I believe that you and other have served to complicate the question unnecessarily.
Or perhaps the question was ambiguous, and we're trying to figure out what it is exactly you were asking - that's always a possibility, right?
The quote was simply from a longer editors notes section. What he meant is basically irrelevant, because I was never asking what he meant, it was simply as a way of mentioning that this got me to thinking-what do we actually know about evolution and its testability. Its that simple. The ToE contains the principles (as others have stated) of RM, NS, and change over a vast amount of time. There was never any need to make the discussion more complicated than this.
Well, yes, evolution is testable and it has been tested. But it's a very wide topic to discuss broadly. Perhaps we can focus on one aspect and take it from there?
They will claim that face symmetry is more beautiful to us, because that indicates better health of the individual, and thus we would select for this over time (illogical) but this is the claim.
This is a thread (and has been a thread) all of its own -
How can evolution explain body symmetry?. You assert it is illogical, but you don't provide any reasons for it being illogical.
So now science has to show, that not only can NS (by the use of RM!) make complex body parts through a RM creating some small advantage of survivial in a population, and slowly becoming selected for, and then as it becomes a more common trait in the population, a further mutation down the bloodline could be added to that mutation (if you don't agree this is the claim the ToE, ie. Dawkins and so man others, makes for how complex body parts can be formed, please provide your own idea of how the theory claims this is possible) to eventually shape this form.
Thank you at least for clarifying the subject for us. It might be easier if you pick a 'complex body part' that you want to discuss the evolution of and then dedicate a thread to that. It's just without focus the topic tends to spread about all over the place and nobody gets any satisfaction. I offer my five and a half years as a member here as evidence that on the subject of topic sprawl, I have some idea what I am talking about.
In broad terms the thing to do would be to show that two organisms with differing 'complex body parts' are related and share a common ancestry. Then we know there must be an explanation for this. We have already shown that natural selection leads to adaptive changes to a population's genetics. Together these two facts alone constitute evidence of natural selection's role in larger scale evolution. It's not a mountain yet - but it's a start.
I would like to add that bacteria have complex parts too - and they are massively diverse. It's a common impression that all bacteria are bacteria are bacteria - but it's a little unfair!
Of course I am not saying that female finches sit around making a choice, I think it is you who is not getting it. I am saying that science claims subconscious choices have lead to all kinds of traits being selected for- like the plumage colors of male birds for instance.
But to be clear - this is sexual selection. A specific form of natural selection. It isn't typical of natural selection.
The point I made, which I don't think should be so hard to understand is that if birds were making subconscious choices of rating their partners health based on their plummage colors, at the same time they would also be making subconscious choices about their beak size, about their nest making skills, about their length of their wingspans, and every other bird trait you want to think of, because we are claiming that all of the traits we see on earth are created by NS.
Hopefully now we can see that natural selection does not imply sexual selection. It is often the case where sexual selection is acting in the opposite direction to general natural selection. For instance - if we suppose a peacock's tail is sexually selected for its size, there is also natural selection cutting in limiting the size of the tail (peacock's with bigger tails attract more predators perhaps). So yeah - the 'choices' a finch might make are not the be all and end all of natural selection. The environment, including other species, weather patterns, even other genes in the gene pool, can exert selective pressure too.
So frankly, for you or anyone else to say that its because I am not understanding the basics is frankly just bs.
It certainly appears that you have confused natural selection with the mate selection made by an animal. If that's not the case, maybe you can at least see how the confusion arose.
Can we test in any way shape or form Dawkin's theoretical model of how an eye might have formed for instance (Nilsson and Pelger's attempts to show scientifically how it could have happened was laughable).
Without knowing what you found laughable about it I can't help, sorry. The answer is, we can. Whether you think it is sufficient is not for me to say.
Why was it necessary to complicate the discussion? The question started out very broad, to allow it to be narrowed over time.
