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High Speed Evolution
Taco Cowboy writes: Normally, the term "evolution" implicitly refers to super-long time frames. However, in the case of lizards on Florida islands, evolution seems to have shifted into a higher gear. Researchers have documented noticeable changes in a native species over a period of just 15 years, after an invading species altered their behavior (abstract). "After contact with the invasive species, the native lizards began perching higher in trees, and, generation after generation, their feet evolved to become better at gripping the thinner, smoother branches found higher up. The change occurred at an astonishing pace: Within a few months, native lizards had begun shifting to higher perches, and over the course of 15 years and 20 generations, their toe pads had become larger, with more sticky scales on their feet.
'We did predict that we'd see a change, but the degree and quickness with which they evolved was surprising,' said Yoel Stuart, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Integrative Biology at The University of Texas at Austin and lead author of the study... 'To put this shift in perspective, if human height were evolving as fast as these lizards' toes, the height of an average American man would increase from about 5 foot 9 inches today to about 6 foot 4 inches within 20 generations — an increase that would make the average U.S. male the height of an NBA shooting guard,' said Stuart."
'We did predict that we'd see a change, but the degree and quickness with which they evolved was surprising,' said Yoel Stuart, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Integrative Biology at The University of Texas at Austin and lead author of the study... 'To put this shift in perspective, if human height were evolving as fast as these lizards' toes, the height of an average American man would increase from about 5 foot 9 inches today to about 6 foot 4 inches within 20 generations — an increase that would make the average U.S. male the height of an NBA shooting guard,' said Stuart."
the height of an average American man would increase from about 5 foot 9 inches today to about 6 foot 4 inches within 20 generations — an increase that would make the average U.S. male the height of an NBA shooting guard,
Is that unreasonable? If there were evolutionary pressure (ie, short people kept being killed before reproducing), and tall people got multiple mates, I could see this change happening within twenty generations. Twenty generations is enough for two people to repopulate large countries, or even the entire earth if they have large families.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm not sure that's so shocking. Assume there were a predator that killed 90% of the shortest 1/3rd of all humans at age 15. Let that run for 20 generations. I don't see how the average male height going to 6' 4" would be at all out of character. Heck it might happen faster than 20 generations, possibly more like 5.
Normally, the term "evolution" implicitly refers to super-long time frames.
Ummm, no it doesn't. Fruit flies, bateria, viruses and a host of other living things evlove on timescales that are observable by humans in near real-time. Taco Cowboy better stick to something other than commenting on biological processes that he knows little about.
Discussion?
Evolution is easy to falsify. Apply pressure and see if the species DOES NOT adapt to the pressure.
If you believe that genes exist, then you believe in evolution, it's that simple. And if you don't believe that genes exist, then you might as well not believe in medicine either, or believe that cell phones exist, because it's all the same science.
At this point, evolution isn't really falsifiable. But not because of it not being a valid theory (the theory is that if you have things breeding, and their genetic makeup changing as they breed, then any selection at all will cause changes over time), instead, it's simply because of the huge body of evidence - we have watched many species evolve at this point, and hence know without a shadow of a doubt that it does happen.
This is why it's so ridiculous for religious nuts to argue against evolution.
What's not trivially observable though is the idea that all of us, and all animals evolved from some origin of life. There's some pretty compelling evidence that that did happen (see the fossil record for example), but there are holes in the explanation that still need to be understood. I'm amazed that any religious person doesn't believe (if they must believe that god put us here) that god put some life here, and it subsequently evolved into its current state, given that we can see the evolution happening right in front of our eyes.
Simply if change doesn't occur then there is no evolution. Logic 001 (Remedial).
Exactly, just like any force.
If it falls fast, gravity.
If it falls slowly, like a leaf, gravity.
If it happens naturally due to falling, gravity.
If it happens without falling (ie airplanes), gravity.
So basically, if an object occurs anywhere near a planet, it's "gravity".
I'd really like to see a falsifiable rendering of "gravity". It would make discussion so much easier.
Now about those Moon landings, would you need some falsifiable evidence there too?
my cell phone is made of DNA and requires a doctor!!
If it falls to the ground quickly, it's gravity.
If it drifts to the ground slowly, it's gravity.
If it falls because someone pushes it off a cliff, it's gravity.
If it just slowly slides down a slope without anyone touching it, it's gravity.
So, basically, if downward motion occurs in there somewhere, it's gravity.
I'd really like to see a falsifiable rendering of "gravity". It would make discussion so much easier.
Until the, TEACH THE CONTROVERSY!
Sometimes organisms adapt to selection pressure, sometimes they do not. Sometimes they go extinct.
As for your assertion about genes, depends on what specifically is scoped by "evolution", which was really my point. I certainly can believe in genes and also believe that the mainline factors proposed are causally exhaustive, because that assumption, often driven by worldview bias, is both untestable and unfalsifiable.
It the difference between necessary but not sufficient, and necessary and sufficient. It's the latter I'm trying to get a falsifiable notion of.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Some people get caught up in the difference between the mechanics of evolution and the theory regarding how life became so diverse over time.
I'm not opposed to believing one and disbelieving the other in regards to what is the truth (evidence notwithstanding). i.e. "Genes and exist and evolution works, but that's not necessarily how we got from monkeys to us, or from amoeba to monkeys."
So we have smart people who can write papers that sound intelligent.
This is not evolution. This is the same argument that Jean-Baptiste Lamarck put forward for inheritance of acquired characteristics.
I agree the lizards are hanging out higher in the trees(nice thing about the brain), the bigger feet thing is just because they use their feet differently.
If there is real evolution, then we will end up with a new species. This is just adaption on a human scale(maybe). Lets see if in 10k years if these lizards
can mate with their other relatives and produce viable offspring.
Fine, bring on the "redundant" mods.
jeffb (2.718), typing more slowly than Anonymous Cowards since 2008 or so...
I don't think "falsifiable" means that *will* find any contrary evidence, just that you have to be able to *look* for it!
What about evolution prevents you from *looking* for any contrary evidence? I'm sure plenty of people have. Guess they didn't find any.
Mostly random stuff.
Your assumption is that "the evidence" is only open to one interpretation. Like the Interpretations of QM, that is not the case here.
If you could give me a generalized description of how you would methodologically know that an organism we -know- is designed, because we did it ourselves, if you had not read the news saying we did it and found rather partial remains, then you'd have a strong argument. Rather, though, you are assuming your conclusion by fiat. You have no actual differentiating evidence between the two cases.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
The "ring species" are basically speciation events in progress. All it takes is one catastrophe, a disease or volcanic eruption or an invasive predator species introduction, that interrupts one of the breeding in one of the islands, and there will be two species. And this is what most anti-evolution folks don't get. No, a chimpanzee did not suddenly gave birth to a human. Population of the ancestor species split into two, and one evolved to become human and the other became chimpanzee. And the split need not be geographic. Changes in mate preferences, internal body temperature, food preferences, etc can lead to breeding isolation that could lead to speciation.
Still it is nice to see evidence being presented in a species much higher than mosquitoes.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"Your assumption is that "the evidence" is only open to one interpretation. "
And you're assuming there should be more than one interpretation. Why is that better?
Seems like you're talking about abiogenesis vs life appearing from a magic wand, by fiat as it were.
Mostly random stuff.
And if we find a case where it doesn't behave that way, the current model is falsified. That's why theories of what gravity is and how it works is falsifiable, and therefore science.
What is the case in which you would -not- call a biological change "evolution", and how is that different from the mere criteria for "reproduction"?
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
We have not causal explanation for abiogenesis at this point. It is, scientifically, not understood better than "magic", the only difference being your self-contradictory characterization.
"Fiat", fine. Now you just have to point out an actual issue with that, rather than just trying to linguistically smear what you can't refute.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Well, yeah, that'd work.
That's what "evolutionary pressure" is in the real world.
Whoever I am is still waiting for these rushed reports of everything being evolution to include some animal evolving a feature which it didn't already have.
It's kind of disingenuous to act like the an entire codebase is being refactored and made more flexible when the only actual development to be observed is modifications to two or three parameters in the configuration file...
Sometimes organisms adapt to selection pressure, sometimes they do not. Sometimes they go extinct.
Some going extinct is adaptation. The remaining life forms on the planet are more adapted to the situation. That's how evolution works.
No, falsifiability means you could at least envision a test by which the theory would fail.
Given the scope of what is defined as "evolution", as I said every apparently-possible scenario involving reproduction, what would you propose that test to be?
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
I'd really like to see a falsifiable rendering of "evolution". It would make discussion so much easier.
That must be the basic problem with physics too. The universe we live in is NOT falsifiable; therefore physics can never come up with a valid scientific theory that us internally consistent and also completely covers everything.
;-)
Is that the philosophy of science in a nutshell? Enquiring minds want to know
"And if we find a case where it doesn't behave that way,"
And if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle. We haven't found any, so we moved on. Why can't you?
"What is the case in which you would -not- call a biological change "evolution""
Biological change in what? An entire species, an individual, before he reproduces, after? What? Describe your experiment a bit better.
Mostly random stuff.
yes, the finches are still finches and the lizards are still lizards. yet this is generally extrapolated to the extreme position that humans were green slime, then monkeys, etc. It is kinda like starting your argument with "we know the warming has to be CO2"
Bennett Hasselton Has undergone high speed evolution
So, you choose to define it in a way even more unfalsifiable.
Great for you, I guess, but that doesn't really address the question.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
" It is, scientifically, not understood better than "magic""
Considering that magic uses a lot of science to make its tricks work, that's pretty funny.
So are you talking about abiogenesis or evolution?
Mostly random stuff.
....Now about those Moon landings, would you need some falsifiable evidence there too?
Does a link to a Faux News web site count? ;-)
If you could give me a generalized description of how you would methodologically know that an organism we -know- is designed
That's the point though, we know it's not designed. We can sit there and observe how a new organism is produced from the parents. We can sit there and observe how this produces new things for natural selection to test, and we can set there and observe that the less successful ones don't get to breed. Finally we can sit there and observe that in not breeding their genes become less likely to be present in the following generations, and that the following generations develop general traits based on the above.
All of the above is trivially observable in the modern world. To deny it is like denying that the sun exists because "there might be other explanations for why there's lots of light and heat coming from the sky".
Maybe you don't understand the word: Evolution. Let me scope it out here for you.
You said that you believe in genes. Let's assume that you believe in the reproductive process too. When the genes of two parents combine you get all sorts of possible outcomes for the genetic result, or child. This child is then a combination of parental traits and yet not the mother nor the father. The child is new. We have also witnessed random mutation. You with me so far?
Now let's read the biological definition of the word Evolution:
"Evolution is the change in the inherited characteristics of biological populations over successive generations."
In conclusion:
If you believe that you are different than your parents then you believe in evolution. If evolution did not occur then you would be an identical twin of your father or mother.
No, again, not unfalsifiable. If you apply pressure and they don't adapt, then you falsified evolution. It just happens to be really hard to falsify, because it's actually happening, and we can observe it.
Some going extinct is adaptation
No. Let me recommend this book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Well, yeah, my kind of "magic" would use a lot of science as well, specifically only requiring that on a quantum level, "random" (which is a non-explanation causally anyway) isn't entirely "random".
Consider it a potential universal back-door to all of reality, as a good engineer would naturally install up-front.
As for what I'm talking about, I'm talking about what you are referring to when you refer to it. Redirection doesn't seem to accomplish much here.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
However... Not all dogs are still wolves. That is, there are actually now sufficiently large differences between dog breeds that they can't interbreed, and hence could reasonably be classified as different species.
Similarly, these lizards are likely to become a new species too, because by living high up in the trees, they'll not come into contact with their less grippy cousins, and hence are likely to evolve in entirely incompatible ways.
You are claiming that all organisms will adapt under selection pressure, under testable timeframes?
This is absolutely false.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Evolution happens faster than we expected....specifically in 20 generations, toe pads can become X times larger
That is completely falsifiable.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"No, falsifiability means you could at least envision a test by which the theory would fail."
Yeah, how is that different from " that you have to be able to *look* for it!"
Look and envision is pretty much the same thing.
Mostly random stuff.
And that being falsifiable has nothing to do with evolution being falsifiable.
Evolution is the theory that such selection mechanisms explain -all- variation, over -all- biological history.
"Often, therefore always"?
Your "test" is akin to saying all animals have two legs, looking at the guy next to you, and considering your theory unfalsified.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
The change occurred at an astonishing pace: Within a few months, native lizards had begun shifting to higher perches, and over the course of 15 years and 20 generations, their toe pads had become larger, with more sticky scales on their feet.
