"While we respect Prof. Behe's right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific."Could someone help me out here? What experimental testing has proven evolution? I am aware of experiments with fruit flies, etc. but as I understand it this just yeilds the same old micro/macro debate (round and round we go... when we stop flaming nobody knows). Any additional info? Thanks
Could someone help me out here? What experimental testing has proven evolution? First ask yourself, how is paternity or identity established in court with DNA. When you've answered that question, you answered the other question. Except that the word proof doesn't come up much in science, except in creationist writings.
"Could someone help me out here? What experimental testing has proven evolution? I am aware of experiments with fruit flies, etc. but as I understand it this just yeilds the same old micro/macro debate (round and round we go... when we stop flaming nobody knows). Any additional info? Thanks"
Sure. I can help. Here's the deal:
Evolution described the changes in lifeforms over time. Speciation takes lots and lots of time. It takes so much time that new species do not ordinarily appear within the lifespan of any human being. Indeed, speciation requires times that can be only measured in millenia, in most cases.
What does that mean? It means that experiments on current species will not generally produce new species. (There's some room here for error, depending on how you define a species. Viruses and bacteria go through generations very, very quickly, so new species may well have emerged in our lifetimes.)
So, what evolutionary scientists do is to study the 3.5-billion-year history of life on this planet, using fossilized life forms as their laboratory. What they have found is a steady stream of speciation occurring over that 3.5 billion years.
In some cases, as with whales, the sequence is fairly complete from land animals to whales. It can never be complete, because of the time it took and the number of intermediate species, all of which may never have been fossilized or which may never be discovered.
However, despite gaps in a series, the series is complete enough to generate valid conclusions. When all of these series of fossils, in many different genera are combined, it's clear that speciation did occur through evolution, over that 3.5 billion year period.
I hope that helps.
["While we respect Prof. Behe's right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific."] Could someone help me out here? What experimental testing has proven evolution?
Note that they didn't say "proven". Nothing in science is ever "proven". Science does not deal in proofs, for the simple reason that outside of artificial self-contained realms like mathematics, there is no such thing as "proof" in the real world.
I am aware of experiments with fruit flies, etc. but as I understand it this just yeilds the same old micro/macro debate (round and round we go... when we stop flaming nobody knows). Any additional info? Thanks
Here's my infamous Tip-of-the-Iceberg Evidence of Evolution post... One note before you dive into it -- I've since realized that the "table of contents" near the start of that post may look as if it indexes the rest of the material in the post -- it doesn't, it's an index-by-category to many external links which outline individual lines of evidence supporting evolution, each of which contains many links and research citations which can be followed for even more information.