It wasn't. You asked for evidence of natural selection causing evolutionary change and you got it. You then went on to clarify that you meant to ask whether there was evidence for the evolution of complex body parts through neo-Darwinian processes. The difference between what you appeared to be asking and what you meant to ask caused some confusion. Hopefully we can move on from there. Sometimes even the most obvious looking point one tries to make on a forum turns out to be understood differently by everybody that reads it to infuriating results. It is a bit of an art trying to balance ambiguity, condescension, post length and simplicity.
What do we know in this modern age of science, 200 years after the birth of Darwin, that shows how his big picture can all be put together to show how all the forms of life came to be how they are today.
A hell of a lot. Enough to fill a lifetime of learning, by which time a whole new lifetime's worth of knowledge will have no doubt surfaced. And then some. And a bit more.
That I mentioned NS and didn't go into more details at the very beginning about RM and genetic drift, and every other details that goes into your theory, and how it all ties together is a complete smokescreen-because many discussions start off broad by necessity because its the beginning of the topic, not ten steps down the ladder of complexity. if you need to include every smaller point that you wanted to discuss in the very opening paragraph, that would be a very very long paragraph I would suggest.
There are some words which cover such large paragraphs. Instead of recounting the entire body of knowledge that is the theory of evolution and then finishing with 'has this been tested and verified' you could instead have simply asked in your OP - "has the theory of evolution been tested and verified as the explanation for how life has changed on earth over time?" Very short and very general and it would have been rejected as a new topic because of this.
The answer is yes - go read some papers, some books and so on. It cannot be simply covered in a debate like this forum deals with.
You could just start a debate that focuses on the eye.
If that isn't possible to be talked abut on this site (that is, what scientifically proves NS actually works the way you claim it does), without all of your constant assertions that all us whacky creationists just don't know what we are talking about, then I don't know what is.
If you aren't sure what topics are encouraged, and which ones are too general or ambiguous - then don't start any new topics. Just read through some ongoing ones, some older ones and get a feel for things. With broad topics things tend to devolve into meta-debate like this one has, so we try and avoid them since they aren't particularly constructive.
I will say at this point though, that originally I came here actually wanting to learn something about what science can prove nowadays, but when I see the scarcity of people who are able to follow one simple logical step to the next (like understanding that just because I prefaced a question by talking about an article in Discovery magazine-that doesn't mean you need to know what context the magazine said this. It is me asking the question now, not Discovery magazine. Its like saying, I was walking down the street and I saw an ad for milk, and I got to thinking, is milk good for our bodies-and then someone saying, well, that depends, tells us what the ad said exactly....geez.), I frankly no longer hold out a lot of hope for having conversations with many people here who can have a logical conversations without bungling the meaning of every sentence and then accusing me of not knowing what I am talking about.
Once again - we have evidence that communication difficulties cause problems. You just up and insulted my intelligence because I wanted to read the article that got you to thinking because I had an idea about how to develop the discussion in a constructive way. You didn't need to launch into a sixth grade lecture about how sometimes people will come across something that 'gets them to thinking'.
Now - here you are, "wanting to learn something about what science can prove nowadays" - which to me suggests that you indeed have a self-confessed problem with the basics. You can learn a lot at this site, if you stop being hostile for a moment. I was trying to be pleasant and civil and take a fouled conversation and lift it out of the soil. But I was a little unclear on what you wanted, so I asked.
If you want to learn - my suggestion is that you create a debate around a small topic. This will allow focussed discussion on that subject, and not only might you learn about that topic, but you might learn some general principles that can be applied elsewhere. Asking for general principles first can work - but I personally think it is more difficult...especially when you don't have a single person who is here to teach you - but instead a crowd of people who come here argue.
If you want to reply, please don't be an arse about it. Maybe we can use this opportunity to discuss something interesting, who knows? If you want to learn some interesting background then you might try the
29+ Evidences for Macroevolution if you haven't already done so, it's a fairly standard internet document and you'll be exposed to it before too long if you keep exploring this subject.
If you don't accept common ancestry has been demonstrated there seems precisely no point trying to give evidence that natural selection was responsible for it. So, do you accept common ancestry?
Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.
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