This language confuses most non scientists and those not used to reading about evolution. The lizards did not convene a Supreme Soviet of Lizards and pass a resolution to shift to higher perches. The did not look at the evidence, pros and cons and decide, "yeah! sticky scales on the feet are a good idea. But Lizz Ard patented it. The survival of the species depends on it. So let us use eminent domain and make it public domain". Some lizards naturally like perching higher and other prefers perching lower and most do exactly what their parents did. The ones who liked higher perches survived more than the others, and their percentage in the population rose. Eventually only those who perched higher would be left alive.
The inuit are able to eat fried whale meat fried in blubber nonchalantly because those who could not handle that much cholesterol died out ages ago. Lactose intolerant toddlers died out en mass some 8000 years ago in western europe. That is why humans should try to stick their "ethnic ancestor" foods. [begin personal rant] Indian Indians (not American Indians) went through so many cycles of feast and famine. Only those who had the ability store fat in the times of plenty survived the lean times. When they get F-1 visa, then green card then citizenship and melt into the melting pot guzzling beer, eating pizza, their genomes are still gearing up for the next famine that could be just round the corner. Heart disease and diabetes is rampant among the immigrants from historically impoverished ethnic groups are very very susceptible to diseases of the plenty. Your body evolved to eat what your grandpa and his grandpa ate. If they eschewed bacon, stay clear of bacon. If they ate rice and lentils and ate samosa and jamoons only on festival feasts, you would do well to do the same. Stop ordering dessert in every meal and pigging out in the 9$ lunch buffet with unlimited mango lassi at India Palace. [end rant]
It is fascinating to see it from evolutionary perspective. But evolution has been used by every one with a perverse agenda to justify their ulterior motives most scientists steer well clear of explaining it in simple terms. They hide it in obscurantist journal papers with very dry commentary.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
No, again, not unfalsifiable. If you apply pressure and they don't adapt, then you falsified evolution.
No, that's absolutely incorrect. Evolution, as commonly understood, is the result of a RANDOM genetic process. Whether an appropriate adaptation will arise given selection pressure is always a matter of chance, and any given instance of a species NOT adapting isn't much evidence of anything really. By that logic, we could argue that all of the species currently going extinct due to manmade changes in environment etc. have somehow disproved evolution... which is obviously not true.
The only way to falsify it would be to a systematic study comparing pressure placed on a variety of different organisms in a variety of different circumstances -- and if you saw no adaptations (or the ones you could see could be explained by other mechanisms), THEN you might potentially falsify evolution.
Back to school you go.
You got part of it - genetic (or epigentic, it really doesn't make a difference to the theory) variation.
And.
Selection. You need that part. Otherwise you just have a whole bunch of very slightly different critters wandering around the petri dish. Don't forget selection.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Evolution is not evolution because it happens quickly, slowly, with pressure, nor without pressure.
Evolution is evolution because the end result is significant change in the genotype and phenotype of a species, without direct genetic tampering (the chimeras we cook up in a lab don't count).
This change is usually caused by natural selection, which is a response to selective pressure, so those elements are part of the model.
Want to falsify it? Apply selective pressure to a species over several generations, and demonstrate a complete lack of change in the genotype or phenotype. Make sure the experiment is a good one however (no attempting to make bricks evolve, and no using selective pressure that wipes them all out in the first generation, or that isn't actually selective, etc.).
It's not quite that simple, but you could probably simplify it to a few basic steps, like:
Is there a coding mechanism for heredity? - Yes, the genetic code.
Is there a way to generate new code? - Yes, mutation.
Does that code allow unlimited blending? - No, if it did the two sexes would completely blur together, among many other lesser examples.
Is there selection for fitness? - Yes, not everything gets to reproduce as much as it attempts to, and at least some of that is attributable to being "unfit".
Basically, people can point to examples where limited blurring may occur, or being taken out of the gene pool may have nothing to do with fitness (all dinosaurs are equally unfit to survive a 5 mile wide asteroid strike), or many other such factors, but they aren't really offering any effective criticism of evolution unless they want to claim things like selection or mutation never happen.
This is also why what Darwin did was science. His publication made several testable predictions - that there would be a genetic code, that the code could be altered on occasion, and that it would not allow unlimited blending of traits.
Who is John Cabal?
Evolution does not require "genes". Any biological or physical or even behavioral feature that allows information to be transferred to other members of the species, especially to new members of the species, can support evolutionary pressures. We can see it in social and cultural evolution as well as biological evolution, and they also in co-dependent ways. A great deal of child-rearing is learned behavior in more neurologically complex species.
I don't know why the researchers were so surprised by this. If the genetic variation already exists within the population under selective pressure, then the "evolution" measured by phenotypical changes in the population can take place literally overnight. Kill every human under 6'4" and the population will be 6'4" from then on, especially if you don't return to the set of selective pressures that had encouraged the shorter average. Sure there will be a lot of shorter individuals being born at first, but they'll fall to the same new selective pressure that killed the initial short cohort. This is exactly how the famous peppered moth evolution event happened so quickly; it wasn't anything unusual about the moth species in question, just a quick change in the suitability of existing genes. Evolution is only slow when the locally optimal genes don't exist in the population, and need to arise by mutation or genetic flow, or when an immediate optimum has room for genetic fine tuning, so to speak. TFA isn't really an example of evolution per se, it's an example of natural selection--a closely related concept in that they almost always co-occur, but it is not the same thing. We've changed the equilibrium frequencies of various genes, but as far as we know there are no new genes in this population. (And as far as that goes, it's a decent illustration of the importance of genetic diversity in a population: this population would be extirpated if it didn't have the genes responsible for these behavior and phenotype changes.)
How long is one human generation?
Just find an inertial object that doesn't fall.
No. Physics is real and math is abstract. It often provides close approximations of physical reality but it is not reality itself except in the sense that it is neurons firing in brains.
Cell phones aren't made of actual cells, buddy.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Some people say chugging a big frosty glass of bleach is good for you! others disagree! TEACH THE CONTROVERSY!
The organism will ALWAYS adapt, it is simple logic. If pressure is placed on an organism, then less of the ones that carry genes susceptible to that trait will reproduce, because they will die. Ones that carry genes that help with that trait, will reproduce more. This WILL cause adaptation over time. And random mutation will be constantly introducing new genes into the mix.
There is absolutely no question on if pressure will cause a species to adapt. The only question is if the adaptation will happen at a pace fast enough to save it. If the entire world was covered in mustard gas tomorrow, humanity would be wiped out. That doesn't mean there would not be a very small percentage of people who would survive. They just would not be enough to continue the species because they would probably end up not reproducing fast enough to keep up with other pressures.
The subject is not whether evolution is falsifiable. The story is about a particular instance of evolution. If you can't keep up with the topic, ltr.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Why can't you?
Because I'm in favor of actual science, rather than "no clear counterexamples found yet, therefore forever proven".
Biological change in what? An entire species, an individual, before he reproduces, after? What? Describe your experiment a bit better.
You are just restating my question. Give me the criteria for what you consider "evolution", and your test/experiment for that, by which it could in theory be falsified.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Pardon, but your kind of magic is booga-booga. You're attempting to sound scientific but what you're really doing is disguising the notion that your agency is a supernatural entity. Hence the air-quotes around random. Hence booga-booga.
The important part is that we are NOT seeing such rapid changes amongst the PREDATOR population. So this is not unusual at all.
The lizards that are not sticky enough to climb out of reach of the predators are the lizards that get eaten by the predators.
Nice try.
A weird attempt at dodging and/or censorship, but I'm sure that you've been on Slashdot long enough to know that posting only within the narrow set of responses you imagine are framed by the story, is almost never the case here.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Evolution comes from Latin, as I researched now, with a meaning akin to "turning out".
In my language, it has a close sense to what an artistic roller skater does: moving but at the same time presenting interesting poses and pirouettes.
The word even does not need to imply "improvement". "The patient evolved to passing" is a classical expression over here. It seems to be the case in English,too, but that's not my native language.
> So, basically, if reproduction occurs in there somewhere, it's evolution.
Evolution, as a theory, requires reproduction -- because organisms cannot change themselves beyond a certain point (e.g. I cannot add an inch to my height), so we have to wait to offspring that is different by mutation -- and natural selection -- which acts like a natural favoring of part of the offspring, meaning it will be able to survive or reproduce.
> I'd really like to see a falsifiable rendering of "evolution". It would make discussion so much easier.
You get science. Looking for cases where a theory would fail is a good way to present flaws in it. Unfortunately, it seems evolution is here to stay.
From other post of yours> It the difference between necessary but not sufficient, and necessary and sufficient. It's the latter I'm trying to get a falsifiable notion of.
You might have to analyze "change" (mutation) before evolution. Mutations, I am not an expert in that by far", are abundant. We have a lot of meaningless mutations which, come the right setting, can become vital -- like those of malformed blood cells which showed to be protective against malaria. IOW, a bad mutation could save our lives...
Can change be insufficient? Yes, if a species cannot mutate fast enough -- or if it cannot change fast enough to overcome a natural selection challenge. But even when extinction happens, evolution was at play.
Apply pressure and see if the species DOES NOT adapt to the pressure.
That does not prove evolution by natural selection. Lamarkism would be an alternative explanation. Darwinian evolution not only predicts that species will evolve, put predicts a specific mechanism: The better adapted individuals reproduce more than the less adapted.
Most evolution is believed to be Darwinian, but there are Lamarckian adaptions such as epigenetic inheritance. Life is complicated.
The organism will ALWAYS adapt, it is simple logic.
Well, I'm glad you find it to be "simple logic", particularly since your claim is simply verifiably false.
If there is no genetic pathway to characteristics that will allow it to survive in the environment creating selection pressure, the organisms will simply all die. Maybe "not adapting = adapting" to you, but the question at hand is what set of characteristics we are considering "evolution" and a test for that.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
I don't think the modern synthesis makes the claim that this process needs to be successful on a species basis, or needs to "save" or preserve certain populations or not in order to be true, which sounds like what you're proposing. Really all evolution claims is that (1) organisms change through generations, (2) these changes are subject to challenges from the environment and competition, and (3) changes that increase survivability in the face of these challenges will be conserved -- the changes are conserved, not the organisms themselves, the population or the species; these may all be lost in the process. The idea that this process must be "successful" or produce "better" or "more adapted" beings is not a necessary part of the synthesis.
I think the issue is you're seeing it teleologically. Wether something is "adapted" or not is to a large extent subjective, and in the context of evolution and natural history it's basically tautological. Evolution says, if it's alive, it's "adapted."
I'm not sure the claim that evolution is "causally exhaustive" is true, or even necessary in order to accept that evolution happens. Also I'm not sure where all this emphasis on "falsifiablity" comes from, Karl Popper is by no means considered the "exhaustive" authority on the philosophy of science. We can roll back and establish the evolution is a completely valid scientific concept, say, from a Baconian perspective, due to its practical insight and applicability.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Darwin himself was careful to specify what he was arguing for - His first book was, after all "On the Origin of Species", not "On the Origin of Life". His theory is about how existing life divides into distinct groups, and (in a modern version of his phrasings), why species are 'distinguishabe sets with fuzzy boundries', and doesn't really touch on where the first life forms came from, one way or another. We could start from some assumed single primative life form, or imagine a world where there was somehow only one very complex life form, say existing as millions of identical clones, and speciation would still occur, and the mix of species, once formed, would still change over time, according to the theory.
Darwin made predictions which were testable, and could have been falsified - for just one, there's a prediction that the genetic code (unknown at the time), wouldn't allow unlimited blending of traits (Mendel published the first proof of this as a general fact, and Crick and Watson's work in actually discovering the code confirmed it was the sort of coding that didn't allow blendable traits). One problem I see with the "anti-evolutionists", is they keep talking like 'testability' means we have to have two copies of Earth and run the great experiment twice, or there's no testability at all, when a little real familiarity with Darwin's work reveals lots of testable predictions of the same sorts we see in many other works of science. It's sort of like how early critics of Special Relativity dismissed the 1919 solar eclipse test as not sufficient by itself, and people who wanted to reject Relativity on any and all grounds turned that into its not being a test at all in popular discussions. I suspect there's real debate needed about just what the limits of the Theory of Evolution's predictions are, but those debates need to be among people who know what the theory does or doesn't predict, what testability itself means, and other fundamental ideas.
Who is John Cabal?
Just to show how bad your logic is, note that the summary didn't even posit a mechanism for the evolution.
That is, the hypothesis is that the lizards legs grow longer under pressure. If God himself decided to help the lizards out by giving them longer legs, then it is still irrelevant to the hypothesis.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"no clear counterexamples found yet, therefore forever proven".
I don't think anyone really claims that.
Mostly random stuff.
