Uncovering the Truth: The Power of Predictions in Evolutionary Evidence

[bobze]

bobze:
Thanks for those links, John Endler's guppy experiment is fascinating.

Now I take back what I said before. I think that my mistake was that I failed to recognize a distinction similar but not identical to the one that DaveC426913 pointed out. I was looking at evolution as more of an historical question, i.e are all the organisms we see today byproducts of natural selection as explained by evolution. And while this is also possible to prove, it's much harder to experiment with than sciences like physics because we're pretty much limited to natural experiments where we're not in control or even aware of all the factors. But the theory "organisms evolve through natural selection and that could conceivably account for life on Earth" can be tested with definitive experiments.
In addition, I think that I was a little fixated on evidence from fossils and, as I said before, nothing guarantees that we find what we're looking for. On the other hand, homology might be a better approach to this kind of experiment.

Even though this is a minor issue in comparison, I think that part of the problem was that in the book I was reading [in one of the first posts I said which one] the author repeatedly said things like "evolution predicts that fossil A will be found and we really found it" which in my opinion isn't entirely honest. Because like I said, sometimes biologists search for certain fossils without actually find them and this poses no problem for evolution. So I think that if the author wanted to give examples of fulfilled predictions he should have chosen examples similar to the ones posted in this thread.

Right and that is a cultural bias we've inherited from teachers and scientists who grew up without molecular biology. I've been saying for the past decade we really need to get away from teaching evolution through fossils.

There's no point. They don't make or break evolution, even without fossils, the evidence from molecular biology, genetics, EvoDevo, etc would still be overwhelming. Fossil evidence (sorry to any paleontologists reading along, I don't mean to piss you off :tongue:) really is the weakest and least convincing evidence that exists for the different parts of evolutionary theory.

 

[Ken Natton]

sorry to any paleontologists reading along, I don't mean to piss you off

I don’t think palaeontologists will be pissed off with you. They might have been if there was a grain of truth in what you say, but there isn’t. Elsewhere, I have seen the matter of evidence for and against evolution compared with the situation of a criminal trial. Always, the most powerful evidence in a trial is evidence that is corroborated by two independent witnesses. Palaeontology and microbiology each offer powerful evidence in their own right. It is when that evidence corroborates that it really becomes unanswerable.