UPDATE: So far NO IDEAS as to how the theory of evolution can be falsified have been proposed…To make things worst, nobody so far picked up any of MY SUGGESTED IDEAS how to falsify evolution – now clearly numbered from 1-4.
It makes one wonder what the bases are for believing in the theory of evolution if no one seems to even want to at least try to falsify it…
Please keep in mind that by falsifying evolution you can refute many claims by the proponents of ID!!! Isn’t it what Darwin’s faithful want to do?
This OP is just a prelude to hopefully many future ones, where I would like to focus on the specific examples of how to falsify the theory of evolution…
This OP gives everyone an opportunity for the input on no doubt the many available ways how to experimentally falsify evolution…
As most of you know, Darwinists and post-Darwinists, for unknown reasons, are reluctant to experimentally prove their beliefs, so by the series of the OPs on the many possible ways of falsifying evolution, we can hopefully encourage Darwinists and the like, to do so for their own good… I could definitely help with that…
Here are some ideas on how to falsify evolution that I have come across so far:
How a walking mammal can evolve into an aquatic one?
1. Just as an example, let’s say I would like to evolve some aquatic functions…
How long would it take for me to see some evolutionary changes, if I spend most of the day in the water and what would they be? How about several generations of water-lovers? Can someone make a prediction, as evolutionists often do?
2. How about growing a bacterium without a flagellum, knockout the genes for the flagellum, or make the flagellum not fully functional and see whether the bacterium will evolve anything at least resembling a flagellum or evolves a better functionality of it…
3. How to evolve a function of an existing appendage that is no longer in full use to fully function again? How to make emus and ostriches to fly again?
4. How about finches? Since their beak size seems to change within one generation, could they evolve into another species within short period of time if put under selective pressure or something?
Let’s come up with ideas and put some organisms under selective pressure or whatever makes the organism evolve, and see if we can falsify evolution, so that we can end the speculations, once and for all, about who is right and who is wrong; Darwinists or Intelligent Design proponents…
Let us not hear any excuses anymore!
Let experimental science speak the truth!
I don’t think anybody in the right frame of mind would object to what I propose here… unless…. one doesn’t have the confidence in his or her preconceived ideas that could potentially be exposed…
Let’s begin!
It’s not difficult, but around here we like to help people who help themselves. Like Christian conservatives say about God and poor people. So if you lost your job and you’re starving and homeless, God will help you if you first get a job. Then God will come down from heaven and force the salary your boss pays you, to be capable of being exchanged for bread and milk at the store. Or something. Not exactly sure.
So if you read the definition, you should be able to answer that for yourself. We don’t have to fucking spoon-feed you do we? Are you a 1 year old?
Yes.
Because we like to see people think for themselves instead of just giving them the results. You don’t learn anything from having all the answers just handed to you. You need to learn to think and do the work, otherwise the answers won’t make sense to you. It’s like learning math. You have to do the work yourself. You have to count, and add, and subtract, and multiply and all that. When you do lots and lots of problems, you start to understand what is going on and then when you get the answers, you understand WHY that is the answer.
So stop bitching. Read the links and try to understand what they say, think about what it says, figure it out. Use your brain.
Yeah, easily. You’re not worth anyone’s time.
J-mac:
“Now I want someone to tell me whether according to this definition finches with small and large beak are different species…”
Rumrocket answer:
“It’s not difficult, but around here we like to help people who help themselves. Like Christian conservatives say about God and poor people. So if you lost your job and you’re starving and homeless, God will help you if you first get a job. Then God will come down from heaven and force the salary your boss pays you, to be capable of being exchanged for bread and milk at the store. Or something. Not exactly sure.
So if you read the definition, you should be able to answer that for yourself. We don’t have to fucking spoon-feed you do we? Are you a 1 year old?”
No Yes , no No, no I don’t know answer …
Instead attack on God and Christianity…
We are talking about one of the most fundamental issues in evolution that is supposed be a scientific fact, and ALL evolutionist don’t even have one frickin straight answer…
What did they base their faith on??? It beats me…silent sigh…
And there we go again…
Joe blah, blah, blahs something vaguely and disappears again…
Creationists’ fault again that they don’t understand evolution he can’t clearly explain and clearly avoids doing for one reason or another…
Maybe because your question is based on a misunderstanding, or has a false assumption built into it?
