Evidence for Evolution

[Soloist]

The evidence is in "undersea volcanic vents", lol.

Yeah that’s why the idea of comets seeding are gaining appeal. They can’t find it, so they kick the can down the road

[Josh]

Willful ignorance by conservative Christians is not a good look and I expect it is partly why interest in Christianity is falling off so dramatically among the young.

Do you have an explanation for why interest in astrology is increasing amongst the young?

[Ken]

Willful ignorance by conservative Christians is not a good look and I expect it is partly why interest in Christianity is falling off so dramatically among the young.

Do you have an explanation for why interest in astrology is increasing amongst the young?

Is it?

Probably social media. Which I expect also explains why so much new age and pseudoscience nonsense keeps circulating and metastasizing in our society. As a society we seem to be getting dumber rather than smarter. Because there are no longer any gatekeepers to vet and edit information before it goes viral.

How does the famous Mark Twain quote go? "A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes" Which is especially relevant today, even if it probably wasn't written by Mark Twain.

[NedFlanders]

Interesting thread.

From the "Science Times" of the NYT, dated December 12, 2023

"According to the fossil record, geology and evolution have been engaged in a dance for 3.8 billion years, since our planet was only 700 million years old. It was then that the first single celled creatures appeared, perhaps in undersea volcanic vents, feasting on the chemical energy around them.

The population of cells has been growing exponentially ever since, even through geological disasters and extinction events, which opened up new avenues of evolution.

The seeds for animal life were sown sometime in the dim past when some bacterium learned to use sunlight to split water molecules and produce oxygen and sugar. By 2.4 billion years ago, with photosynthesis well established, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere began to rise dramatically. The Great Oxidation Event 'was clearly the biggest event in the history of the biosphere,' said Peter Ward, a paleontologist from the University of Washington.

Without photosynthesis, the rest of creation would have little to eat. But it is just one strand in a web of geological feedback loops by which weather, oceans, microbes and volcanoes conspire to keep the globe basically stable and warm and allow life to grow."

My favorite word in this article is "conspire".

Lot of ideas there with no evidence. I wonder why they teach things that have no evidence.

Actually there is an immense amount of evidence.

Take the oxidation event referred to above. Which was actually a period lasting millions of years. The chemical composition of the oldest rocks on earth suggest that there was very little free oxygen in the earth's atmosphere and vastly more carbon dioxide and methane. We also know from the composition of such rocks that the early oceans were rich in iron. Iron is one of the most abundant elements in the earth's crust and most soluble in water so it would have been an abundant mineral in the early oceans due to erosion.

Iron oxidizes very easily in the presence of oxygen as anyone who has ever seen rust knows quite well. Without protection, raw iron and steel will begin to rust almost overnight. And rust (which is iron oxide formed by the reaction of iron, oxygen, and water) is far less soluble than free iron ions. Which means that if iron oxide forms from the reaction of oxygen and dissolved iron in sea water it will form solid deposits and settle to the bottom. So what do we see everywhere around the world during the time period of the great oxidation event when the first photosynthetic bacteria began to convert carbon dioxide into O2? We see the same identical layers of red iron oxide across the globe in ancient layers of sedimentary rock. It is an exact fossil footprint of this event.



When the first photosynthetic organisms in the world's oceans began to produce oxygen it would have mostly been consumed by reacting with iron. And it would have taken millions of years for the process to have used up all the available iron dissolved in the oceans before the surplus oxygen could have started to accumulate in the earth's atmosphere. And that entire process would have resulted in banded layers of iron deposits in all the sedimentary rocks formed at that time around the world.

Now as with all science, it is more complicated than I just described. But to say there is no evidence is patently wrong. There is an immense amount of information, observations, and data that have been collected and they all point in this direction. Have scientists used time machines to go back 2.5 billion years and take air and water samples? No, of course not. But that is not the same thing as saying there is no evidence. Clues are all around us. And science is about finding and interpreting the clues that we do have.

Willful ignorance by conservative Christians is not a good look and I expect it is partly why interest in Christianity is falling off so dramatically among the young.

