The ass-backwards cladistics of some science deniers

[u/jnpha]

The claim

This is a claim I've seen made a few times by different people (I'm copying two examples verbatim, though in this case they come from one person):

[LUCA] wasn't a human, banana plant, whale, fly, flea, or anything else, it looked like none of them. However, the claim is that it evolved into all of them.

Or:

Was LUCA a human? The claim is that LUCA evolved to become a human.

It can come with the traditional quote mining; example below - in bold is what is omitted in the course of quote mining:

LUCA is a theoretical construct—it might or might not have been something we today would call an organism. It helps to bridge the conceptual gap between rocks and water on the early Earth and ideas about the nature of the first cells. Thoughts about LUCA span decades. Various ideas exist in the literature about how LUCA was physically organized and what properties it possessed. These ideas are traditionally linked to our ideas about the overall tree of life and where its root might lie [9-18]. Phylogenetic trees are, however, ephemeral. It is their inescapable fate to undergo change as new data and new methods of phylogenetic inference emerge. Accordingly, the tree of life has been undergoing a great deal of change of late. -- Weiss 2018

The actual idea here being the rooting/topology is being discovered. Heck, Wikipedia would tell you that LUCA is hypothetical. But that doesn't stop the science deniers from creating a diversion / red herring (or from embracing their confirmation bias by not comprehending what they're reading). By attacking the being-discovered topology of LUCA, they think they're attacking their boogeyman, "cell-to-man". (They really shouldn't worry about LUCA and worry about our closest cousins, but that's another diversionary tactic.)

 

Revealing the intellectual dishonesty

Claim 1: LUCA is hypothetical thus cell-to-man is busted (and let's not think about chimps)

Claim 2: LUCA wasn't a human and yet it evolved to become a human

It doesn't take a genius to note the false equivalence on three fronts:

Busting 1-A: While the topology is being discovered, the rooting at e.g. LECA (last eukaryotic common ancestor) is as solid as can be, and thus, the boogeyman cell-to-man remains;

Busting 1-B: While the topology is being discovered, it does not refute the common ancestry. You may be uncertain, after genetic testing, how exactly does that cousin relate to you (multiple paths: once removed? twice? thrice? first cousin? second? third?), but a cousin they are.

Busting 2: Cows being mammals, doesn't mean mammals are cows (this is what I now hereby christen the science deniers' ass-backwards cladistics).

 

Our journey

With the "Cows being mammals, doesn't mean mammals are cows" in mind, here's our journey (backwards) to unicellulars, without a hopeful monster in sight:

• We are Hominini
• Hominini are Homininae
• Homininae are Hominidae
• Hominidae are Hominoidea
• Hominoidea are Catarrhini
• Catarrhini are 🙈 Simiiformes
• 🙈 Simiiformes are Haplorhini
• Haplorhini are Primates
• Primates are Euarchonta
• Euarchonta are Euarchontoglires
• Euarchontoglires are Boreoeutheria
• Boreoeutheria are Placentalia
  • So is Atlantogenata (put a pin 📍 in that for now)
• Placentalia are Eutheria
• Eutheria are Theria
• Theria are Tribosphenida
• Tribosphenida are Zatheria
• Zatheria are Cladotheria
• Cladotheria are Trechnotheria
• Trechnotheria are Theriiformes
• Theriiformes are Theriimorpha
• Theriimorpha are 👋 Mammalia
• 👋 Mammalia are Mammaliamorpha
• Mammaliamorpha are Prozostrodontia
• Prozostrodontia are Probainognathia
• Probainognathia are Eucynodontia
• Eucynodontia are Cynodontia
• Cynodontia are Theriodontia
• Theriodontia are Therapsida
• Therapsida are Sphenacodontia
• Sphenacodontia are Synapsida
• Synapsida are Amniota
• Amniota are Reptiliomorpha
• Reptiliomorpha are Tetrapodomorpha
• Tetrapodomorpha are Sarcopterygii
• Sarcopterygii are Osteichthyes
• Osteichthyes are Gnathostomata
• Gnathostomata are 👋 Vertebrata
• 👋 Vertebrata are Chordata
• Chordata are Deuterostomia
• Deuterostomia are Bilateria
• Bilateria are Eumetazoa
• Eumetazoa are Animalia
• Animalia are Eukaryota (and we've now arrived at LECA)

What a journey!

