"Best" evidence for evolution.

And they lost the wings they used to fly to Hawaii too...

So to you "seriously" means Pangaea took a few days to break up, koalas evolved from another species on the Ark and all those toads and panthers and penguins and Anami rabbits and Micrixalus and millions of other species had some magical vigor that let them get from Mount Ararat to their particular homes through a landscape ravaged by forty days of mountainous waves?Wait . . . did you say koalas evolved?

How long does it take for mature trees to "get established"? Especially if they're "getting established" in a part of the world they are not suited for? How many years of supplies did Noah have in reserve?What about the fish? How did they get "established"? All the ones who depended on salt water would have been killed by the fresh water of the 40 days and nights of rain.Really, the image of polar bears camping out next to a beached Ark for a few years while they raise families and live off emergency rations until the earth returns to normal from a sodden wasteland and then eventually decide to head back to the part of the world that isn't quite as hot as the middle east is . . . curious.

And the glaciers would have advanced (and then retreated, and then advanced again nine or ten times) unconscionably fast, for the same reason Pangaea split up in only a few days? And then, of course, after all that we have to shoehorn in three millennia of dynasties in Egypt before we even get to the time of Cleopatra.

Ok, so the geologists are wrong about all those extra ice ages and the archaeologists are wrong about the three millennia of Egyptian history from the first dynasty to Cleopatra and the astronomers are wrong about us being able to see distant galaxies by their light that has been traveling for millions of years and the physicists and chemists are wrong about radiometric dating and the botanists are wrong about this "pre-Flood vigor" that you say made plants grow superfast . . .OKDisprove this theory: There is no god. Earth was built last month by mice, which are really the manifestations in our plane of existence of a race of hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings (to replace an earlier version of Earth that had, unfortunately, been destroyed by other alien beings) complete with fake dinosaur skeletons and carefully crafted evidence of continental drift and Carbon-14 decay etc. etc. etc. There is a book that says all this and it sold a lot of copies.

But your view of reality is not falsifiable.

Actually, falsifiability is very important in science. Say you have an idea that birds descended from dinosaurs. That idea is falsifiable. A lack of intermediate fossils, or intermediate fossils between birds and something other than dinosaurs, would be evidence for the incorrectness of the idea. Finding intermediate fossils is evidence of the correctness of the idea.Your claim that Pangaea split up very quickly should have something similar to make it falsifiable, but you don't say what we should look for. Instead, every piece of evidence that shows it to be incorrect, such as the extensive sediments on the floor of the Atlantic, varying from deep near the coasts to shallow near the middle where new land is being formed, you answer with another outlandish statement, something about sedimentation happening extraordinarily fast in earlier years. If you keep "multiplying entities unnecessarily" you are not working with falsifiable ideas.

You state that it's not falsifiable. Why? I've given you examples.For example, a claim that the top of a mountain was once much lower, on the bottom of the sea in fact, before plate tectonics pushed it up into the sky is falsifiable. Just look for fossils of sea creatures in the rock, for example.

Is it really off topic? Shouldn't the presentation of the best evidence be accompanied by a discussion of that evidence?

I've been looking for a generic "evolution vs creationism" debate thread, but they all seem to be about narrow subtopics.

OK

Evolution, like the formation of stars or the motions of plate tectonics, is a reasonably slow process, as scientific processes go, but it has been observed by humans. New species have been observed to evolve, of course, and scientists have used the principles of evolution many times in dealing with things like patterns of disease mutation, drug resistance, pesticide resistance, etc.On the other hand, if you were to demand that, for example, a new family of arthropod must be shown to evolve over a few weeks in a laboratory, you wouldn't be rational.

Two important points here:
1) Your complaint that evolution "hasn't been observed" is a straw man. Evolution is a slow process, claiming that it doesn't happen because the millions of years it took for humans and chimps to evolve from a common ancestor means modern scientists cannot "observe" it doesn't mean it didn't happen. As far as I'm aware, when Darwin and Wallace established evolution nobody had yet observed a new species evolving. Think of plate tectonics: you can't see new continents forming over a weekend!
2) Evolution of new species has been observed. Not in primates, obviously, but in flowers and worms and such. If there are more species of such things now than there were in the past either your deity miraculously created new species or they evolved naturally. Here are some examples;1. A population of worms separated into two populations (one in a lab) diverged until they could no longer interbreed.

