Devolution 0
At Scientific Blogging, Michael White dissects creationism’s laughable efforts to offer credible criticism of evolution. Follow the link to see the concrete evidence for his reasoning:
(snip)
Creationists have no credibility on this issue of common descent because they don’t know what they’re talking about. The main intelligent design textbook Of Panda’s and People can’t even get the basic argument used by biologists straight. The authors clearly don’t understand how biologists infer evolutionary relationships from DNA sequence, because they make a basic blunder that anyone who has taken Biology 101 in the last 20 years could refute.
(Here’s another discussion of the blunder, from the Kitzmiller trial transcript – scroll down to the part that starts with “I think the treatment of biology by Pandas is inaccurate…” In a nutshell, Pandas falls for the basic ‘if humans descended from chimps, why are there still chimps?’ fallacy, by suggesting that today’s living amphibians are intermediates between fish and reptiles. The correct answer is that today’s reptiles and amphibians are both descendants of a common amphibian-like ancestor – and DNA sequences reflect that.)
