from the authors.
So there we have it...they developed a statistical model based on evolutionary relationships between a wide variety of organisms and applied it to genetic data. And even when that data was "sparse or noisy", the model
still correctly identified genetic function to a 96% degree of accuracy. Unless you want to be so absurd as to argue that genetic function isn't at all relevant to medical science, the only conclusion (for normal people) is that evolutionary common ancestry
has clearly and directly contributed to medical science.
Thus the claim that "Common ancestry is an idea that has not contributed to a single new technology...nor a single advancement in medicine" is demonstrably false, and no amount of mindlessly repetitious "No it isn't....no it isn't....no it isn't..." changes that.
At least that's how it works in the normal world.