If you can prove evolution wrong, then there is a Nobel prize, fame, and fortune in it for you. If you can prove it is a paradox, unprovable or disprovable, and of no predictive quality, then you can have the same. We shall eagerly await your dissertation.
We see this on the farm. Nature guides the hand of evolution in the wild through selective adaptive pressures. On the farm it is the hand of man, sometimes, but the same thing. We use selective pressure to improve our livestock. In just the past slightly more than a decade we have made significant evolutionary changes to our pigs. They're a particularly nice animal to work with for genetic selection because they reproduce fast (up to 3 litters a year) with very large litters (8 to 21 piglets per litter) with rapid growth (6 months to market, 9 months to breed) so we can turn over generations quickly.
And what would we "look" for if any and all forms of change are "evolution"?
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Glad you're taking it.
Then you are saying all change is evolution, and all reproduction entails genetic change, so "evolution" as you've rendered it is functionally equivalent to "reproduction".
Nothing could falsify evolution that doesn't equivalently falsify simple reproduction. Not quite what I'm looking for.
Let me be clear, I am not against evolutionary processes being a very significant factor in genetic change, I am after a falsifiable definition of it. And the typical usage of "evolution can be anything, just make sure to insist there's no God" just isn't one.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Thanks for the silly characterization. Hopefully you'll learn the difference between that and science and actual arguments someday.
Okay, explain how "random" is not "booga-booga", then.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
This is why it's so ridiculous for religious nuts to argue against evolution.
Perhaps because people like you refer to them as "nuts" and dismiss their views as "ridiculous", when you clearly don't even understand what their views are. Christian (and Muslim) fundamentalists do not deny that evolution occurs. There is clear and obvious evidence that it does, and they accept that. What they do NOT accept is that evolution can lead to the emergence of new species, and (more importantly) is the sole explanation for the existence of humans. There is strong evidence that they are wrong, but there is not any absolute proof. There is fossil evidence, and genetic evidence, for "macro-evolution", but we have never actually observed the emergence of a new species except in the case of bacteria, and even in that case it was due to artificial human-applied selective pressure. There is nothing that we know "beyond the shadow of a doubt". You don't convince people that appeal to absolutes by appealing to them yourself. There is at least a shadow of a doubt that the Sun will come up tomorrow morning.
evolution is biology.
biology is chemistry.
chemistry is physics.
physics is math.
Bennett Haselton.
Some people get caught up in the difference between the mechanics of evolution and the theory regarding how life became so diverse over time.
That's the equivalent to the scuffle between the materialist and the others, and the implications it has to the ideas about human nature and how human mind works. For the materialist, the theory follows directly from the mechanism as the complex results are produced from the simple, interacting rules and events.
No, you absolutely don't know it's not designed, and you have given no reason even to think so, other than there's reproduction and survival involved, which you somehow take as definitive on the matter.
Again, I can give you two animals, one which absolutely does have design as an explanation of its characteristics (say, fluorescent cats or spider-silk producing cows), unarguably, and one which may or may not, say a common farm animal. How, outside of the fact you happened to read about genetic engineers designing them, would you know one is designed and one is explained wholly by adaptation, other than sheer presumption of what you cannot in any way observe? You have DNA of the two animals. Tell me how, in the general case, you would know that one is designed, and the other is not, other than because it happened very recently and is common knowledge, a method that is -not- available to you with regard to the DNA of common animals. The issue here for you is that you can no longer just blankly assert "nothing is designed", because science has made that directly factually false by the fact we're doing it.
Did something, at some point in those billions of unobservable years, modify genes by means much like we do today? You have no idea. You have no possible way to have any idea.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
In Biology, there's the concept of Stochastic Mutation. It's most commonly attributed to viruses, for example HIV is a known stochastic mutator. In these cases, some (not all, just some), types of cell mutations occur, where there's no selection pressure - the virus changes its protein coat in one of several ways (4 for HIV), and type B is just as likely to mutate back to type A or into Type C or D, as to stick where its at. In equilibrium, none of the protein coats is preferred by natural selection, and there's no pressure for one type to come to dominate. HIV also undergoes non-stochastic mutations, just like (we think) everything else with a genetic code does, and stochastic mutation has been studied for many other viruses and probably happens in more complex species.
That's the point - evolution is essentially a two part theory, a synthesis of Mendel's genetics including mutation, and Darwin's natural selection. Cases where all the organisms subject to selection pressure are identical, are not evolution*, and cases where the organisms are not identical but there's no selection pressure applied are not evolution either, and so there really are at least two categories of biological change which are not evolutionary. It's just that 'cases where there's no selection pressure' pretty much discribes some sort of paradise where nothing dies or is limited in how often it reproduces, so there are not a whole lot of known examples of that, especially over a long term, and it would be pretty expensive to create such an environment over a short term.
* If you had some organisms, and they have 0% chance of mutating in the particular way that responds to that particular selection pressure, then you could say that they are identical in that respect. Imagine for example a bunch of Leopards suddenly introduced to an environment where there are abundant fish in deep subsurface pools which can only be reached through narrow fissures. There's really no selection pressure sufficient for those Leopards to start adapting into creatures that can squeeze through six inch wide cracks and use their gills to dive deep enough to catch those tasty fish. All the Leopards are effectively identical, in that they are identically unsuited to take advantage of the new factor in their environment, tasty deep dwelling cave fish. However, I get a feeling you would reject generalizing that sort of example into one of the cases such as you are asking for, so let's just stick to Stochastic Mutation
Who is John Cabal?
> You have no actual differentiating evidence between the two cases.
Which two cases?
Right off the bat, besides the traditional theory of evolution and intelligent design, I can envision a third way: evolution occurring because that's the way God wants it to be. And that's excluding other possible interpretations (from Buddhists, to cite a single example).
There are not just two views on what happened, but a palette of them.
Regarding provability, all we do at one point is infer. Unless you believe in a religious teaching (from the many religions that exist). But then again, it cannot be proved, it's an act of Faith -- either you have it or not... you don't discuss Faith.
Similarly, until proved or disproved, someone can only connect the dots and also believe to have done the right inference.
We keep getting partial evidence to connect the dots all the time. At one point, the amount of lines connect becomes so convincing, it's hard to believe that is not the way it happened.
Regarding differentiating between a natural occurring organism versus a designed one, I _think_ we could suspect by doing a correlation between known lab techniques and what we found, but it really doesn't make a proof. Recently, someone discovered naturally occurring gears in an insect -- a sure sign of something being designed by man... and yet there's no mention anywhere of anyone being able or having done that. I guess a serial part number would make a strong evidence. Or a copyright notice, readable directly on the organism.
But it is certainly true. If a species have a long generation cycle, then you must just wait long enough. You can make an experiment that spans 200 years or more.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Toss a coin. Random side comes up. No booga-booga involved.
This statement does not reflect the broad diversity of doctrine on this issue, beliefs run the gamut from theistic evolution thought intelligent design to young-Eartherism.
And given that much of their arguments center on metaphysics and the nature of proof, there never will be.
I'm generally a lot less concerned with epistemological certainty than "What are you going to teach the kids in school?", and does this thing respect freedom of conscience and critical thinking, or simply kowtows to politics, mysticism and dilettante pseudoscience, in the interests of "fairness" and "sensitivity to all worldviews."
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Well, to clarify a few points...
I am in absolute agreement than "evolution happens". I am in disagreement with the untestable assertion of "only evolution happens", which is the only form of the assertion most people of a certain worldview, particularly, say, fans of Dawkins, care about. They'll happily destroy valid science and the understanding of it as long as they can hope they are damaging religion in some way by doing so.
Falsifiability, when possible, is a very valuable attribute of any scientific theory, as I think is pretty-much universally agreed. I would also agree with you that it isn't always -essential-, and in fact many inferential models that aren't in themselves falsifiable are valuable (e.g. the current state of QM, some models of astrophysics, inference from non-repeatable historical events, etc.).
So, if the answer here is "evolution isn't falsifiable", that's a perfectly fine conclusion to me. I just find that equivocations of "evolution" and issues of falsifiability are presented in a way that overstates a particular notion of "evolution's" epistemological status beyond what is warranted. And I'm looking for clarification for myself that there isn't a strong counterargument to this position, which your response has rather strengthened my conclusion on.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Join me in class, won't you?
You don't need that part. Luckily you don't have to satisfy every definition of a word at the same time. English would be impossible if that were true.
Selection is outside of the scope I gave you and for good reason.
I am speaking of biological evolution with no respect to behavioral science.
It is my opinion that behavioral science is bullshit and sexual selection is arbitrary. You didn't specify what kind of selection, either. There are countless different types of selection and factors that influence which animals mate and which ones do not.
The bottom line is that it doesn't matter. Look at the biological definition of the word. Every child satisfies the definition. It doesn't matter who the parents are or why.
Genetic science didn't exist when Darwin wrote his theory so don't act like it is the only source material on the subject. Many scientific theories have changed in the last 100 years. If you still function on outdated teachings then it is you who needs to return to school to learn about new developments.
So where are the dinosaurs? Why didn't they evolve and instead went extint? How about all the other species that have gone extint?
If we go by your standards, we have proven evolution doesn't exist.
No a random side does not come up. The outcome is totally determined by the initial conditions and the physics involved in he coin toss.
That's pseudo-random, which is the reality of most cases of apparent "randomness" we observe.
If you're going to use it as a core component of a causal -explanation-, though, much more detail is warranted.
What are the causal factors that determine a particular result of the "random" mutations, or is it in fact not random?
"Random" is not an explanation. "Random" is a placeholder-word for an absence of an explanation.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
There might be no direct evidence for absence of design, but if it is designed, I suggest we fire the designer. The blood cells on top of human retina and the blind spot in the eye are one example of really stupid design decision.
What's so hard to fathom about the simple fact that many small changes add up to big changes, and thus different species ?
Yes, we can sit there and observe how a new organism is produced from the parents. We can sit there and observe how this produces new things for natural selection to test, and we can set there and observe that the less successful ones don't get to breed. And yes, we can sit there and observe that in not breeding their genes become less likely to be present in the following generations, and that the following generations develop general traits based on the above.
However, none of that is evidence that it is not designed.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Consider dogs (all breeds derived from wolves several thousand years ago) and foxes http://cbsu.tc.cornell.edu/ccgr/behaviour/Index.htm the genetic basis has been studied and similar studies have been done on other domestic animals. The chicken http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junglefowl This type of "evolution" is really just exploitation of existing genetic variation within a species.
The thing about falsifiability in scientific theories is that it doesn't appear until somebody comes up with an alternate theory. And there just aren't a lot of good alternative theories to Evolution.
As far as I can tell there've been three theories as to why species exist/change/etc.
1) God made them that way. This was proven inadequate by the demise of the Dodo bird (after all, if God specifically made Dodo birds because he liked Dodo birds, why would he let us kill them all?), and was really on it's last legs when Darwin and Wallace published. The fact we've seen new species appear since then, and other species change their physical traits and behavior quite dramatically, are just more nails in the coffin.
2) Animals change themselves to be better adapted to their environment, and pass those traits onto their offspring. This is called Lamarckism, or Lamarckian evolution, and it fell out of favor because nobody could get lab animals to exercise themselves in such a way that their offspring changed. ie: his classic example was a giraffe striving to reach the highest branches, and exercising it's neck until it stretched, then it's little giraffe babies started out with longer necks, and they exercised their necks, etc. Geneticists are actually bringing some elements of this back because they have proven that some behavioral changes change the epigenetics of an organism, but even that's a lot more limited then Lemarck's original proposal.
3) Darwinian Evolution. This could be falsified if you found a bunch of fossils in the wrong layer and there wasn't some other explanation -- the classic "rabbits in the Devonian" scenario. It could be falsified if you could find some population of animals under selective pressure that wasn't changing. Say you have a colony of lab mice, 20% of them are white, and you selectively kill those white ones. Every generation should have fewer and fewer white mice.
Pseudo random is good enough.
Only GOD can act so quickly to act against our Sin. It is in Him that we can look for an answer, always.
Man Sins and goes against His work, and so He must protect His creations by giving them better adaptations. There is no debate about this. Science cannot explain it, because science is an imperfect creation of Man and a direct affront to His image.
Because I'm in favor of actual science
No you're not. You push intelligent design and other nonsense all the time. I'm sure you posted today just trolling for a chance to blather on about your made up woowoo crap. Again.
Interesting. So evolution says it is an optimal solution given the constraints of the environment and the timeframe required, but you'll discard the conclusions of evolution in favor of your personal subjective context-dropping opinion, if it allows you to disparage the designer.
