evidence?

Fossils are proof of life. Morphological changes in these fossils (life) proceeds in a step wise fashion through the fossil record in a chronological order. Therefore, since fossils are evidence of life, we can say with a great certainty that life changed in a step wise manner. These changes can be very dramatic or very muted, and are observable and testable. These changes bridge gaps between not only genuses, but families, orders, and beyond.So, the question we have to ask is why wouldn't that same process be happening today? It probably is. When somebody tells me that Mt. Ranier in Washington is a dormant volcanoe, I wouldn't demand that it erupt to proove it. Instead, I would ask for evidence of prior eruptions and availability of magma for future eruptions. Some things aren't observable in the short time span that you want, but rather the time span that they were meant to happen.Speciation at the species level has been observed and no known barrier to further speciation has been evident. Prior life, through observation of the fossil record, is evidence for the absence of any barrier.

As you phrase it, it is a strawman...one organism does not become another one...nor will placing D. melanogaster in a tube result in the next generation becoming D. simulans.Place bacteria under selection for 20,000 generations and you get bacteria that are genetically and phenotypically very different from their ancestors...whether you define it as a generic or species level change is semantics. They have evolved and diverged from a common ancestral population.Similar experiments have been done with Drosophila but take much longer.Plants are even more extreme with novel species produced rapidly and it is also observable.Changes in the fossil record provide snapshots of change over scales of time not amenable to study in the lab by people with average life expectancies under 100 years.

Hello everybody.lawdog asked for empirical, basic, observational evidence that one genus has changed into another, from the fossil record. I find it surprising that nobody has volunteered this information. Mammuthus, you say that evolution on large scales should not be observable in short spans, but lawdog is looking for observational evidence telling of past events. Mark24 says that there all predicted transitional species are in the fossil record. This statement puzzles me. Evolution seems to indicate that there should have been halfwhales with a partly-evolved mechanism to separate mouth and blowhole (without which they would drown, leading to speculation on how they would survive while this mechanism evolved) or partly evolved baleen, or partial fins or flippers. There should have been fish with partial legs, partial air-breathing lungs, or birds with partial feathers, wings or hollow bones. Where are all the transitional forms required while one thing evolves into another? Please give lawdog and myself a documented example. Thanks!defender

Hi defender:Actually, there are examples of most of the transitions you mention. Believe it or not, it's a bit much to explain the details of why we think, for example, acanthostega and icthyostega represent water-->land transitionals, or why we think himalyacetus and pakicetus, for example, represent the land-->water transition (your "half whales" with legs). However, the data - both raw and interpreted - is available to anyone who wants to take the trouble to learn it. If you want really excruciating detail, I recommend Caroll's "Vertebrate Paleontology". It's available at Border's for purchase, or you ought to be able to find it at a decent library. If you just want a really nice, written-for-general-consumption book that still contains enough data to make a convincing case, you could check out Zimmer's "At the Water's Edge", also available either from bookstores or many libraries. If you're really interested in the subject, it seems to me that it'd be worth your time to actually make an effort to learn what the scientists who study these things have to say about them. THEN you can decide whether they're full of it or not on your own.Lungs and other soft parts which don't fossilize well are a bit more difficult, and require a bit more knowledge of anatomy. For example, understanding that certain configurations of bone lend to an inference that lungs were attached, or that a blowhole is migrating backwards from the front of a face to a position on the back of the neck (like modern cetaceans) would be required to understand why scientists think that those organisms - long extinct - had that. OTOH, you can also look to living organisms to see if the postulated capability makes sense. On the lung evolution side, you might start looking at some of the Gobidae, of which I can think of a half-dozen species with some minor-to-significant capability of "breathing" air through the epithelium in their mouths and throats - tissue which oddly enough has many if not most of the gas diffusion properties of true lungs. Or you could look to modern critters like mud skippers, walking catfish etc, which can spend a greater or lesser amount of time completely out of the water. Looking at their adaptations, and checking to see if the skeletal features that support those adaptations are present in putative transitional fossils lends a lot of support to the idea.So how much detail do you want?

