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!
The grains of sand. One grain, one evolutionary event (one allele frequency change if you like). At what point as the grains accumulate do we decide it’s macroevolution?
We’ve just finished talking about macroevolutionary processes — differential speciation and extinction — that aren’t reducible to the same evolutionary process. And I see no reason to allow creationists to control what terms we find useful.
You might as well ask why a bunch of reproduction events needs the extra description of calling it natural selection. The description isn’t needed for individual extinctions or speciation, but for patterns of multiple events. If there are causal factors that determine whether species in one group speciate or become extinct more often than species in another group, that’s a macroevolutionary process.
Microevolutionary processes are those that happen within species: allele frequency change, for the most part. Macroevolutionary processes are those that don’t involve allele frequency change. I don’t see why you don’t consider that a distinction. I think your problem may be that “macroevolution” has multiple definitions, and under some of those definitions piled up microevolution is considered macroevolution.
Here we go again…Harshman started off nicely … one would hope…and ends up with some kind of paradox of the heap that doesn’t seem to apply to the thread…So we have a heap of s..t again…
What’s new from Harshman the miraclevolver…He makes me want to cry sometimes…
John, to Alan:
That, and his fear that you’re giving ammunition to the IDers and creationists by using ‘macroevolution’ to mean something more than just than ‘piled up microevolution.’
But as you say, we shouldn’t let those folks scare us away from using the terminology we find useful. We don’t eschew ‘teleological’ language when describing evolution, despite the fact that Mung barks like a trained seal whenever he sees an instance of it. Why let similar barking scare us away from using the word ‘macroevolution’ as we see fit?
Has anybody mentioned adaptive mutations on this thread?
J-Mac,
Gee — I wonder how one might go about finding out. RTFC.
ETA: Or as Rumraket put it earlier:
No, I’m sorry, that doesn’t work. If grains are genes all you have are more genes, not a change in gene frequency, and if all the genes are the same you don’t have evolution.
Mung:
Jesus, Mung. He didn’t say that grains are genes. Read it again:
Evolution is like piles of dirt. Got it.
Please tell Alan. He’s confused.
When you end up with 2 species instead of one.
Yes, I know that usually there’s a range where a “species” begins rather than a point, but it’s a pretty significant fact in evolution when species that physically could breed no longer will.
Glen Davidson
Do you even comprehend the basics of what I have been trying to establish here? You can pile up microevolution upon microevolution all you want up until you reach the heavens to find enough excuses for macroevolution. Nobody gives a damn… I don’t…
I’m trying to establish the very foundation, hopefully by some kind of scientific method, as to how to determine that a new species has evolved…
All I got so far seems that reproductive isolation is the best candidate… Someone could possibly say: Beautiful! Unfortunately, the mechanism that leads to reproductive isolation has not been agreed upon and there were other possibilities vaguely suggested…
That’s pretty much it…
However, What answers am I going to get if I ask for the evidence for macroevolution i.e. totally new body plans; requiring a quantum leap between 2 supposedly related organisms?
Or, what if random mutations supposedly leading to macroevolutionary changes i.e. new body plans are not that random after all and operate on the subatomic level of quantum mechanics?
How far are we going to get with this?
I’ve been thinking about that and I’m not yet convinced that is the case.
Nor me. But it seems the terms macro and micro do add unnecessary confusion.
A quick digression on my path of discovery on evolution follows in italics Feel free to skip!The UK public school system I experienced laid no particular emphasis on evolution as an idea but equally there was absolutely no religious objection to the theory. C of E (Anglican) doctrine had never made any fuss about Biblical inerrancy and I just absorbed a simplistic understanding of ToE while developing somewhat of a skepticism, even a contempt for the particular brand of Christianity I was exposed to and taught with an assumption it was the natural order of things.
On to university and biochemistry. Many insights followed(too many involving alcohol!) but my first insights into the overarching and universal idea of common descent began when discovering chemical pathways. Why are we not discussing metabolism more specifically? Because metabolism is common across species. Why can we estimate relatedness between species (the example was a yeast and a moth) using DNA extract, attaching radioactive markers and running column electrophoresis. Percentages, molecular clocks and bingo, millions of years. DNA code, universality, redundancy, the chemistry of replication beautifully endorsing Mendel’s sweet-pea genes. Learning about the translation process had me wondering. DNA sequences produce RNA sequences and proteins. How could that code for detailed morphology and innate behaviour? But otherwise, the chemistry fit so elegantly with ToE, what was there to question? Only to await further discoveries.
Academia was not to be for me, so I learned about HOX genes and other developments in the biological sciences via the media. My interest remained on the back burner till rekindled to a large extent by Richard Dawkins’ popular writings and the controversy that gradually built up around him. So I became aware of Young Earth Creationism probably in the mid-eighties as something to point and laugh at along with Dawkins.