Do note, though, that to address one particular notion of that designer (the issues and value of the question remaining even if we consider it, say, some extraterrestrial intelligence), it is in no way stated Earthly physical "perfection" was intended or necessary, and such a criterion becomes quickly meaningless when applied to the wider biological domain, say, by attempting to determine what the "perfect animal" would even be. It's an illogical notion that can be endlessly goalpost-shifted. But then you probably already knew that, and that's why you're making the statement.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Dogs giving birth to reptiles would be a start. The modern synthesis of genetics predicts that the phenotype of a child will be a combination of the parents, and many aspects of evolutionary theory and particularly sexual selection rely on this observation.
Something evolution implies is that it's path-dependent, so you might expect that traits emerge and are retained in some kind of chronological order, there's the old joke about Haldane looking for "bunny rabbits in the Cambrian epoch" that illustrates this. There seems to be certain prerequisites to get to mammals, for instance, such that you expect to see a long natural history of animals predating mammals, if you found a mammal with very little natural history, seemingly from nowhere and having completely distinct heritage from every other animal on Earth, that would probably be cited as something not evolutionary. We don't see this because most mammals on Earth can be morphologically or genetically related to each other, and no contrary explanation is compelling.
A population of animals that developed a set of persistent traits that had no purpose and seemed completely hazardous to survival would be hard to explain, evolution predicts that conserved traits contribute to survival, and the more they contribute, the more conserved they will be.
Evolution predicts that mutations are passed from one individual to the next through time, if we were to discover that this wasn't actually happening, and genetic inheritance was only an apparent phenomenon, then evolution wouldn't be an adequate explanation.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Evolution is easy to falsify. Apply pressure and see if the species DOES NOT adapt to the pressure
Ask the North American Bison how that pressure turned out. Or the Black Footed Ferret or Grey Wolf or countless other species pressured by Humans. These species and many more exist only because the Humans realized just how messed up what they were doing was. The Passenger Pigeon wasn't so lucky.
Nothing really new here.
Wolves, then seen as unreservedly undesirable, were eradicated from the Yellowstone region by the early 20th century. Between then and the end of the century, coyotes got larger and started hunting in packs, taking the ecological niche that wolves had filled and pursuing larger prey.
Then (1994) we reintroduced wolves to Yellowstone.
Even in the short time since, observed coyotes have gotten smaller and started acting less like apex predators and more like the sneak and scavengers that they are in other habitats where they're threatened by the apex predators.
That's a lot fewer generations than the reported adaptation of lizards in the islands.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Did something, at some point in those billions of unobservable years, modify genes by means much like we do today? You have no idea
Please describe a test that would falsify such a designer.
Good enough for a model where you're explicitly not identifying all the causal factors.
You can't, however, have it both ways.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
If the model is good enough, why complicate it ?
Anyone who's ever lived in a Victorian-era house can do better than this.
In the last hundred years, doors that were perfectly shaped to allow entry now have their upper limit at eye-height. You literally cannot walk into an old house without ducking all the time.
And that's just a couple of hundred years, a handful of generations.
Sure it might be something other than "environmental" factors, but it's telling you that species can change extraordinarily rapidly given the right conditions.
Who has made this assertion? Sure not TFA or really anyone else here. Or is this just your thing?
A lot of people including myself have given you examples of how it could be falsified, and you can only really get to the idea that it can't be by making categorically false assertions, such as "evolution demands that all change is evolution" or "evolution predicts that a species/a population/any arbitrary group of organisms will improve its fitness over time."
I mean if you don't like the evolutionary "worldview" with the blind watchmaker, the metaphysical naturalism, and the creeping utilitarian moral calculus, that's great. But not of that is required to accept the biological process as valid, nor does the biological process philosophically entail same.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
However, none of that is evidence that it is not designed.
Indeed. All we can say is that the theory doesn't need a designer. It doesn't need a painter or hair stylist either. Would you prefer if we rewrote the theory of evolution so that there was a hair stylist fixing the hair of the woolly mammoths ?
Ask me that again in 150 years.
In short, though...
Methodological Naturalism: Good
Philosophical Naturalism: Bad
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
What's so hard to fathom about the simple fact that many small changes add up to big changes, and thus different species ?
It is not hard to fathom. There is plenty of circumstantial evidence that it is true. If you are an atheist, there is no reasonable alternative explanation. But we have not actually observed it happening, and it is not something that should just be accepted as true "beyond the shadow of a doubt". Science doesn't work that way. Small changes can add up to big changes. But sometimes they don't. Something should not be accepted as absolutely unquestionably true just because it is "fathomable".
Perhaps because people like you refer to them as "nuts" and dismiss their views as "ridiculous", when you clearly don't even understand what their views are.
Their views are not hard to understand. It is hard to understand why they are held, failing the reality check (comparison with what we find in nature).
Christian (and Muslim) fundamentalists do not deny that evolution occurs. There is clear and obvious evidence that it does, and they accept that. What they do NOT accept is that evolution can lead to the emergence of new species, and (more importantly) is the sole explanation for the existence of humans. There is strong evidence that they are wrong,
There is none. Feel free to come up with it instead of remaining silent on it.
I'll give you evidence that what christian/muslim fundamentalist say is wrong: ERVs (endogenous retro virus). Viruses that end up in the DNA of germ lines are passed on from generation to generation. As it turns out, chimps have them at exactly the same location as we humans have. Chance of that occurring by chance: zero. Simple explanation? Animals procreate. You can learn more about it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
There are no black people and white people and yellow people because some god wanted a colourful species. We evolve, like any other animal. Those living in the Andes/Tibet have mutations helping them to deal with low oxygen levels, and they're not the only humans genetically adapted to the place they live.
There is tons of evidence for evolution, independent that scientists have it right (e.g. the fossil record says the same thing as the DNA record. Geological evidence shows the earth is old, so there is time for evolution).
There is fossil evidence, and genetic evidence, for "macro-evolution", but we have never actually observed the emergence of a new species except in the case of bacteria, and even in that case it was due to artificial human-applied selective pressure. There is nothing that we know "beyond the shadow of a doubt". You don't convince people that appeal to absolutes by appealing to them yourself. There is at least a shadow of a doubt that the Sun will come up tomorrow morning.
Yes, but then my bet is that the sun will be there tomorrow when I wake up, and those books are rubbish as you can find out by reading them (Koran: allah tells the sun when to rise? Earth is a rotating sphere: the sun rises at any moment, there is nothing the sun can do about that. No god would claim authorship of those books.
Bert
That is all.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Of course evolution doesn't find optimal solutions. It finds a solution, sometimes. It happens to have found quite a few solutions on earth. None of them are optimal, as evidenced by the fact that they're mostly all still capable of killing each other.
Of course it is - we can observe how the design came about, as described above. It was not via a designer, therefore it was not designed.
What we can't prove is whether or not some root creature was designed or not.
I would prefer that people don't claim conclusions that the evidence doesn't support. If P then Q says nothing about Q if P is false. We can find all the shaggy-haired, unkempt woolly mammoths we want. It doesn't prove that there wasn't a hair stylist.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Who has made this assertion? Sure not TFA or really anyone else here. Or is this just your thing?
It has become the default assertion, mainly because it is required for the worldview stance of atheism, particularly as popularized by Dawkins et al. The only problem is that this non-sequitur to what is absolutely needed by them on a personal level, is wholly invalid logically and scientifically.
Fortunately, I don't have that constraint. I'm happy to acknowledge the evolutionary formation of particular biological species and structures to the actual degree science has actually supported it for that actual species or structure. That's valid science. Any evolutionary stance is compatible with my worldview. Only one, overextended, stance is compatible with certain others'.
As for your statement that you've provided criteria for falsification of evolution, again, I don't see how you're providing anything more specific than falsification of reproduction occurring per se. But that's the core of my question. How are we defining "evolution"? If it's simply "any change that happens by any means over time" then that is not falsifiable, and such a notion is hardly explicable only in terms of evolution.
You seem to be switching focus here, in a way that doesn't change the question at hand. I'm not contending reproduction doesn't happen, I'm contending that you have no way of differentiating morphological changes and similarities as a result of "evolutionary" processes from those of explicit genetic design. You provably can't do it today by reference to the DNA alone, when we're doing it ourselves, and there is no logical reason for that fact to change as we extend into the past with less and less direct data. I'm not contending that any particular proposed evolutionary process is relevant, I'm contending that by the time we enumerate all of them, absolutely anything that can happen is equally "evolution". That isn't validating "evolution" by evidence (or scoping it usefully), it's validating it by construction of a definition that includes everything that could possibly occur, in a way that doesn't really differentiate it from any other possible model.
So, yeah, in short, I am not "against" evolution. I am against unscientific overextensions and apparent misuse of the term, both for the sake of science and my own worldview.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
I didn't know of the subway mosquitoes speciation event. The mosquito is known as "London underground mosquito", but is present in New York subway and sewers too. The relevant wikipedia page is not particularly well written but has interesting resources none the less:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Ok... when did Dawkins say this? Or Sam Harris? Or Darwin, for that matter? I must say I find this point of contention completely unproductive and querulous, you've beaten this strawman to death!
Do you? What exactly is "explicit genetic design"? Does such a thing exist? If it does, does this dichotomy represent the, uh, "causally exhaustive" set of options? Is the existence of design falsifiable? It seems like you probably should have lead with your belief that this exists, and then your justifications for it, because this is your actual positive claim, instead of just trying to bait everyone into discrediting an unrelated negative claim.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Fine, if you prefer, "relatively optimal".
The "absolute optimal" is the thing that doesn't biologically exist, that the person I was replying to is proposing to use as his baseline.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Evolution is the change of species over time. We know that species change over time and coined a word to describe that. There is so much evidence for evolution (physiological, genetic, archeological, direct observation, etc.) that the only possible reason to not believe it happens is that at some point you adopted a dogma that requires you to dismiss it. Scientifically it is one of the best proven theories of all time.
It is "falsifiable" in the only scientifically meaningful way in that it is possible to imagine experimental findings that would show that species haven't changed over time. The theory doesn't state that change happens to all species at any particular pace. It simply describes the actual findings from the world around us which is that life has changed over time. It is falsifiable, but isn't false.
The problem with the dogmatic worldview that requires its adherents to dismiss evolution is that it is simply wrong. Evolution does happen, has happened, is happening. The one and only reason to not accept this fact is dogma. All of the stupid "gotchas" creationists spout off are simply advertisements of their own ignorance of both the theory of evolution and the science that supports it.
So, yes, if change happens fast or slow or just because, it is evolution. Because all evolution means is change of species over time. That's the definition. If reproduction occurred over countless generations of all species throughout time and nothing ever changed, then that'd be your falsification.
Ok... when did Dawkins say this? Or Sam Harris? Or Darwin, for that matter? I must say I find this point of contention completely unproductive and querulous, you've beaten this strawman to death!
Every assertion any of them has ever made connecting evolution with an argument for atheism is saying this. There would be thousands of such statements.
What exactly is "explicit genetic design"?
Fluorescent cats, spider-silk producing cows, to name a couple of popularized examples. They cannot be explained by evolutionary processes. They are explained by design. We know this for a fact because we did the designing. At what date in the past would you assert this becomes no longer the case, and by what means limited to the DNA at hand would you determine this?
Is the existence of design falsifiable? It seems like you probably should have lead with your belief that this exists, and then your justifications for it, because this is your actual positive claim, instead of just trying to bait everyone into discrediting an unrelated negative claim.
Why? I lead with the question that was my question, which I'm asking to solidify my view of the science of the matter. As for "negative claims" (IMHO a dubious kind of semantic classification), I am, as stated, precisely against the "negative claim" that causal factors not enumerated by mainline evolutionary theory are not causal factors. All -scientifically valid- claims that address particular evidence for particular cases of evolutionary processes occurring, and are not the non-sequitur "often, therefore always" (again, required for Dawkins et al, not for me) I have no issue with.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Then surely producing one would be easy. How is a belief in atheism consistent with a belief that neo-Darwinian evolution is the only explanation for the origin of species? I don't think these are bound by logical inference.
Now, if you wanted to assert that "designed" non-Darwinian adaptations/morphologies/whatever exist, and that their existence can only be due to the intervention of a God, then yes, atheism and neo-Darwinism would be related, but you haven't actually said that. So frankly I don't know what your position is, other than "sometime people say wrong things about evolution (but I can't find the quote)."
Who says they can be? Who thinks they must be? Nobody here would claim these are evolutionary. Did Dawkins?
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Evolution happens because genes mutate. How often this happens depends on many things. How any mutation affects the organism also depends on many things. Applying environmental pressure merely serves to highlight the differences in survivability of any given mutation.