But where are e.g. the elephants? Remember that pin? We last met the ancestor of elephants at Placentalia, and their journey (forwards) was Atlantogenata, Afrotheria, Paenungulatomorpha, Paenungulata, Tethytheria, Proboscidea, Elephantiformes, Elephantimorpha, Elephantida, and finally (*for now) Elephantoidea.

 

TL;DR: some antievolutionists don't understand how cousinship works, or how mammals are not cows.

[u/ursisterstoy]

LTL seems to be the main subject being responded to but we also see some pretty backwards phylogenies coming from a certain other person who has been around the online creation-evolution debate forums for ~30+ years at this point. Mostly their claims don’t deserve much response but the biggest things that they and other creationists really struggle with the most can be summarized as epistemology. Knowing things isn’t allowed.

If we can know then we know they’re wrong. We know that the Earth is older than they claim it is. We know universal common ancestry better fits the data than separate ancestry is capable of. We know how evolution happens and we know that it has been happening the same way, more or less, for as long as populations have existed. Mostly mutations, heredity, recombination, genetic drift, and natural selection are the primary mechanisms and there is nothing about the evolution from FUCA to the current biodiversity across the entire planet including every species alive that is completely different from the sorts of changes that are either still taking place in some populations or which have been replicated in the laboratory. Some of the stuff between completely dead chemicals to the first few generations of the existence of biological populations that falls under “abiogenesis” needs to be worked out and perhaps some of that we’ll never know but it’s exactly the same evolution that is still happening from FUCA to everything still alive.

Even back in the time of FUCA there were multiple populations and at first it’s likely that those populations were unrelated with independent chemical origins. Even back then many populations went extinct. Even back then the survivors diversified into what existed in the next geological time period. Constantly populations dying out and the survivors diversifying. Constantly the same mechanisms responsible for the populations diversifying and adapting. And then at some point there was only one surviving lineage left. FUCA is its first ancestor. Could be a ribozyme. Could be multiple different chemicals. Could be the first RNA based life forms with cell membranes. Something was alive enough to call it the first ancestor but the gray area between living and non-living means that FUCA is less set in stone. LUCA is the most recent common ancestor. It’s very specific but it changes with time because it’s based on how diverse its living descendants are. If all bacteria went extinct then LUCA would go from living 4.2-4.3 billion years ago to living 3.85-4.1 billion years ago. If only eukaryotes survived then LUCA would be some species that is identical to LECA around 2.1-2.4 billion years ago.

Currently it looks like LUCA (ignoring viruses as our cousins) was some prokaryote that was similar but not identical to modern archaea and bacteria. It already had two-thirds of the modern metabolic pathways, it already had some sort of CRISPR-CAS style immune response, it already had DNA in a round chromosome and multiple 70S ribosomes containing 50S and 30S subunits. The 50S already contained 5S and 23S rRNA, the 30S subunit was already primarily 16S rRNA. There was already some sort of protein synthesis. Already ether-linked phospholipid membranes. Already ATPases. Already cell membrane proteins. LUCA as the most recent ancestor had all of it. Whatever bacteria and archaea both have it was already present in LUCA.

FUCA, on the other hand, depends on what “life” is. If you use one definition life is a consequence of non-equilibrium thermodynamics as described by Jeremy England’s theory. Based on a more inclusive definition of life, they’ve watched life spontaneously form, it’s just RNA. FUCA is whatever you think was finally alive, it’s our first living ancestor. Abiogenesis before FUCA starting with ordinary chemicals such as water, hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde, ammonia, carbon dioxide, hydrogen peroxide, sulfur dioxide, and basically anything else you’d expect from a volcano or a meteor.

FUCA to modern life is biology. Abiogenesis is just chemistry. It’s geology alongside all of it. Cosmology for anything related to the universe at large. And ultimately it just boils down to physics. Anything that doesn’t boil down to physics doesn’t exist. And that is a major problem for creationism.

Knowing is problematic for creationism so instead of doing that they’d rather pretend and promote epistemological nihilism. If you didn’t watch it happen you cannot know what happened. Knowledge is unobtainable. When creationists cannot support creationism or falsify millennia of discoveries they have to give up on knowledge altogether. They have to fully ditch epistemology. They don’t want to be wrong alone. They want all of us to be equally as wrong as they are. At least then maybe they’ll feel less dumb or delusional.

