NedFlanders wrote: ↑Sun Dec 03, 2023 7:57 pm
Touché…
No attacking necessary.
It’s simple when someone demands proof of your beliefs or they won’t believe, then the intent I share is helping them look in the mirror. Personally for me, when I actually got serious into looking for any proof for evolution as an atheist and found I was lied to because there is zero scientific evidence for evolution it was instrumental for me finding God. So I get excited if someone is dogmatic about evolution - I see myself and therefore have hope for them.
I'm not dogmatic about evolution. It is just one unit out of about 20 that I teach in regular biology classes along with all the other topics: Ecology, biochemistry, cell biology, photosynthesis, respiration, cellular reproduction, mendelian genetics, molecular genetics, history of life on earth, biological classification, etc.
But to say that there is zero scientific evidence for evolution is beyond absurd. There are vast amounts of evidence all around us. Evolution simply means change. And there is endless amounts of evidence that life on earth is constantly changing. The environment and habitats on earth are constantly changing. And plant, animal, protist, fungi, and bacterial species are constantly changing along with them. We cycle from ice ages to warm periods and have experienced mass extinction events in the past. Yet life continues to survive, thrive, and yes, evolve.
People understood that we lived in a changing world long before Darwin. All he really did was propose the mechanism driving this change and titled it the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin as a naturalist focused primarily on observations and the fossil record. Since then we have acquired vast amounts of evidence in other areas of science such as molecular genetics that did not exist in Darwin's day. But that continue to confirm Darwin's basic observations about the mechanisms of change on earth.
Theories in science aren't about facts or common sense proofs, or ironclad natural laws. They are explanations that allow us to relate and connect seemingly unconnected phenomenon. Take gravity, for example. Humans have always known about gravity since the dawn of time. It is observable. If you pick up something and drop it, it will fall. If you jump out of a tree or off a cliff you will fall. If you throw a rock upwards it will come back down. This is all common sense. But it took Newton to come up with a universal theory of gravitation that was able to connect an apple falling from a tree to the ebb and flow of the tides, the changing of the seasons, the flow of rivers, and orbits of celestial bodies. All of these seemingly unrelated observations are connected through Newton's Universal Theory of Gravitation which explains that bodies with mass attract each other with a force that varies directly as the product of their masses and inversely as the square of the distance between them.
Evolution is no different. People have observed change in our biosphere for centuries. We can see it happening in human time scales as well as vast periods of time in the fossil record. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection simply provided an explanation of the mechanism driving the change that we see all around us. And explains seemingly unconnected phenomena such as how disease develop resistance to drugs, why penguins have wings but cannot fly, why there are so many varieties of finches in the Galapagos, and why whales have hipbones despite lacking hind legs or feet. As science advances and new areas of study emerge such as molecular genetics and genome sequencing, they only provide more and more evidence for natural selection and more powerful explanations of how it works. And we also observe how humans can produce the same exact types of change through artificial selection (selective breeding). Which is how we now have over 450 different breeds of dogs from the Chihuahua to the St. Bernard, all descended from Pleistocene-era wolves. Or how we have hundreds of different varieties of apples and how ancient Mesoamerican peoples developed modern corn from its grass-like ancestor teosinte.