The following question has been posted on a creation website: "...tell me of the one piece of “evidence” that unequivocally proves evolution or even ages of millions of years..." What is it?
A question from a creation website
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the best evidence i can think of is the increasing complexity of the fossil record.
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sfs
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Are you offering this as an example of the disingenuousness of creationist sites, or what? Why should there be any single piece of evidence that unequivocally proves anything? Normally, one evaluates claims by assessing the body of evidence for or against them, not by demanding a single piece of unequivocal piece of evidence.
In any case, here are two that I happen to like:
1) The 200,000 endogenous retroviruses that humans share with our closest relatives.
2) The fact that all higher primates are missing the same exons of the GULO gene.
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I will second sfs' suggestions. It isn't one piece of evidence. It is the millions of pieces of independent evidence that all point to the same conclusion. It is the correlation between the phylogenies based on physical features and the phylogenies based on DNA sequence. It is the phylogenies based on LTR divergence in orthologous ERV's. It is shared pseudogenes. It is divergence of functionally redundant genes. It is genetic equidistance. It is all of it.
It's a bit like a murder trial. Standing on their own, one could perhaps nit pick one piece of evidence here and there. However, when there are hundreds of pieces of independent evidence all pointing to a guilty verdict, that is when you have an air tight case.
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The Cadet
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"Find me one piece of evidence that will prove a massive overarching theory containing literally thousands of individual claims."
I mean, if you want one piece of evidence that proves the general concept of descent with modification and the tree of life, the twin nested hierarchy of life is probably your best bet. But asking for one specific piece of evidence misses the point. One of the greatest strengths of the theory is just how many independent lines of evidence support it.
I mean, if you want one piece of evidence that proves the general concept of descent with modification and the tree of life, the twin nested hierarchy of life is probably your best bet. But asking for one specific piece of evidence misses the point. One of the greatest strengths of the theory is just how many independent lines of evidence support it.
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There are plenty of people who are Christians and accept the theory of evolution. I was actually trained by quite a few scientists who fit that mold. Belief or lack of belief in God has nothing to do with the reasons that scientists accept the theory of evolution.
It's not that we need a different explanation. It's that we need an explanation. Period. Special creation can't explain what we see in the sciences. For example, let's take a look at a protein called cytochrome c (cytc). It is found in a lot of different but quite different organisms, from humans to yeast. In fact, you can take the yeast cytc gene out of its genome and replace it with the human gene, and it works.
If special creation were true, what could we predict about a protein that has the same function in tons of different species? Would the sequences for these genes be similar? If so, by how much? Why would they differ? What pattern of shared sequences should we expect to see, if any?
Special creation is completely silent on this topic, yet these are problems that biologists actually deal with in the work. Evolution, on the other hand, does answer these questions. The first thing you need to understand is evolutionary distance and phylogenies. Here is a basic phylogeny:
When we talk about evolutionary distance, we are talking about where two lineages finally meet up. Looking at the picture above, look at A and D. Trace those lineages to the left until they meet. That is their common ancestor. Now do the same thing for C and D. What do you find? They meet at the same place. Therefore, the evolutionary distance between A and D is the same as the distance between C and D. A and C are genetically equidistant to D.
What does this mean? For species that are genetically equidistant, there has been an equal time for those genomes to diverge. When we compare DNA sequences, we should see around the same number of differences between the genomes. Let's look at an example. Humans and mice are equidistant from chickens. Mice are as distant from chickens as humans are. If we are using diagram above, humans are A, mice are C, and chickens are D. What do we find when we compare cytc genes between them?
Humans----Chickens = 81.6% similar
Mice--------Chickens = 81.9% similar
Humans---------Mice = 90.5% similar
Special creation can't explain this. Evolution predicts it. That is why biologists use the theory of evolution, because it works.
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There are millions of religious believers who accept evolution including Christians.
And before you respond with the tired "not a true Christian" refrain, it is against CF rules to suggest that individuals or groups who identify as Christian in accordance with the Nicene Creed are not or not really Christian.
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As has been noted, there isn't one single piece of evidence (no need for the scare quotes). There are numerous lines of evidence such as the fossil record and genetics.
Here's an example from the latter. The variety of globins found in vertebrates is due to two whole genome duplication events early in the vertebrate lineage.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21965344
>> Here, we report genomic evidence for a direct link between WGD and key physiological innovations in the vertebrate oxygen transport system. Specifically, we demonstrate that key globin proteins that evolved specialized functions in different aspects of oxidative metabolism (hemoglobin, myoglobin, and cytoglobin) represent paralogous products of two WGD events in the vertebrate common ancestor. Analysis of conserved macrosynteny between the genomes of vertebrates and amphioxus (subphylum Cephalochordata) revealed that homologous chromosomal segments defined by myoglobin + globin-E, cytoglobin, and the α-globin gene cluster each descend from the same linkage group in the reconstructed proto-karyotype of the chordate common ancestor. The physiological division of labor between the oxygen transport function of hemoglobin and the oxygen storage function of myoglobin played a pivotal role in the evolution of aerobic energy metabolism, supporting the hypothesis that WGDs helped fuel key innovations in vertebrate evolution. <<
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JonFromMinnesota
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Evolution makes no claims about the supernatural. It's does not have a goal of disproving God. It only explains the natural world. One of the most interesting studies I have read was the Italian wall lizard study. In 1971, 5 pairs of wall lizards were moved from their home island to a small island off the coast of Croatia. 30 years later the decedents of the original pairs had larger jaws, larger skulls, a new digestive system with a stomach valve and they had changed their diet from insects to plants.
This study was published in the journal, "Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences"
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080421-lizard-evolution.html
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So, in your mind, evolutionists know God exists, but they pretend he doesn't, because that means they don't have to follow his laws...except that pretending he doesn't exist doesn't mean they're exempt from God's laws, which they have to know, because they know he exists.
Hm.
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