It’s like asking for the precise frequency where green changes to blue. I suppose someone could specify such a frequency, though nobody could tell the difference by looking. But how helpful would that number be? Who could use it, and for what? Probably someone has some purpose it would be useful for.
So it seems to me that the process of speciation must be understood before you can make sense of any answer to your question. So two finch populations, which do not currently interbreed, are gradually growing more different. At what point do they become different enough to qualify as different species? For some purposes, they became different species the day they stopped interbreeding. For others, it’s when they are so different they couldn’t interbreed if they tried. For yet others, it’s when they get assigned different names
The key here is that each of these groups has a different reason for deciding whether they’re different species, which is useful for that group. And that’s the nature of how it works. YOU are demanding that each group selects a definition inappropriate to their needs to satisfy YOUR misunderstanding.
But that’s all he has.
Glen Davidson
I doubt that. Rather, I think that’s what he WANTS. I think he understands that similar populations have all kinds of relationships between them:
–those that are prevented from interbreeding by some physical barrier, but would interbreed willingly if they could.
— those that can interbreed, producing sterile hybrids.
–those that can interbreed, and one offspring sex is sterile but not the other
–those that can interbreed but choose not to for some reason
–those that couldn’t interbreed if they tried
–those that actually DO interbreed, but do so increasingly rarely
and so on. And I guess one can look at this complex range of (real life) situations, and regard it as a gold mine for denial, simply by demanding ONE universal constant feature. So that one can mock those who recognize the range of complexity, for failure deny it as God intended.
I haven’t decided what my species concept is yet. Where do I fit in?
Or there’s more than one God. keiths seems fixated on “the Christian God.” It’s as if for him “the Jewish God” isn’t even a contender.
J-Mac,
The closest I can see to a ‘this definition’ is the reproductive one it kicks off with, although it goes on to talk of others.
So, you simply find out if the finches can interbreed or not, which you can’t tell from their beaks. Not rocket science.
J-Mac,
Macroevolution begins at speciation, which is simply the bifurcation of one lineage into two, and divergence between. People sometimes use it also to discuss larger-scale evolutionary trends. It’s simple enough to distinguish the two, though I have noted Creationists struggling like hell with this most simple of concepts. Because it suits them to portray evolution as incomprehensible. I suspect.
I’m beginning to think the entirety of Creationist argumentation rests upon stirring the pot of equivocation.
Mung,
With those who make over-much of equivocation, on past experience.
What’s a larger-scale evolutionary trend than the bifurcation of one lineage into two? The bifurcation of one lineage into three? Or two into four?
Mung,
The evolution of wings, the origin of mammals, the Cambrian explosion, the impact of HGT on the Tree/Bush/Banyan of Life, etc. Macroevolution is really just everything that isn’t microevolution – ie, that isn’t simply change in allele frequency in a population.
Macroevolution is a term that has a meaning in paleontology, I think. Doesn’t really mean anything much with regard to biology. There’s just adaptation, speciation and extinction.
Paleontology is biology, at least when you aren’t using it purely for stratigraphy. The term has meaning in biology, though paleontologists are more prone to use it than others are. And of course there’s more to evolution than adaptation, speciation, and extinction. Speciation and extinction are macroevolutionary processes. I don’t think there’s any argument about that. The argument is about whether those processes are important in evolution.
I’m not convinced that “macroevolution” is a useful term when discussing evolutionary processes. It suggests a different process to microevolution. Sure, when looking back one might refer to macroevolutionary change over a long period but the process is not different.
I was painiting with a broad brush and thought about an aside to symbiogenesis.
Fair enough. I have seen “macroevolution” defined as change above the species level but the process is still gradual accumulative change over time. I hadn’t heard that extinction is “macroevolution”.
I’d say adaptation, speciation and extinction are all important.
Exactly. That’s why we talk about macroevolutionary processes, meaning any evolutionary process that can’t be reduced to microevolution. So why isn’t that useful?
One could argue that that can be reduced to microevolution, with the parasite a “mutation” that spreads through the population by inheritance, and thus “allele frequency change in populations”.
Certainly differential extinction based on characters fixed in a population is macroevolution.
Then you must accept that there are important macroevolutionary processes not reducible to microevolution.
