[Right Wing Professor]

I think you would answer ENCYC. What I would say is all 26 letters of the alphabet came into existence at the same time and that life shares common characteristics and are not necessarily related by common descent, but by similarity; i.e. all life is similar. I think a more relevant representation would be:

No. I'd answer encyclopedia. Each of the word is related to 'encyclopedia' by a one letter change.

Otherwise you are assuming what you are trying to prove.

If I list those five versions of 'encyclopedia', and say they look like they're all copies of a single word with a small number of errors, what am I assuming?

I see similarity and see similarity.

You see similarity and choose to look no further. Fine. But don't say we have no evidence, because similarity is evidence. It's one thing to decide not to look at it. That's a choice. It's another to claim there is none. That's a falsehood.

Nor do I see how this gets you to a creature which you have no genetic information for?

But I gave you the eyecolor - which is genetic information - for a creature - your grandfather -for which you had no genetic information. All I had to do was look what was common to his descendants. Is it really for hard for you to see that if we have gigabytes of genetic information - not just one characteristic- for hundreds of different descendants, we can piece together what the genome of the ancestor looked like, even though we don't have any direct information about it?

[microgood]

You see similarity and choose to look no further. Fine. But don't say we have no evidence, because similarity is evidence. It's one thing to decide not to look at it. That's a choice. It's another to claim there is none. That's a falsehood.

We would expect chimps to have similar genomes to humans whether we have a common ancestor or not. That is why it takes something more than similarity to show common ancestry. All life has similarities, and that does not necessarily imply causation.

Is it really for hard for you to see that if we have gigabytes of genetic information - not just one characteristic- for hundreds of different descendants, we can piece together what the genome of the ancestor looked like, even though we don't have any direct information about it?

You could, but you would have no way of verifying the analysis. And the further back you go, the higher the possibility of being in error. At some point the blue eye trait, for example, could disappear completely and you could not really know if/when that happened.