[allmendream]

So if I predict that the bodies from a series of murders are buried under the chief of police's shed, and based upon my prediction they dig up bodies; that is not a valid prediction because the murders happened before I made the prediction?

How about the prediction that a population subjected to heat stress will accumulate mutations to better survive heat stress? Is that also not a prediction based upon the theory of evolution through natural selection? How so?

[muawiyah]

If you predict that bodies will appear under the police chief's desk, and we look and there aren't already bodies there, that will be viewed with great suspicion, particularly if tomorrow there are bodies.

However, if you were to say "based on my analysis of the evidence there are bodies under the desk" and bodies are then found (which were already there) you are under a little less suspicion.

That's why Monk always gets the criminals to OUT themselves.

[muawiyah]

The problem here is with the use of the word "predict". If you use it in the sense of "predicting the future" I'd suggest evolutionary thought has yet to predict anything at all.

If you are using it in a lesser sense to suggest you've filled in "x" number of critical elements with inferences drawn from evolutionary thought, and therefore "condition y" should be found, that's yet another thing.

[muawiyah]

Regarding the "heat stress" idea, be interesting to see if we can, in fact, find "new genes" that mediate heat stress in mamals ~ as a whole ~ as the class, since it seems to be the case that all mammals share a set of genes of remarkably similar number that do not vary much at all.

Afer over 100 million years of evolution you'd expect greater differences, e.g. one mammal wih 10,000 genes and another wih 90,000, right?

That all of 'em have 25,000 or thereabouts, we have to ask ourselves just how in the hell did that happen!!!