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THE EVOLUTION LIST: Macroevolution: Examples and Evidence

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In 1964 five or six individuals of the polychaete worm, Nereis acuminata, were collected in Long Beach Harbor, California. These were allowed to grow into a population of thousands of individuals. Four pairs from this population were transferred to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. For over 20 years these worms were used as test organisms in environmental toxicology. From 1986 to 1991 the Long Beach area was searched for populations of the worm. Two populations, P1 and P2, were found. Weinberg, et al. (1992) performed tests on these two populations and the Woods Hole population (WH) for both postmating and premating isolation. To test for postmating isolation, they looked at whether broods from crosses were successfully reared. The results below give the percentage of successful rearings for each group of crosses.

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WH WH = 75%
P1 P1 = 95%
P2 P2 = 80%
P1 P2 = 77%
WH P1 = 0%
WH P2 = 0%

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They also found statistically significant premating isolation between the WH population and the field populations. Finally, the Woods Hole population showed slightly different karyotypes from the field populations.

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2. A new species of grass evolved that can tolerate soil contaminated with mine tailings.

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http://education.nationalgeographic.com/...opedia/speciation
Parapatric speciation sometimes happens when part of an environment has been polluted. Mining activities leave waste with high amounts of metals like lead and zinc. These metals are absorbed into the soil, preventing most plants from growing. Some grasses, such as buffalo grass, can tolerate the metals. Buffalo grass, also known as vanilla grass, is native to Europe and Asia, but is now found throughout North and South America, too. Buffalo grass has become a unique species from the grasses that grow in areas not polluted by metals. Long distances can make it impractical to travel to reproduce with other members of the species. Buffalo grass seeds pass on the characteristics of the members in that region to offspring. Sometimes a species that is formed by parapatric speciation is especially suited to survive in a different kind of environment than the original species.

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3. Mice brought from Europe to Madeira islands diverge into new species.

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Are new species still evolving? › Ask an Expert (ABC Science))
A small handful of European mice deposited on the island of Madeira some 600 years ago have now evolved into at least six different species. The island is very rocky and the mice became isolated into different niches. The original species had 40 chromosomes, but the new populations have anywhere between 22-30 chromosomes. They haven't lost DNA, but rather, some chromosomes have fused together over time and so the mice can now only breed with others with the same number of chromosomes, making each group a separate species.

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4. Flowers introduced into a new environment produce new species.

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Evolution: Watching Speciation Occur | Observations - Scientific American Blog Network
In the early 1900s, three species of these wildflowers - the western salsify (T. dubius), the meadow salsify (T. pratensis), and the oyster plant (T. porrifolius) - were introduced to the United States from Europe. As their populations expanded, the species interacted, often producing sterile hybrids. But by the 1950s, scientists realized that there were two new variations of goatsbeard growing. While they looked like hybrids, they weren't sterile. They were perfectly capable of reproducing with their own kind but not with any of the original three species - the classic definition of a new species.

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Here is an example of humans breeding new species.

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Just a moment...
Varieties of wheat that have forty-two chromosomes are the most recently evolved and most used types of wheat. All of these varieties have been cultivated by humans (as opposed to growing wild). They are hybrids of twenty-eight-chromosome wheats and wild fourteen-chromosome wheats or grasses. Early bread wheat was the result of the crossing of goat grass (Aegilops tauschii ) with Triticum turgidum. Modern bread wheat varieties have forty-two chromosomes and evolved from crosses between emmer and goat grass, which is the source of the unique glutenin genes that give bread dough the ability to form gluten. Goat grass grows abundantly in the region stretching from Greece to Afghanistan. Descriptions of the fourteen species of wheat that yield the thousands of wheat varieties grown today are provided here.

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One thing that's interesting about this is that it shows to be false the interpretation of the "fossil record" as reflecting increasing complexity. But my main response to this is that we don't know what chromosome count the original Kinds possessed and there's nothing very persuasive about what "we would expect" to be the case, so I'd drop that one if I were you.

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First, this is another example of the ignorance creationists have for science. While it is true that over time more complex organisms have evolved (it could hardly be otherwise considering that the first living organisms were necessarily small in volume and mass) evolution does NOT prescribe that life must evolve unidirectionally to greater size and complexity. Just consider the mammalian forms that went back into the oceans, with descendants having fewer limbs!Second, when you imply the "original Kinds" had a different chromosome count you are implying that modern forms of life have a different number of chromosomes than older forms! If that's not evolution, what is? Are you really saying the "original Kinds" had a different chromosome count?

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But a mutation is nothing more than an altered allele, a change in the existing genetic stuff, not anything that changes the existing stuff into something else. It's still the same gene, with a different sequence.

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Not sure what you mean by this. You say that mutations are changes but then you say they are not anything that changes!Are you perhaps saying that these are changes, changes great enough to produce different species but that isn't enough to provide evidence of evolution to you?