Evolution is not science

Since the evidence of evolution in the past is available in the present, there's little validity to your statements. While it's common for creationists to assert that science has no power to look backwards, it should be obvious to the most casual thinker that, indeed, every observation that has even been made has been of an event that is now in the past, so clearly, the past is an appropriate field of study for science. The past, in fact, is all science can study.All points in time in the past were the present, once; when they were, they left evidence that we can see in the present, now. We use that evidence to discern what happened when we weren't there. It's no different than what happens on CSI. It would be ridiculous indeed to suggest that the same process that sends criminals to jail isn't sufficient to tell us what happened a little farther in the past. No, it really can't. The body of evidence on the subject, when approached without a prior ideological commitment to support a political movement, points to the conclusion that has been accepted as definitive by the scientific community - the evolutionary model.

Maybe you should relax. When I began the message, nobody had posted yet. I had no way of knowing what Chiro was writing.

There's no debate. Evolution is accepted as consensus science because of the vast weight of evidence in its favor; evidence that necessitated the conclusion of evolution. The theory of evolution is that natural selection and random mutation are responsible for the history and diversity of species on Earth; as such, the observation that natural selection and random mutation give rise to new morphology and new species is, indeed, evidence for the theory of evolution. The physical evidence is observable; the tests we perform on that evidence are repeatable. The study of evolution is science by any definition. There's such a vast weight of evidence that, indeed, it does almost speak for itself. Evidence, however, does not support an infinite variety of interpretations. The scientific interpretation of that evidence is the evolutionary model. Indeed. But there is no question - evolution is the best explanation of all the evidence we have available. And arriving at the best explanation - of any phenomenon - is definitely science.

Lol! Perhaps it's just a hopeful expression.I've been here for many years, and I've never seen an instance where legitimate, honest debate about the science happened between creationists and evolutionists, except when they were talking about something else.But perhaps it would have been less ambiguous for me to have said "no debate within the sciences." Random mutation creates new traits. That's why I said "natural selection and random mutation." This statement doesn't make any sense to me. Mutation is why there's the potential for variation in the first place. Why not? Mutations can create arbitrary genetic sequences. No, but the evidence did, and I can see the evidence. If the objections leveled at evolution were scientific ones, I would agree. But the scientific debate over evolution ended in Darwin's time.The objections of creationists are religiously motivated, however, and I shouldn't have to tell you how hard it is to oppose religion with fact. The debate rages on among laypeople because evolution contradicts a narrow interpretation of the Bible, not for any fault of its science.You may find my remarks arrogant. I find your presumption of universal rationality among all human beings to be naive.

It has, for scientists. Not everybody is a scientist, though. I don't understand why you think the scientific consensus would end the debate for everybody else. We can't even get everybody to agree that the Earth is spherical. How complicated? Genetic sequences are actually quite simple - it's just 4 different bases in different orders. And the total number of different proteins among known life is actually a very small fraction of all the possible proteins; which tells us that, in fact, it's quite easy to mutate your way from one functional protein to another. (There's a mathematical proof of this but I don't have it.) The fossils. The genetics. The experiments. Specifics can be found in your biology classroom. Atheists often have questions about evolution, but that's just to learn more about it. There's no such thing as an atheist creationist, by definition.

Not for scientific reasons, though. You'll find that all of your "scientists" (almost none of which are biologists, btw) question evolution because it conflicts with the Bible, which they hold to be inerrant. Quantity isn't complexity. Quantity isn't complexity. Except that errors are common. It's those errors, in fact, that create variation within populations and allows evolution to act. This doesn't make any sense at all. It's not like you can interpret the evidence in an infinite number of ways. The simplest, most parsimonious interpretation of those areas of evidence is the scientific theory of evolution. You're going to have a hard time providing concrete examples - which I'm asking you to do - because that simply isn't so. Creationism is a religious movement, not a scientific one; and therefore clearly not an enterprise an atheist would be interested in being involved in. Atheists are not creationists, by definition.

In fact, they can and often do. The classic experiment is the mutative creation of a replacement lac operon in E. coli culture.The thing is, though, the history of living things is not really a story of "new structures." What we find throughout the world of living things is that, largely, organisms all have the same structures. I mean, consider how universal the tetrapod body plan is among the vertebrates. At no point since the Devonian period have we really needed large novel structures to evolve.There's not really a lot of novelty in evolutionary history. We really don't need to prove that mutations can create a human heart in one mutational event, because that didn't happen. Humans have the hearts they do because they inherited them, through slight modification, from the hearts that other primates have.

This isn't a link to a scientist questioning evolution on scientific grounds. This is a link to a television story that misrepresents the science. This is not a link to scientific concerns about evolution, either. This is a link to Discovery Institute hucksters asserting that there are scientific concerns without saying what they are. Moreover:

quote:

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"I am skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."

