Your complaint would be more meaningful except for a large number of not-so-serious thinkers making dishonest comparisons against evolution, against biology, against geology, and even against the laws of physics. There is enormous evidence to support that “the process of random variation plus natural selection has the power to morph a pig like creature into a whale”. If you want to remain sceptical, that’s fine, but at least acknowledge that dishonest scepticism exists.
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In humans, that involves zero evolution.
“New functional system” is a Humpty Dumpty term. I suspect that you are fully aware of that.
Let’s remember that you claimed to avoid nothing in these discussions.
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There’s also a considerable literature on echolocation in shrews, and of course there’s the oilbird as well as a couple species of cave swiftlets.
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And, I suspect, in at least ten-fold more species that we don’t know about yet.
I predict a goalpost move.
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Wait, is that a new functional system?
No, no, the goalpost move is just a modified burden shift
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If there is enormous evidence, I guess you are able to offer at least one. Please, give us one then.
Ah good point, these evolutionary concepts are just so complicated
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The common dolphin (Delphinus delphis) and the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) diverged 3.99 million years ago. This represents about the timeframe available between pakicetids and basilosaurids and shows what blind evolution at best can achieve with whales in this time: only very minor differences!
Oh baby!? This from a paleontologist?
As per Rum and evolution 101, exploitation of a novel niche will shift selection of traits towards optimization for that environment. Once basic adaptation is established, further specializations will be accompanied by comparatively fine tuning. Once limbs have optimized for hydrodynamics, exactly what are they supposed to further evolve into? Propellers? Warp drive?
So yeah, terrestrial locomotion still required by Indohyus favors limbs which are visually distinct from bottlenose dolphins. From the time cetaceans acquired their streamlined appearance, there has been little change in the familiar body plan. Bechly asks how bottlenose and common dolphins can still look so much alike given the time since divergence. Well, for the same reason that dolphins and Ichthyosaurs appear alike. The body plan is optimized for their environment and life style. Why is this surprising? Evolution is not about change for the sake of change. Whether by selection or drift adaptation always happens within the constraints of environment.
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I can. I did. **Sea **otters and ferrets.
Bechly’s response was to inadvertently admit he didn’t know what a sea otter was (and to misrepresent his sources).
Now stop evading responsibility for you claims.
- Large-scale morphological change due to random variation and natural selection has been directly observed, most obviously in selective breeding of crops and livestock within timescales ranging from mere centuries to millennia.
This alone demonstrates that the process of evolutionary change of species is a concrete empirical fact.
- The fact that morphological intermediates even exist in the fossil record in the first place is a fact that really only makes sense if evolution took place. Simply put, if the transition isn’t possible, why do we have anatomical and molecular evidence it happened?
The consilience of independent phylogenies together with substitution biases separating terrestrial and aquatic mammals demonstrates that the species in question are genealogically and genetically related by a process of descent with modification.
So we put 1 and 2 together and get 3 (whales evolved from terrestrial ancestors by variation and natural selection) by the simplest of inferences. What else would anyone even need?
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Here is one of my favorites.
I like this one because, as the Curmudgeon writes, it demonstrates the scientific method at work. If evolution were not a strong scientific theory, we wouldn’t be able to make this sort of prediction.
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157 posts were split to a new topic: Experimental Evidence of ‘Taking the Bait’
Cool. Where was this?
How on earth does the discovery of a possible intermediate fossil such as Tiktaalik would count as evidence that the transformation took place through the process of random variation and natural selection ? Please note that the issue here is not about whether changes/transformations happened over time in the history of life, nor about whether common descent is true, but about the mechanism underlying said transformations.
Evidence is that which favors one idea over the alternatives. In isolation, Tiktaalik may not itself be a incontrovertible exhibit of RV+NS, but such a fossil does not exist in a vacuum. There is a immense body of support accumulated as a general mechanism of evolution. Even most creationists do not challenge that there is demonstrable variation, environmental selection, and subsequent speciation in nature, although some prefer to describe this with other semantics. So it comes down to a matter of degree.
What intermediate fossils do is narrow the transformation that must be bridged - the more intermediates cataloged, the narrower the gaps. Without Tiktaalik, there is a larger gap between between aquatic and amphibian creatures, which creationists may think unbridgeable by RV+NS. The discovery of an intermediate form provides a stepping stone which is more accessible from both sides of the fossil record, and provides opportunity to evaluate prior conjectures. By a fossil expressing features in common, modification shows more as variation rather than complete novelty. Further, the geological age is in line with the rough time one would expect for the degree of development, and that was the presumption which narrowed the geological formations for a successful search. RV+NS is an explanation consistent with, and supported by, the evidence of the fossil record.
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Because if the process of random variation and natural selection hadn’t occurred, given the other transitional forms in the series there’d be no expectation that such a fossil should exist in the first place. We know of no other mechanism that could have operated 385-365 million years ago to change species over time, and we do know of one that does change species over time (random variation and natural selection). Again, the inference is simple and obvious. It is no more complicated than to infer heat from the sun would have created evaporation from Earth’s oceans and produced clouds and rainfall back then too.
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How would you distinguish natural evolution from divinely guided evolution? There seems no way to do it. Even Bechly’s supposed test is useless. Suppose there are no species pairs that differ sufficiently in the current biota. Given the divine guidance theory, why should we expect that? It’s a theory with no expectations.
Now, I would expect that if God were responsible for the history of life, there ought to be some kind of visible plan, building toward some kind of ultimate result. But that’s not at all what we see. Mass extinctions in particular seem capricious. How do you deal with the lack of goal-oriented evolution?
@RonSewell beat me to it. And Rum and John.
We have a prediction that such creatures should have existed, and we can seek fossil evidence to confirm the prediction. The discovered of Tiktaalik represents a repeatable experiment in evolution and paleontology.
IF on the other hand I asked you for experimental evidence that some creature is Created by something other than RV+NS, I think you would have difficulty just framing a falsifiable hypothesis.
Just to be clear - I’m NOT asking you to do that.
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