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There should have been fish with partial legs, partial air-breathing lungs, or birds with partial feathers, wings or hollow bones.

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How about fossils of horses with toes on either side of the big main toe which do not reach the ground any more.Furthermore, what about modern horses which have a bone on either side of big main leg bone which articulates the knee joint but then just tapers away to nothing about 2/3 of the way down the leg?

lawdog is not asking for evidence from the fossil record. He argues that we can't percieve evolution from chronological changes in morphology seen in dead things. So even if we had 100 transitional fossils from cow to whale lets say, it still wouldn't be enough for lawdog.

A lab test he says. Why is it when people are born again, God forgets to give them a brain for their second life?I bet a pizza his next post says: "You see 100 transitional fossils, I see 99 gaps in the fossil record."Any takers?------------------
I would not let the chickens cross the antidote road because I was already hospitlized for trying to say this!-Brad McFall

Sure, bacteria and flies can change significantly at the genetic level, but ultimately, that bacteria is still a bacteria, and that fly is still a fly. I was hoping for some empirical, observational evidence of rapid evolution at a greater taxonomic level. Does something such as this exist?It's okay to infer that this pile of bones from a dead ungulate is the ancestor of that pile of bones from a dead whale. However, science is about empirical testing, observing, repeating, etc. in the present time frame. Historical events demand historical research, such as the study of written documents, eyewitness accounts, etc.Science is epistemologically limited, and I believe that many evolutionists do not want to acknowledge this simple fact, but instead, insulate themselves with the blanket of 'science'.

No such thing exists, nor does evolution expect it to exist. What you need to realise is that all taxonomic categories are, in fact, human inventions - a means of categorising the natural world into convenient chunks. Now species approximates to something that actually exists (there's a long discussion about what exactly a species is elsewhere on this board), but a Genus is simply a grouping of 'similar' species. That such groupings can be identified is explained by evolution (they diverged from a common ancesteral pool), but there is nothing special about the events that create them. At the first point of divergence two Genus could not be identified, it is only after a long sequence of evolutionary changes that the groups springing from that original divergence could be identified.For all we know one of the speciation events we have observed could produce two Genus in a few million years time, but there is no way we could identify that at this time. Rubbish. Certain Sciences operate this way, certainly not all.

I grant that it might seem that way, and it's a natural mistake one can make in science, but not in this case. It only seems this way to you because you're focusing on the wrong thing, trans-genus evolution, as the reason we accept evolution. We do not accept evolution because we've found the branch species for many genus level evolutionary events. We accept evolution for a wealth of other reasons, such as the fossil record that we *do* have, the radiation patterns of change into the many ecological niches, and genetic inheritance. Just these three aspects alone are sufficient to conclude evolution produces species. In other words, evolution explains the evidence we have.Naturally we could not possibly have observed genus level evolution. First of all, as has already been noted, genus is a man-defined division, and as such there is an element of the arbitrary about it. Is a dog in the same genus as the wolf? Yes. As the coyote? Yes. As the hyena? You might think yes, but probably for good reasons it is in its own genus. Where did genus Hyaena and genus Canis separate? I certainly don't know. I don't even know if this has been studied or not. But speciation takes a long time, and a new genus is formed from a long series of speciation events, and so we're certainly not going to observe the formation of a new genus. We can only imply it from the evidence.Now one might argue that since we have no evidence for evolution at the genus level (by the way, I'm sure this isn't true, but let me continue for the sake of discussion) that we must look for other answers. But doing so would be truly perverse. We know reproduction is imperfect, producing mutations in almost every newly born organism. We know this causes change over time. We have a fossil record of change over time. We can see the evidence of adaptive change in all the life around us. And yet you argue that we should conclude that none of these played any role in the formation of new genuses? That it instead must have happened by the action of a deity for which, in contrast to evolution, there is no objective evidence whatsoever? And about whom the world's religions disagree, often to wide extents?--Percy

