RE: The code that is DNA
December 18, 2019 at 4:59 pm
(This post was last modified: December 18, 2019 at 5:01 pm by John 6IX Breezy.)
(December 18, 2019 at 9:51 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: Are we confusing 'assumptions' and 'testable hypotheses' again? Like we can't compare organisms that we KNOW are related because we bred them to learn how to use genomes to measure relatedness? I think a confirmed hypothesis is way more reliable than an assumption.
In the absence of known ancestry, relatedness is always an assumption. Homoplasy (such as convergence or reversals) often breaks with this assumption because trait or genetic similarity is not a true indicator of relatedness. (Wake, et al., 2011). Phylogenies are indeed hypotheses (though I disagree they're testable); they attempt to predict various ways in which the relatedness assumption could have played out.
Reference: Wake, D. B., M. H. Wake, and C. D. Specht. 2011. Homoplasy: From detecting pattern to determining process and mechanism of evolution. Science 331: 1032–1035.