Evolution

Part of what I just explained was the setup: it’s mostly the information that fed into Darwin’s initial hypothesis. (I’ve misses out a lot of stuff relating to his observations on the variability of life).

The setup, was so that I could start at the beginning and show you how the scientific method has been applied - we have to start at the initial hypothesis. I wanted to make sure you were happy with the initial hypothesis and information before I went on.

If you’re happy with it, let me know - or I can explain any details or information you think is missing with regards to the initial hypothesis.

If you’re happy with it, before I continue: one question I wanted to ask you, is that once a scientist has an initial, plausible hypothesis - what do you think the next step should be, in order to be following the scientific method? 

I should just respond to everybody by refering them to books they aren't ever going to read.

Ok, if you are so familiar with this website, surely you will be capable of dropping some science here for us. 

I did! What did you think about it?

All life is related. Is that the hypothesis you are refering to?

You would need to test the hypothesis through experimentation, so the next stop would be to formulate an experiment that accurately isolates the variable you are trying to measure. Right?

You gave me a google answer. I'd rather see you edify the thread personally.

Sorry, but I cannot fit the entire scientific body of knowledge regarding evolution into the character count provided.

Then make it simpler. Show examples of how the scientific method is used to back hypothesis concerning aspects of evolution.

You don't have to do everything. Start with a point at a time. Stronn made a post that outlines some of the. evidences. Pick one and demonstrate the evidence.

Any of it really.

I did. But for some reason you have an issue with me referencing evidence already collected and collated and compiled on an external site.Shrug. Not sure what is to be gained by me simply cutting and pasting it here. You could have read it all by now.

So far all I'm getting from you is that you blindly believe what the lab coat wearing priests tell you.

Demonstrate your knowledge or go away. Any fool can say, "read this book".

Edify the topic please.

I've generously offered to happily expound on any specific area you wish. Your reluctance to do so can only indicate that you can find no error or flaw in the provided science and therefore accept it wholeheartedly.

You have done no such thing, and the proof is that when you respond to this post you will still do no such thing.

Present any acience at all, and ahow how it is scientific. It's very simple. If evolution is really science, it should not be hard to present experimental data that supports it.

If you are going to be worthless, I'm sure someone else will step up while I rightly ignore you.

Then I'm sorry you missed it! In that case allow me to formally extend an offer to expound on any specific area of the evidences for macroevolution (previously provided) that you wish!

Expound on any one of these. I suggested we go down the list and start from the fossil record, but since that is proving too difficult to accomplish, I'd say pick any of these things.

It would edify anyone reading this topic to actually see science.

Oops! I looks like you're referring to a list provided by somebody else. I'm afraid I am not in a position to speak on someone else's provided list. I will note that none of those are terribly "specific." To help you along, here is a more focused list of specific evidences that I would be more than happy to delve into with you: 29+ evidences for macroevolution

No science. Got it.

Ignoring you now. Would rather talk to people who are serious and facilitating the discussion.

It'd be an interesting discussion to figure out what measure you are using to make that determination. As it is, it looks like you simply don't want to read.

Mostly right - but not entirely. The difference is actually just semantics, but is easy to get caught out on.

The Hypothesis you make has to be tested. That is, you have to predict facts and occurrences before they are known. Those predictions need to be specific to the hypothesis (so it can’t be any arbitrary definition - it needs to be something that you hypothesis can’t be true unless the answer is true and the answer has no reason to be true if the theory is false). You also need to have the ability to prove the theory wrong, by being able to point out things or scenarios that couldn’t be true if the theory was true.

That does require you to make observations, where you can be certain that what you’re seeing is what was predicted, but as long as you can validly and logically say what you’re seeing is what was predicted - that’s all that’s important. Often, scientists do that via an experiment - where a particular value or measurement in particular conditions is what is being predicted. There - controlling variables and conditions is important when you know those conditions may effect the measurement. It’s all done so as to be certain that the value being measured can be attributed to the prediction - rather than anything else.