Willful ignorance is to keep insisting that millions of years is proof. Again if something is not testable, repeatable, and observable it is NOT scientific fact and millions of years can never be proven because we simply don’t have the life spans to observe such. We are questioning- you are trusting “the system”(willful ignorance).

[Ken]

Willful ignorance is to keep insisting that millions of years is proof. Again if something is not testable, repeatable, and observable it is NOT scientific fact and millions of years can never be proven because we simply don’t have the life spans to observe such. We are questioning- you are trusting “the system”(willful ignorance).

How do you think science actually works? And what do think scientific facts are?

What you are calling "scientific facts" are just observations about the natural word. They aren't explanations. They only answer the "what" not the why or the how. Which are really the much more interesting questions in science.

Take, for example, the structure of the atom. We can't measure the atom directly. It is far too small. And any tool we might use to observe ad measure the size, shape, and composition of an atom will be unequal to the task since atoms are hundreds of times smaller than the wavelengths of visible light. So we have to take indirect measurements and develop theories about its structure and composition using indirect clues. And our understanding of the structure of the atom has changed over time as we improve our observations and construct increasingly complex theories about the structure of the atom.

In the 5th Century BC ancient Greek scientists debated the nature of matter. One philosopher, Democritus, argued that all matter was composed of tiny finite particles that could not be further subdivided which he called "atomos" (the Greek word for indivisible). Aristotle argued that matter consisted of various combinations of the four "elements:" fire, earth, air, and water, and that it could be infinitely divided.

Aristotle's view held sway for over 2,000 years until 1803 when the British scientist John Dalton proposed an atomic theory to explain the behavior of matter which resurrected Democritus' notion of an indivisible atom and suggested that each element was composed of only one type of atom which has a specific mass. Also that compounds were composed of atoms combined in whole number ratios and that atoms were neither created nor destroyed in chemical reactions, but simply rearranged. But Dalton still viewed atoms as solid objects just like Democritus



Dalton's atomic theory was the standard view of the atom throughout the 19th century during the entire industrial revolution when great advances in science occurred until 1904 when British physicist J.J. Thomson discovered the existence of the electron, the first subatomic particle identified. His famous observations using beams of cathode rays led him to conclude the existence of tiny negatively charged particles that were over 1,000 times smaller than atoms which became known as electrons. Two years later he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his related work on the conduction of electricity in gases. Thomson proposed his "Plum Pudding" model of the atom in which the atom was a spherical mass of positively charged matter interspaced with negatively charged elections like plums or raisins in a bowl of pudding. At this point the nucleus of the atom had not yet been discovered.



In 1911 New Zealand physicist in a famous series of experiments that involved shooting alpha radiation through gold foil and observing their deflection rates concluded that atoms were largely empty space with a small positively charged nucleus. From which we got the Rutherford model of the atom with a positive nucleus surrounded by negatively charged electrons.



Two years later Danish physicist Neils Bohr conducted a series of experiments and observations in which he concluded that electrons traveled in orbits of quantized energy states and that electrons could move back and forth from higher to lower energy states. The resulting Bohr model of the atom reflected these different orbital levels



In 1926 Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger used a series of complicated methods to analyze the obits of electrons and eventually developed a quantum mechanical model of the atom in which electrons do not move in set paths but in probability waves. And he developed a model of the atom in which electrons inhabited space around the nucleus which he called an electron cloud.



In 1932 the English physicist James Chadwick (a student of Rutherford) discovered the existence of the neutron which completed the picture of the nucleus as a mass of positively charged protons and neutral charged neutrons which more or less has brought us to our current functional model of the atom



Several years later Schrodinger, Linus Pauling, and Max Born used probability distributions to describe the shapes of electron orbitals of different quantum levels which more or less is where we are today in terms of electron orbital theory



In 1965 physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig independently proposed the existence of the subatomic particles known as quarks as a way to explain the behavior of particles discovered through high-energy collisions. But there was little actual evidence for their physical existence until deep inelastic scattering experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator in 1968 Which brings us to the standard model of the atom that consolidates previous theories but is still incomplete because it does not explain dark matter and dark energy



All of modern chemistry is based on our understanding of atomic theory yet we still do not have unified models of the atom and the fundamental forces in the universe (gravity, strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism) so the scientific research continues. In science, answering one question always raises two new ones.

