UTE, you are presenting your opinions as facts in a number of cases here.
I think I am presenting the majority opinion as something that I agree with and that I presented references that support that opinion.
First, I do not see where Bob ever indicated that he had any heros among the ID movement. So that is simply a snide, and false, comment on your part.
You got me. I am much more aggressive with Bob than required. On the other hand, in my opinion I merely echoing the kind of language that he often uses himself.
But he is also the one that brought up ID to begin with. He asked my opinion of IDism right there at the beginning of the very first post on this thread. I think that it is valid, since he was trying to make a point about agreeing or disagreeing with ID, that many of the leaders in ID do not have a problem with universal common descent, at least in what they write.
I'm sure Bob has the same sort of referencing. There are a number of people he respects highly and trusts, but they are not his heros, and for you to use that term derogatorily, as you have, only shows your own desperation in this discussion.
I have no desparation at all. I have the facts on my side. Again, my choice in phrasing has more to do with echoing his own style of posting and with an over agressiveness with him. You should now by this point that those who wish to have reasonable discussion with me can have that and those who wish to increase the discourse to something stronger can also have that answered in kind.
Second, we can prove common ancestry within groups. Dogs had a common dog ancestor. Swine had a common swine ancestor. Horses had a common horse ancestor, etc. Genetic and biological evidence easily goes back to original distinct populations
The very same evidence that shows common ancestry within such groups continues to be present for as far up the nested heirarchies you wish to go. There is no sharp demarcation where the evidence ends.
There are, however, a lot of different lines where some people capriciously quit recognizing the evidence. YEers cannot even seem to agree where these lines are. Some recognize only changes within species. Some no change at all that results in something new. Some recognize maybe new genera. Some even go up to families or higher. Of course they then assert much higher rates of change than any biologists would say possible, by orders of magnitude. They are also pretty vague about where the observed genetic diversity comes from.
As far as abiogenesis is concerned, "many plausible methods by which life could have arisen" is not evidence. It is imagination. And all the imagination in the world does not create data. The data we have from labs and nature indicate that abiogenesis is impossible, despite the imaginations of believers.
I'll give you the same response.
How life arose is lost to history, never to be known for sure. However, I gave a sizable list of references of research into how it might have happened. These show at least that it is not "impossible." If you want to challenge the mainstream researchers, fine, be my guest. I gave a nice list of references from which to start. I am sure that it would not be too hard to track down the authors and the editors if you can demonstrate their mistakes.
Believers like you say it took "a billion years or more". And then you need another billion to get to a multicellular organism. Let's go with that. The rest of evolution just ran out of time, I'm afraid. For unless those early organisms had generation times of several years each, the number of generations it took to get to a simple multicellular organism is in the trillions, and there is not that much time to get from that multicellular organism to ferns, monkeys, dinosaurs, sharks, etc.
You have made this assertion many times in the past. I have consistently sent you to references that show that the genetic diversity of all of the eukaryotes is tiny compared to the diversity of the prokaryotes. And multicellular life is just a subset of the eukaryotes. In terms of reality, there has not been that much genetic diversity since the rise of multicellular life compared to what came before. For instance, here I previously addressed this claim.
me said:
As nucleotide sequences began to be accumulated for bacterial genomes, it became obvious that the bacteria encompass two groups (True Bacteria and Archaea) and that the genetic diversity within each group far exceeds the diversity among the multicellular organisms!
This observation is demonstrated graphically below. The lines represent evolutionary relationships of the various groups among the three evolutionary domains - Bacteria, Archaea and Eucarya. The genetic distance between any two groups is shown as the length of the lines between those two groups. Thus, it is easy to see that plants and animals (an oak tree and you) are much more closely related than are methanobacteria and green sulfur bacteria.
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~rjh9u/bactage.html
http://www.baptistboard.com/showpost.php?p=23015&postcount=207
I have answered the question several different times with several different references. You continue to assert that there is some problem without ever addressing the reality that there is comparitively little additional diversity needed to get "to ferns, monkeys, dinosaurs, sharks."
I am not even sure that we have ever received a specific answer as to where you assert that the observed genetic diversity comes from. We have some braod assertions about information rich genomes or some such. But nothng specific and with evidence.
