Evidence for evolution

My apologies. My fault completely.

Me too. However, if this thread doesn't return to topic it will be closed for a day of rest.ABEThank you for the apology. But off threadness is rarely the fault of one individual you had lots of help with it.A note to all:
This form of communication is subject to more misunderstanding than face-to-face (and that has enough as it is). Don't take anything too personally.I know we all know that, just a reminder, k?This message has been edited by AdminNosy, 12-15-2004 10:47 AM

Many of the science shows are info-tainement and highly speculative. I am particularly thinking of "Walking with Dinosaurs" where they attributed all sorts of social behaviors to each dinosaur they showed as if it were fact.In a scientific paper you can easily distinguish between the data/evidence that has been gathered, the conclusions the authors draw from the data and any speculative extrapolations they might propose...and you are free to repeat the work or analyze the data yourself. This is obviously not the case in a tv show or popular book on science.

And most annoyingly showed dinosaurs urinating! Neither reptiles nor birds do that, so why would dinosaurs? Arggghhhhh!

Getting cranky here, about to close this if anyone else posts off topic.

Right. Stipulated. Wrong on all counts, but a truism. However, as my last no-doubt-vain attempt to keep this discussion somewhere in the remote vicinity of the original topic, I'll reiterate: do you have any other questions concerning my statement that biogeography is one of the key lines of evidence supporting both the fact of evolution and the theory of how it all came about?

Excuse if I am mistaken, but by "biogeography," I suppose you are referring to your earlier point, which you said was very convincing evidence for TOE, that species when isolated evolve in different ways. Then you asked earlier if I wanted an example. I'd like an example. I want to see what's so convincing about it.

I'll answer in the "how did it start" group.

I'm very tempted to jump in and make up my own explanation of this. But since Quetzal is online I'll be fair and leave it to him.I do think Q, that you need to flesh it out a lot since Robin seems to be missing the main point. (well maybe, I might be reading it carelessly).

I think that Robin keeps looking for the one single "proof" of evolution, without realizing that scientific theories explain patterns of evidence, and are not "proven" by single examples. We're not going to be able to show you one single example that you can't handwave away, Robin. But the only way you'll be able to explain all the examples we could give you, at the same time, is through evolution.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 12-15-2004 01:33 PM

Go for it Ned. Mine's gonna have to be one of them loooong posts. Ya know, like having to build the tools to build the tools to build the machine to produce the item? There's such a whopping lot of ground to cover just to make it plain that any shorter version is welcome.

Well, yeah. You are mostly mistaken. I'm working on a reply that should cover the basics. It's a bit more than a one-liner answer that's required, here, unfortunately. Hopefully it won't be wasted effort.

While waiting for Q's more detailed answer I'm going to try to pull something out of (somewhere) quickly.When we look at the pattern of life on the earth (not, this time, arrayed over time like the evidence for evolution that I mentioned early on ) arrayed over the geography of the planet we see what is seems to be called biogeography.We don't see a pattern that suggests all life originated recently at one point (and re started even more recently after what can only be called the mother of all extinction events). We see a pattern that of the life in each geographic region being related to the recent fossils in that region. We see this connection only slowly break down as we go back very deep into the fossil record in the region.This suggests, strongly I would say, that the life of a particular piece of geography has been there separated from other life in other areas for an extended period of time. It is exactly the patter that is consistent with the ToE.

The OP asks for "...what the most solid, most convincing evidence is for this theory". This is going to be "in the eye of the beholder" in each case.I would hope that someone asking that would understand that something like this is really accepted because of the total body of evidence.This thread could handle that by each giving their own "fav". The sum of those might cover enough ground to be somewhat representative of the whole body of knowledge but in bite sized chunks.

In my wife's literature search for her research, she uncovered an article (I'll dig up the biblography if anyone really wants) where phylogenetics were done on a series of beetle populations in the Canary Islands, to determine from their molecular clocks the order in which the beetles colonized the islands.What they discovered was that, when they compared that order to the order of the geologic formation of the islands from radiometric dating and other evidences, they matched. Both molecular phylogenetics and geochronology corraborated, in one swift stroke.