proving evolution as just a "theory"

[Kenny'sID]

What would constitute proof of evolution if not the wealth of data and evidence from the scientific literature? (I mean, one could post links to research all day and still have a long ways to go)

Do you want an experiment that would allow you to collect the data yourself? (I can recommend studies for you to replicate, particularly in paleontology and paleobiology where you can study morphological change through time in a given clade, but this will require you to become adept at species identification which is a skill that takes quite a bit of practice to really get. You could also replicate the experiments from the evolutionary biology literature too. The Lenski experiment is a good one, but one could look at all sorts of organisms in their surrounding area)

A thought experiment to show proof of concepts? (there is a game I tentatively call "the evolution game" that I have used in class before to teach students about how selection pressure affects populations through successive generations. It's fun and uses jelly beans and various utensils for grasping them, but in order to this experiment you'll need to compute some basic statistics and you'll also need several other volunteers to help you do it)

Proof, as in proof.

I put my hand on the stove, I get burned, that's not only "evidence" but proof the stove will burn my hand....it is a fact, and it's easily proven.

Proof plain and simple, nothing complicated with opinion of what something means when there could be several answers for that. See, it is not an opinion I burned my hand, it is fact absolutely.

So do that, or at the very least, go back to stating it's theory.. Somewhere, at some point, is seems it's become fact instead of theory, and for no good reason that I know of.

No need to complicate it, simply present your proof. Do you think you have proof, and can I get a straight answer on that please?

 

[TBDude65]

Proof, as in proof.

I put my hand on the stove, I get burned, that's not only "evidence" but proof the stove will burn my hand....it is a fact, and it's easily proven.

Proof plain and simple, nothing complicated with opinion of what something means when there could be several answers for that. See, it is not an opinion I burned my hand, it is fact absolutely.

So do that, or at the very least, go back to stating it's theory.. Somewhere, at some point, is seems it's become fact instead of theory, and for no good reason that I know of.

No need to complicate it, simply present your proof. Do you think you have proof, and can I get a straight answer on that please?

So you want an experiment that you can replicate yourself? Sure, can do.

I don't know where you live, but the majority of the US population lives on the east coast and are within a reasonable driving distance to sedimentary rocks that contain fossils. I can find you a location with enough stratigraphic resolution for you to replicate a morphological experiment similar to what Gould and Eldredge did in 1977. Thus allowing you to see if you can replicate the results and show any punctuations in the morphology of a species that you sample through the sections.

Is that what you want?

 

[PsychoSarah]

All your branching tree stuff is assumption. You cannot branch tree backwards to a common ancestor because there never has been any observation of anything becoming something it was not originally.

-_- evolution applies to populations over multiple generations. Individual organisms don't suddenly transform into something entirely different. We have observed populations of organisms change dramatically over many generations. Not just with bacteria (which creationists hardcore want to dismiss all the time for some reason because they don't become "not bacteria", even though a kingdom level classification transition is a ridiculous amount of change to try to measure to demonstrate the genus and order level transitions creationists frequently deny); there is an isolated island of birds utilized in evolution experiments, as well as the happenstance result of what happened when a primarily carnivorous species of lizard became isolated on an island with mostly greens available for food a few decades ago.

You assume a bird evolved from a lizard or whatever with out any observation or testable theory that can show it's possible.

-_- mutations result in physical change upon which natural selection can act over time. Since no limit has been found on how much mutations can change populations of organisms over time, various transitions are measurably possible.

The branches are all assumed to branch the way evolution says.

-_- no, evidence suggests a certain branching, and it is added to evolution as we gain more evidence. Evolution didn't start out with a bunch of branches we then later had to scramble to find evidence to support.

All you can really say is that somethings have some genes or genomes in common.

XD since genome refers to the entire genetic content of an organism, anything that has a genome in common is, by definition, the same species. Also, it isn't just "some genes". Since every living organism on this planet has 4 base pairs in their DNA, and those base pairs are the same in every organism, then the degree of similarity in genomes that can be attributed to coincidence is 25%. Our genetic similarity with other apes is over 90% across the board.