But that type of controlled experiment with lab coats, and Petri dishes etc, isn’t the sole method of being able to perform tests. Observations also work when the observation has not yet been made, and the prediction is specific. If I had a theory that made a prediction that Jupiter - when viewed in ultra violet - showed Mickey Mouse: and that’s what you observed - you’d probably conclude that the theory has some merit.

in addition, while a lot of the time a measurement can validate a prediction, or invalidate it. Some observations by their nature can only be confirmative, some only discomfirmative. Importantly though - in most cases one or two observations are not enough to confirm such a theory. You need lots of them.

What’s semantic though is that while these sorts of observational evidence ARE experiments, just not necessarily what you would consider as experiments from popular culture.

As long as it’s a logically and scientifically sound observation that by its nature can be determined to match the prediction - it’s an experiment. It’s a point a lot of people get caught up on.

Darwin made one of the most famous predictions, observed to be true two years after OtOoS was published. If you don’t have any problem with my explanation above, I can start talking about that.

Not at all, please go on.

....it is VERY refreshing to see that here rather than the usual faith based denials.

There have been no faith "based denials" in this thread.

But evolution is a process? That is like saying a strip of movie film is movement.

Lol.

You ask him to comment on the fossil record, he insists he'd rather comment on the genetic record. When you object, he claims he is formally extending an offer to expound on any specific area of the evidences for macroevolution, though he is at the same time refusing to address your question. So the you repost the OP and allow him to pick any point on the list, and all of a sudden he insists on his own list, not the OP's.

He will only answer questions he's supplied you. Funny. What? Did you think he was going to risk you asking him anything?

There are no competing Theories, if you disagree then produce said Theories

This coming from a bible believer is hilarious. Thanks.

Awesome!

So, one of the ways Darwin said that you could test the theory is through transitional forms.

If all life is related via descent with modification, then new species and classes of organism must be the same as it’s ancestor, but with small changes. This means that if you have a species with multiple differences over some ancestor, you’d expect to find an example of an organism in the middle - with only some of those changes.

For example, it looked like dinosaurs were in the same group as birds - just without wings, feathers and some other specific changes. If birds were descended from dinosaurs, then we should find organisms that has lots of these dinosaur traits, and some of the bird traits - for example a bird with feathers but did not have fused wing bones. 

At the time the fossil record was really patchy and the study of dinosaurs themselves was really new and barely systematic until the time of Darwin, so such examples did not exist.


The nature of what evolution predicts will be found is very specific. An ape that stood upright with a human style pelvis would meet the criteria of having treats of both descendent and ancestral species: a lemur with a human skull - would not.

Finding a fossil crocoduck - for example - would falsify evolution - because it would represent the fusion of traits from two different branches of the tree without them being found in intermediate species.


So: following the highly specific prediction of transitional forms, and that of the bird - this was discovered in 1861 - the Archaeopteryx - a bird with multiple reptile traits including unfused wing bones.


But in addition: this isn’t a one off prediction done once either. This is part of a class of predictions from evolution on what animals can and can’t be found - allowing tests, and falsifications

1.) You will never find animals with the same structural train on disparate branches of the tree, unless common ancestors have that trait as well

2.) If two animals have the same structural trait, you will be able to find the same structural trait on an ancestral form that has none, or few of the distinctive traits of those descendants.

3.) Fossils will be chronological. You will find basic and less complex animals in the past, and as you go forward in time you will find animals higher and higher up on the tree. When you have an animal the theory says shares a common ancestor with horses, you don’t find that animal well before the ancestor appears in the fossil record: (the famous fossil bunnies in the Cambrian).


So far, If memory serves there are over 250,000 species of fossils found, and many dozens of species that match even the most stringent and restrictive definition of “transitional fossil”, and hundreds that meet the scientific term. 

One of my favourites, is Tiktaalik, which is a fish-amphibian transition. The reason it is my favourite is that it’s discovery was based in part on using where and when the ancestors were found to predict not just what this transition would look like, but where it would be found.


