fallacycop writes:
That won't do as an answer because it would only explains why there is a hierarchical pattern, but gives no reasonable explanation to why that same pattern can be obtained by differet methods, such as taxonomy, and genetic analysis (or did god expect Adam to do some genetic analysis before naming the animals?).
No, of course Adam could not have done any genetic analysis. My example with Adam was only to show that we would expect
some pattern among creatures even from the premise of creationism.
Certainly there should exist a significant degree of correlation between genetic analysis and taxonomy, to use your example. For instance, we would expect a hippo to be more genetically similar to a worm than to, say, a ficus. Even just among mammals, we would expect a human to more genetically similar to a chimpanzee than to, say, a mouse. This is of course because phenotype is defined largely by the genotype, so those organisms with more physical characteristics in common should obviously have more in common genetically than organisms with fewer shared physical characteristics.
No one denies that taxonomically closer organisms (i.e., those with closer phenotypes) ought also to have generally more similarity genetically. It should be predicted by anyone, creationist or evolutionist, with any background in genetics.
Most creationists even accept that certain similarities between species are due to common ancestry, such as between dogs, cyotes, dingos, jackals, foxes, and wolves or between horses, donkeys, and zebras. As I said before,
Speciation can occur in multiple ways that in no way contradict creationism, including geographical isolation, changes in mating seasons, sexual preference, and mutations that prevent production of fertile offspring, as is the case with the horse and donkey, for instance. None of these require the addition of new genes or alleles [(i.e., macroevolution)], only the "sifting" or loss of some within a population by natural selection.
Of course there are some examples of where genetic similarities are observed which are not predicted by common ancestry:
Actually, the molecular clock has many problems for the evolutionist. Not only are there the anomalies and common Designer arguments I mentioned above, but they actually support a creation of distinct types within ordered groups, not continuous evolution, as non-creationist microbiologist Dr Michael Denton pointed out in Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. For example, when comparing the amino acid sequence of cytochrome C of a bacterium (a prokaryote) with such widely diverse eukaryotes as yeast, wheat, silkmoth, pigeon, and horse, all of these have practically the same percentage difference with the bacterium (64 -69%). There is no intermediate cytochrome between prokaryotes and eukaryotes, and no hint that the ”higher’ organism such as a horse has diverged more than the ”lower’ organism such as the yeast.
The same sort of pattern is observed when comparing cytochrome C of the invertebrate silkmoth with the vertebrates lamprey, carp, turtle, pigeon, and horse. All the vertebrates are equally divergent from the silkmoth (27-30%). Yet again, comparing globins of a lamprey (a ”primitive’ cyclostome or jawless fish) with a carp, frog, chicken, kangaroo, and human, they are all about equidistant (73-81%). Cytochrome C’s compared between a carp and a bullfrog, turtle, chicken, rabbit, and horse yield a constant difference of 13-14%. There is no trace of any transitional series of cyclostome ’ fish ’ amphibian ’ reptile ’ mammal or bird.
Another problem for evolutionists is how the molecular clock could have ticked so evenly in any given protein in so many different organisms (despite some anomalies discussed earlier which present even more problems). For this to work, there must be a constant mutation rate per unit time over most types of organism. But observations show that there is a constant mutation rate per generation, so it should be much faster for organisms with a fast generation time, such as bacteria, and much slower for elephants. In insects, generation times range from weeks in flies to many years in cicadas, and yet there is no evidence that flies are more diverged than cicadas. So evidence is against the theory that the observed patterns are due to mutations accumulating over time as life evolved.
fallacycop writes:
For instance: why would god choose to have man and chimp share a similar set of broken genes? That one is really hard to explain away with some just-so explanation.
Could you please provide some examples of "broken" genes that humans and chimps share?
™ Version 4.2