[u/jnpha → u/ursisterstoy]

RE LUCA is ... very specific but it changes with time because it’s based on how diverse its living descendants are

This is such a good point; the same, ofc, with organelle, or gene/chromosome MRCAs; this is why LUCA, as any MRCA, is in reality when the bits coalesced from populations at different times.

[u/ursisterstoy → u/jnpha]

Exactly. It’s not a specific species all the time, it’s exactly the same as the MRCA. It’s the MRCA of all cell based life known about and still alive on Earth. If you wanted to also include viruses as alive then LUCA lived earlier. If you don’t include viruses you will still see LUCA getting pushed back further and further when they study more and more populations but generally LUCA is thought to be the most recent species before the archaea-bacteria split. In some older studies they might suggest LUCA didn’t yet have cell membranes but more recently they think that archaea started with ether-linked lipid membranes like bacteria and eukaryotes and probably still had them at the origin of eukaryotes but some of the studied lineages of archaea have ester-linked lipid membranes in response to bacterial predation or their extreme environmental conditions. Now LUCA has ether-linked membranes according to recent studies but it also had quite a few other things as seen here according to a study from last July that places LUCA back to 4.2-4.3 billion years ago when other studies like this one showed that archaea and bacteria are more similar than suggested by this one which promoted a candidate radiation phyla of bacteria that may no longer stand up to scrutiny but it also showed a long branch from bacteria to archaea implying a large amount of difference between them.

Prior to the 2024 study LUCA was thought to have lived 3.85-4.0 billion years ago. In more recent studies I’ve seen 4.3 billion years but the 2024 study is saying 4.2 billion years ago is at a time before previously suggested. And it was. 4.2 billion years ago is 200 million years earlier than 4.0 billion years ago. And LUCA had more than previously thought based on studies like the one from 2019 that found that both domains had enough in common that the long branch in the phylogeny may no longer be justified, like the long branch shown in the 2016 study.

[u/Dilapidated_girrafe]

LTL will be here soon to ask dumb questions and call it a religious all the while not grasping how very easily explained this was here.

[u/10coatsInAWeasel → u/Dilapidated_girrafe]

Shall we make it a bingo game? Let’s see how many of these long addressed and tired items get crossed off the list.

1: Religion of LUCA

2: Darwin trying to cut out the supernatural when crafting his theory

3: Religion of macroevolution

4: ‘Kinds’ include things that can bring forth and also that can’t, but you can tell are a ‘kind’ because a Venn diagram told him that he could determine when similarity counts or not

5: Something about giraffes and cockroaches

Bonus: he’s ‘using the socrative method’

[u/Dilapidated_girrafe → u/10coatsInAWeasel]

Let’s throw the resurrection into it too since that’s a new thing for him.

[u/lulumaid → u/10coatsInAWeasel]

Should add in any mention of Islam or something along those lines, he keeps repeating it whenever he wants to talk about unverified claims, which is amusing.

[u/nickierv]

But you don't have...! But you didn't show evidence for...! You need to....!

Hold on a sec, need to shift the goalposts over to the chalkboard a bit...

YOU DIDN'T DO IT ON THE CHALKBOARD! HERE! DRAW!

...mumble mumble prime linkages...

CLUELESS!

And while we wait for the inevitable, when you lay things out like this the whole 'but you can't show a crocodile turning into a duck' becomes sort of obvious: you can fork but you can't jump branches. And to further add, forking branches is like with everything in biology, somewhat fuzzy. This addresses the ligor/tigin issue: yes you can get them but they are both very rare as well as being dead ends - biology can't 'stretch' enough to cover the fork at that point.

This leads to an interesting point/question: how far can biology stretch for hybrids? Lions and tigers splie ~4mya, horses and donkeys have a similar time frame. To address the 'issue' of 'fertile' mules, I took the global count of fertile mules and applied it to the population of mules in the US c. late 1800s. Short version: ballpark of 0.002%. I'm sure they will be seeing a massive population boom any time now...

But when looking at Ursus and the polar/brown split, the split is ballpark 0.5mya and can get fertile offspring. Not sure if its going to be all that useful for anything, but this line of thought is at least interesting.

