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Best Evidence of Macro-Evolution

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seebs

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Originally posted by s0uljah

Why would He make mistakes, as Morat puts it?
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I don't think He would - which is why, given the number of apparently-dysfunctional bits in the bodies of animals, it's a lot easier for me to accept evolution than young-earth creation.
 
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Finrod

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Originally posted by s0uljah
Or a Common Design...doesn't tell me much. Next?
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Ha! Common design is pure assumption, we observe the mechanisms behind evolution.  Ever heard of a ring species? That is speciation in front of your face Things like these weigh heavily in favour of evolution.
 
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Trinai

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  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).
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And yet, it's a very legitimate thing to say. We don't know everything about genes. It's akin to the situation with vestigial organs. People didn't know what they did and declared them useless.
 
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Jerry Smith

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Well, Trinai, it is true that it was incorrect for doctors and scientists to conclude that just because some structures are vestigial that they must have no function. That is the nice thing about science though. Eventually, someone identifies the ideas that do not match the theory, and they correct the theories. Evolution correctly predicted vestigial organs, but eager scientists incorrectly assumed them to be useless because they were vestigial. This has been decades passed, and the understanding of vestigial organs now includes the understanding that they may retain some of their original function or be co-opted for a different function. If it were the case that they were not, in fact, vestigial, that should have been discovered by now too.

Look at the whale's pelvis. It is obviously a vestigial pelvis (anatomically, it is a pelvis), but it has no function in locomotion.

Look at the human coccyx. It is obviously a vestigial tail bone (anatomically, it is a now fused set of vertebrate extending past the pelvis, where a tail could attach), but it no longer serves as structural support for a tail.

Yet both retain some "function", most notably as a point of attachment for needed muscles.
 
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Jerry Smith

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Predicts or jumps to conclusions based upon lack of data?
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Predicts! The theories of population genetics do not allow a structure just to disappear. For any closely related species where one no longer requires a thing (walking legs in a whale, grasping tails in humans), the structures that form it are no longer selected for (and may be selected against), but they cannot disappear overnight. We expect to see such things as the coccyx and the whale pelvis (not to many more) under the theory of evolution (and indeed we do!!).

Common design just does its best to cope with such data. One would never expect to find a vomeronasal organ in various stages of disrepair among primates under the common design hypothesis.
 
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npetreley

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EVERYTHING weighs heavily in favor of evolution in the imagination of evolutionists. It is the single most malleable theory on the planet. You find reprodcutive isolation in mosquitos, call it "speciation" and that's evidence for evolution. You cross a lion with a tiger and that's evidence for evolution. You cross-breed two species of plants and you call that evidence for evolution. You find a pseudogene that you assume has no function and that's evidence for evolution. You find a function for that same pseudogene and that's evidence for evolution.

There is virtually NOTHING that evolutionists can't somehow imagine is evidence for evolution.
 
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Morat

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Actually, if you want a prediction from common design, presumably it would be that we will find more function in those structures labeled as nonfunctional.
Click to expand...
 

  Pish-posh. Now you're dabbling in subjectivism. "Those vomeronasal organs are needed to retain the shape of the nose".

  "That appendix has a function. It sits there, taking up space that would otherwise be empty".

  "Whales need pelvises, because where else would their legs attach?"

   Precision is something you often see in science, and rarely in Creationism. It's something I've harped on for a long time. A hallmark of Creationism is a lack of follow-through. A lack of precision. Airy ideas that never seem to get grounded in data, facts, or reality.

   Take ye olde Vapour Canopy model. Any physicist who looked at the thing would immediatly wonder "If this is true, what would happen if...." and do a few back of the envelope calculations and note that "If the Vapor Canopy Model is true, then Noah would have been breathing superheated steam".

   So much (virtually all, from what I've seen) of Creationism "science" (we're ignoring "why evolution is wrong" since false dichotomies are obviously pointless) is airy speculation with little to no attempts at falsification, or even an attempt to fit the thing into the real world. Hydrological sorting is an excellent example.

  Anyone seriously trying to test such a theory would have immediatly run aground on certain problems. Big fat dinosaurs consistantly above tiny trilobites, for instance. But there was no serious attempt to test it. It wasn't a scientific theory, but an attempt to preach to the choir.

 
 
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