Best Evidence of Macro-Evolution

[Chris†opher Paul]

Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Non-Creationists...

Whatever you call yourselves, would you please indicate your BEST evidence for macro-evolution?

I have a Christian friend that believes that macro-evolution has no actual evidence.

Personally, I am on the fence on this issue.  I would like to see the BEST you got, to compare both sides of the story.

Ready, go!

 

[npetreley]

I know you weren't asking creationists, but after studying the issue in depth, here's the best evidence I could find for macroevolution:

http://pbskids.org/barney/

 

[seebs]

Okay, I'm gonna cheat and go with the really simple one.

Do you have a cat or dog?

Compare your bone structure to its. Observe the ways in which your bone structure is inconvenient for bipedal motion. Look at the useless (and prone to injury) "thumb" on a cat's front paw. Look at the similarity in the layout of the various bones.

Now, look at the bones inside a whale's flippers. Look familiar? How about those teeth that some whales start to grow, and then reabsorb? Isn't it sorta cool the way a whale's bone structure is much more similar to a human's than to a fish's?

I would bet that, if you had one group of people given a vast and unlabeled stack of, say, cytochrome-C chromosomes from a variety of life forms, and asked them to predict relationships, and then took another group of people and showed them a large stack of unlabeled fossil skulls, and asked them to predict relationships, you would get very, very, similar predictions about the relationships of the living animals.

Oh, and one other big one: Marsupials. They exist only on one land mass, which is isolated from the rest of the world, and have gradually expanded to fill a number of the niches that other animals are in elsewhere. This would be exactly what you'd expect from macro-evolution, and a single marsupial species on an otherwise wide-open land mass.

Want more? Lemme think. A study of fossil horses and their ancestors looks pretty compelling, to me. You may or may not agree. It's really fun looking at all the different types of horse-like animals, and looking at the fossils we find where we find them.

But, in the end, I still say cats and dogs are one of the best, because they're one of the areas in which the marginal functionality of various bits in both us and them argue strongly for traits from a common ancestor being gradually adapted to our current forms. e.g., the thumb, which tends to be useless and easily injured on cats and dogs... but which we use heavily.

 

[Chris†opher Paul]

Or a Common Design...doesn't tell me much. Next?

 

[Morat]

  Personally, I'ld like to point to Nick as evidence for macroevolution. Specifically, that's the face of YEC creationism right there.

  You can tell a lot about the strength of an argument by the quality of it's opponents.

   On a more serious note, Douglas Theobald's 29 Evidences neatly sums up 29 independent lines of evidence for macroevolution.

   Personally, I find the strongest evidence to be the fact the nested heirarchies of life.

   When the pattern of common decent (the nested heirarchy) can be replicated with good precision (the same nested heirachy each time) by comparing things like the fossil record,  proteins, retroviral insertions, transposons and pseudogenes, then you have strong evidence that the pattern of common descent is a valid one.

   Each of those methods reveals the same nested heirarchy. Not a nested heirarchy, but the same one. By any of those methods, for instance, you will find birds more similiar to alligators than alligators are to turtles, and whales more similiar to bears than whales are to sharks (and the degree will be the same).

  Indeed, the pattern is even predictive. Genetic analysis has caused the shuffling of portions of the tree. There had been debate over the specific origins of hippos. (There were, if I remember, two main possibilities). Genetic analysis indicated one of the two as more likely, and fossils were found matching genetic analysis (timeframe and geographic location included) inside of 2 years.

  
  However, a caveat: Common design can explain anything, because Common design is unfalsifiable. A designer (especially God) can bloody well do what he wants. Common descent, however, is quite falsifiable and would leave specific patterns. We see those patterns everywhere we look. Personally, I consider that strong evidence of common descent. After all, if only one specific pattern (out of an infinite number) can result from common descent, whereas a Common Designer can make any pattern, finding the one sole possibility of common descent is far more potent than saying "Well, yeah, but a designer could do that".