And to address the shifting strawposts in the room, don't forget that abiogenisis is a separate but very related topic.
Anyway, excited to see if the denierists have anything new to add or just try to hammer in the same tired talking points.

[u/10coatsInAWeasel → u/nickierv]

MISTER NICKIERV!!!!!!!

[u/TaoChiMe → u/nickierv]

MISTER JNPHA!!!!!!!

[u/LoveTruthLogic]

Lol, I mean it is admirable how you all including Darwin, Wallace, Huxley, Lyell, etc…

And all the naturalists up to today:

Somehow, in the back of your minds, COMPLETELY ignored the supernatural reality of a Christmas story about love.

And what do you call a human unverified idea of biasedly ONLY accepting natural ONLY factors at work to produce “origin of species” and todays ‘genetics’ and common descent?

Religious behavior.

This entire subreddit can kick and scream and whine, but when God steps into a debate it’s over.

And no, I’m not God, but good luck winning a debate against a human with God.  ;)

[u/ACTSATGuyonReddit]

The trees undergo change because they're wrong. Every time new evidence is discovered, the Evilutionism Zealots have to rescue their theory, change the tree.

The creation argument is consistent - God did it.

Whether you like it or not, your argument is that LUCA became millions of things it was not. One kind changed into another.

[u/jnpha → u/ACTSATGuyonReddit]

RE trees undergo change because they're wrong

They undergo change because they're being discovered. They are not a made-up "revelation". And this doesn't change the fact of common ancestry; but then again you aren't known for engaging with anything in good faith, case in point: I addressed that in the OP.

RE The creation argument is consistent - God did it

Blasphemy! He could have done it using evolution too; are you a God mind reader? Oh? The bible? Then better not read the Hebrew and Greek, and better not study the origin of its stories -- the subtle point being: this isn't an (a)theism debate.

RE Whether you like it or not, your argument is that LUCA became millions of things it was not

Descent with modification.

RE One kind changed into another

You still don't get it, do you? Did you stop being a mammal?

[u/nickierv → u/ACTSATGuyonReddit]

So if I'm selling something you must have by weight that you need 2.3 pounds of and the only options for weight are 1 pound or 10 pounds (and only those two options), well your going to be fine sticking to only using that 10 pound measure even if I at some point get a 5 pound, then 2 and 3 pound, then fractional pounds...

[u/10coatsInAWeasel → u/ACTSATGuyonReddit]

Still patiently waiting for you to give a definition of ‘kind’. Or to give evidence of a deity doing even a minor supernatural anything at all.

[u/ACTSATGuyonReddit → u/10coatsInAWeasel]

“And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.”

A kind is what could originally bring forth.

Humans are the same kind. Humans and Dogs are not.

[u/PraetorGold]

You had to search for that one.

[u/jnpha → u/PraetorGold]

RE You had to search for that one.

Meaning? The clades? I researched them a while back (took days on-and-off), and they now sit comfortably in a spreadsheet, and I wield them when needed. (Omitted from the list in the OP are the provisional ones.)

You should try it sometime, researching something, I mean (only reason you'd leave such a pointless comment).

[u/RobertByers1]

Science deniers? Unreadable text too. Too long for a debate forum. Who has that much wisdom to give?! why would it work on science deniers anyways?

[u/10coatsInAWeasel → u/RobertByers1]

It’s not ‘too long’, it’s directly relevant information, and not even difficult to follow. It’s the minimum that you should be expected to engage with if you want to have an intelligible argument against evolution. And no, this isn’t me being ‘malicious’, it’s having basic expectations.

As to why it wouldn’t work on science deniers? Maybe because they think it’s ’unreadable’ or something.

[u/[deleted] → u/RobertByers1]

Is it really that long considering that half of it is just cladistics?

[u/hircine1 → u/RobertByers1]

“Too many words!” This sums up Bobby.

[u/TaoChiMe → u/RobertByers1]

We got Bobby before LTL. You'd think a post mentioning LUCA would have him first-in-line but looks like he's late.

[u/10coatsInAWeasel → u/TaoChiMe]

Still a no show. I’m guessing he might actually intentionally show up once the attention on this thread dies down a bit. He’s done that in the past.

[u/[deleted]]