The evidence is extensive and consistent, and it points unambiguously to evolution, including common descent, change over time, and adaptation influenced by natural selection. It would be preposterous to refer to these as anything other than facts.
Exactly. There are vast numbers of such examples, where all the different, *independent* lines of evidence all line up so perfectly at the same answer that only the most stubborn person would continue to deny the validity of the conclusion, or try to argue that some "alternative interpretation" might have any chance in hell of aligning so perfectly.
For yet one more example, of tens of thousands, here's something I wrote a while back about a genetic study of army ants:
Meanwhile, the study's findings are interesting in their own right, and add yet more data to the massive mountains of hard evidence *for* evolution (which insulting cartoons by our resident creationists do nothing to refute).Using a variety of measures (DNA base-pair sequences consisting of three nuclear and one mitochondrial gene totalling 3538 basepairs from each of the 49 extant ant species, fossil evidence, and 116 morphological metrics), the author's mathematical analysis produced a cladistic tree for both army ants and many non-army ant species as follows:
The letters (A-H) indicate points in time where the subsequent "branches" are known to have already existed, because representatives from each "branch" have been disocovered in the fossil record.
The branches marked with "*" are branches where the ML tree analysis produced results with "a posterior probability of >95% after independent Bayesian phylogenetic analysis".
As described in the press release, this does indeed clearly indicate that all modern army ants (species shown in bold type) descended from a common ancestor, instead of from two or more common ancestors which were themselves not army ants.
It's also interesting to note that all the "old world" (OW) and "new world" (NW) army ants are separate branches of the oldest split of the army ant family tree. This demonstrates that, as previously presumed, the lifestyle of the army ant (especially, wingless queens) precludes any cross-continental "crossovers", where some species had (during the last 100 million years) managed to travel from one continent to another and take up new residence there.
This correct presumption -- along with the incorrect presumption that army ants had appeared more recently than 100 million years ago -- was the basis for the original assumption that old-world and new-world army ants had perhaps evolved independently (on their respective continents).
Instead, this DNA and morphological analysis (which, by the way, does *not* depend on a "genetic clock") strongly indicates that army ants first arose approximately 105 million years ago.
The reason that this is such an interesting result is that it *very* closely matches the known time of existence of the Cretaceous super-continent of Gondwana, *and* the time of the old-world/new-world army ant split matches the known time of the break-up of that supercontinent into separate continents which contain what is now South America (on one side) and Africa (on the other), the respective homes of the new-world and old-world army ants.
In other words, the analysis strongly matches an evolutionary model in many different ways, including several I haven't even mentioned here.
First, the fact that such a "family tree" works out *at all* is strong evidence that evolution has actually taken place. If instead ants of various species and/or "kinds" had been separately created, there's no reason at all that their DNA details *and* their fossil traces *and* their morphological details would so neatly fit a timewise evolutionary tree of common descent *at all*. For just one example, if the species at the top of the tree and the bottom of the tree shared a characteristic gene sequence, while the other species didn't (because, say, God felt they each would benefit from it), then the entire tree structure would be blatantly violated. Instead, every time DNA/morphological data is analyzed in this way, even across widely divergent species like cows and giraffes and whales, an implied "tree of common descent" is inarguably implied by the evidence.
Second, in this case, the "family tree" implied by the evidence "just happens" to *exactly* match geologic events which would be expected to explain parts of the tree if it came about via evolution. For example, if all modern army ants had a common ancestor, then at some point in time the ancestral army ant must have arisen at a particular geographic location (obviously). This would be a problem if, for example, the data implied that this happened at a time before ants existed at all, or after army ants were known to exist in fossils, etc. And yet, when the available evidence is objectively analyzed by a mathematical algorithm with no ideological ax to grind, the results beautifully match an evolutionary origin consistent with the known fossil record, timewise.
Furthermore, red flags would be raised if the time-and-place of the calculated origin happened to fall in a place where army ants would be highly unlikely to have gotten from their point of origin to the separate continents where they are seen today (e.g. South America and Africa). But lo and behold, the analysis shows the time-and-place of the calculated origin to be at a time when those two continents were known to be joined.
Furthermore, the calculated split between old-world and new-world army ants is found to fall at a time when the continents themselves split apart, perfectly explaining how and why the populations on each new continent, now isolated, should (and thus did) diverge into families of species which evolved in unrelated directions from each other (thus forming species that, while all still army ants in lifestyle, show characteristic differences).
And so on and so on.
Again and again, every time studies and analyses like this -- and every other conceivable type -- are performed, the results "just happen" to fall in a way that makes perfect sense if modern (and fossil) life had arisen from earlier life forms in a common-descent, evolutionary process, like individual jigsaw puzzle pieces all of which form a smooth, coherent picture (albeit with some pieces still not yet discovered) where all the pieces found so far all mesh smoothly with their neighbors.
If evolution is *not* true, why does the jigsaw puzzle formed by the mountains of evidence so well match the evolutionary picture predicted by the theory?