  Further, if you want to claim "design", you're going to have to explain why your designer replicated mistakes, left in non-functioning code, replicated viral insertions, and often used sub-optimal solutions when better solutions already existed. A panda's thumb is a crude thing, not nearly as efficient as a human's. Why modify the wrist bone to grow a "thumb", when you've got the thumb already designed for humans?
  

 

[RufusAtticus]

There is so much evidence that, everyone is going to have a different one that is the "best" one. Probably because of my Genetics background, I think that bifurcating trees based on DNA sequence similarity are the best evidence for macroevolution. (See sig for apporprate use of that term.)

 

[RufusAtticus]

I also find it amazing that in a thread when you are asking an honest question, a creationist and fellow christian has to make a snide remark.

 

[Chris†opher Paul]

"replicated mistakes"

How so? Redundant DNA? How do we know it is truly redundant?

 

[Chris†opher Paul]

Originally posted by RufusAtticus
I think that bifurcating trees based on DNA sequence similarity are the best evidence for macroevolution. 

I am ignorant on the subject personally, so that doesnt mean anything to me.

 

[seebs]

Originally posted by s0uljah
Or a Common Design...doesn't tell me much. Next?

Hang on, you need to give this some thought.

What, exactly, was the common *design* that led to cats having a "thumb" that they can't use, which only serves to lame them occasionally? Not much of a design.

Why didn't God use the same design for the flippers on whales and fish? They're doing the same thing. Why finger bones in whales? They never use them.

The point about design is that God, in theory, uses the same design to accomplish the same goal, right? But He *doesn't*, in fact! We see humans with clumsy legs, and huge problems trying to give birth, because bipeds are supposed to have narrow hips, and big-brained creatures need wide hips. We see cats and dogs with "thumbs" they can't use. We see whales with five distinct sets of bonse just like our hands... in flippers, permanently joined.

We see teeth being formed and then dissolved again. What "design" is that? As an unused trait which the immune system takes care of, it makes sense. As a *design*? Rediculous; why would God have used a common design for us, cats, and whales, but not a common design for whales and fish?

It's certainly evidence. Proof? Of course not; God can be as silly as He wants. He's quite a kidder. But the fact is, it's a lot easier to explain these things as leftover features from common ancestors than to say "oh, and then God decided to make a special kind of fish which were more like primates than like any other fish".

 

[Chris†opher Paul]

Seebs-

Do you think that God allows freedom in nature?

P.S.

Just realized you had a homepage...I see you are also a C coder. 

 

[seebs]

Originally posted by s0uljah

Do you think that God allows freedom in nature?

I'm not sure what you mean.

My personal opinion is that the current states of various mammals, including whales, reflect common ancestry and macro-evolution, because this is the most reasonable explanation I can offer for the amazing density of common traits. It is supported by similarity in the layouts of chromosomes.

The best evidence I have suggests that this is how things happened. Since I believe God made everything, I assume that this is *how* He did it.

I have a really hard time imagining God as putting all these things together just to fool us.

 

[Chris†opher Paul]

Originally posted by seebs


I'm not sure what you mean.

My personal opinion is that the current states of various mammals, including whales, reflect common ancestry and macro-evolution, because this is the most reasonable explanation I can offer for the amazing density of common traits. It is supported by similarity in the layouts of chromosomes.

The best evidence I have suggests that this is how things happened. Since I believe God made everything, I assume that this is *how* He did it.

I have a really hard time imagining God as putting all these things together just to fool us.

Why would He make mistakes, as Morat puts it?

 

[Morat]

How so? Redundant DNA? How do we know it is truly redundant?

  Because it's not transcribed. There are bits of code called stop codons. Anything after a stop isn't transcribed, but skipped over (unless it's a start codon).

Why would He make mistakes, as Morat puts it?