Physical similarity isn't an excuse for genetic similarity, as most codons (3 base pairs, which signal for a specific amino acid) are entirely redundant, having at least one other codon signal for the same exact amino acid. As many as 4 codons can signal for the same exact thing. Furthermore, amino acids themselves are a tad redundant, as a few are chemically similar enough to be interchangeable in proteins without significantly impacting function.

You assume that means common ancestor. The truth is it doesn't mean any such thing.

By that logic, genetic paternity tests are garbage.

What it means is that some things have some genes in common. That's all.

But there has to be a cause, and coincidence cannot account for the degree of genetic similarity we observe in different species.

And your formation idea further illustrates my point. We didn't see our solar system form.

-_- no, but thanks to telescopes, we can watch other solar systems form. Not that this has anything to do with evolution.

 

[PsychoSarah]

Proof, as in proof.

I put my hand on the stove, I get burned, that's not only "evidence" but proof the stove will burn my hand....it is a fact, and it's easily proven.

Nope, that's just a correlation between putting your hand on a stove and burning yourself. There are alternative possibilities for the cause, it is just that the heat of the stove makes the most sense based on the EVIDENCE. You can't PROVE hot stoves can burn hands, no matter how many times you repeat the experiment.

This is why the common use of proof is nothing like the academic use of it. Most of the time, people would call extremely good evidence "proof" of something, but in scientific terms, you can't even prove that anything actually exists. That's why creationists demanding "proof" is annoying. In common terms, plenty of evidence for evolution would meet the general standard of "proof", but proof as an academic term only applies to math. Not even math applied to the real world, just independent equations.

Proof plain and simple, nothing complicated with opinion of what something means when there could be several answers for that. See, it is not an opinion I burned my hand, it is fact absolutely.

Well, no, you might just think you burned your hand because it hurts.

So do that, or at the very least, go back to stating it's theory.. Somewhere, at some point, is seems it's become fact instead of theory, and for no good reason that I know of.

Theories are based on factual observations. For evolution, change in populations over time was already observed BEFORE the theory (which exists only to explain HOW populations change over time, not the fact that they do). So, when you challenge the idea that populations can change over time, you aren't challenging the theory of evolution. You're challenging the capacity for people to make observations.

No need to complicate it, simply present your proof. Do you think you have proof, and can I get a straight answer on that please?

-_- since the common use of the term "proof" is somewhat arbitrary, and the academic use of the term never applies to science, what you are asking for doesn't make sense. You don't need "proof" to know that computers exist or that people digest food, so why are you asking for it with evolution?

 

[sfs]

OK now we're getting somewhere.

Now explain how that is proof of evolution.

If common descent is true, then all genetic differences between populations are the result of mutations. Therefore, common descent predicts that genetic differences should look like lots of accumulated mutations. If special creation of different species is true, on the other hand, there is no reason to expect genetic differences to have any particular pattern. To test the hypothesis of common descent, therefore, we can look in detail at the genetic differences between any two species, to see whether they look like mutations.

So what do mutations look like? Well, we know a lot about that, since genetic variation within a species is produced by mutations. Some kinds of mutations happen very frequently, some less frequently, some rarely. So we have a simple test: when we look between species, do we see the common kinds of mutation more frequently? Here's what we see when we compare humans and chimpanzees:

The columns represent seven different classes of mutation which have very different mutation rates. The bottom panel shows how often we see each class when we look just in humans. The top panel shows how often we see each kind of difference when we compare the genomes of humans and chimpanzees.

As predicted by common descent, the distributions are almost exactly the same. So what's the creationist explanation for the similarity of the two panels?

 

[Bugeyedcreepy]

Funny, because geology actually shows there was a giant watery disaster on all of the earth.
Slow stratification has been quite refuted in the 80s of the previous century, by experiments by scientists.
Now why does hardly anybody know that?

I don't believe a thing you say.
The evidence clearly shows a huge watery disaster some millennia ago.
We see what we expect: Various strata with dead animals in it = rapid burial.

