Because "things evolving into other things" is too vague to be meaningful.
Well then it's a good thing no one said "populations evolve, therefore universal common ancestry is true".
No, not by itself. But it was one of the premises Darwin used for his conclusion of UCA. And if the premise is invalid...what of the conclusion? If ANY premise is invalid, the conclusion that was reached via those premises is invalid. It just takes one. It doesn't make the conclusion false, necessarily, but it makes the logic invalid and CAN lead to a false conclusion?
Again you seem to be operating with a very poor understanding of evolutionary biology. No one says anything like "bird traits vary, therefore universal common ancestry".
No one except Darwin and those who agree with him. Again, it doesn't stand on its own, but it was instrumental in Darwin reaching his conclusion.
And that brings up several points...
First, the Science Daily article (and the work it describes) you cited is not about universal common ancestry of all life on earth; it's about the early evolutionary history of birds. That's what was so amusing about how you were trying to use and cite it. I'm not sure exactly how your train of logic went, but it seemed to me to be something like "Here's this paper where they redraw the early evolutionary history of birds, therefore universal common ancestry should be rejected". As I've noted several times now, that makes no sense at all.
I didn't pick the article title! What is "Tree of Life" if not a summary of UCA? Can you really say with a straight face that an article with "Tree of Life" in the title is not at least somewhat about UCA? Well, forget the title of the article. Here's the summary:
New species evolve whenever a lineage splits off into several. Because of this, the kinship between species is often described in terms of a 'tree of life,' where every branch constitutes a species. Now, researchers have found that evolution is more complex than this model would have it, and that the tree is actually more akin to a bush. |
The summary seems to think the article is about
1. kinship between species
2. how species branching off is described by "tree of life"
3. how "evolution" is described by that "tree of life" model
4. how the "tree" (one of two concepts mentioned in the model, the other being "life") is really not a tree.
It is amazing the lengths you feel you need to go to to point out how the article is not talking about UCA when both the title and the summary are talking explicitly about "tree of life".
But let's forget about the title AND the summary, since those are mere delusions of the writer of the article, apparently. What do the scientists actually say?
'We can see that the very rapid rate at which various bird species started evolving once the dinosaurs went extinct, i.e. around 65 million years ago, meant that the genome failed to split into separate lineages during the process of speciation', Hans Ellegren says.
'The more complex kinship patterns that result from this phenomenon mean that the Tree of Life should often be understood as a Bush of Life', Alexander Suh and Hans Ellegren say. |
Funny. The authors start talking about evolution of various bird species, and end up talking about, "the Tree of Life". So, despite all your herculean efforts to distance the evolution of birds from universal common ancestry, the article quotes the scientists as joining the two concepts. You can't get around the fact that the article, and the scientists the article is about, are in complete disagreement with you about the point of the article and the science!
Also, your version of universal common ancestry and the history of life on earth that it describes is cartoonishly simplistic.
Like this?
If you really are interested in this subject, you should take the time to actually learn it before trying to debate it. But in general, the history of life on earth is merely a series of speciation events...it's existing species giving rise to new species. And each one of those new species is very similar to the one it evolved from. So to keep things very simple, it would be species A giving rise to species B, which gives rise to species C, and so on and so on, with each new species being not very different than the one it evolved from. It isn't until you compare species Z to the original species A that you notice the sorts of transitions that you're referring to.
If you really are interested in telling me I don't understand the article we are talking about, you really ought to read the article. The whole point they were making is that they can't find the simplistic view of evolution you describe in the bird species they investigated. They CAN'T FIND IT. So they say the fundamental concept of species A evolving into species B and species B giving rise to species C, which matches the simplistic description of Darwin's tree of life cartoon, as well as YOUR description, is not that simple. Darwin was wrong in that aspect of his theory.
Now you know and I know that a bush branches exactly like a tree. So when they say it is more like a bush than a tree, we have to probe a little deeper to determine why they make a distinction. What I suggested they mean is that the branches bifurcate and conjoin, rather than just bifurcating. Maybe instead they are saying the branches trifurcate or some other kind of branching where a single species gives rise to a bunch of other species in a short amount of time. But even Darwin's cartoon of the tree of life fits that second option, which I think only leaves my suggestion to consider.