Fast forward to 2005 and living in France I had a brush with cancer (all sorted) and found myself with spare time on my hands while undergoing radiotherapy after surgery. The internet came to my rescue and the hot topic was the Dover trial. Fascination verged on obsession but one result of that was realising my understanding of ToE was poor and I wasn’t well equipped to respond to some objectors to the theory I encountered on line. John Davison, a retired physiology professor (now deceased) insisted that sex was a barrier to speciation because any time a sub-population acquired new mutations, these would be subsumed back into the general population by spreading. There had to be another explanation. He had an interesting one but the much simpler explanation is breeding isolation. so obvious now!
Since 2005, I’ve also spent time (intermittently depending on fluctuations in UD moderating policy) at the remaining ID friendly site still allowing comments. In one thread, I found myself disagreeing (well, perhaps at cross-purposes) with Nick Matzke regarding macro vs. micro evolution. Using Google site search, Ive not yet been able to find the particular thread but using macroevolution plus Matzke and me finds a lot of stuff I’d forgotten. Anyway enough of this ramble.
The essential point is that if you search site:uncommondescent.com plus “macroevolution” the obfuscation arising from the unnecessary false dichotomy is significant. Link
I have a hard time making sense of that. Macroevolutionary processes surely involve allele frequency change(?), they’re just not defined by them like microevolutionary processes are.
You could have a population splitting into two by geographic isolation, and then divergence in allele frequencies could result in a reproductive barrier?
Can you clarify if this is wrong?
Alan Fox,
As with drift, I’m struggling a bit to see your issue here. If I saw a book on ‘Macroevolutionary Trends’ or some such, I’d have a pretty good idea what was in it; the term isn’t empty. It wouldn’t just be talking about chronospecies, which I think is what you seem to understand by the term – accumulated change in a single lineage to the point where we need a new name. Nor would it be talking about what Creationists insist it means – ‘new body plans’, whatever the heck that might mean. It would be talking about broad scale differences among and between separate lineages, from the point of separation (speciation) and on. Microevolution certainly contributes to those broad scale divergences, but it is not the whole of the explanation for them.
LoL!
You crack me up, you small, small man. 🙂
John:
Rumraket:
I think John will agree that “involve” was the wrong word to choose there, and that “reduce to” would have been better. From what he’s written elsewhere in the thread, it’s clear that he understands that macroevolution involves allele frequency change.
Always?
Speciation isn’t a macroevolutionary process, or at least it’s on the cusp between micro and macro. Differential rates of speciation are macroevolutionary, and they don’t involve allele frequency change in the features that cause differential rates of speciation. Extinction doesn’t involve allele frequency change at all, at least not in any way relevant to the extinction. Or perhaps “involve” is not the proper word and should be replaced by “consist of”. I would also claim that competition between species for which there is no selectable variation within either species is a macroevolutionary process itself.
Depends on the definition of “macroevolution”, which is why I keep harping on “macroevolutionary processes” instead. Most of what we commonly think of as macroevolution, i.e. big changes in morphology over millions of years, is just microevolution extended in time. That’s not what I’m talking about at all.
Steven Stanley’s book Macroevolution, which is mostly about species selection, might help resolve some confusion. Anyway, species selection is an explicitly macroevolutionary process, not reducible to accumulated microevolution.
Every evolutionist should own a copy. Especially the ones who think that the microevolution/macroevolution distinction was made up by Creationists.
The issue, I suspect is a combination of understanding and communication. The effort at both is rewarding to me and I hope to you.
Where are we disagreeing?
GlenDavidson,
Violent agreement again! 🙂
Grains of sand. When does the micro-pile become a macro-pile. You need to drop that metaphor.
My Kindle book budget is in credit! Thanks for the recommend.
I’m sure my misunderstanding is semantic.
Yes, well, this is where I am, too, at the moment.
Mung,
OK. It was pretty crap!
Mung,
Not half as much as someone who’s been debating evolution for years and still thinks it synonymous with Natural Selection.
I think when Creationists use the term ‘body plan’, they are trying to sound like real scientists.
John,
When a lineage bifurcates, that’s decidedly on the macro side of the cusp.
A rate of speciation isn’t a macroevolutionary process. It’s a rate.
Sure it does. In fact, you can think of extinction as the special case where all allele frequencies go to zero in a population.
Perhaps this rephrasing captures what you were intending:
Mung,
You are bluffing. Who has made that claim?
Alan Fox,
On the point ‘macro is just lots of micro’.