At no point in the advancement of our scientific understanding of the nature of the atom over the past 200 years could it ever have been said that we had a scientific model of the atom that was directly testable, repeatable, and observable SCIENTIFIC FACT because that isn't how science actually works. The entire advancement of our understanding of the atom has been based entirely on indirect observations and clues as atoms are far to small to observe directly.

Evolution and many other fundamental theories in science are no different. Scientific theories are not observable facts and a scientific theory does not graduate into scientific fact or scientific law. Rather, scientific theories are proposed explanations that unify and describe the relationship between seemingly unrelated observations or what you are calling "facts. And just like theories of the structure of the atom, all scientific theories are subject to change, modification, and improvement with the discovery of new information and new observations.

[JayP]

The argument of evolution tequires faith completely losses what science is. Nothing in science is truly carved in stone. Science is constantly changing, hopefully improving, our understanding. Evolution in as much a fact as how electricity works. I mean that we are building models trying to explain and understand how things work, or are related, etc.

A great point on this is the example of how it was understood clean water supply eliminated cholera before the understood what it was.
The model of understanding it had practical applications before that knowledge grew complete.

And no, cats do not become dogs.

Evolutionary theory, currently best modeled by natural selection, is not guaranteed to be the end of the discussion.

Arguing for or against religion by supporting or attacking evolutionary theory, or other science, is silly and unproductive.
Equally so is so much of our “made up” science built to support liberal political and social theory.

Render unto Caesar, and Edison, what’s is theirs……..

[NedFlanders]

The argument of evolution tequires faith completely losses what science is. Nothing in science is truly carved in stone. Science is constantly changing, hopefully improving, our understanding. Evolution in as much a fact as how electricity works. I mean that we are building models trying to explain and understand how things work, or are related, etc.

A great point on this is the example of how it was understood clean water supply eliminated cholera before the understood what it was.
The model of understanding it had practical applications before that knowledge grew complete.

And no, cats do not become dogs.

Evolutionary theory, currently best modeled by natural selection, is not guaranteed to be the end of the discussion.

Arguing for or against religion by supporting or attacking evolutionary theory, or other science, is silly and unproductive.
Equally so is so much of our “made up” science built to support liberal political and social theory.

Render unto Caesar, and Edison, what’s is theirs……..

You must be American. It is amazing the difference in textbooks. In Canada Edison doesn’t get a whole lot of recognition and it is noted his greatest work was developed by a Canadian that worked for him.
You wanna talk electrical science now Nikolai Tesla was a fascinating man - even when Einstein was asked how it feels to be the smartest man in the world he replied that he didn’t know and to go ask Tesla. We have most of our electrical technology today from more of his work than anyone else yet he is kept mostly silent or nonexistent in many American textbooks when I’ve looked…

[ohio jones]

In 1926 Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger used a series of complicated methods to analyze the obits of electrons ...

Old electrons never die, but one can never quite be sure about Schrödinger's cat.

The best measurement yet of the lifetime of the electron suggests that a particle present today will probably still be around in 66,000 yottayears (6.6 × 1028 yr), which is about five-quintillion times the current age of the universe.

[Ken]

In 1926 Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger used a series of complicated methods to analyze the obits of electrons ...

Old electrons never die, but one can never quite be sure about Schrödinger's cat.

The best measurement yet of the lifetime of the electron suggests that a particle present today will probably still be around in 66,000 yottayears (6.6 × 1028 yr), which is about five-quintillion times the current age of the universe.

You want to really hurt your brain, look up Wheeler's one electron universe theory which posits that all the electrons in the universe are all the same electron just moving backwards and forwards in spacetime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe#

And you guys think it is the biologists who have unsupported theories.

[Josh]

Physicists based what they say on observations.

Evolutionary biologists mostly work off of an assumption of “First, I need to prove those ignorant hillbilly Christians are wrong.” Then they tell me that a soup of chemicals turns into a lizard turns into a bird turns into a monkey turns into a human.*

*Yes, I know this isn’t the exact proposed family tree.