For example there is a mutation in a certain Italian population that changes the expression of the HDL molecule. This mutation makes the bearers more resistant to cholesterol related heart disease. Reference: wikipedia. In our current environment of low exercise and heavy eating, it isn't hard to see that this is a positive adaptation. The mutation that leads to people having 6 toes by contrast probably wouldn't be considered good or bad unless the environment changed and everyone with 6 toes was considered defective and removed from the population.
So, no, species don't suddenly change because of pressure. You can't alter how many mutations occur in a generation or how that mutation will affect the survivability of the organism. But you can observe that over many generations (short or long depending on the species), the changes that helped the organism survive its particular environment could lead to it producing more offspring. As each generation possessing this mutation continues to produce more offspring than those of the population who don't have it, the mutation becomes enriched. The heavier the environmental pressure, the more difference the enhanced survivability makes. The more difference, the greater enrichment of the mutation in the population until perhaps it becomes dominant or even complete.
Thus, the species has changed.
Had the mutation never happened, the species could have died out. Or it could have gone on without being that little bit better adapted to its environment. Or some other mutation could have happened with more or less dramatic effect.
All of this is explained in the theory of evolution. If you understand the theory, everything it describes and why, then you'd have no argument. It isn't invalidated by any given species failing to adapt. It isn't invalidated by "bad" mutations or slow change or fast change or no change (for any given genetic line over any given time period). It is well understood that mutations don't always (or even often) happen in a way that enhances survival, especially in a limited time frame (like dinosaurs needing to adapt to changes from a meteoroid impact overnight).
When you understand what is actually claimed and described by the theory of evolution, you'll quit complaining about it not being falsifiable and start accepting that it just isn't false. It could be disproven by any number of things, except none of those things are actually found. It really is just a description of what is found in the world around us. No magic, no extraordinary leaps of faith.
Genes can mutate. Those mutations can be neutral, better or worse for the survival (or sexual attractiveness) of the affected individual. Depending on how environmental pressure changes the breeding success of the individual, the change can die out, thrive, or just become a variation in the genome of the species. Enough of these mutations accumulating over time causes the species to change. THAT is evolution.
Funny. In the last 100 years, human height has gone from an average 4'11 to what it is now, 5'9"
This can be determined by visiting existing structures which have stood for some great deal of time - such as old west towns in Arizona and evaluating photos of people back then in contrast to existing structures and seeing the remarkable height difference.
Interestingly, this is not documented as such.
The same thing has been occurring across the board for different species.
Evolution is the change of species over time. This has been observed and really shouldn't be up for questioning. You could try to construct an argument that evolution hasn't been happening due to natural selection but rather due to the hand of your favorite causal figure. That would be hard to disprove but also would not be within the realm of science. There is no necessity for a causal figure. Natural selection applied over countless mutations in countless individuals over billions of years can account for what is observed.
If your worldview requires that you insert a causal figure then so be it. It can't be disproven that your causal figure isn't doing exactly what nature might have done.
But, most folks would say that if you want to posit a super-natural force, you want to be able to claim that it is necessary because what is observed isn't explainable without it.
Then surely producing one would be easy. How is a belief in atheism consistent with a belief that neo-Darwinian evolution is the only explanation for the origin of species? I don't think these are bound by logical inference.
... have a residue of feeling that Darwinian evolution isn't quite big enough to explain everything about life. All I can say as a biologist is that the feeling disappears progressively the more you read about and study what is known about life and evolution."
"An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."
--Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker
He seems to be binding them pretty directly here.
My position is that we know the influence of evolutionary processes directly to the degree we actually know them on the basis of evidence for their determination of the actual transition for which the evidence applies, and that saying more is contrary to science, for example, "all biological characteristics are due to evolutionary processes" or truly unscientific statements like "evolution is proven" are unscientific. Those statements are easily commonplace in direct statement and implication to justify a response to.
Who says they can be? Who thinks they must be? Nobody here would claim these are evolutionary. Did Dawkins?
Actually, I've directly had people here make precisely that torturous argument, that direct genetic manipulation is artificial selection. It didn't go well for them.
As for Dawkins:
"I suspect the reason is that most people
So yes, he here directly says Darwinian evolution is causally sufficient to explain everything about life. But, it obviously isn't, and the notion is directly contradicted by scientific fact, in particular our own genetic engineering. That it is false across the scope of the topic isn't in question. The only thing in question is if there's a time window in which we can say it isn't false. I invite you to give an end date for that time window. Seriously. Month and year will do.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
You don't prove the lack of something. You prove the existence of something. If you want to posit a designer when the observed facts don't require one, then it's on you to prove your claim.
No, evolution never says you end up with an optimal solution. Every change that happens is the result of totally random mutation. Sometimes that mutation makes the individual more suited to the environment, but never is it claimed that the optimal result has been or will be obtained.
However, in comparison, if you want to posit any kind of being with enough knowledge and power to control the genetics of millions of species, I'd expect something better than what could be explained by totally random mutation.
If your causal figure can't do any better than random mutation can, then what's the point? Why posit a causal figure who doesn't get a result that can't be arrived at without it?
Then what has proven it false? Or are you doing proof by declaration?
Learn to love Alaska
South Florida has an amazing invasion of exotic lizards of several species. They are thriving and increasing in number and variety. Iguanas are common place here and it is more than one type of iguana at that. We have moniror lizards as well as species that I do not know the name. One iguana that I am seeing has a bright orange head when small. Pythons are also getting really common and we have had one cable guy bitten by a green mamba. There are cobras caught on rare occasions as well.
It has become the default assertion, mainly because it is required for the worldview stance of atheism, particularly as popularized by Dawkins et al.
What, are you an anti-atheist atheist?
Learn to love Alaska
The mutations are the causal factors. The sources of many mutations are well known, displacement, reversal, etc. Now, if you're saying that something is controlling those mutations, have the guts to say it outright. Otherwise, provide "more detail". You seem to be trying very hard to sidestep ID as your controlling agent.
"at some point in those billions of unobservable years" Don't need those years, as we have watched current animals diversify without any such agency. It's up to you to provide proof that it was there, not us to prove your desires and conjectures weren't.
Mediterranean island lizards evolving gastric structures the original implanted lizards did not.
Even here, in both instances Dawkins is saying that evolution is sufficient, but just because something is sufficient doesn't mean that it's the only answer, or that we'd ever find something completely different. You're original contention was that people say "only evolution happens," and I asked for a quote that gave it as "the only explanation," neither of your quotes actually say this.
So you're not really saying anything about evolution, you're only beef is with how some people talk about evolution? It's just a rhetorical argument?
Hmm, I don't know, most people expect that when talking about this sort of thing we're only talking about natural occurrence. When you're talking about animal breeding or genetic engineering, we usually treat these as separate because they're not natural, we know at some point a person did it. If you wanted to propose some kind of non-evolutionary mechanism that didn't involve people, that would actually make your argument make sense, otherwise it seems completely semantic.
I mean, sure, non-evolutionary, non-artifical mechanisms are possible, but what exactly do you have in mind? I've asked this like three times now and you demur every time, I don't think you're being completely honest about your position. You clearly believe in intelligent design but refuse to say so, because you know you cannot mount an affirmative defense of it with evidence. So you snipe at other people's missteps and logical fallacies, and throw up smokescreens to confuse the actual points of contention, and hope to
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
we have not actually observed it happening
Um, wrong.
No, because we cannot determine whether natural selection is actually random, or purposeful. We assume it is random. But we cannot logically conclude that it is random from observations made under that assumption, because that is circular reasoning.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
What is the case in which you would -not- call a biological change "evolution", and how is that different from the mere criteria for "reproduction"?
To start with, any time the change was brought about by deliberate, external intervention. For example, Bt-expressing corn, or glyphosphate-resistant crops, are obvious examples of "intelligent design" in the literal, non-pseudoscientific sense. We know this because "we" (i.e. humans) made these modifications ourselves, by a known and reproducible mechanism. I would argue that conventional breeding isn't really "evolution" either, although it relies on more natural phenomena rather than direct genome manipulation.
The fact that these biological changes are genuinely intelligent design does not prove the general case, however, because we've only had the technology for direct genetic manipulation for a few decades, and only know about selective breeding for a few millennia. For other biological changes, we assume evolution, because the directly observed mechanisms by which evolution operates rely on processes that we know have been possible for hundreds of millions of years (if not billions). If you want us to start considering intelligent design, you need to demonstrate a mechanism that predates human civilization.
You're original contention was that people say "only evolution happens," and I asked for a quote that gave it as "the only explanation," neither of your quotes actually say this.
The requested quote was given. Dawkins says it is doubtful that atheism is logically tenable without Darwin.
So you're not really saying anything about evolution, you're only beef is with how some people talk about evolution? It's just a rhetorical argument?
It's an argument that in the interests of science, we need to make scientifically-valid statements. That includes valid definitions, valid scoping, and valid inferences.
If you wanted to propose some kind of non-evolutionary mechanism that didn't involve people, that would actually make your argument make sense, otherwise it seems completely semantic.
Well, no, it doesn't seems completely semantic, even to you. But sure.
1. A superlatively knowledgable and capable trans-dimensional being
2. Extraterrestrial life
Which are not exclusive possibilities. Both would be scientifically interesting, and the possibility of further scientific evidence should not be discounted a priori. I say further, because apparently-IC structures are evidence. When you bring up that they aren't "proof" or because there's an alternate scenario, they aren't evidence at all rather than in fact evidence for both, they will remain exactly the evidence they are.
I've asked this like three times now and you demur every time, I don't think you're being completely honest about your position.
I have stated my position many times. I'm an advocate of directed evolution, overlapping in content with "ID" as it is known and politically smeared. There is no "sniping" or "smokescreens" going on, I want a falsifiable working definition of "evolution", or agreement that it is not falsifiable. As I said at the outset, that's essential for clarity of consideration of it within a scientific context. The rest of the content of the thread has resulted from sniping at my question.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Much of that height difference is probably due to better diet and healthcare, and not evolution. For example, N. Koreans are noticeably shorter than S. Koreans due to diet, medical, etc. despite being recently separated.
Table-ized A.I.
But that doesn't rule out God incrementally fiddling with genes if there is change.
Table-ized A.I.
Can you construct a falsifiable hypothesis involving trans-dimensional beings, or ETs, or something else, and Earth's natural history? Or any hypothesis of any kind? What experiments would we run? What observations can we make? I'm not sure that this counterproposal is actually scientific. Just because it doesn't require a deity doesn't mean it's "science."
You're getting way ahead of yourself, what you have to do first is find the aliens, and then when we meet them you'll be able to make some hypotheses. People believed atoms existed for thousands of years. But atoms weren't actually science until people in the 19th century devised experiments to observe them; until then there was "Atomism," a branch of philosophy, and atoms were mystical, pseudoscientific entities.
If Lavoisier, or Leibniz, had proposed a bomb that could destroy entire cities with the power of millions of tons of gunpowder, everyone would have called him a crank, and they'd have been right. Where would his evidence have been? And sure, they were entitled to guess or make prognostications, but should those have been taught in school as science? Should the King of France have spent millions of francs trying to invent Leibniz's bomb?
Your position is pseudoscience. This may only be for the time being, but its condition today is the issue.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
It is super easy for drastic evolutionary changes to occur rapidly, and such changes could occur in less than a day. The key to remember is that various definitions are commonplace for the word "evolution". For example, a common scientific meaning is a change in allele frequency. This may occur due to the generation of novel alleles or natural selection acting to change the frequency distribution of existing alleles. A common layman definition of evolution is the generation of novel DNA or a novel physiological trait.
There is little speed limit to the rate at which natural selection can act on an existing population. However, the generation of new alleles is limited by the laws of probability and the current population size and generation time. The article gives no indication that it was about novel alleles, therefore I assume that it is about the well-known fact that natural selection can act quickly.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Nothing could falsify evolution that doesn't equivalently falsify simple reproduction. Not quite what I'm looking for.
So you are rejecting the easy answer as "too easy" and not accepting the hard answers because they are not fully proven (because nobody else has your standards).
That leaves us wondering why you are being so pedantic about this.
Reproduction *is* evolution. Parents pass on genes to their children, who are different than their parents. Q.E.D. Whether separate populations under different evolutionary pressures will result in non-interbreeding species is not required to prove "evolution" (in the most basic sense).
Let me be clear, I am not against evolutionary processes being a very significant factor in genetic change, I am after a falsifiable definition of it. And the typical usage of "evolution can be anything, just make sure to insist there's no God" just isn't one.
You've been given some, and you reject them, like you reject reproduction being tied to evolution. There is no falsifiable definition of gravity. Any definition that's falsifiable isn't falsifiable with our technology, hence why we are looking for dark matter and dark energy. Their absence would prove gravity wrong, from what we can observe.
