Uh, well that is what the article was about, after all. Remeber the article? The one up at the top of this thread? Yeah, that one.
[me: it's pathetic how you rely so much on ad hominem attacks which are based on dumb guesses] That's your story and you're stickin' to it.
Um, whatever. "That's your story and you're stickin' to it" isn't a really good comeback to what I said. The expression is almost an inappropriate response. Am I talking to a real person here, or a junior high school student simulator? It's as if I said "2+2=4" and you've come back with "so's your mother!"
But at least you're having fun. That's the important thing.
But you also appeal to the lack of human eyewitnesses to common descent as a means of relegating evolution to conjecture.
Try to understand, it's common descent which I've said is a "conjecture" (i.e. hypothesis). A fairly plausible one. "Evolution", I suppose, contains more than just the hypothesis of "common descent"; namely it provides a plausible mechanism for why "common descent" isn't a nutty hypothesis.
"Evolution" is a theory. "Common descent" is a hypothesis. Understand now?
(You do recall "agreeing" to conjectural status, don't you?)
Yes, but not of evolution. Of "common descent".
That same standard of proof would make the idea that you had a great-great-great-great-great grandfather a conjecture,
Well....... yeah. (I still prefer the word "hypothesis".) It's a hypothesis that I had a great^5 grandfather. It just happens to be a very very solid one. (The only alternatives being that I or one of my ancestors was created via immaculate conception, or similarly implausible scenarios.)
Not all hypotheses are equally plausible and just because I'm saying that A and B are both hypotheses doesn't mean I'm saying that B is just as plausible as A. (I'm not sure why I'm telling you this, BTW, since I don't think you'll understand it, let alone respond to it intelligently.)
You try not to get into the details of the anti-E technicals, which would only end with you linking TrueOrigins or AnswersinGenesis (at very best, Discovery-of-Nothing Institute).
It would end up with me "linking" what? "TrueOrigins"? "AnswersinGenesis"?
WTF ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
What are these things? Are they websites? I honestly have no freakin' idea what you're talking about. More blind, dumb guesswork on your part in pathetic attempts at ad hominem. Face facts kid: you ain't a mind-reader. In fact you're horrible at it. Don't quit your day job.
Seen enough ducks to know a duck.
Apparently not, cuz you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
["common descent" is not a fact, it's a hypothesis] There's controvery on this branch and that branch about how exactly to reconstruct the tree of life, but it's a little too late to say that there is no tree,
I never said that "there is no tree".
or that it's really five separate trees,
I'm not saying it's "really" N separate trees for some N > 1.
or that humans at least are somehow disconnected from the rest of the thing.
Not saying that either.
Listen up: I think "common descent" is probably true.
But it's still a hypothesis.
A theory provides insight and mechanism to observation.
Right, but "common descent" is NOT AN OBSERVATION. It's a hypothesis about what we can observe.
Any useful framework (scientific theory) for the diversity of life has to deal with the evidence for common descent in the obvious way, which is that outwardly divergent life forms appear related because they are.
Right, that's why "common descent" is a plausible hypothesis and "evolution" is a useful theory.
THEORY.
The preponderance of evidence for common descent has reached the status of fact.
I don't think so.
A scientific theory has to address why the preponderance of observation is what it is.
True. Any alternate hypothesis to "common descent" would have to address all the facts.
Actually no. In Darwin's own words:
If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. "
Charles Darwin, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life", Chapter 6.
By Darwin's own terms, evolution has been disproven with Behe's bacterial flagellum.