The reason I ask is because I believe cladistics is a process which creates relationships for eukaryotes
The principles would work for anything that has a lineage.
built on the shared derived characters
Yep, synapomorphies in the lingo. But there’s more to it than that, of course.
and part of those shared derived characters are dna/amino acids which they would not have any samples from species millions of years ago
Well duh. Oddly enough, it’s perfectly possible to do cladistic analyses with mere fossils. Funny old thing, science. It tends to work with the evidence there is, rather than worry about the evidence that is unobtainable.
and without these sampals it is only a assumption that if they inserted more character data (i.e. dna from ancient species millions of years ago) that it would continue with the current universal phylogenetic tree.
But cladistics is successful: it enables one to predict the properties of an organism. Are you suggesting that if we had, say, some DNA from
Australopithecus afarensis, that it would
not fit nicely with at least other ape DNA (and most likely nearer to human)? You’d think it just as likely that it’d be nearer to a tardigrade, I suppose? Scientific assumptions are only made if they’ve previously been well tested, they are not just pulled out of thin air.
I was reading at the 29 evidences websight that biologists hypothosis is that if they entered more character data as in ancient character data then it would not change, basically it is an assumption.
Based on the fact that everything so far has acted in that way already. Why is it not safe to assume, say, that unsupported rocks will fall? They
might not, and philosophers of science can get their knickers in a twist over such inductive arguments. But whilst this reasoning may not be watertight, it is certainly good enough to be going on with. It may be an assumption, but it is not an unfounded one.
So tell me: on what grounds do
you assume that such assumptions are unfounded?
So it seems that I agree with John Paul still on the mutation leading into big changes problem. We have no evidences of this aspect.
Where’s the problem? We can observe small changes (eg antibiotic resistance); we can observe small changes accumulating (eg the dogs and pigeons in another thread). We can observe large-effect mutations, as with those affecting hox genes (eg
this. And we can observe perfectly gradual changes in some groups of fossils (eg
here, and Peter Sheldon’s work on Ordovician trilobites).
Remind me what the problem is?
TTFN, DT
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