  This makes no sense. If common descent is correct (which the evidence indicates), then you'd expect to see the things seebs (and I) describe. Jury rigged design, poor design, and many cases where better ways of doing it can be seen easily. Either elsewhere in nature, or just from casual examination.

    Now, nothing says that God (should he exist) couldn't have chosen evolution (and thus common descent) as an elegant way to run his universe. BUT, if you want to claim God designed everything, you either have to limit him to tiny "tweaks" of the system, or admit God is a horrid engineer, who can't seem to remember he already used a better design elsewhere.

 

  

 

[Jerry Smith]

Lets don't forget the fossil evidence. True it is very circumstantial, and true it is very incomplete. Still, the fact that there are found no vertebrates 500 million years old and that one by one, jawless fish, teleost fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals & birds, primates and finally humans appear, is simply too much to be accounted for by any theory that doesn't look an awful lot like darwinian evolution, and doesn't at least recognize descent of modern forms from primitive ones.

 

[Chris†opher Paul]

Originally posted by Jerry Smith
Lets don't forget the fossil evidence. True it is very circumstantial, and true it is very incomplete. Still, the fact that there are found no vertebrates 500 million years old and that one by one, jawless fish, teleost fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals & birds, primates and finally humans appear, is simply too much to be accounted for by any theory that doesn't look an awful lot like darwinian evolution, and doesn't at least recognize descent of modern forms from primitive ones.

Didnt life just "burst" onto the scene, according to the fossil record...sea creatures, etc?

 

[Chris†opher Paul]

Now, nothing says that God (should he exist) couldn't have chosen evolution (and thus common descent) as an elegant way to run his universe. BUT, if you want to claim God designed everything, you either have to limit him to tiny "tweaks" of the system, or admit God is a horrid engineer, who can't seem to remember he already used a better design elsewhere.

Or, that we don't fully understand the design.

 

[Morat]

  No. (And you haven't addressed my remarks). The Cambrian "explosion" was a period of tens of millions of years where the first hard-bodied life forms appeared, including the origins of most modern phylums.

  Now, that sounds far more impressive than it is. First off, pre-Cambrian fossils are rare (soft-bodied creatures don't fossilize well and we're getting into some old fossils here), but not non-existance (the Burgess Shale, for instance). Secondly, the differences between phylums at that point were relatively tiny. We're not talking seeing jawed fish next to modern mammals and such.

  The most primitive fish, for instance, don't appear for another 50 million years. You don't get the first land animals (millipede looking things) for 120 million years.

   Here is a nice page about life during the Cambrian.

 

[Jerry Smith]

Originally posted by s0uljah


Didnt life just "burst" onto the scene, according to the fossil record...sea creatures, etc?

Not quite. The oldest fossils are on the order of 3 billion years old, and only bacteria are found there. In the late pre-cambrian, (the Vendian period) a few multicellular fossils are found, including some worms and things that might have born a similarity to jellyfish. The early Cambrian is the "burst" of activity, with all of the basic body-plans of hard-bodied organisms turning up within a very short period of time. Still, there were no fish for a while after this "burst", and then the others that I mentioned appeared intermittently after the first fish.

For a good discussion of the Cambrian period, http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1997/PSCF12-97Miller2.html#Keith%20B.%20Miller*  is an excellent resource (If that link doesn't work, try here.)

For the fossil record of the vertebrates, Kathleen Hunt's famous article is the best possible resource. You have probably seen it before:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html

 

[Morat]

Or, that we don't fully understand the design.

  And this is why Common Design is an unfalsifiable and unscientific concept. If it's considered good design, it's proof. If it's bad design, we don't know what God was designing (or it's the fall).

  Sure, Souljah. You let me know what "design" results in teeth being formed then reabsorbed in whale embryos (this does have an energy cost), or what "design" results in large streches of DNA that code for nothing, and what "design" resulted in the inefficient thumb of the panda, and why God didn't simply use the better thumb he'd given people.

   As I said before, Common Design can explain anything. It's utterly sterile and pointless.