Straight Dope Scientific Advisory Board. Basically folks who contribute to the actual Straight Dope column. dropzone for instance did an article (rather good IIRC :)) for the Straight Dope a few months (probably more…I’m too tired to look it up) ago and thus earned the title.
-XT
Maybe he just wants to avoid compounding his mistake.
You’d better thank God Casey & Andy is de facto over and done with, dude; otherwise we’d SOOOO be getting the Pun Paladin on your ass.
Yes. Frogs have evolved to include a small switching dial on their bellies. It’s hard to find, as you have to fold back the cloacaphanthal flap, but when you’ve located it, you’ll see that on all frogs, the small dial is actually set to “frog.” Additional labels around the dial indicate the other options for the animal; for example, if you turn the dial one step clockwise, the animal turns into a badger. One more click, and it’s an okapi. Then an arctic tern, then a Nile crocodile. One more click gets you the ape. It’s actually remarkably simple, and a testament to the awesome power of evolution.
As I’ve stated, I feel some things evolve and some don’t. I don’t know which, though. Anyways, this is and interesting article:
<checks forum> Nah, better let this one go by.
Maybe it would help if you would tell us what you would accept as “proof.” For example, if a delusional goatherder living in the Bronze age wrote a book stating that evolution was true, would you accept that as proof?
Shame you don’t direct any of that skepticism toward things that are claimed by creationists.
Don’t Call Me Shirley, I don’t mean to antagonize, but I can’t help but to ask this question.
Why do you guys always break out the proof semantics argument? Every time someone says “I want to see solid proof for your argument” a person who is on the opposing side of the debate breaks out the “well, what does ‘proof’ really mean?” or “define ‘proof’.” This has happened to me twice already and I’ve only been here a few months.
Proof is proof, it has no other definition. I’m not starting a fight with you about evolution, I’ve just always wondered why that is. Proof is proof is proof. Evidence, facts, solidarity = proof.
Now if there were a God, He would have given us a remote.
Proof has many different meanings in different situations and with different people. “Proof” in a court of law has a different meaning than “proof” in science. Even in a legal setting, before a grand jury you have to “prove” something by a preponderance of evidence, but in front of a regular jury you have to “prove” the same thing beyond a reasonable doubt. These are called different “standards” of proof. In neither situation is 100% “proof” required.
In this thread, the OP asked for “proof.” Nothing in science is ever 100% “proven.” There is a threashold of evidence past which a theory is considered “proven.” For one scientist it might by 95%, for another it might be 97%. As evidence builds up for a theory, scientists gradually come on board and accept it as “proven,” but a scientist would never claim that anything is proven 100%. In this case, the OP was directed to mountains of evidence for evolution, and mountains more evidence is ridiculously easy to find. And despite all this evidence he is still asking for “proof.” In cases like this it usually turns out that the person asking for “proof” is defining “proof” as 100% certainty. And 100% is never going to happen.
I hear that shrimp have this dial too, and there are several herpetological options. These are called “Snakes on a Prawn.”
In debates such as this, you can read that statement translated as ‘What proof would you find convincing? What would constitute proof that you would accept?’. You see, most of the guys in this thread have been through this particular debate so many times that it gets tiring for them. They have PROVIDED proof…only to have to have it waved away. So, before they want to waste more of their time, they are trying to figure out what the anti-Evolution poster of the week would CONSIDER as proof…or if its even worth their while to find links only to have them ignored or waved away.
Its not like this ‘no proof of evolution’ schtick hasn’t been done to death on the board, you know?
No, ‘proof’ is only ‘evidence’ if one accepts the facts. The overwhelming body of evidence supports evolution. And we aren’t talking about a radical new theory here still being disputed…this is a theory (yes, I know Evolution is fact AND theory both) that has stood the test of time, being picked at by peer reviewed scientist for over a century. And yet, all this evidence, all this proof, this huge body of facts…all this still doesn’t constitute ‘proof’ to the faithful. Thus the request for a defintion of ‘proof’ and what it means to the OP…
-XT
Question: do you consider ALL inductive and deductive reasoning to be “speculative” in nature, and only videotape to be conclusive? Or what? It seems like the evidence for the tree of life is overwhelming. But apparently not so for you.
I’m not exactly sure who said this or what they are really asking, but if I understand the question right, then yes: that is exactly (in gross terms) what genetic analyses of different species involve: figuring out relationships by comparing the differences in all sorts of various genetic sequences.
