Debunking Evolution Clip: Cladograms

Genesis Apologetics

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00:09

So, we could organize it as simplest to most complex. Or by color.

00:17

See, organization just is not my thing. Once my little sister asked me to organize all her little tiny plastic animals, it took me two days.

00:25

Organizing animals. It's like Carl Linnaeus. Who's that? Yeah, he was the first guy to classify animals.

00:32

Oh, oh, yeah, I remember him now. His motto was, God created, Linnaeus ordered.

00:39

Yeah, his work is the basis for the classification system we still use today. Later, Charles Darwin sketched a diagram to show how life started simple and then branched out to every creature on Earth.

00:50

He said the different branches represent the different levels of classification. A tree of life, if you will.

00:56

Oh yeah, I keep seeing this over and over again in our textbooks. Really? Yeah. Here we go, check out this one.

01:08

Are researchers still trying to figure out how it happened? There are a lot more of these diagrams.

01:13

I think they change as different researchers group them based on different features.

01:19

These charts show groups of organisms they believe share a common ancestor. Yeah, a group like that is called a clade.

01:26

And these diagrams are called cladograms. Hmm, man, and I thought organizing my makeup was hard.

01:35

So do they. Well, not your makeup, classifying animals. Okay, so remember that modern evolutionary classification is a rapidly changing science with a difficult goal, to present all life on a single evolutionary tree.

01:51

As evolutionary biologists study relationships among taxa, they regularly change not only the way organisms are grouped, but also sometimes the name of groups.

02:03

Remember that cladograms are visual presentations of hypotheses about relationships and not hard and fast facts.

02:10

Whoa, whoa, whoa. You're saying our textbooks say that cladograms are based off hypotheses, not facts.

02:18

Yeah, I'll show you why. Flip forward a page. That's because they only have living animals or fossils for certain places on the branches.

02:27

These are real animals or fossils we've actually discovered. But these branching points are just imaginary lines that represent the hypotheses about which animals evolved from a common ancestor.

02:40

No facts support them that can't also support different links, or no links. The transitional fossils they represent have never been found.

02:49

If they were, well, we'd see their pictures here, right? Though evolutionists point to a few examples, there should be thousands.