Originally posted by Shane Roach
Normal scientific standards are that you take the thing you are studying and look directly at it. This is impossible with evolution. This is the reason so many people find themselves shocked by this recent push to have it understood as a more or less accepted "fact" in science. I can remmeber a day in my lifetime even when the general consensus in the books I read was "we'll probably never know for sure." Now it's, "we know for sure and not only that, anyone who doesn't believe in it is irrational."
Where on earth did you get such weird ideas about science? We had the proton/neutron/electron model of atoms for a very long time before we could even distinguish between an atom and its nucleus with any instruments we had.
The model survived, not because anyone had ever seen a neutron, but because the model allowed us to make predictions about chemical bonding, and those predictions were borne out.
All sorts of science is based on indirect observation. We set up lasers and say "If gravity bends space, we should see an interference pattern here". We don't actually see what happens; we just test our theories by looking at the things they effect.
Ever seen the experiment where you send light through two thin vertical slits, and you get weird interference patterns? That's *indirect* observation of light doing wave things.
Twenty or thirty years ago, lots of evolutionary theory was much less established, and crucial supporting evidence had been predicted, but never found. In the intervening time, many of the holes have been filled in.
At this point, there are lots of interesting questions to be explored, but, from a practical science standpoint, there's no real question about the basic evolutionary model. This doesn't mean it *can't* be wrong; it means there's no point in arguing about it until you find *NEW EVIDENCE*. The stuff people like to point at (there was a very long post on one of these threads recently) is all old, rehashed, and long since addressed. There's even a fairly well documented case of someone moving some fossils around to try to weaken the case for evolution - which is dishonest, and I think he should be ashamed.
Keep in mind, we have multiple different ways of checking the dates of fossils - and they generally agree fairly closely. Thus, we have the history well down. We have a lot more fossils now than we did in, say, 1970. We have better technology for analyzing them, and we have *MUCH* better technology for analyzing DNA.
Thirty years ago, no one could tell you how closely something was related except by looking for fossils, or eyeballing it and saying "these look similar". Now, we can look at fossils, say "these should be fairly closely related, but they should both be very different from this guy", and we can *test* this. And, whaddya know, the DNA generally supports the fossil record.
At some point, specific conflicts stop being a weakness in the overall theory, and start merely correcting the details.
(ie can lead to flawed results).
As I said before, nothing is going to get thru to those who deal with evidence by denying its existence.