Salt Mines. <== Global Flood Disproven!

 

[driewerf]

That's not really what i wrote, is it?
PEOPLE accept it because it's force fed to us for decades.

Okay, I accept the correction.
But that still doesn't explain why the people (both scientists and laymen) accepted it when Darwin presented his book. These people had not been brainwashed.

Scientists can have a career in it when they subscribe to it.

And they had no career back then?
By the way, you realize that to show Darwin wrong, and this through the peer review process, as judged by experts -- not just a chruch congregation of laymen -- would be the biggest career booster.

It's the only natural explanation, there's not much choice for natural science.

So the ToE is THE BEST explanation we have. Nice.

That may be true, however by default the amount of complexity as we find in our reality (living nature in particular) is explained best by a capable intelligence with a will and a goal, rather than by unintentional dead forces of nature.

(emphasis mine)
By default? Why by default? Nothing is accepted in science by default. Moreover, we have seen DNA write itself, in the lab. We have seen beneficial mutation arise, both in the lab and in the wild, through "the unintentional dead forces of nature". We have seen morphological changes arise in animals due to different selective pressure.

Let's not forget that this is all a human endeavour to make sense of our reality.

Correct. And science is the best tool for that.

So I repeat my question: if people accept/belive the Theory of Evolution just due to decades of brainwashing, as you stated, why did the first people reading Darwin's book accept it, since they had not been brainwashed?

 

[Ana the Ist]

That's not really what i wrote, is it?
PEOPLE accept it because it's force fed to us for decades.
Scientists can have a career in it when they subscribe to it.

That's not really a point to be arguing...

After all, christianity has been force fed to us for millennia. People accept it so they can be accepted by their christian communities.

See how that works?

 

[Waggles]

any things i could say to prove him wrong?

Sure. Ask your friend to show you real evidence for evolution.
Ask for him to take you to any museum and share the evidence of species transitioning from one species to another.
Ask him to show you how kidneys evolved, or the liver or the spleen or the heart and circulatory
system evolved. Ask for the evidence. Ask him to prove it.
In the end he can't.

You know dinosaurs had all the body components - skeleton; muscles, organs, digestive systems;
eyes; brains; spinal cords; etc etc etc - they died out some supposed 65 million years ago and
ruled the world for hundreds of millions of years before.
So if dinosaurs had everything to be complex warm blooded animals and reproduce then just when did
all these necessary body parts evolve to allow for this? and from what?

When you get into the nitty gritty of the how of evolution there is only supposition and hopeful
wishing. Show me the evolution of the eyes and sight: eyeballs that are cameras, rods and cones
that are photographically sensitive to images; optic nerves; brain receptors; turning upside down
images into the right way up. Should be easy to show all the steps involved from light sensitive bacteria
right through to what we can visualize today.

Creation is self evident, evolution is continuing to deliberately deny the truth.

 

[Waggles]

iam trying to prove to a friend that the christian way is the true way but he tells me to give an explanation of evolution and dinosaurs.
any things i could say to prove him wrong?

God I can interact with. God in Jesus is a wonderful truth.
Jesus, unlike Charles Darwin, rose from the dead after three full days in a tomb.
That alone declares the truth of the gospel of salvation.

We are not some accidental mishap and our only end is the grave. Rather we are the most highly
created beings in the known universe created for purpose and meaning.
For those who choose good eternal life with Jesus and our Father in a new age.
For those who choose unbelief and evil before God eternal condemnation.

If evolution is true then the Nazis and the Communists are right - elites can create their own
atheistic religions and commit genocide and make war, and do atrocities to their own people.
For there is no external truth or morality outside of human determination and actions.

Only God alone commands that we MUST love our neighbour as ourselves; that we should
do to others as we would have others do unto us.
Love is not about survival of the fittest or might is right; but rather that we should make personal
sacrifices of ourselves to serve others; to help the weak; to feed the hungry; to love the unlovable.