And many "great laws" aren't falsifiable to the standards you require. "A body in motion tends to stay in motion, a body at rest tends to stay at rest" is no more "falsfiable" than "a genetic line will tend to 'evolve' to pass on the most desired traits" But there doesn't seem to be a large anti-inertia contingent in the US.
Learn to love Alaska
Because I'm in favor of actual science, rather than "no clear counterexamples found yet, therefore forever proven".
So gravity isn't science either.
When your argument works just as well against gravity, then you look silly. Why are you so pedantic on this point?
Learn to love Alaska
Evolution is the theory that such selection mechanisms explain -all- variation, over -all- biological history.
I've never seen that as the definition. I think you are picking a fight. My only question is, Why?
Learn to love Alaska
Same thing is happening among the cane toads spreading from one side of Austrailia to the other. The fastest ones on the frontier only mate with each other, making super fast cane toads.
Can you construct a falsifiable hypothesis involving trans-dimensional beings, or ETs, or something else, and Earth's natural history? Or any hypothesis of any kind?
Can you construct a falsifiable hypothesis involving -human- design, bearing in mind that present-day design is -fact-? You are given an animal, say, midway between the town's biggest farm and the town's genetic research facility. Form a testable hypothesis showing either of these is involved in explaining the animal's biological characteristics. You have the DNA available to you. Neither the farmer nor the research facility's staff recalls this animal specifically.
If you couldn't do it -presently-, with such an empirical immediacy available to you, how reasonable is that as a criterion for the distant past?
Rather, I suggest, we would address it inferentially, as this is a case, like the QM Interpretations, where there isn't a differentiating test. The inference that over billions of years some alien civilization has visited is not implausible. That another kind of being could have as well, is not implausible. Yes, I expect you to say it is implausible. As you are saying it, it will be perfectly clear in your own mind it is plausible, as you type otherwise.
People believed atoms existed for thousands of years. But atoms weren't actually science until people in the 19th century devised experiments to observe them; until then there was "Atomism," a branch of philosophy, and atoms were mystical, pseudoscientific entities.
Well, wholly wrong. Then, as now, inferential support for entities from empirical knowns is science. Witness the Higgs boson. This was most definitely science long before empirical observation was possible. Same with neutrinos. Same with quarks. It may not meet your scientific criteria, but that's because your scientific criteria is wrong.
Should the King of France have spent millions of francs trying to invent Leibniz's bomb?
Well, probably. That's why we had the Manhattan Project. And it was science.
Your position is pseudoscience.
No. Your scoping of science is pseudoscience.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
You don't have to, you just ask the guy that did it. I don't think you can actually falsifiably prove that something is designed, but falsifiability isn't the only way we know things. Science isn't the only way of knowing things, and things can be true even if science cannot establish their truth.
In this way, we can say that aliens probably exist, and it's plausible that they have visited here in the last billion years, but if you wanna make it scientific, you do have to show me how you know this happened. The problem is, you can't hypothesize that aliens participated in evolution without first establishing that aliens exist. Without any particular clue as to what the properties of aliens are, their actual existence becomes an ontological question that science alone cannot resolve. You have to establish the physical properties and nature of aliens empirically before you can actually do any inferences with them, otherwise they could do anything, they could have the power to rewrite your brain to make you think they created us when they didn't. You have to have an account of aliens that's epistemologically grounded, and inferential science cannot supply that, that's beyond science.
Here's the question though. What are the empirical knowns pertaining to alien or trans-dimensional beings, or their interference in evolution?
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
... but if you wanna make it scientific, you do have to show me how you know this happened.
Well, no. Nobody knows which of the Interpretations (Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, etc.) of QM "happen". They are all science. The are science by virtue of strong plausible inference from knowns.
Mainly, this one is winnable simply by observing actual scientists (or anyone working in a domain related to the sciences), and noting that nobody actually applies the same criteria to any other scientific arena that they apply specifically to anything reminding them of religion. Untested, and untestable premises abound in every field. The hypocrisy part of that fact isn't scientifically central, the fact "science" would be an unrecognizable hatchet job of itself, if the claimed criteria were actually applied to science in general, is. I prefer my scientific criteria to be such that science as we know it would still be possible if we accept it.
The problem is, you can't hypothesize that aliens participated in evolution without first establishing that aliens exist.
Watch me. I hypothesize that aliens participated in evolution. I have not yet established they exist. Similarly, I hypothesize that dark matter participates in the expansion of the universe. We have not yet established it exists. There you go. Fait accompli.
You have to establish the physical properties and nature of aliens empirically before you can actually do any inferences with them, otherwise they could do anything, they could have the power to rewrite your brain to make you think they created us when they didn't.
Er, no. That they might have such a conjectural power in no way means they don't have the power to do genetic design. In reality, though, you're making another argument that is shown unrealistic in light of current human-implemented design. You are doing the equivalent of saying, "But... you haven't established which geneticist. You haven't specified which tools he used. Which exact ones on the shelf. At what time, exactly. You haven't proven which room the genetic modification occurred in... how he was dressed...".
No, the geneticists have the assumed ability to perform the design, and you would not ask these questions in -that- case. It would be seen, even by you, as nonsensical blocking of the hypothesis that "the geneticists designed the animal". Same case here. Again, I demonstrate my point regarding your premise via that -you- don't believe your premise, for any circumstance or context other than when talking about something reminding you of a religious notion.
Here's the question though. What are the empirical knowns pertaining to alien or trans-dimensional beings, or their interference in evolution?
Biological structures that appear to be Irreducibly Complex, and are not yet specifically explained. One can argue as well that periods of history where massive unaccounted-for increases in genetic diversity occurred, such as the Cambrian Explosion, are also evidence, though in a less precisely-detailed way. There's two. N others may follow, presuming we maintain a degree of intellectual and scientific integrity and don't dismiss them before they're ever analyzed, because we don't like the potential implications.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
This selection is only within existing genetic variation. Evolution requires mutation as well. As commented elsewhere, if you sterilize everyone with black hear, everyone will be blond in a generation. That is not evolution.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Wolves - dogs are a particularly interesting one.
They have been domesticated many times in many places. Or one might argue that they have domesticated humans many times in many places.
Similarities between wolf and human culture led us to work together. As a group we are more powerful working together than either is apart. The wolves and humans who learned to work with their opposite comspeciest are the most powerful.
Together we were able to domesticate other animals for meat. Wolves kept browsers out of human gardens. Humans shared food and fire. A very good bond.
Evidence varies from about 11,000 to 40,000 to 60,000 to over 140,000 years ago that our species started working together. Very strong evidence that we met up and retained multiple times.
What we like most about you is that you have thumbs and your minimal fur doesn't catch on fire. Very handy.
-Sire Grey Muzzle, 8109 PD
...when the observed facts don't require one, then it's on you to prove your claim.
Not in any way.
Try that with the Interpretations of QM.
I'm talking about science here, not Judge Judy.
And, to state it up front, it is your claim that is "extraordinary". Mine's the ordinary one, by sizable statistical preponderance.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
As was previously stated, "relatively optimal" would have been a better way to have put it. And it is "relatively optimal" by the criteria of survival.
The rest reminds me of that old joke of God to the dismissive genetic engineer asserting he can create life: "No. Get your own dirt."
"Totally random" presuming a fine-tuned planet capable of producing it, within a fine-tuned solar system capable of sustaining that environment on the Earth, within a fine-tuned universe within which the odds that intelligent life, rather than "spacetime goo" would be produced on the first-and-only "try" are vanishingly small.
And, of course, presuming that "random" is scientifically meaningful explanation. It isn't. And, that you have any idea what "better" would be, other than as a subjective floating abstraction. You don't.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
It isn't invalidated by any given species failing to adapt. It isn't invalidated by "bad" mutations or slow change or fast change or no change (for any given genetic line over any given time period). It is well understood that mutations don't always (or even often) happen in a way that enhances survival, especially in a limited time frame (like dinosaurs needing to adapt to changes from a meteoroid impact overnight).
In other words, it can be invalidated by no means whatsoever, merely because of how it is defined. Therefore, it is unfalsifiable. Falsifiability matters. If your notion is that what you are presenting is somehow distinct from theorizing mere reproduction, it isn't.
"Evolution" is only coherent as a theory insofar as it prescribes -particular- mechanisms for genetic change that are distinct from some other conjectural model. Saying it is caused by selection pressure, but maybe not, happens gradually over a long period of time, but maybe not, etc., etc., is not giving "evolution" any particular attributes that can be said to characterize it. It's the scientific equivalent of the guy at the restaurant looking at the menu and saying "okay".
Despite your assertion, I understand he mainline mechanisms quite well. I'm just looking for you to understand that in their totality, as they are rendered in TFS and increasingly commonly elsewhere, no actual specific assertions are being made, i.e., the conceptualization lacks both specific content and falsifiability. These are not good attributes for any scientific theory. I am not against "evolution" per se, but this definitely needs to be cleaned up. You say "evolution", I say "reproduction". What does your term entail in terms of content that mine does not, given the admission of literally every possible scenario of genes being altered by reproduction (hardly notable) into the model? This really can't be handwaved. Phyletic gradualism versus punctuated equilibrium is, and has been, important entirely as an internal scientific debate. For good reason. If the answer now is "eh, screw it, maybe the brain evolved over millions of years for this species, maybe it was one super-compound set of mutations happening in a single generation, we'll just call them both evolution" I don't even know what is being proposed that "evolution" means here. And yes, I -know- fully as much about evolution as I need to, to make the determination that this aggregation is not useful. It is not a question of the scope of my knowledge, it is a question of the validity of certain renderings of it.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Bennett Hasselton Has undergone high speed evolution
You are not funny, insightful or informative, you are just being an annoying prick. Why don't you try to make a positive and useful contribution somewhere for once.
So, please describe a test that would falsify such a designer, if you would.
What we can do is observe random mutations in normal reproduction. That has been done multiple times. We can try to understand the fundamental cause of these mutations. For instance, we subject a test subject to ionizing radiation, and see if that has an influence on certain types of mutations. We can also look at the frequency of mutations, and distribution of mutations in a population. Then we can look at differences between chips and humans, or any other kind of species pair, and see if the differences in their genome agrees with the observed mutation rate and the fossil history.
But sometimes they don't
Is that so ? Can you name one ?
The most you can show through statistical analysis is that something is NOT random. And if natural selection is NOT random, if natural selection has some sort of imposed order, then what?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Say...repeating multiple times the peer-reviewed study (and it's contained test cases) here:
http://www.thelancet.com/journ....
http://profezie3m.altervista.o...
--and persistently finding a lack of reported empirical verification of the predictive accuracy of the mainline hypothesis of the "designer", rather than consistently finding empirical (i.e. "eyewitness sense data derived") verification of its predictions. The latter being the actual case we see per reality.
There's one. Additional and/or better ones in no way excluded by providing this one.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
And the fact that you are writing is not evidence you are not a retard. It is sad to witness adults believing in imaginary friends. We dispense very well with your religious fanatic ideas.
Well, who cares about a group of people defending a book of fairy tales? From an atheist point of view, they are nuts.
"we know it's not designed"
This is like saying the editor of a film can't decide the ending because he let the actors improvise. You are mistaking editor for spectator.
A hypothetical creator, creator of time itself together with all the rest, can design randomly evolving stuff that ends up exactly the way he wants, because he is not bound by time. A creator can build an end and let the beginning evolve freely from it, there is no cause/effect outside time, only correlation. More precisely there is no "beginning" nor "end", those are concepts defined from the POV of someone travelling in spacetime, they make no sense whatsoever outside of it.
If I tell you "imagine a circle" do you have to start imagining the circle at some point and doing some rotation to be drawn or are you able to simply imagine all of it in one step?
This is not religion, guys, this is logic. Please, stop being more inconsistent than whatever "god told me so" religion ever invented. Captcha: sharpest.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Fine tuned planet? Fine tuned solar system? Oh please. That's like the puddle claiming the hole was meant exactly for him because of how well it fits. We could not have evolved into a world that wouldn't support us. And there is no reason to believe there was only one try.
Things like the recurrent laryngeal nerve and human embryos having a stage with tails or vestigial limbs in ancient species of snakes would all be a very strange design if one could create each species independently with an "intelligent design." These things make perfect sense under the theory of evolution however.
In other words, it can be invalidated by no means whatsoever, merely because of how it is defined. Therefore, it is unfalsifiable. Falsifiability matters. If your notion is that what you are presenting is somehow distinct from theorizing mere reproduction, it isn't.
Nope. Here's some things that would falsify it:
A modern rabbit skeleton found in cambrian fossils (this could also falsify a lot of geological theories too).
An organisim developing an advanced trait (e.g. a new eye) with no intermediate steps.