If you’re talking about here at TSZ I can’t recall a specific instance, but in my years of
trollingdebating on the internet it has assuredly come up. I even bought the book by Bernhard Rensch in order to refute it.Mung,
Damn those evolutionists. They say all sorts of stuff. And even if they don’t, they damn well ought to have, so I can slag ’em off.
Allan,
That’s a Mung specialty. He’s done it repeatedly in the FMM/Jesus/Bus thread.
It’s easier for Mung to “defeat” his opponents when he puts words in their mouths.
Misinformation about macroevolution.
https://www.thoughtco.com/microevolution-vs-macroevolution-249900
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Microevolution_and_macroevolution
No wonder evolutionists are confused.
And this, more to the point:
Creationists have created another category for which they use the word “macroevolution.”
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB902.html
Why do you say that? What definition of “macroevolution” are you using there? I would claim that speciation is not “allele frequency change in a population”; at the least it’s allele frequency change in two populations. But at least it’s all about allele frequency change (ignoring polyploid speciation for now). How is that decidedly on the macro side?
True. The process is what results in a particular rate. This seems more a quibble over language than anything interesting. Any rephrasing would be purely grammatical and would not affect what I consider to have been a clear meaning.
Yes, you could do that, but it would be pointlessly stupid playing with words. Why would you want to do that?
No, it doesn’t at all. Macroevolutionary processes, if the term is to mean something, can’t include accumulated microevolutionary change. This is why I prefer to talk about macroevolutionary processes rather than macroevolution, because the latter term can have multiple meanings.
Yes, you can even find evolutionists making all sorts of stupid arguments right here at TSZ. I don’ know why you think they are immune. Claiming that Creationists made something up even when they didn’t isn’t a stretch.
I’ve seen it made fairly often in discussions like this, though never by a professional biologist that I can recall. I try always to point out that it isn’t true.
Alan,
Consider two scenarios. In the first, a lineage changes over time. In the second, a lineage changes over time, then bifurcates, and then the daughter lineages change over time.
In both scenarios, microevolutionary changes accumulate. But to say that “microevolutionary changes accumulate” doesn’t capture or explain the fact of the bifurcation in the second scenario.
The bifurcation is usefully regarded as a macroevolutionary event that requires explanation, beyond merely noting that microevolutionary changes have accumulated.
Huh? I frequently ask whether someone is speaking of natural selection as cause or natural selection as effect. At the moment you’re in the natural selection as cause camp. Others are in the natural selection as effect camp. Others are in the “it”s both” camp.
In some contexts, therefore, natural selection is synonymous with evolution. But I understand that it’s not always synonymous with evolution, contrary to your mischaracterization of what I believe.
Mung,
I don’t. But I think I’m seeing here another example of ‘some-therefore-all’. Let’s do the same then …
Creationists certainly have their peculiarities. Such as their meaning when they use the term ‘Darwinist’. And when they use the term ‘macroevolution’. And when they use the term ad hominem. There is a bit of an argot circulating among the initiates.
Which would absolutely make sense if scientist do in fact speak of body plans. And they do. Which is why I LoL’ed at your comment.
So here you are, making a very similar argument to the one I jsut mentioned about macroevolution, but for you it’s “body plans” are made up by Creationists. That’s wrong too.
Mung,
Then perhaps ‘what’s the difference?’ was a poor choice of words?
Still, regardless whether NS is ’cause’ or ‘effect’, there are many more causes of allele frequency change than NS, and hence NS is most definitely not synonymous with evolution, ever.
ad hominem
ETA: tell me you saw that coming. 🙂
Mung,
Just because scientists use the term ‘body plan’ does not mean that Creationists use it correctly. They ape science. Often, people mean ‘bat’s wing’, ‘heart’, or some other ‘macroevolutionary’ innovation.
Mung,
No, I didn’t see it coming – it’s a variant of misuse of the term I hadn’t anticipated.
keiths:
John:
See my comment to Alan.
keiths:
John:
It isn’t a quibble, because we’re discussing your claim that
If something isn’t a macroevolutionary process, then it isn’t relevant to the truth of that claim.
keiths:
John:
Given a choice between a false statement…
…and a true statement…
…I prefer the true one.
And it isn’t just “pointless stupid playing with words”. It’s directly relevant to your thesis. You’re claiming that macroevolutionary processes don’t involve changes in allele frequencies, and you’re cited speciation rates and extinction as examples of such processes.
Speciation rates are not macroevolutionary processes, as I explained in my previous comment, and extinction does involve allele frequency change, as I’ve explained here.
John,
That’s silly, because it implies that the following sentence is false…
…when we are using one of the accepted definitions of “macroevolution.”
If you’re willing to accept multiple definitions of “macroevolution”, including “accumulated microevolutionary change”, then why insist that “macroevolutionary processes” can’t include accumulated microevolutionary change?