 

[HitchSlap]

Sure. Ask your friend to show you real evidence for evolution.
Ask for him to take you to any museum and share the evidence of species transitioning from one species to another.
Ask him to show you how kidneys evolved, or the liver or the spleen or the heart and circulatory
system evolved. Ask for the evidence. Ask him to prove it.
In the end he can't.

You know dinosaurs had all the body components - skeleton; muscles, organs, digestive systems;
eyes; brains; spinal cords; etc etc etc - they died out some supposed 65 million years ago and
ruled the world for hundreds of millions of years before.
So if dinosaurs had everything to be complex warm blooded animals and reproduce then just when did
all these necessary body parts evolve to allow for this? and from what?

When you get into the nitty gritty of the how of evolution there is only supposition and hopeful
wishing. Show me the evolution of the eyes and sight: eyeballs that are cameras, rods and cones
that are photographically sensitive to images; optic nerves; brain receptors; turning upside down
images into the right way up. Should be easy to show all the steps involved from light sensitive bacteria
right through to what we can visualize today.

Creation is self evident, evolution is continuing to deliberately deny the truth.

Fun fact: humans lived closer to T. rex, than T. rex lived to Stegosaurus.

 

[HitchSlap]

God I can interact with. God in Jesus is a wonderful truth.
Jesus, unlike Charles Darwin, rose from the dead after three full days in a tomb.
That alone declares the truth of the gospel of salvation.

We are not some accidental mishap and our only end is the grave. Rather we are the most highly
created beings in the known universe created for purpose and meaning.
For those who choose good eternal life with Jesus and our Father in a new age.
For those who choose unbelief and evil before God eternal condemnation.

If evolution is true then the Nazis and the Communists are right - elites can create their own
atheistic religions and commit genocide and make war, and do atrocities to their own people.
For there is no external truth or morality outside of human determination and actions.

Only God alone commands that we MUST love our neighbour as ourselves; that we should
do to others as we would have others do unto us.
Love is not about survival of the fittest or might is right; but rather that we should make personal
sacrifices of ourselves to serve others; to help the weak; to feed the hungry; to love the unlovable.

Another fun fact: dead people don't rise from graves.

 

[driewerf]

Turnabout is fair play -

Well please let me know when you can test and reproduce creation from nothing will you? I will swallow my pride and say well I guess they were right all along. So far all they have is presupposition based on Faith. We have yet to be shown how dust can become organic compounds.

Creation from nothing is a contradictio in teminis. Since once you have a creator you haven't nothing anymore.

 

[driewerf]

Sure. Ask your friend to show you real evidence for evolution.

That friend, if scientifically educated will list some of these:

• The finding of Tiktaallik in the environment and layer it was predicted
• the teeth, feathers, claws and tail of Archeopterix
• the Pod Koppiste experiment
• the experiment by Martin Boraas on chlorella vulgaris
• the Urey-Miller experiment
• the inactivated telomere in the middle of human chromosome 2, including in every cell of your body
• the 208.000 ERV's in our genome. Yep your body caries evidence for evolution and common descent
• the experiments on multicellularity on Saccharomyces cerevisiae by Ratcliff, Denison et al
• The rugged fitness landscape performed on an fd phage by Yuuki Hayashi et al
• He will also point out that based on evolutionary thinking Leslie Orgel predicted that RNA should perform some catalytic tasks in 1968, and that with the discovery or ribozymes (1982) and the catalytic role of RNA is ribosomes this prediction was spectacularly confirmed.
• the Lensky experiment on E. coli

Ask for him to take you to any museum and share the evidence of species transitioning from one species to another.

Sure, he will show you this:

Ask him to show you how kidneys evolved, or the liver or the spleen or the heart and circulatory
system evolved. Ask for the evidence. Ask him to prove it.
In the end he can't.

How typical a creationist referring only to soft tissues...

Creation is self evident, evolution is continuing to deliberately deny the truth.

Self evident? Absolving yourself of proving any evidence? LOL.

 

[driewerf]

God I can interact with.

