Your Inner Fish

Continuing the discussion from BioLogos: Teaching Evolution to Students of Faith:

Here is how you test it…

https://www.amazon.com/Your-Inner-Fish-Journey-3-5-Billion-Year/dp/0307277453

The story behind the discovery of the four-legged fish is driven by hypothesis testing about our common ancestry with them.

69 posts were split to a new topic: Nonlin’s Case Against Common Descent

The original thread was somewhat hijacked, so we never really got to discuss this case without the interruptions. The posts in that exchange was moved to: Nonlin's Case Against Common Descent.

At this point, we can reopen discussion on the original post.

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Copying a response from the split that was not meant to be a response to Nonlin, if that is OK? (If not, please delete.)

Tiktaalik is one of my favorite examples. I use it in reply to people claiming there is no experimental evidence to support evolution.
There was a gap in the fossil record between fish and land-walking tetrapods, and based on evolution hypothesized that such a creature should have existed. Shubin and others examples examined geological records for location of the right age and environment where fossils of such a creature might be found. After several years of searching they discovered the fossils representing the creature we now know as Tiktaalik. This constitutes an experiment based on a prediction of evolution: hypothesis, gathering of data, and confirmation of the prediction. This is very repeatable - we can (and do!) search for other fossils not yet known but predicted by evolution.

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It would seem to me that phylogenetic analyses are test enough, though it’s certainly nice to have consilience of different sorts of data.

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