I’m not qualified to do such testing but plenty of scientists are (including computational specialists like Dr. Swamidass.) Human and chimpanzee genomes have been mapped and the patterns rigorously compared. One of the most striking features to compare is the presence of ERVs. They tend to fall into the same patterns of nested hierarchies which evolutionary theory predicts. Scientists have also compared human chromosome #2 with its chimpanzee counterpart and observed that the human chromosome #2 is the result of an end-to-end fusion of two ancestral chromosomes. Vestigial centromeres and vestigial telomeres are obvious in human chromosome #2! (If people still commonly used the word aglet in describing shoelaces, I would be tempted to use an analogy of two separate shoelaces tied together. The result would be one very long shoelace but inspection would make the “fusion” obvious to any careful observer. One would notice aglets in the middle of the very long shoelace, not just at the ends.)
I’d say “a sufficient number of site comparisons”. The higher the number of comparisons confirming the prediction, the higher the confidence level. To me, it is a matter of simple math. (Well, it is not simple for this old guy who hasn’t taught z*-values and sigmas since the early 1980’s. But it would be a piece of cake for the biostatisticians on this forum.)
In any case, I’m sure that the specialists here could provide a much better answer than I can.
I agree!
Of course, I’m not saying that Universal Common Descent is as well attested as Common Descent in general—but your example is yet another very powerful reason why Universal Common Descent is explained in virtually every evolutionary biology textbook I’ve ever seen. The evidence that all life on earth descended from a LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) is massive. Indeed, you’ve brought up a great example of how “historical science” depends on the hypothesis testing of the scientific method.
You keep promoting false dichotomies. I don’t think you understand what the scientific method entails. Inferring and predicting are essential to science.
If someone drives home after work and finds a pile of rubble and charred embers where their house once stood, they can infer from their observations that the house burned down. Yes, someone might say, "No. While the owner was at work, somebody demolished the house and hauled it away for the sale of the scrap lumber and fill. Then they piled burned materials from a nearby junk yard at the site. " A forensic scientist could analyze the debris at the site, test the soil for evidence of combustion, and make observations which lead to logical inferences about what happened—even though the scientist was not present to observe the burning of the house. That’s good science as well as common sense.
In fact, I’m always amazed that people like Ken Ham promote absurd mantras like “Were you there?” when in his daily life he could scarcely function without such logical inferences about what happened in the past, where events in the past produced evidence which can be observed in the present. Indeed, it is impossible to devise an experiment which doesn’t involve collecting evidence in the present from events which happened in the past. In a typical lab experiment, the time delay involved in data collection may be measurable in a few nanoseconds but in solar astronomy the “delay” is about 8.3 minutes. (Yes, the light travels that fast but I admit that there are particles which take much longer.) For radio-astronomers, they collect data in the present from events which happened up to millions and even billions of years ago. Indeed, look up at the stars at night and you are observing the past.
@colewd, you’ve asked some excellent questions! Even though this is a tangential sub-thread, I consider it very worthwhile.