I’d say: think of a tree. The entire tree is built by cell division – replication. That could be viewed as analogous to microevolution, and one might argue that, from seed to twig-tip, it’s all just replication. But there are trends both internal and external that cause the tree to take the particular shape it has – nodes clearly don’t form solely because of replication, same goes for branches falling off.
(This analogy has been passed by the Board of Analogy Classification as suitable for ages 15 and up).
You seem to think that it takes some special category of change to make a new species…but it’s same old, same old argument microevolution is different from macroevolution nobody can explain what the difference is…
It’s reproduction this…adaptation that, convergence this, natural selection as the the power of all problem solving that…
An evolution god Theobald says one thing …and evolutionists here say their own…
Evolution of new species is a fact nobody knows how to explain this fact…
Fucking geologists. It’s pressure this… heat that, subduction this, the forces of nature as the power of all problem solving that…
And geology god Bottomswaggle says one thing …and geologists here say their own…
Formation of new geological features is a fact nobody knows how to explain this fact…
Rumraket,
You are clueless about the facts you based you faith on…I get it…
Tell me no more…
J-Mac,
I just told you what the difference is. FFS.
Allan Miller,
Speak English!
Right. But I need to see it for myself. Pictures and Diagrams, not just word salad.
Hasn’t Salvador taught you anything?
J-Mac,
If, intellectually, you’re not up to following a very mildly technical distinction, perhaps you need another hobby.
Mung,
You want a picture of microevolution? Or a picture of a tree?
That’s illegal in my state.
Not only this special category of change to make new species seems like evolutionary delusional belief, the mechanism of change seems to be another…
Coyne says natural selection has the molding evolutionary power unlike random genetic drift, Larry Moran says it doesn’t…Drift has…
On the other hand the third way of evolution people are still searching for the mechanism after having discarded natural selection and drift as the main mechanisms…
And the evolutionary circus keeps rolling…
I want other people to know what we are discussing and have fun…Not just me…lol
My kids are following so no “f”words…
J-Mac,
You are struggling with the material. And you cast names around like anyone should care what X, Y or Z thinks, and say what you think they said without any attribution. You Creationists do this a lot. I have my own views, and am not interested in defending anyone else’s.
J-Mac,
You should have parsed that sentence before sticking ‘lol’ on the end … lol.
fixed
Excuses instead of evidence…yeah… I get it…
J-Mac,
Nope – poor grammar aside, it still reads as if you are including yourself in the group of people who don’t know what we are discussing … lol
J-Mac,
Evidence for what? So far, you haven’t grasped the distinction between the arenas of microevolutionary and macroevolutionary phenomena. That’s a definitional distinction, not an evidential one. Then you don Coyne and Moran glove puppets and have a bit of a Punch-and-Judy with them. For some reason.
Allan Miller,
Coyne and Moran are good buddies as is Harshman…
The holy trinity of darwinism and yet 3 different views…Must be another mystery of evolution…lol
Yes…it is pathetic…to watch a grownup ( I hope) to behave like a child in a sand box…
You are a waste of time…
Goodbye!
And your kids know less than you do?
How?
Glen Davidson
J-Mac,
You should know (if you knew anything) that the predominance of drift vs selection has nothing to do with the macro/microevolution distinction. So why bring it up?
J-Mac,
Aaaaand … flounce!
He does that.
Yes yes bla bla. I don’t do faith at all. Faith is dishonest.
Mainly because of the confusion that arsises when Creationists talk of accepting microevolution and not macroevolution. It reminds; me of the paradox of the heap. When do enough microevolutionary events add up to macroevolution? I don’t see the need to make a distinction for what is essentially smaller or larger accumulations of the same evolutionary processes.
Why does extinction need this extra description. What more is it telling me?
Not sure about that. I’ve tried to think through how microevolution could be used to describe some particular subset of evolution in general but I’m failing.
Works for me!
Microevolution is not accumulation. Microevolution is changes in gene frequencies.
Well, say we use an analogy with sand. The smallest microevolutionary event possible to be represented by one sand grain. How many sand grains before we call it macroevolution?
Alan Fox,
When they are in 2 buckets!
It’s a false analogy, for the reason given. What in your analogy corresponds to changes in gene frequencies?
Splitters and Lumpers.
Mung,
Nope.