Macroevolution: Its all around us...

I'm denying that it occurs in pseudogenetic sequences, or at least, that it occurs in any greater frequency than we would expect from random chance, in which case I guess it wouldn't really be convergent. No, of course not. You would have to explain why the false trees established by convergent pseudogenes would match the trees constructed from morphology and stratiography, when in fact they shouldn't match at all. If convergent pseudogenes exist to such a degree that they match inferred trees from stratiography and morphology to the precision that we observe, then the only reasonable conclusion is that someone is playing a grand joke with our genetics. There's no other explanation.

Of course it doesn't. The Indians used asprin for hundreds of years before the white man came. Does that fact disprove the effecacy of modern pharmacology? How does plant breeding make sense in the light of anything but evolution?

You would be right. It's creationist semantic trickery. It would be like saying that the numbers from 0-10 were "micronumbers" and that every number greater than that was a "macronumber", and saying that they were so fundamentally different you couldn't get one from the other.

I guess I don't understand, because I thought the evidence you presented was of convergence between multiple satellite regions across one single genome. How does that apply to, or substantiate, convergence between multiple individual unrelated genomes?

But between species? How do the specific "seed" sequences get from one species to another? It would seem that you would need genetic information to have passed, at one time, from one species to another; so you're back to two alternatives:1) Some unknown mechanism of horizontal gene exchange between species.
2) Common descent.If Randman is trying to explain genetic similarities by recourse to convergence, he has a problem that his model recourses to genetic sequences that convergence can't possibly explain.

Oh.Wait, this is new? How so? I mean, knowing that the most common mutations are the ones that extend repeating sequences, this seems obvious.How is this "convergent"? I mean there's nothing here that would prevent one species from having, say, 20 repeats of "AC", and another from having 200, right? They don't "converge" on a sequence; if anything, they diverge.

I would have thought it was obvious.The paper shows that the "convergence" occurs ajacent to a specific sequence. If you propose that the convergence effect explains genetic similarities between species, then the seed sequence has to already be in the genome of each species whose genetics "converged." (Otherwise, no genetic convergence would have taken place.)So now you have to explain why multiple, independant, unrelated species each carry this genetic seed; and moreso, the convergence argument can't explain the seed that causes the convergence. you've simply recursed your argument to a segment of DNA that must be shared, and you've left yourself no option to explain that sharing except for 1) an unknown mechanism for horizontal gene exchange; or 2) the very mechanism you started out trying to disprove, common descent.

I don't see how that's the case. I don't see how that's the case, either. If all sequences have such a predisposition, then why are sequences so different across the board? And what are the odds of that occuring across thousands of unrelated species? But according to the study that only happens in the presence of very specific sequences that already have to be there.So you haven't answered my question. How do those first sequences arise? Do you really expect us to believe that it happened, across many thousands of species, entirely by coincidence in such a way as to match phylogenies derived from independant stratiography?How stupid do you think we are, exactly? We've already established that there's no selection pressure for these seed sequences, or for any pseudogenetic sequence of the type used for molecular phylogenics. And you have to keep in mind that assuming that "it's predisposed to happen", and then saying "and then it did happen, which proves the whole thing true", is circular logic. Mutations need not be driven by chance for Darwinism to be true. They need simply be undetermined by environment.

Then there's no such thing as convergence, if DNA is predisposed to be divergent. You've undercut your position once again. You brought it up. That's your position, is it not? That the hundreds of thousands - possibly millions or billions - of different species are not the result of common descent from one species, right?If they're not related, then they're unrelated. Simple logic. Try to keep up with your own position, ok? No, you still don't get it yet. You have to explain how all those different genomes wound up with the starter sequences. This convergence effect cannot do that, because the convergence effect requires certain pre-existing patterns. So how did those patterns start multiple times in independant, unrelated species? But it's clearly not, which you yourself have admitted:

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Different sequences have different predispositions.

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When have I not admitted that? Of course there would be some disagreement. The problem for you is that there is considerably - astronomically - more agreement than we would expect from chance alone, or if DNA was simply "converging" on one single pattern. Certainly more than we would expect if DNA was diverging into thousands of different predispositions. What's conincidental about it? But your convergent model is incomplete. The convergence can only occur between two species if they already share certain specific sequences, and you have no mechanism to explain why that would be the case. Why would chimps and humans share non-morphological DNA? This is simply not the case. We observe that mutations almost always arise in populations before they're selected for by the environment.Or are you telling me that DNA can see the future?

If there were, all DNA would have converged on the same sequence by now. There would only be one species.Instead, there are billions. Thus, we know that the vast majority of DNA is shaped by the forces of Darwinism, not by pre-programmed convergence.