Convergence and Common Ancestry

[blike]

How do we distinguish convergent evolution from common ancestry?

hows that for short and sweet :)

I'm on vacation right now, as is faf. We'll be back to normal when school kicks back up.

[blike]

bump.

anyone?

[Sayonara³]

Isn't common ancestry basically another way of saying 'divergence'?

[Giles]

(Molecular) cladistics gives the most parsimonious phylogeny.

The odds of molecular convergence (as opposed to conservation) across a lot of characteristics are pretty low.

[Eli_Cash]

Convergence is a similarity that doesn't make sense in terms of a historical relationship that evolutionists find platable. For example, I believe human eyes are more similar to those of the squid than to those of apes, but no one wants to say that we inherited this trait from a squid, so it's dismissed as convergence. (It may be an octopus, but I think it's a squid.) There really is no other reason than agreement with the theory. As such, evolutionists really shouldn't use homology as an evidence for evolution, since they are selective about it according to what they've already decided about the theory.