What you personally are looking for is something in the world now which can falsify it so you can prove it false. Evoloution is overwhelming likely to be correct so you are wildly unlikely to find any such thing.
Falsifiable does not mean you personally can falsify it now, so therefore it is false.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The theory of evolution by natural selection makes many predictions any one of which could have been found inaccurate therefor casting doubt on the theory or even invalidating it completely. It predicts genetic findings, fossil findings, physiological findings... and each of these has been borne out.
I am genuinely at a loss about what your misunderstanding is with the whole thing. I can only assume that you've decided for other reasons that you want a reason to be able to dismiss it or doubt it or whatever.
Evolution is enabled by reproduction due to the way DNA works. They are not the same thing. If you want to find falsifiability in the theory of evolution then I guess you really don't understand it because there is plenty there that could have been found wrong. We could have found that chimpanzees share almost no genetic code with us rather than something over 99%. We could have found that species around the world that live in similar environments never have similar physiology, but that hasn't happened either. We could have found no transitional fossils and observed no changes even over our own lifetimes in species with fast life cycles.
I really think the the problem is that you want to be able to falsify something that isn't false. There is so much evidence for evolution by natural selection that the only real alternative is that some causal agent is doing things exactly the way natural selection would have. That is about as useful an idea as that we were all created from nothing 5 minutes ago with memories of civilizations implanted in our brains.
The requested quote was given. Dawkins says it is doubtful that atheism is logically tenable without Darwin.
The nice thing about science is there are no high priests. It atheism is logically tenable then it is logically tenable. Evoloution is only a huge blow to religion if your god is the "god of the gaps". If your god isn't (Catholocism among many others accepts evoloution), then evoloution does nothing to dent it.
Besides, evoloution is about the origin of species, not the origin of life. There are still huge unknowns out there. One more or less doesn't make atheism better or worse as a logical proposition.
1. A superlatively knowledgable and capable trans-dimensional being
trans-dimensional? I have no idea what that even means. As far as I can tell, it doesn't actually mean anything at all.
2. Extraterrestrial life
Well, no. We've observed evoloution happeneing here on earth. Unless you are proposing that the aliens are invisible and guiding the individual deaths of microorganisms.
I want a falsifiable working definition of "evolution",
The working definition is falsifiable. From the definition we can find things that falsify it. Life broadls forms a tree, and more specifically a DAG. Anything happening out of time or on the wrong branch would be a massive blow to evolution. We can ignore genetic engineering as it has no bearing on evoloution in the same way that a rocket engine does have any bearing on Kepler's Laws.
Finding ancient evidence of a modern organism, e.g. a rabbit from before the time mammals are known to have existed.
Observing generation of a complex feature such as an eye in a very small number of generations (e.g. 1).
Discovery of an organism with features morphologically derived from two different branches, e.g. a creature with mammary glands and bird lungs.
Any of those would falsify evolution, and all those falsification options come from the definitions of evoloution.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
A "biological population" is not one person, thus your example of comparing yourself to your parents does not show evolution by the very definition you're using.
If you believe that you are different than your parents then you believe in evolution.
If you believe that all that is required as proof for evolution is being different, you're setting the bar a little low.
Also, evolution existed quite a while before sexual reproduction did... sexual reproduction had to evolve.
Mainly, this one is winnable simply by observing actual scientists (or anyone working in a domain related to the sciences), and noting that nobody actually applies the same criteria to any other scientific arena that they apply specifically to anything reminding them of religion. Untested, and untestable premises abound in every field. The hypocrisy part of that fact isn't scientifically central, the fact "science" would be an unrecognizable hatchet job of itself, if the claimed criteria were actually applied to science in general, is. I prefer my scientific criteria to be such that science as we know it would still be possible if we accept it.
Having read over this thread with your various arguments, it seems like you want to offer everyone a very specific dichotomy. Either:
(1) Someone comes up with a concise description of how to "falsify" "evolution" in a Slashdot post.
OR
(2) We must admit that "evolution" is unfalsifiable and thus "not science."
To you, these are the only options. But there is at least one more: perhaps your working definition of "science" is absolutely wrong.
I'll take this third option. You're working from a definition of science that became popular roughly 75 years ago, with the work of Karl Popper. But, the weird thing is that you (along with many people here on Slashdot) seem to love philosophy of science in this weird small window, but then everyone just ignores the insights that followed almost immediately. Basically, your idea of science, according to philosophy of science, is at least 50 years out of date.
The people who actually write on this stuff and study it specifically recognized that the naive falsificationist approach to science never actually succeeds in defining science well, nor does it explain how science worked throughout history, nor does it explain how scientific discovery happens (particularly major discoveries).
The simplest problem is: how exactly do we come up with these "falsifiable" hypotheses in the first place? There are an infinite number of crazy and stupid and wacko hypotheses, but scientists seem somehow to narrow down all the infinite number to reasonable questions that might actually advance our knowledge.
Furthermore, MOST of science is NOT actually falsifiable in the naive sense that one dude could do an experiment that shows an anomaly and we all go, "Well, OBVIOUSLY the entire Theory of Relativity is falsified" or whatever.
Established scientific theories do NOT work like this. They generally are not completely falsified, but rather amended to take into account new information and data. Thus, to use the dark matter or dark energy ideas you brought up, astrophysicists do not declare all of celestial mechanics to be falsified because of these current anomalies -- rather, we continue to work to figure out a way to incorporate an explanation of these anomalies within our current scientific framework.
From a practical standpoint, the "falsifiability" criterion is thus a red herring for major theories. It works well enough for "everyday" minor hypotheses. It does NOT describe how science in general works for just about anything else. (Even Popper clearly recognized this and spent much of his later life trying to come up with a way of adequately describing how science really works.)
Philosophers of science have come up with a number of different ways of describing how science actually works. Whether you buy into Thomas Kuhn's idea of paradigms or Imre Lakatos's idea of research programs or whatever, there are many decades of philosophers of science who have proposed better models for science based on analysis of how science has functioned historically. Naive falsificationism is just not a practical method for pushing knowledge forward.
So...
With all th
evolution = variation + selection
What's happening here is likely more about selection then variation, although maybe a bit of both. I suspect this is largely the mechanics of punctuated equilibrium at work.
The way evolution is taught at high school level is typically over simplified to the point of being wrong, as indeed are many subjects. Evolution is NOT a continuous process of each generation getting better fitted to the environment via the process of natural selection acting on genetic changes introduced in individuals in that generation...
The normal way that evolution is understood to play out in practice is via "punctuated equilibrium" whereby genetic changes - which are typically too small and/or irrelevant to have any immediate impact on fitness - accumulate in animal populations over many generations. It's not the genetics of individuals that are changing so much as the genetics of the interbreeding population as a whole as accumulated changes get spread throughout the population over a number of generations. This is the "equlibrium" phase whereby genetic changes are accumulating but there is no external evidence of this as the changes are irrelevant to fitness.
What happens next is the "punctuated" part of "punctuated equilibrium" - something changes in the external environment that the animals are part of - in this case the arrival of an invasive species. These changes in the environment (drought, disease, invasive species, etc, etc) can happen very quickly compared to the speed at which genetic change accumulates. Now, it may happen that in the new changed environment some of the accumulated genetic changes that were previously benign now become a factor in fitness (either positively or negatively) and therefore a "sudden" change in the population may be seen as those individuals possessing what has now become a helpful trait, or not posessing a negative trait, prosper relative to their peers and rapidly come to dominate the population.
When a change in the environment brings about a quick change in an animal species, it is tempting - but sloppy - to say they are rapidly evolving. What happened rapidly was the change in the environment, not the slow process of genetic change that suddenly became significant.
In this case the Florida lizard population presumably already had all the traits - to some degree - that would prove positive or negative when the invading Cuban species arrived, and a quick change was seen as natural selection did it's thing and over a few generations the population became dominated by individuals having the (slowly come by) traits that now proved to be critical.
Of course there's more to how the dynamics of evolution play out than just puncuated equilibrium... While it's always going to take a long time for any complex feature such as sticky toes (or toes themselves for that matter) to evolve, the way genetic coding works is such that it may be very easy for a feature - once it exists - to be modified by a small change (e,g. a birth defect giving you unwanted extra limbs or extra sticky toes - advantageous if you mostly climb slippery trees, disadvantageous if you don't).
So.. the big picture here is that the Florida lizard species will have already accumulated the feature set that proved advantageous (or disadvantagous for those that dies giving way to the "new" variety), and this just played out once the environment changed. Subsequent to the changed environment additional variation/selection (which you could think of as optimization "tweaking") of the most critical features (toe pad size, scale stickyness) may have occurred.
I have not stated my beliefs. All I have done is state that the evidence does not support the No Designer conclusion. Modern science assumes No Designer from the outset, so it cannot validly conclude No Designer as an outcome. That's basic logic.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
young earthers
Ah, the causality-reversing "Anthropic Principle", which is nonsense. Winning the lottery 5 times is a row is not "explained" by "Well, if I didn't win the lottery 5 times in a row, I would be here wondering how I won it 5 times in a row". The probabilities involved are still notable, and still need to be addressed.
And yes, the main reason to believe there was only one try is that's what the evidence indicates. If you have evidence for a different model, feel free to present it. Yes, I know other models exist, and yes, I know they are conjectural, and you have an odd stance if you feel you have superior evidence of that than fine-tuning.
My position actually isn't "special creation" of independent species, but rather directed evolution, but, yeah, it is not uncommon at all for when I design code to use a DLL that both includes functionality relevant to my desired end application, and functionality that is not relevant and remains inactive. Given the similarity of DNA sections across vastly different organisms, a similar scenario does not strike me as implausible.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
I have had pro-undirected-evolution biologists tell me in this very forum that any biological change whatsoever happening in a single generation would be unproblematic for his notion of evolution.
Therefore, from that perspective, a Cambrian-era creature reproducing and a modern rabbit emerging, would not be an issue. Neither would generating a modern eye in -one generational step-. Where's your line of demarcation between mutations (or clusters of mutations) that are reasonable versus unreasonable? Because without that, this isn't falsifiability. Whatever happens, just call it "evolution" and done.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Okay, well, I'm not seeing a difference between this and simply calling evolution "reproduction", as there appears to be no functional difference between the two notions as you've rendered it here. I'm looking for something specific to evolution as a theory. Contrary to historical notions (e.g. "gradual change over time") there now appears to be nothing at all differentiating "evolution" from "anything whatsoever that may happen involving reproduction". Which is fine, it just doesn't give evolution any useful differentiating characteristics as a theory.
As for the question of a causal agent not being relevant, that's based on your presumption that no biological attributes exist that could not be produced by standard naturalistic means. That's a presumption for which you have no possible evidence, whereas there is evidence for the contrary, namely proposed IC structures (yes, run the standard arguments on how it isn't evidence, it'll still be evidence per what evidence simply means afterward). The distinction on how we would approach biology would fundamentally change, as it will have to anyway, as genetically-engineered organisms become ubiquitous and it becomes crucial to be able to determine characteristics of design, e.g. for biological weapons/terrorism. Being able to apply such analytical mechanisms to historical organisms would be clearly scientifically useful as well.
And, we address teleology, which naturalistic evolution is woefully inadequate at doing. I know your answer will be "there is no teleology", and "correct" me that it isn't inadequate, it's entirely nonexistent. Unfortunately you can't talk about evolution for 15 minutes without using a construct implying teleology, and your own mouth shortly refutes you. That suggests a structural problem with the model that should be addressed to, you know, bring it in line with reality, as science tends to attempt.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
The anthropic principle is not nonsense. It makes perfect sense. In any case, there is still ongoing research into the origin of the universe and whether this was the only sort of "rule set" that could have generated a universe etc. I make no claims to know more than the current experimental evidence. But you shouldn't either.
I think the scale of the universe and the time involved are what exceed most people's imagination. It's not like winning the lottery 5 times in a row. It's like playing the lottery billions of times every day and winning 5 times out of all those tries. Not even time existed in the nothingness from which our universe is thought to have sprung. There is no way of knowing how many failed/aborted "big bangs" happened before it was just right to expand into our universe. There is no way of knowing how many puddles of ooze existed on how many planets in countless galaxies across the universe. With so many "lottery tickets" in play, why should it be more than pure chance that there was a winner? In fact with so many puddles on so many planets in so many galaxies, it's hard to imagine there is no other life in the universe.
Ok, here goes, some testable findings which could falsify the theory of evolution by natural selection. Let's do a quick review on the theory itself, shall we? That species change over time, evolving and differentiating from common ancestors (due to natural selection in the most relevant statements). So let's look at just a few of the areas where findings could support or falsify the theory.
