Bio Logos Interviews Bill Nye (The Science Guy)

[Audie]

It likes us it seems.

are you proposing to post purported facts about your hypothetical god?

I believe we can see care taken in God's design of the world.

What you believe you perceive is reported as fact?

[Kurieuo]

It likes us it seems.

are you proposing to post purported facts about your hypothetical god?

I believe we can see care taken in God's design of the world.

What you believe you perceive is reported as fact?

You're barking up the wrong tree. That's a fact.

[Jac3510]

Hi Jac,

Whether there are violations, that is the question isn't it?

Many would say there are none they have come across that would falsify common descent (and as such evolution).
For example, Dennis Jones who I linked to previously. He's also actually agnostic as to intelligent design and open to the complex and specified information seen in the natural order.

I really found his article on universal common descent a good read. Very detailed.
He shows some courtesy and tactfulness in his writing. Not just out to drive a knife in if you know what I mean (at least that's what I felt).
Would highly recommend it to you or anyone else.

I didn't think that was the question. It's a rather well established fact, I thought, a so my question. For example, the first three sentences of the abstract of a paper titled "Understanding phylogenetic incongruence: lessons from phyllostomid bats" (Biol Rev Camb Philos Soc. 2012 Nov;87(4):991-1024) state, "All characters and trait systems in an organism share a common evolutionary history that can be estimated using phylogenetic methods. However, differential rates of change and the evolutionary mechanisms driving those rates result in pervasive phylogenetic conflict. These drivers need to be uncovered because mismatches between evolutionary processes and phylogenetic models can lead to high confidence in incorrect hypotheses." The paper goes on to state that the incongruities are "pervasive" and are only increasing as we research this more and more.

Another example might be a paper titled "The evolutionary-developmental origins of multicellularity" (The American Journal of Botany 101, 1 (2014): 6-25). The author points out that " Multicellularity has evolved at least once in every major eukaryotic clade (in all ploidy levels) and numerous times among the prokaryotes." And in the concluding remarks, the paper sates, " The morphological theme of multicellularity and the confluence of generic and genomic processes by which it was achieved in different clades continue to draw attention to classical but largely unanswered questions in microbiology, botany, zoology, and mycology. . . . A contributing factor to this ignorance is the assumption that patterning processes and the mechanisms accounting for them are the same in different organisms. The fact that fungal mitotic divisions are intranuclear, whereas microtubules invade the nuclear space after the dissolution of the nuclear envelop to form the division spindle in most plant and animals cells is sufficient to caution against canonical discussions about cell division." So it seems that not only is multicellularity not perfectly nested, but even more basic notions like cell division itself isn't!

Or, again, it is no surprise anymore that DNA replication seems to have evolved at least twice (so see "Did DNA replication evolve twice independently?" in Nucleic Acids Research (1999) 27 (17): 3389-3401, in which the authors conclude, "The hypothesis of an independent evolution of DNA replication offers a parsimonious explanation for the strange assortment of apparently unrelated, homologous but not orthologous and orthologous components in the DNA replication machineries of bacteria and archaea/eukaryotes.").

I could offer literally dozens of more such examples. That's why I didn't feel the need to offer any in my initial question. It seems that the general fact of convergence argues against perfect nesting in particular. Perhaps one or two examples can be explained away as shear coincidence. But everywhere we turn we seem to see these types of unnested properties. And so my question.