Why should evolution be accepted on authority?

This morning, after writing this up, I went to work (I teach English at a community college), and I was listening to a conversation between two other teachers. One, an economics teacher, was saying to someone that there really wasn't much proof for evolution; it was mostly speculation, he said. Presumably the economics teacher was reasonably well-educated. You have to have at least a Master's degree to teach there.Just goes to show how widespread this idea is that there is no real proof for evolution.

Are you talking about the fact that mommas have little babies, and these little babies are not exactly like either their father or their mother? What does this prove?

This is one of the cornerstones underlying the evolutionary process. With imperfect replication and a selective pressure evolution has to happen. It would be interesting for someone showing that it can be avoided.By the way the difference of the baby from it's parents is not that it is mix of the parents characteristics. The additional difference is in the errors/mutations/changes that it has.

Ned, I read one article some time ago that talked about some butterflies that over the period of not too many years changed color because of man-made changes in their environment. The color of the wings was a camouflage device so when the environment changed, the color of the wings changed. Have you ever heard of that particular case?

Yes, I know of the case. We've had a whole thread or so on it here. Peppered Moths is what you might want to google with an advanced search restricted to this site. (that seems to work better than the internal search here).This is only a demonstartion of the effect of selection. As I understand it the moth populations have both light and dark varieties all the time (I don't know the details of the genetics involved with this or what maintains the population variety but there are lots of examples where this can happen).The changes in the environment produce selective pressures on the populations that means one or the other variety predominates just as one would expect.

What about this type of evidence, Mike?1. People started doing this careful fossil excavation, and they found out that the further down you dug, the less and less of the higher animals (primates, etc.) you found, until eventually they reached a spot where there was nothing but simpler, more primitive species. It was not just here and there that this was the case. It was always the case, no matter where they dug. The deeper the fossil is, the older it is, it was naturally assumed.
2. But then they came up with a way to more accurately date these fossils by measuring how much radiation they lost over time. This let them know that these deep fossils were really old, and it verified the deeper-the-older idea.
3. And then many years later along comes DNA analysis, not the DNA analysis of fossils but the analysis of living species. With this you can show what's related to what in the animal world. This DNA analysis verified a lot of the old speculation about what evolved from what.
4. And then you have this phenomenon of isolated species. Some animals wander off some place, many years pass, and then this place becomes an island, say. The same species that was in the original place changed in one way and the same species on the isolated island started changing in other ways. And it's easy to see why the isolated species changed as it did, due to differences in their environment (I'm a little fuzzy on why it's easy to see why they changed).My knowledge of this is minimal (Ned and others can correct me), but that's the way I understand it. I am wondering why none of this is convincing to you. The reason it's convincing to me is that all the different methods of analysis come together and agree on the same conclusions. If you just had one method, it would not be very convincing.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------This message has been edited by robinrohan, 12-20-2004 03:00 PM

By George! I thnk you've got it.

Well, sort of.One way to know if you understand something is to try to put in your own words, in plain language.

sorry i gess i ranted and got off track.
what i meant is that in one area it's not like EVERY choice is available because, were i live, the majority of people are christians and if you grow up in a christian family there is that pressure to be christian because you are pressured to go to church. even in school or work there is that pressure. and there are no areas to prectice budism, or islam.but to tie this to evolution when you ask some one to explain something they tell you what THEY belive not just the possibilities. lets say you ask me something and i tell you my belife or opinion on the subject you are just getting one point of veiw no choices. same goes on in school there needs to be some DEFEATABLE opposition rather than undefeatable.if not then evolution should just become a law.and thanks for the meanings ^_^.This message has been edited by PerfectDeath, 12-20-2004 03:43 PM

I was trying to discuss a philosophical issue about why we should accept something on authority, but what I was really wondering was why evolution is not accepted on authority by more people.I'm thinking that maybe people are willing to accept on authority all kinds of scientific claims as long as those claims don't seem to interfere with their religious or moral beliefs.I was trying to think of a scientific claim that everyone accepts without question even though they can't perform any experiments at home to verify it--something in which the nature of the evidence would be comparable to TOE. Big Bang won't do, because a lot of people don't accept that either.Some creationists say they don't accept macro-evolution because no one has every witnessed it. Is there some other scientific claim that we all accept without question though no one has ever witnessed it?

Mike the Wiz seems to accept the Big Bang...

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

Ned,I'm not sure I've understood you. I would think at least quite bit of the difference is that it has a different mix of dominant and recessive genes then either parent. I don't know what the mutation rate is but I guess I'm under the impression that from one generation to the next there are NOT that many mutations. How many mutations are there on average in an egg and a sperm?lfen

That's what I meant, yes. It proves that imperfect replication happens all the time, obviously. For the rest I refer you to Ned. He explained it very succinctly and with a surprising twist:

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

The average frequency of synonymous substitutions ("silent" mutations, if you will) in mammalian nuclear DNA is (and this is from memory, mind you) is about 3.6 per billion base pairs, or something like the "between 5 and 50" figure we toss about. Non-synonymous mutations are something like a third as frequent.

What is it, exactly, that prevents you from examining the evidence yourself?