"the science hobbyist" -pseudosicence?

[Odin]

http://www.amasci.com/

Site that appears to enjoy building and tearing down skeptic shaped strawmen. (http://amasci.com/weird/wclose.html)



http://amasci.com/freenrg/evolv.txt
Has this been covered before? Apparently evil mad scientist Richard Dawkins tried to supress it:D. I looked on talkorigins but couldn't find much, especially about this bit-

In 1981, molecular biologists working under Dr Morris
Goodman at Ann Arbor University decided to test this hypothesis.
They took the alpha haemoglobin DNA of two reptiles -- a snake
and a crocodile -- which are said by Darwinists to be closely
related, and the haemoglobin DNA of a bird, in this case a
farmyard chicken.

They found that the two animals who had _least_ DNA sequences in
common were the two reptiles, the snake and the crocodile. They
had only around 5% of DNA sequences in common -- only one
twentieth of their haemoglobin DNA. The two creatures whose DNA
was closest were the crocodile and the chicken, where there were
17.5% of sequences in common -- nearly one fifth. The actual DNA
similarities were the _reverse_ of that predicted by neo-
Darwinism.


This part is interesting-
http://amasci.com/freenrg/abhor.html

??? I'm not sure what he's suggesting here but there seem to be plenty more strawmen in his discriptions. I'm I missing something and some of this is a parody?

[Roboramma]

I don't know anything about it, but as reptile isn't a natural category - they don't form a clade - it shouldn't be surprising that some reptiles would be more related to birds than to some other reptiles.
Just as some fish are more related to lemurs than to some other fish.

I don't know if this applies to the specific examples, but even if the research quoted is accurate, the conclusions might not be. We'd first need to see if crocodiles actually are posited to be closer to snakes than to chickens.

[Nick Bogaerts]

Not according to the Tree of Life (http://tolweb.org/tree?group=Diapsida&contgroup=Amniota)

ETA: Those satanic neo-darwinists were right after all!

[sphenisc]

Not according to the Tree of Life (http://tolweb.org/tree?group=Diapsida&contgroup=Amniota)

ETA: Those satanic neo-darwinists were right after all!

Not at all, The Tree of Life Phylogeny is based on Gauthier (1994). This more than a decade after Goodman's work. They've obviously adjusted their diagram to suit the evidence... How sneaky is that! :)

[Odin]

So crocodiles are more closely related to birds than snakes, but this is what we would expect? I think it makes sense now- birds are close relatives of the dinosaurs so it makes perfect evolutionary sense for them to be closer genetically to crocodiles than snakes.