Discovering the Tree of Life

National Science Foundation Office of Legislative and Public Affairs ^ | November 18, 2002 | NSF Press Release

[forsnax5]

Seventeen million bucks to create a giant document for the crevo's to argue about!

A little something for a quiet weekend's musings.

[forsnax5]

Tree Of Life ping!

[AndrewC]

Checking in

[MHGinTN]

Geez Louise, I thought another of my novel themes had been stolen. Glad to see it's only about Darwinian puzzlements.

[AndrewC]

The real argument is not going to be between those you suspect, rather it will be between the Darwininians and the molecular evidence. Anyway, last I heard it was not the tree of life. It was either the "bush of life" or the "cactus of life".

[f.Christian]

"The 18th and 19th centuries witnessed the rise of the positive(ideological/illogical)* sciences, and with this an intensification in skepticism about God and the claims of traditional religion, especially among the educated classes. This inclination became most marked after the publication of The Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man, by the naturalist Charles Darwin. Darwin ascribed man's immediate ancestry to the anthropoids, supposedly through a process of gradual evolution. Man was no longer a creature made in the image of God, but merely a natural extension of certain lower forms of life, a refined gorilla, as it were. It was these circumstances, and this intellectual milieu, that led philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to declare that "God is dead" and to predict the rise of new and terrible manifestations of barbarism in the century that was to come. As he put it, "For ... we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which has never been dreamed of ... there will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth." The non-believer Nietzsche would agree wholly with the Christian believer Dostoyevsky about one thing: Without faith in God, all horrors, all of man's worst nightmares, would become possible. And so they did."

"What men... believe---really does matter."

*...my addition!

[Alamo-Girl]

LOL! If we are guessing what a "tree" drawn from genetic evidence might look like, my guess is a lawn.

[RnMomof7]

Nietzsche spent his final years in a lunatic asylum...the man that pronounced God dead signed his insane musings "the crucified one"

[Hebrews 11:6]

If we are guessing what a "tree" drawn from genetic evidence might look like, my guess is a lawn.

From Dr. Fuz Rana: "...the hominid fossil record is not a family "tree" but a "lawn."

("Toumai Man Offers Evolutionists No Hope," Connections, 3rd & 4th Quarter 2002, Quarterly Newsletter of Reasons to Believe.)

[LiteKeeper]

mega-dittoes

[Hebrews 11:6]

The real "Tree of Life" is the one on which Jesus loved us.

[Alamo-Girl]

LOL! I had no idea it was already used! Thank you!!!

[edsheppa]

What does that mean exactly?

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you! Hugs!!!

[RnMomof7]

And the real tree of life is in heaven...not here

[Alamo-Girl]

The reason I said "lawn" is that I expect the genetic code to match around 50% of the time (or more.) Each unique creature would have differences that would look like neat, little spikes --- like blades of grass.

[Doctor Stochastic]

So far, things look more like a tree than like a lawn. The genotypic trees look much like the phenotypic trees.

"Tree of Life" is also a representation of the Kabala. It is used in Tarot reading.

[LiteKeeper]

YEC - you are welcome

[gore3000]

Seventeen million bucks to create a giant document for the crevo's to argue about!

Crayola stock took a big bump!

[gore3000]

So far, things look more like a tree than like a lawn. The genotypic trees look much like the phenotypic trees.

No it does not. Evolutionists claimed that mitochondrial DNA would verify the classifications that had been made by phenotype. However, this has proved false. It has given some very different results and now evolutionists have thrown out mtDNA as proving their theory:

1. Ying Cao, Axel Janke, Peter J. Waddell, Michael Westerman, Osamu Takenaka, Shigenori Murata, Norihiro Okada, Svante Pääbo, and Masami Hasegawa, “Conflict Among Individual Mitochondrial Proteins in Resolving the Phylogeny of Eutherian Orders,” Journal of Molecular Evolution 47 (1998): 307-322.
It is widely believed that molecular data confirm morphological data when the history of groups such as the mammals is being reconstructed. Many cases exist, however, where molecules (such as proteins) give “false” or erroneous phylogenies. This paper, by a team of researchers from Japan, Germany, and Australia, demonstrates that different mitochondrial proteins can give different, and contradictory, groupings. In particular, the protein NADH dehydrogenase (ND1) places primates and rodents together as closest relatives, with ferungulates (artiodactyls + cetaceans + perisodactyls + carnivores) as more distantly related to primates -- in contradiction to most other data, which places primates and ferungulates together as closest relatives. The authors conclude that this anomalous phylogenetic grouping “is not due to a stochastic error, but is due to convergent or parallel evolution” (p. 321), suggesting that molecular evidence is not free from the confounding (historically misleading) effects known to plague other types of systematic data, such as anatomical patterns.
From: Bibliography presented to Ohio BD of Ed .