Potential falsifications of the theory of evolution

Repeatable observations can be made in the present to determine what's happened in the past. Many branches of science do this. Much of forensic science is concerned with determining what's happened before the time of observation, and much of geology, astronomy, cosmology and biology involves making observations in the present that relate to past events.Scientists know that this is science. Who told you that scientific theories were necessarily considered "provable"? Your preacher?They are considered falsifiable, and this thread is about potential falsifications of evolutionary theory.As for "Mother Nature" being a deity, she lacks the usual qualifications, like being invisible and imaginary.

If rabbits are going extinct due to genetic entropy, why aren't fruit flies and mosquitoes?Sanford puts the age of the earth at somewhere between 5,000 and 100,000 years.The creatures I mentioned can manage 125,000 generations in 5,000 years. (E. Coli would have about 10,000,000 generations in the same period).So, for sexually reproducing organisms like fruit flies, rabbits and elephants, about how many generations does Sanford think it would take before the species would inevitably become extinct due to genetic entropy?

Alpha, could you clarify something for me? You entered the thread making the claim that "genetic entropy" would falsify "macro-evolution", or so I understood. Yet you seem to be making a case against the view that modern animals could have descended from bottlenecks of two emerging from the Ark after the flood.Populations of animals can actually be produced from just one pair if the environmental circumstances are favourable, as I think you know. So, it is not mutational meltdown or inbreeding depression in themselves which is a problem for the Ark story, but the environment in relation to these things.It would have been impossible for the herbivore populations to achieve the necessary expansion in the first few generations because the carnivores are in their environment, and the numbers aren't balanced (balance requires a lot more individuals in the "prey" species than the "predator" species). There would also be little or nothing for the herbivores to eat.So it's essential to consider the environment combined with genetics if you want to falsify the flood/Ark scenario.As for macro-evolution, individual species being driven to extinction by their environments is no problem for the theory.Edited by bluegenes, : No reason given.

Can you model the following for us? A population of African elephants with an average long term adult population of 100,000 with about 125,000 infants being born to each generation (2.5 per average adult female lifetime).About how many generations would it take before this population would become extinct according to your model using your "real world values"? Our mtDNA mutation rate forbids a common female ancestor at less than about 15,000 years ago, minimum. Also, do you think it has occurred to Sanford that, on the flood model, stone age skeletons found in the various regions of the world from which DNA can be extracted should be much more similar to each other than they are to their modern regional counterparts? What if that isn't the case? Yet all the threatened mammals that we know of are known to have suffered from adverse environmental conditions that have occurred recently and too rapidly for the fixation of any mutations, advantageous or disadvantageous, to be a factor. No. It's based on observations and calculations. Just 100 individual predators (50 species) coming off the Ark and each killing one herbivore per. week would have killed 5,000 herbivores in the first year, meaning that somewhere between 2,500 and 5,000 species would have lost one or both members, and would go extinct.Now, that's what I call a real bottleneck.However, I probably shouldn't have mentioned the flood bottleneck as it seems to have led to a diversion from the main topic. Stick to the elephants and their extinction due to accumulated detrimental mutations.About how many generations would it take on your model?

To help you understand falsification.The observation that the fossil record is incomplete would be a good falsification of the claim that "the fossil record will be complete by 2010."The observation that there is loads that we still don't know about the natural history of this planet would be a good falsification of the claim that "everything will be known about the natural history of this planet by the year 2010."As evolutionary theory doesn't make either of these claims, your post was rather a waste of space, wasn't it? Of course you can falsify religious Faiths when they describe a false world.

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The Christian Catholic Church, later known as the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church, was a religious group founded in 1896 by John Alexander Dowie. They are sometimes called the Zionites (not to be confused with the German Zionites) and were the forerunners of the Zionist Churches of southern Africa. They were noted for their adherence to a flat earth cosmology. Because of Dowie's emphasis on "faith healing", the church is considered by some Pentecostal groups to be one of the forerunners of the modern Pentecostal movement.

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That group's cosmology was falsified before they even started up, but the religious mind can believe anything.That example should explain what strong falsification is. Observed facts that cut right across a claim or theory. So, this thread is about thinking up potential falsifications of evolutionary theory. There are many.Establishing positively that the earth is less than 10,000 years old would effectively do it, for example.

Koonin would certainly agree with Coyne and Dawkins that evolution is a fact. He treats it as a given in the paper you quoted from. There's nothing arrogant about stating this. It's true. And neither Coyne nor Dawkins think that we know everything about the processes by which evolution happens. Just like Koonin.It's hard to see what point you're trying to make. Koonin certainly believes in common descent, natural selection and drift. The point about the lines of descent being blurred at the genetic level, especially in prokaryotes, is well known, and could possibly have been inferred to some extent when horizontal gene transfer was discovered (1959 I think). So is the point about jumps in change, like the endosymbiotic event that many think is the origin of eukaryotes.What he's discussing is the ongoing research into the fine details of exactly how evolution happens, and there's nothing particularly exciting about his paper, IMO. That's because it's not the subject he's discussing in that paper! He certainly discusses it elsewhere, and he certainly believes it's natural. What else should it be? He's not a fantasist (creationist), as you said above.

So what's your problem with people like Coyne, Dawkins and many others stating that evolution is a fact? They do not say that any particular theory of evolution is a fact.Here are Coyne and Dawkins in a newspaper piece they wrote together in 2005: (my bold):

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Among the controversies that students of evolution commonly face, these are genuinely challenging and of great educational value: neutralism versus selectionism in molecular evolution; adaptationism; group selection; punctuated equilibrium; cladism; "evo-devo"; the "Cambrian Explosion"; mass extinctions; interspecies competition; sympatric speciation; sexual selection; the evolution of sex itself; evolutionary psychology; Darwinian medicine and so on. The point is that all these controversies, and many more, provide fodder for fascinating and lively argument, not just in essays but for student discussions late at night.

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All those "controversies" about how evolution actually happens and what has happened in the past "and many more". Note that they mention at least three of the areas that Koonin mentions in the article you linked to.No-one is claiming that the study of evolutionary biology is finished, or even near its end, when they state that evolution itself is a fact.More directly on the topic of the thread. Scientific theories can adjust to new information, and evolutionary theory has evolved (appropriately!) over time. Actual falsification of the modern theory requires something that cuts completely across it. I agree with some others on the thread that Koonin slightly overstates his case, although that's common when people have a point to make.His statement that gene duplications aren't incremental changes seems strange to me, as they happen all the time with little or no apparent effect on the organism involved, meaning that at least most of the time they could certainly be described as "incremental".There's a much better case for key historic endosymbiotic events being non-gradual, but these seem rare, and gradual change is still the norm.Discussion on the relative importance of two kinds of natural selection (positive and purifying) do not change the fact that natural selection has been a central plank of the theory for 150 years.Things that could be described as "neo-Lamarckian" are not really the kind of Lamarckian view that was strongly opposed in the early twentieth century, and Darwin himself was certainly open to Lamarckian ideas.Much has changed in 150 years, and many processes and details have been incorporated into the mainstream as knowledge increases. But this is nothing dramatic, just the evolution and improvement of a strong theory.