You wouldn’t necessarily be sharing the exact same ones, because they would have been changing just as much as yours had from that common origin. But the common origin would be apparent.
Frogs don’t turn into apes. But once speciation has happened, and populations cannot interbreed, their development is no longer linked to other frogs, and can head out on it own direction. This is what happened long ago to the early tetrapods: diverging from other bony-fishes. And then again when early mammals diverged from the mammal-like lizards. And on and on again.
I was wondering how you did that!
Dammit, now I have to add you to the list of people I can no longer get mad at!
OK, I lied…I’m not gonna change me name.
You are correct - that is exactly what happened. And that is exactly what happens in evolution. There are, in fact, no instances of any “thing” turning into a different “thing” in all of evolutionary history.
When looking at the fossil record, what we see are bits and pieces of the “Big Picture”. A mere smattering of relatives from our geneology, one might say. It appears that big changes occur and that species just “appear” and “disappear”. But on a much smaller scale – season to season, year to year, generation to generation – gradual changes occur within a population. The next generation is still very much whatever type of thing its parent population was. But it may be slightly different. Over time, those differences add up, and can become so great that if you look at the populations “now” compared to an ancient ancestor way back “then”, the two will look very different.
What we see when we look at living things today are the tip-ends of the branches of the Tree of Life. Without the branches themselves, or even the trunk, they all look quite different. But as we move back along a pair of neighboring branches in that Tree, we see the two groups looking more and more alike in their distant past. Eventually, we come to a fork, at which point the two groups are virtually indistinguishable. Then, we can move further back from there, and eventually encounter yet another fork, where some other group had split off even further back in time. And so on.
The fossil record fills in many of these branches and even a few forks. We see a near seemless transition from early crocodile-like creature to dinosaur to bird. Crocodiles and birds today look very little like one another, but based both on the fossil record and genetic analysis, it is clear that they are more closely related to each other than they are to any other living things. But it did not just happen that a crocodile-like creature “became” a bird. There were many gradual transitions, over many tens-of-milions of years.
Obviously, the answer is “no”. A frog will not turn into an ape. But, both apes and frogs do share a common ancestor, way back in their geneologies. The common ancestor was, of course, neither frog nor ape, but one branch of the split would eventually lead to bullfrogs shilling for Budweiser, and the other to automobile mechanics.
See, the key to understanding evolution is to forget about this “amoeba to ape” or “frog to ape” business. That’s not the way it works, and that’s not the way it’s ever presented, except by creationists. Gradual changes add up, over great spans of time, to create significiant differences between populations. Once you grasp that, you’re on your way.
The difficulty, of course, which I suspect is close to the heart of the anti-evolutionists’ resistance, is that it’s nearly impossible for a human being with a seven-decade lifespan to completely comprehend the staggering vastness of a million-year span, let alone the three billion years and change it’s been since the first proto-bacterial forms appeared. A visceral recognition of the sheer awesomeness of the time periods involved is a prerequisite for really understanding the mechanisms of evolution, I think. And since most of these creationist wankers are primarily characterized by an obstructive self-absorption (“I don’t see it, therefore it isn’t true”), they’ll never be able to overcome the crippling limitations of their worldview.
Except, oddly enough, with respect to an invisible deity.
If it helps, think of evolution as the living-world analog to changes in languages. You couldn’t communicate with someone in Engand 1,000 years ago, but there was never a parent who couldn’t communicate with his child over that 1,000 year time span. Go back 2,000 years and the language is even more unrecognizable. But slow changes over time turned one language into what is essentially an entirely different language.
Now, look at the fossil record. Go back 1M years, and there isn’t anything that looks much like a modern human. Slightly similar, yes, but noticeably different. Go back 5M years, and it’s not even slightly similar. Go back 50M years and there isn’t anything that we’d even recognize as an ape. What you see today is only the outer most branches of the tree of life, and it’s only as you go back in time that you see how those branches converge. Similarly, you see a bunch of languages today that may not seem related (English, French, Greek, Hindi, Russian, etc.) , but as you go back in time, they converge on a common ancestral tongue.
IIRC, if you go back 130+ years and look at photos of people taken back then, the average height was about 5’8" and someone 6’0" was considered tall. Nowadays, the average is 6’0". And as AD said, that’s predominantly due to advances in medicine and nutrition, but there’s also some genetic preference to taller people.
We don’t see it happen in our lifetime, but we will see it happen over several lifetimes.