So from the main examples here, this is one very broad but highly specific way of providing systematic and scientific tests of the main evolutionary predictions. - but not the only ones - or even the best

Of course, I would love to. 

I’ll touch upon with other fossil related tests. As I said, there are 250,000 fossil species and hundreds of examples of transitions.

We have multiple examples of transitions between general primates, and upwards. Interestingly it is at the point now where scientists could place skulls of various hominid species in a row and scientists - leave alone lay people - are not able to tell where one species starts and the next begins.

A particularly funny example I recall was back when some of the later austrolapithes were discovered: and creationists disagreed as to whether it was 100% ape or 100% human. Which is kind of the point.

We have a really interesting collection of fossils in the transition of cetaceans between land and water. And some really good transitional forms between fish and amphibians.

In my opinion in terms of systematic measurement: the fossil record and this information on its own puts evolution squarely beyond reasonable doubts. It’s so specific and so broad that the continued validation of the tree is itself knockout proof of evolution.

But there is so, so much more.

Let’s take the tip of the iceberg. Evolution and common descent were proposed before the discovery of DNA, and before the advent of genetics, while Mendel scientifically demonstrated binary inheritance (ie: you inherit traits from mom and dad) and the laws of population genetics were a statistical application of these: for evolution to be valid, it needed to have this mechanism of inheritance - and when this mechanism of inheritance was found, evolution needed to survive the new science that would come out of its discovery.

So, implicitly, Evolution predicted mechanisms of adding new features, genes, protein structures, etc would exist before DNA was even known to exist.

Those mechanisms predicted were indeed discovered in the forms of gene duplication, and various types of copy mutation - together allowing new sequences of genetic material to be produced. It’s easy to forget that DNA hasn’t been invented yet, but the underlying requirements of what DNA must do was implicitly predicted.

But let’s get into the really fun systematics of genetics.


I’m going to continue with my favourite, the analysis of Cytochrome C. This was the first genetic confirmation of the relatedness of organisms.

So, let’s assume life isn’t related, and that the tree of life is somehow a coincidence not indicative of descent.

One way of determining this, is trying to find different ways of measuring relatedness of different organisms - if the tree is indicative of descent, then any way of measuring relatedness should match the tree too.

If the tree says humans and chimps are the closest related extant species - yet another way of measuring relatedness is shoes apples and humans are closer than chimps and humans - if valid this would
Falsify evolution.

So the first way this was done, was by finding a common protein all eukaryotes share - one that doesn’t change in form of function that can be extracted. The idea being that if all organisms have it, and it doesn’t change function between organisms - then any differences between that protein in two organisms would be down to how closely related they are: the only differences will be random accumulations of minor changes if life were related.

Evolution predicts a very specific pattern: chickens and turkeys will have few differences between them:  and the changes will increase the further and further away they go. This pattern should be repeated every animal you compare. 

IE, humans and chimps would have almost no differences, nor horses and zebras, nor chickens and turkeys. Humans and chimps would have the same Amount of differences as horses and zebras do from chickens and turkeys. Etc, etc

If this wasn’t the case. It would falsify evolution.

However, that wasn’t the case, and
Cytochrome C showed the expected evolutionary patterns, and so was one of the most famous evolutionary tests conducted.

Thank you for your input. Is there anything else you feel worth noting about the theory of evolution?

oooh yes.

This has just been a VERY short chronological summary that is currently up to 1975 or so. I have another 43 years of major evolutionary discoveries to go. I don’t think I’ve even briefly summarized 20% of the big stuff.

Well, be as thorough as you'd like to be. I might goad you into writing a book for us in this thread. Hah

i have some limitations on the time I can spend - these posts take time to construct, but I’d be happy to.

how about some feedback. Did it answer some of your questions? Do you have more questions? Is the scientific basis more understandable now? Is there anything you're hazy on? Or you wanted me to talk about in more detail.