It also takes us back to the point I raised earlier....the fact that in all the centuries we've been studying living organisms, the only way we've ever seen new species arise has been via evolutionary mechanisms.
Which brings us back to the point I raised earlier--that "evolutionary mechanism" encapsulates ANY kind of change, thus your statement is a tautology. I'll rephrase it for you: "in all the centuries we've been studying living organisms, the
only way we've
ever seen one species change into another has been via change." Can you see how ridiculous that sounds?
In this I agree with you--we do not see God making brand new creatures out of dirt and water today. But in this I think you have to agree with me--that "in all the centuries we've been studying living organisms, we've never seen a new species arise that was also a new family". Does that bother you? That somehow evolution has lost its creative power?
So just like the geologist is justified in concluding that an ash layer is the result of a volcanic eruption, paleontologists are justified in concluding that the species they see in the fossil record are the result of evolutionary mechanisms.
Speaking of straw men....
Only if there are no other options available, especially if the fossil record shows upward progression.
And finally, if you want to talk about universal common ancestry (UCA), then you need to understand how that conclusion does not stem from a single data point, and as such is not going to be overturned by a single data point. UCA extends from an enormous variety of data, collected over centuries from a wide variety of fields. So simply pointing to a paper that describes a modified model of early bird evolution as somehow justification for rejecting UCA is ridiculous.
You mean a modified model of early bird evolution that the
authors of the paper (not to mention the author of the article) see as representative of the more general model of evolution that is known as the "Tree of Life", as I have well established, despite your unwillingness to see it.
No it's not. Don't assume that your level of understanding of a subject is all there is to it.
Likewise.
And do you honestly think paleontologists just sit around making up stories? Funny...
Funny, indeed! Shall we go back to the article?
Less than a year ago, a consortium of some hundred researchers reported that the relationship between all major bird clades had been mapped out by analysing the complete genome of around 50 bird species. This included the exact order in which the various lineages had diverged. |
Hahahahahahahaha! That is a funny story! (soon to be rejected by members of the group that made it up.)
Where does it say anything like that at all? Be specific.
Read my lips, "Tree........of.......Life".
Basically, "it could have been designed that way" is another way of saying "maybe God just made it that way". And yes, it could be that instead of all these bird species arising the same way we see species arising today, in the past everything was completely different and God created them all individually, kept replacing older versions with slightly different newer versions, and stopped doing all that as soon as we started looking.
I appreciate that what you said is ONE possibility for design. But another is that the ability to change within limits was designed into some original creatures, and that is what we see today. We see dogs and corn and pigeons, etc., that can become different looking dogs and corn and pigeons. But no dogs that become pigeons. We see that we can mutate flies--but the ones that live are still flies. The ones that don't live are flies until they die. Maybe we will get beyond those limits some day, but if we're going with what we've actually observed...well, you know as well as I do, Mr. Fly.
But you see, we can say that about absolutely anything. That ash layer the geologist thinks is from a volcano? Maybe God just "designed" it there. Those images of a spherical earth? Maybe God is just making it look that way. We already see various creationists here making these sorts of arguments with the "mature universe" beliefs....maybe God just made the universe look billions of years old.
Creationists can be wrong, too. Are you sure you want to look at everything every evolutionist has ever said and use it to make a judgment on evolutionary biology? I have a feeling you wouldn't let me get away with that, so why would you want to use it on me?
See the problem? No matter what, someone like you can always come in after-the-fact and declare "that's just the way God made it". But from a scientific and explanatory standpoint, it's meaningless.
Isn't it just as meaningless to ascribe "change" to "evolutionary mechanisms"? From a scientific standpoint, it's meaningless.
So why did you cite it in an attempt to justify rejecting evolution (as you were using the term)?
Because the authors INTERPRETED their study results to apply it to evolution, and not just to a side branch of evolution, but to the fundamental concept of the "Tree of Life". But I guess they are just sitting around making up stories.
It means exactly what I said earlier....the early history of bird evolution was more complex than previously thought. That's it.
Attribute:By John Snape - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28489470