I wanted to address this separately. You're completely correct, except that you're applying the last phrase about "present time frame" too broadly. The testing, the observing, the replication, these must all be able to take place in the here and now. But the object or event under study does not have to be contemporaneous.Some sciences lend themselves to laboratory experiments in the here and now, like genetic studies using bacteria or like chemistry. Other sciences involve gathering and studying evidence from long ago, such as cosmology and paleontology. For these sciences the requirements of replication and falsifiability still very much hold. If a scientist says he found a unique bone but his dog ate it so you'll have to take his word for it, then the scientific position must be as if this bone never existed. The scientist must be able to produce this bone for other scientists to study - that is where replicability comes in. And of course the repeated study of the bone happens in the here and now, just as you say. But the bone itself can be from long ago and it would not detract at all from studying it in scientific fashion.--Percy

Hey Percy,What do you think is scientific about an assumption? Or do you think the interpretation of the ultimate origin of a dead animal (life) found in the earth requires no assumptions? Btw, how did the animals get in their mass graveyards in the first place?Evolution cannot be proven. The cited "evidence" for evolution is almost entirely speculative, depending on which version of the evolution definition one is told is the "correct" one. Guess that's why no one ever tries to prove evolution. Oh well. It's not like evolution ever helped anybody.Whilst I was a perusing your forum, "Percy", I read somewhere that you believe in a god? Is this true, that you are a "theistic" evolutionist or perhaps a theist?I don't believe it myself, but I thought I'd ask anyway. Your posts indicate a clear athiestic tone so far as life is concerned.To all other evolutionists,How does evolution explain, even conceptually, how molecules became aware of themeselves?

Hi, Unknown. Welcome aboard! Hope you decide to join.About assumptions, you'll have to let me know what assumption you're talking about, and why you would like to question it.About proving evolution, you are correct. Science can only build frameworks of understanding, called theories, around bodies of evidence. Theories are supported by, not proven by, evidence. In this way theories can remain tentative, a key requirement of science, so that theory can be modified or even discarded in light of new information or improved insight.About different views of evolution, at the level of detail usually discussed here, which is usually well away from the uncertain scientific frontiers, there is a rather mundane uniformity of viewpoint. I know of only one theory of evolution, which is descent with modification through natural selection. And of course there's the Modern Synthesis where Darwinian evolution and genetics are combined.I don't think it would be correct to say that evolution never helped anybody. One example I can think of is that our understanding of evolution is helping us in our battle against certain virulent viruses like HIV.I am not a theistic evolutionist. I believe in God, but not the God of the Christian Bible, nor the God of any religion. In fact, I don't believe any earthly religion has any idea of the nature of God, and I know I certainly don't. Nonetheless, I believe in God. I guess I would have to describe this belief as part of the way I am made. It is certainly not a position I arrived at by any deductive or inductive process. As far as I am aware, there is no evidence that this God I believe in has intervened in the natural universe in any way, except perhaps at the universe's birth to set the laws of physics.Science does not believe molecules are conscious and can become aware of themselves.--Percy

but that bone is only evidence of previous death. I guess I fail to understand how death is evidence of evolution, when it is merely evidence of the end of physical life, or how extinction is evidence of evolution, when it is merely evidence of previous death, or how long ages is evidence of evolution, when it is merely evidence of a bunch of time having passed. I, too, believe assumptions play a huge role in evolutionary theory, and that empirical, observational evidence of major evolution is severely lacking.Regardless, thanks for your input.

Your problem, lawdog, is that you don't understand the importance of bones. Ask any forensic anthropologist and they'll tell you just how much a bone reveals about the life of the organism. Bones and teeth can tell you about the health, diet, age, etc. of the animal, nevermind the type of animal. It can also occasionally reveal how the animal died.Bones are not only evidence of death, but of life as well. Evolution is evidenced by the multitude of bones/skeletons available and their morphological changes through time.