And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven: this sore travail hath God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith.
Ecclesiastes 1:13
"Evolutionists are going to be very upset over what this paper
claims: phylogenetic trees of living animals are meaningless.
A recent post referred to a philosophical constraint on scientific theories called “underdetermination of theory by data” (see Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). It basically means that data cannot prove a theory, because there are always other theories that can explain the data equally well.
A classic example of this problem surfaced in a recent paper in Nature on 15 April, 2020. The article concerns the practice of building ‘phylogenetic trees’ from observations of living species – i.e., looking at a group of species and deciding which ones evolved first and are related to what other species.
This like telling Charlie, “Mr. Darwin, I have bad news and bad news.”
Ecclesiastes 1:13
"Evolutionists are going to be very upset over what this paper
A recent post referred to a philosophical constraint on scientific theories called “underdetermination of theory by data” (see Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). It basically means that data cannot prove a theory, because there are always other theories that can explain the data equally well.
A classic example of this problem surfaced in a recent paper in Nature on 15 April, 2020. The article concerns the practice of building ‘phylogenetic trees’ from observations of living species – i.e., looking at a group of species and deciding which ones evolved first and are related to what other species.
This like telling Charlie, “Mr. Darwin, I have bad news and bad news.”
Without further information or biologically well-justified constraints, in general extant timetrees alone cannot be used to reliably infer speciation rates (except for the present day), extinction rates or net diversification rates. Consequently, correlations between λ, μ or r and fluctuating environmental factors (such as temperature) also cannot be reliably inferred, neither when λ, μ or r are first estimated and then related to the environmental factors nor if λ, μ and r are expressed as parameterized functions of the environmental factors and then fitted to the timetree (Supplementary Information section S.5), because different parameterizations can lead to completely different inferences." CEH