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This isn't "questioning evolution." This is the Discovery Institute misrepresenting standard scientific tentativity - which is embraced by the most ardent evolutionist - as a basis to undermine evolution. More of their old tricks, I guess. Most of your 100 scientists, later, were quite dismayed to see how they had been represented by DI. Or prevent one. (Where are you getting your numbers? The human genome is something like 5.6 billion base pairs long, which would be 11.2 "letters.") Pull one stone out of an arch and the whole thing falls apart.Is an arch complex? I would say that an arch is very simple. So simple, in fact, that they're often created in nature: Natural arch - WikipediaYeah, I hear you saying it, but you're not proving it, which is why I don't believe you. "Alternatives" to evolution have failed in every regard. Creationism is just religious nonsense dressed poorly in science. Intelligent Design is just an attempt to dress it up better.What are you suggesting as an alternative? Lamarkianism? Discredited. Lysenkoism? The only reason anybody ever believed that was because the Soviet Union would kill you otherwise.Evolution has been responsible for almost every advance in biology in the past 50 years. It's the unifying theory of biology, and the extent to which it has expanded our knowledge about life on Earth is immeasurable. It's been subjected to experimental verification on every level; and on every level it has emerged vindicated. There are millions. A short list encompassing vertebrate evolution can be reviewed here. Nearly every fossil found has revealed to be transitional in some aspect. (It may be that you don't know what a transitional fossil would actually be.)

Hall, B. G. 1981. Changes in the substrate specificities of an enzyme during directed evolution of new functions. Biochemistry 20: 4042-4049.Hall, B. G. and T. Zuzel. 1980. Evolution of a new enzymatic function by recombination within a gene. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 77(6): 3529-33.

No, I asked for proof that scientists have scientific reasons that cast doubt on evolution.They don't. No, it's not. There's absolutely no scientific debate about the essential accuracy of the evolutionary model.None whatsoever. The only "debate" that occurs is the misinformation promulgated for religious reasons. No, they don't. You can usually modify more than 60% of a gene before you have any effect whatsoever on the function of its protein product. They don't have to be precise. Redundancy, in fact, is built right into the translation code. Sure you can. In fact it happens spontaneously; such sequences are called "transposable elements." These kinds of changes are the source of great diversity. This is just a repetition of your claims. "Creationwiki" offers no evidence for its assertions, either. Did you look up those articles to see what they said?Plus, I love the laughable assertion that yeast are somehow smart enough to "genetically engineer" themselves. Yeast were able to master what it took humanity centuries to learn? Yeah, right. You sure picked a winner with "creationwiki."If you think you posted some kind of refutation of the Hall material, you're quite mistaken.

We can, do, and have put evolution to the test in the laboratory setting and, indeed, in any setting you could probably care to name.There's nothing about evolution that makes it unsuitable for laboratory analysis. Indeed, most of the genetic tools and computers we use to tease out evolutionary relationships are too sensitive to be used anywhere else.

We covered a really great example in another thread:More Evidence of Evolution - Geomyidae and GeomydoecusBut if "macroevolution" is evolution above the species level, then we're testing evolution in the lab every time we do any work in molecular phylogenetics. But you're wrong. Almost all of the work on macroevolution is done in the lab. Tests are simply observations that you predict. If someone uses the theory of evolution to predict where a fossil might be found, and roughly how deep in the ground it might be, then that's a successful test of evolution (when they find the fossil.) That's a pretty simplistic case.Another test is the thread I linked to above - given two genera, pocket gophers and their pubic lice, we would expect the pubic lice to experience gene flow only when the pocket gophers did - because the only time pubic lice can come together to mate is when their hosts are mating, as well. The prediction from that scenario is that both the gophers and their lice will have a phylogenetic tree that "looks" the same, because speciation is happening at the same time in both organisms.And that's exactly what we do see; that's another test that confirms evolution. Occam's razor leads us to connect data points with the minimum, simplest line. There's no reason to believe that a line is actually a curve until there is data that indicates that - and if that data is only revealed under extreme, unlikely conditions, how relevant is that?

No, I'd say the vast network of phylogenetic relationships we've developed with genetic tools is larger. The fossil record shouldn't be dismissed however, particularly in so far as it can corroborate the relationships we develop phylogenetically. Obviously, in the controlled lab setting we can create nearly every possible condition, including the conditions found in nature. Your objection here is somewhat spurious. Whyever not? Once you've excavated the fossil from its bed, I assure you you can take it wherever you would like and do whatever you want to it. Indeed, tests run in labs are regularly done on excavated fossils. Who's going to stop you? The fossil police? We're trying to tell you that behavior at "extreme" conditions may very well be interesting, but that data isn't privileged over the data developed under more mundane conditions. The behavior of water at 2000 degrees at 200 atm may be very interesting, but we don't need that evidence to substantiate the atomic theory of matter or the kinetic theory of gases.

A theory with no mechanism is no theory at all. It doesn't explain anything. The "theory of evolution" you're talking about is just the idea of evolution, that more complex or advanced forms develop from simpler ones, and it's not a scientific theory of any kind, it's just an idea about things.The scientific theory of evolution includes random mutation and natural selection, as Darwin formulated, and those two mechanisms can't be extracted from the theory. They essentially are the theory, the core of it at least (there's been some additional mechanisms uncovered, like genetic drift), and without them there's no such thing as the scientific theory of evolution. The reason why it's such a waste of time to try to disprove natural selection is because natural selection is so obviously, undeniably correct. Organisms are selected by nature. That's a fact that simply can't be denied.

Darwin certainly didn't propose "mutation" as we now understand it - a heritable change in genetic molecules - but the recognition that individuals varied amongst each other and even from their ancestors was very much a part of evolution as Darwin developed it. ...right. Hopefully, your paper will be able to explain why, if there's no natural selection, we see so many organisms around us being naturally selected. What happening, exactly?