Nested Biological Hierarchies

You're really got to bring something better than this, NJ. Surface criticisms that don't even really address Theobald's points are not sufficient.Your criticism that "Theobald implies Punctuated Equilibrium" is meaningless. I get that you don't like PE but that fact is not a refutation of the Theobald's argument.Your criticism that "similiarities don't prove common lineage" is meaningless, because that's not Theobald's argument.Your criticism that he "doesn't present evidence" is outright false. I get that you don't think evolution is true, and therefore that no evidence for it can exist; but the fact that you believe that doesn't make the ample evidence he refers to - even in the sections you've directly quoted - go away. Anybody can read your post and see that, indeed, Theobald has referred to ample and well-known evidence, which you have simply ignored.I would really have thought that, after over 150 posts here, you would have a sense about how an honest debate works. I see from this inital post. however, that that is not the case. Why don't you give it another shot when you're ready to bring your A game?

You didn't address the paper. You've addressed the introduction.Again, to criticize the introduction of a paper for not being the body is pretty ridiculous. So far you're just not producing anything worth taking seriously. Theobald presumes that his reader has at least a passing familiarity with the field of biology. I get that you don't have that familiarity. But if you don't know where to look up examples of papers that arrive at a hierarcheal classification of some group of organisms, isn't the smarter thing to ask? Not simply assume they don't exist at all?Theobald is referring to a well-known phenomenon in biology - when independant sources develop a hieracheral lineage of the same organisms from different data, they arrive at largely the same hierarchy. If you're not even aware that this is true, you don't have the requisite knowledge to address Theobald's arguments.It's like opening a third-year textbook on computer science and openly declaring it invalid because it doesn't tell you how to use a mouse. Sorry, but if you're still back at that level, you're not ready for this class yet. If you don't know about the universal phenomenon of convergence between different means of developing phylogenies in biology, you aren't ready for Theobald's introduction, yet. And you certainly aren't ready to rebut it. Do you have any idea how ridiculous you look?This is what I mean by "bringing your A game." Theobald is presuming that his reader's head is not so crammed full of creationist nonsense that there's no room for knowledge about biology.

Suppose, though, that we look under the hood and find that they're similar there, too. And then we look at the model histories and see that, based on the blueprints, you can devise a phylogeny of ancestors back to a common shared ancestor for both models. And you have ten different people generate these phylogenies based on whatever specific characteristics they see fit, and each one of ten come back with largely the same phylogeny.Wouldn't that prove common ancestry and decent with modification over time? That's what we have in the natural world - we've got gross surface characteristics (called "morphology"). We're looking under the hood with genetics ("molecular phylogenetics".) And we can look back at the history of living things on Earth and devise phylogenies based on fossils (that's the field of "paleontology.") And each time we do these things, the phylogenies we develop are pretty much the same.Doesn't that prove that these phylogenies are not subjective, but rather several different ways to arrive at one single objective history about living things on Earth?