1) Genetics
Since we are proposing that all species evolved and differentiated from common ancestors, we should find that those who split off more recently have more genes in common than those who split off further in the past. So an experiment where we compare the genes of horses, donkeys and whales would be a test. If evolution is correct, horses and donkeys share a more recent common ancestor (both being hoofed land mammals etc) and you have to go back quite a ways to find the common ancestor with the whale. So, we should find that horse and donkey DNA has way more in common with each other than with whales. If instead we found that there were no similarities at all between any of the DNA we would have a problem because these are all mammals and share things like placental pregnancy which you'd expect to be reflected in the genes. If they all have identical DNA that'd be a problem. If horses had more in common with whales than donkeys that'd be a problem. So, genetics gives us a good way to test our theory on shared ancestors. If DNA mapping turned up something unexpected - it would have to be explained or it would cause a lot of trouble for the overall theory.
2) Physiology
Since we are proposing natural selection as the filter through which life must pass, we would expect to find organisms that have adaptations to their environment. If we find a tree dwelling species we expect to find something about the critter that makes it suited to that environment. Any or all of prehensile tails, gripping feet, long limbs for grasping branches etc. If we found an animal in an environment where it had no adaptations - a fish out of water let's say - then we'd have some explaining to do.
3) Paleontology
Since we've said organisms evolve from common ancestors, we would expect to see "transitional fossils" showing a progression. Now we know from the rarity of fossilization that we're not going to find a smooth transition for every species ever, but if we never found any that would be a problem. Or if we found say a modern horse fossil preserved from 2 billion years ago. We should expect to see things like we do in whale fossils which show a progression of the nose opening from forward to atop the head as whale evolved for their life at sea. Fossil evidence could be found which seriously compromises the theory.
Any of these areas provide plenty of opportunities to falsify the predictions of the theory of evolution. I still don't understand your statement about it being the same as reproduction. Reproduction if we define it the same as being generating a new being from the DNA of one or more existing ones, simply provides the means through which evolution can occur. Mutations occur because DNA doesn't replicate flawlessly, even in species which have asexual reproduction. From there it's up to you whether you've decided that those mutations can't add up to big changes without help. I think what we see in the world argues against anything resembling a directed evolution with intelligence behind it. But scientifically you can't tell the difference between natural process and a supernatural process that does the same thing.
To address your written complaint though, I think I've provided a several areas of study where the predictions arising from the theory of evolution could be falsified.
The anthropic principle is not nonsense. It makes perfect sense.
.00001%, and the odds of D is could be at estimated 90% considered in some context-dropping isolation, then the actual odds of D can be no more than .00001% (and likely significantly lower, depending on B and C)--if one is proposing causal dependency, which your model absolutely is.
No, it doesn't. But don't get me wrong, I enjoy the notion thoroughly.
Police chief: "I don't understand it. Somehow, the suspected thief managed to elude seven different security systems and 20 guards, in broad daylight, and then opened the highest-security safe on the market, and then left without a trace. Doesn't that strike you as improbable? Seems that the odds here point to the theory it was actually an inside job."
Junior ubercool investigator: "Well, chief, do I really need to point out that if he didn't elude all the security systems and guards, and opened the safe, we wouldn't be here talking about how he eluded all the security systems and guards, and cracked the safe? [removes shades with voice filled with gravitas] -Case closed-."
It's like playing the lottery billions of times every day and winning 5 times out of all those tries.
You have absolutely no evidence of these "billions of times" having occurred. Do you expect evidence for assertions, or not? If you're trying to equivocate this over into an argument from, say, abiogenesis or naturalistic evolution, where there is evidence for multiple tries, do note this is irrelevant. The overall odds of a causally-dependent sequence of events is not possibly greater than the step with the -lowest- odds.
If...
A -> B -> C -> D is proposed, and the odds of A is
Same thing if we use "intelligent-life generating physical laws and initial conditions relative to all possible ones" and "abiogenesis" and "evolution" as our terms.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Looks like their habitat just got a period. Or at least a comma. Vroom!
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Okay, we seem to be moving in the direction of detailing methodology rather specifically, and this discussion could branch out to be very large debating all of them in detail. This is really not what I was hoping for with my initial question, I was looking for broad conceptual heuristics within which we can meaningfully scope "evolution" in a hopefully-falsifiable rendering.
So, I'll propose some broad contrary statements to your assertions here, and see where that takes us.
If DNA mapping turned up something unexpected - it would have to be explained or it would cause a lot of trouble for the overall theory.
Would it? I propose that the conjectured lines of descent would simply be rejuggled, as has happened many times in the past. The phylogenetic tree would simple be moved around again, that becoming the new "definitely true"--for the moment. I really do think I can essentially prove this to be not a route to falsification, as we have finally developed proposably -objective- ways to map these relationships in a descent or causal fashion, via cladistics, and those relationships are -explicitly- probabilistic in that methodology. So, the proposed relationship with the highest probability is selected based on genetic analysis--but the notion that one of them is "of course" correct is simply presumed. So, for cases where we have 90% certainty for A, 10% certainty at most for all others, A becomes the selected "true". In a case where we have 1% certainty for A, and >1% certainty for all others, A becomes "true". It comes down to that any degree of improbability is simply accepted as true, because that's the most probable identified to date, and the idea that some other factor could be involved other than descent is rejected a priori. This is not a route to falsification. The model will accept any improbability whatsoever, by definition.
Since we are proposing natural selection as the filter through which life must pass, we would expect to find organisms that have adaptations to their environment.
Likewise, since I'm proposing the theory that things reproduce (for the purposes of illustration, say, created suddendly ex nihilo), and try to survive, and sometimes don't. I conclude from the fact I only find surviving things where things have survived, and don't find surviving things where they couldn't possibly survive, that my model is equally thorough and accurate as evolution. Correct?
Fossil evidence could be found which seriously compromises the theory.
How? You have a fossil. It by definition contains some characteristics similar to some form of life. What line of descent it conjecturally belongs to, and how you may modify the proposed lines of descent, again conjecturally, is totally up to you. What kind of fossil could possibly compromise any of this methodology, which is ultimately really just a largely-arbitrary categorization system?
I am not a specialist in this field, so it is quite possible I am missing some nuance in your presentation. But I'm not seeing it based on what you're providing.
Incidentally...
But scientifically you can't tell the difference between natural process and a supernatural process that does the same thing.
Would you categorically assert this relative to organisms you might encounter, having their DNA at your disposal, for which the design was done by a genetic engineer, rather than a "natural process"? Methodologically, I do think it is probable that Specified Complexity notions will allow this differentiation to happen with a high degree of certainty. But the question is more around your categorical exclusion: If you reject entirely the possibility of detecting design from a non-human origin, do you assert this is different from detecting design of human origin? Presuming the same data, that is, the DNA, and not the fact you happened to read about the genetic engineering effort and "detected" design's presence that way.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
I propose that the conjectured lines of descent would simply be rejuggled, as has happened many times in the past.
Sure. Because we continue to learn new things about relationships between living and dead creatures. But it IS possible that you could find something that simply could not be explained away. We haven't yet. But it could happen. There could be data out there waiting to be found that cannot be accommodated by the theory. You could find that rabbits are genetically almost identical to some new species of lizard and that would blow the theory out of the water.
I really do think I can essentially prove this to be not a route to falsification...
It sounds like your complaint here is that the theory so well describes the world that there is room in it to accommodate previously unknown data without breaking the model. Similar to the anthropic principle which you are not persuaded by... a scientific theory must account for all data and be contradicted by none. The fact that it has been honed over the years with new data without breaking is an indication of how good it is as a scientific theory, not somehow invalidating it by your notion of un-falsifiability.
The model will accept any improbability whatsoever, by definition.
No, not any. Like I said, you could find that horses are more closely related to whales than donkeys and that would be a huge problem. Or that the genes have no similarities at all and that would be a huge problem. You are apparently put off by the notion that small rearrangements in our knowledge about the so called tree of life can be accommodated by the theory without it breaking. That is its strength not its weakness. But, I maintain very strongly, that there are findings that could break it. It IS falsifiable, but it is also flexible and not dependent on us being absolutely correct in what is related to what and how closely. We can learn new things about how closely chipmunks are related to squirrels without breaking the idea that they ARE related and that if you go back far enough you can find the great-great-x grandparent of them both. However, if you went back and somehow figured out they were actually descended from crocodiles rather than primitive rodents you would have falsified the theory.
I conclude from the fact I only find surviving things where things have survived, and don't find surviving things where they couldn't possibly survive, that my model is equally thorough and accurate as evolution. Correct?
Your model is accurate sure, but not thorough. The theory of evolution goes much further than that. It says not only that they are currently living in places they can live but that they had ancestors. And that those ancestors may have had other offshoots which would share genetic/physiologic similarities with other "cousins" as it were. Before the study of genetics existed, you could use the theory of evolution by natural selection to predict that mammals should have things in common with each other, and that the more similar the mammal the more similar the genes should be. This seems obvious now, with our growing understanding of genetics but it wouldn't have been so in the early days of the theory. It was a prediction that would NOT have had to be true if species didn't evolve from more primitive species via mutations in their genetic code. This was a falsifiable prediction stemming from the theory that was borne out once we learned to to read the genetic code.
You can also predict from the theory that creatures that look similar aren't always as closely related as they seem. Because we've said that natural selection is important you would actually predict that differ
Let me start by saying thank you for an intellectually interesting conversation that doesn't involve name calling, finger pointing or ranting. I have a tendency toward snark, don't take it too personally :)
;)
Likewise. And I'll resist the contextual urge to reply--
THIS... IS... SLASHDOT!
--with a corresponding 300-style virtual kick.
Your points are well-made, and I will consider them further. In particular, I'm noting that the seeming weakness of the apparent "organism -> any mutation -> any resultant organism" process is strengthened by the incorporation of chronological sequence as a filter, in terms of being able to determine actual plausibility, so there is a better "falsifiability mechanism" here than I had in mind.
I think I've reached the limit of time I can spend on arguing these sub-branches of the question for the time being, though, so I will leave it here. Have a good weekend, perhaps we'll resume on these interesting topics another time.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
The GEICO gecko evolved speech with a strange pseudo-Brit accent in just about that length of time. I hear he is mated to a female, Elizardbreath. But he has a reptile disfunction...
Many of them couldn't evolve fast enough and simply died. Others became birds.
Wow, its sad how many people still have faith in evolution...
I have had pro-undirected-evolution biologists tell me in this very forum that any biological change whatsoever happening in a single generation would be unproblematic for his notion of evolution.
So... you're going to base your opinions of science on the ramblings of a nutcase on the internet?
Where's your line of demarcation between mutations (or clusters of mutations) that are reasonable versus unreasonable? Because without that, this isn't falsifiability. Whatever happens, just call it "evolution" and done.
Liklihood determines it. With evoloution you see a large number of trials, say a few million to a few billion per generation, each of which produces some randomization of the genetics. For each change you could work out an approximate probability, and therefore if you observe a massive change, you could work out the probability it occured. Something like an eye developing in a single generation would be so overwhelmingly unlikely given the current models that it would invalidate those models.
We're talking the kind of probabilities where if every fundemental particle was a genetic system and each generation of reproduction happened during a plank time, it would still not happen by chance in a billion times the age of the universe.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I'm not sure what you mean by "blending," but there are good reasons for the sexes to continue to exist. Sexual reproduction provides a mechanism for genetic variation and the spread of genes across populations so it's pretty much crucial to species that reproduce slowly.
The selection pressures on things like bacteria look rather different compared to most larger metazoans. The latter are rather dependent on genetic diversity for survival.
Not evolution.
Article is not titled properly.
If you just have the DNA from those two animals, then you probably can't say which one is which. If you have DNA and/or phenotype data from closely related species, and from distantly-related species, then you could make a much stronger case. You could say that the gene for GFP (the fluorescent protein in cats) is very similar to one found in distantly-related species, and it's not found in the species that are closely related to the cat, nor is it found in species intermediate between the cat and the other source of GFP. Now, you could argue that every other species lost it over evolution, but that's extremely improbable. Therefore, you have two possibilities. It's either designed, or there was natural horizontal gene transfer, likely through an integrating virus. Your next step would be to examine the genome for other viral sequences, taking into account integration site probability and consistency.
As to whether something in the distant past modified genes like we do today: yes, that is technically possible. However, given the robust data from wide clades of species, and the general agreement between genes as to speciation events, it's highly unlikely, and moreover there's no reason to suppose that it happened without data to suggest that.
First off, "micro-evolution" and "macro-evolution" are outdated terms. Second, there have been numerous examples of speciation in multicellular organisms, for examples the California Rift Valley salamanders. If you're interested, you can find more examples; I believe that there was recently an observed speciation event in finches as well.