Strange, I can't interact with god.
Or Go doesn't want to interact with me. Or maybe he can't. Anyway, no driewerf-god interaction.

Jesus, unlike Charles Darwin, rose from the dead after three full days in a tomb.
That alone declares the truth of the gospel of salvation.

O really? Ignoring the circular reasoning that it is the same gospel that is the only source of Jesus' resurrection, how does this invalidate Darwin's theory?
Shall we discard all science if the scientist who started it did not rise from the dead?
Let me see

• Jesus, unlike Charles Darwin, rose from the dead after three full days
  
• Jesus, unlike Antoine Lavoisier, rose from the dead after three full days
  
• Jesus, unlike Gregor Mendel, rose from the dead after three full days
  
• Jesus, unlike Rutherford, rose from the dead after three full days
  
• Jesus, unlike Marie Curie, rose from the dead after three full days

shall I go on?

 

[rjs330]

No, not really.

We can provide reams of data supporting the hypothesis of common descent.

Here is a simple tutorial on just molecular data.

Here is an expansive website with lots of evidence for common ancestry at multiple levels. Tons of citations and references in support of their conclusions.

Your turn.


But please keep in mind that anecdotes or bible verses are not evidence or data.

Thanks.

That so funny! I looked at the one site and guess what I found, supposition and assumptions. Not one tested verified experiment to show there was a common ancestor. Just the same old tired stuff that says in basic "this has a similarity to this therefore we have a common ancestor.". It's all a bunch of assumption wrapped in supposition. No one has observed or tested that one thing evolves into something else.

Before you go all nuts and point to how a lizard changed on an island from one species of lizard into another species of lizard and that proves evolution, let me remind you that I already agreed that can happen. One type of creature can adapt and change due to it's environment in order to survive. That's God's magnificent way to keep life going. What we don't see is a creature turning into something it wasn't in the first place.

 

[Subduction Zone]

That so funny! I looked at the one site and guess what I found, supposition and assumptions. Not one tested verified experiment to show there was a common ancestor. Just the same old tired stuff that says in basic "this has a similarity to this therefore we have a common ancestor.". It's all a bunch of assumption wrapped in supposition. No one has observed or tested that one thing evolves into something else.

Before you go all nuts and point to how a lizard changed on an island from one species of lizard into another species of lizard and that proves evolution, let me remind you that I already agreed that can happen. One type of creature can adapt and change due to it's environment in order to survive. That's God's magnificent way to keep life going. What we don't see is a creature turning into something it wasn't in the first place.

You really need to learn the basics of science. As a result of your ignorance you keep making false statements about others. You are breaking the Ninth Commandment. The Ninth Commandment does not just cover lying. Any statement that you make about someone else that you cannot substantiate is a breaking of that commandment. When you claim "supposition and assumptions" you are making a claim that you cannot support. Suppositions and assumptions are simply not allowed in the world of science. Everything must be supported by evidence.

Now since you clearly do not understand the concept of evidence would you care to learn?

 

[essentialsaltes]

Let me ask you, and I do have a point. Are Christians wrong about Creation, as in God did it?

Unlike your statements about scientific topics, you probably will not be answered by "Wrong," followed by a detailed and fact-based explanation of why you are wrong.

Goddidit on its own is an undecided and possibly undecidable question, so it isn't obviously wrong. When we come to the how Goddidit, some opinions are obviously wrong in that they fly in the face of what we know based on evidence. Other opinions, like those of say Francis Collins, are not obviously wrong.

 

[sfs]

Just the same old tired stuff that says in basic "this has a similarity to this therefore we have a common ancestor.". It's all a bunch of assumption wrapped in supposition. No one has observed or tested that one thing evolves into something else.

Okay, then you should have no problem telling me why the two plots in post 265 look so similar. I think it's because evolution is true. What's your explanation?

 

[rjs330]

Huh. So all of these branches could just happen to fall into a tree, and there's no way of knowing whether they're really related or not?

View attachment 208206

Oh I see another assumptive tree branch of something. Thanks for that. Still no evidence.