Please disprove the theory of evolution to me

[Sky_walker]

Not all radioisotope dating is radiocarbon dating, and does not work in the same manner, that was my whole point. You don't seem to understand what you're talking about.

I understand that just fine, thank you. I never mention that all radioisotope dating is radiocarbon dating nor that it's always used in the same matter. Please, read carefully next time before posting.

Edited August 13, 2014 by Sky_walker

[Wanderfound]

RNA bases are pretty common in primordial organic material (e.g. CC asteroids), and all you need for a first organism is a single molecule of sufficiently efficient RNA replicase. Regardless, that hardly means we can assume animals and plants could be unrelated; that would mean covergent evolution of the transcription and translation, the genetic code, two instances of incorporation of mitochndrions, and a heck of a lot more. There's not a single organism known that doesn't have the same or only a slightly modified genetic code, whereas in your case it'd be unlikely for them to even all use DNA.

This is totally irrelevant to the current discussion, but there are biological replicators that don't use DNA/RNA in their replication: prion diseases. Mutant proteins that convert other proteins into copies of themselves. They're damned freaky things when you get into it.

[Wanderfound]

To be fair even if they had given the value as 3.1415 it would still be technically wrong. If I asked to write it out now you would technically be wrong.

3 pretty close seeing as they did not have super computers. It not like they said it was 4.

This thread is skating on the edge of erasure already; if it drifts into theology and biblical analysis it's certain to get shut down.

Stick to the science, perhaps?

[EdFred]

This thread is skating on the edge of erasure already; if it drifts into theology and biblical analysis it's certain to get shut down.

Stick to the science, perhaps?

What is pi to 1 significant digit?

What is tau to 1 significant digit?

What is 8.23589734123 to 1 significant digit?

[crazyewok]

This thread is skating on the edge of erasure already; if it drifts into theology and biblical analysis it's certain to get shut down.

Stick to the science, perhaps?

I was talking mathematics. Is Maths a banned subject on here?

My point being 3 is no more wrong as Pi than 3.1415. Pi to me is 3. what ever you need it too to do the job.

[Dkmdlb]

doubting dating methods

I was just in a conversation last night with someone who defended an anti-science view about the age of the earth and as evidence for their position insisted that carbon dating was unreliable. I asked the person if they were aware that carbon dating was just one member of a whole suite of radiometric dating methods, and they seemed confused by the question.

In my experience, the ignorance of the science is one of the biggest correlates to rejection of the science.

Edited August 13, 2014 by Dkmdlb

[magnemoe]

Oh, by the way, my favourite one I've come across is when I get asked what the chances are of 2 human beings evolving at the same time and close enough to each other to meet and have intercourse? Hmmm, very unlikely I think you'll find. Then who did the first human to evolve have intercourse with?

Offspring don't suddenly become another species, its an sliding slope, where you get genetic drift because of pressure one place and another pressure another place, after millions of year you have two species.

Easy real world example is dogs who is one species but the largest can not have offspring with the smallest of pure practical reasons, over a million years genetic drift would split it into different species.

Its an species of bird who lives on all of the northern hemisphere, because of genetic drift the ones in the Europe don't produce fertile offspring with the ones in America but both does with the Asian birds, they all live and look pretty similar.

[jfull]

There's really nothing to prove or disprove anymore.

Evolution is the inevitable result of the processes of Heredity (no need to debate whether offspring always take after their parents), Natural Selection (artificial selection in domesticated animals proves natural selection), and Random Mutation (again, nobody can deny that mutations occur).

Even if all life on Earth really was created only a few thousand years ago by a higher power, Evolution would still happen and continue to happen into the future.

(unless of course the higher power was actively intervening to stop it from happening... but why would it do that?)

[rtxoff]

Actually, no. An important quality of a good scientific theory is that it must be falsifiable.

Well, i did not deny that with my statement. So there was really no reason contradicting me.

[Laie]

[dating methods] You should doubt them, as every few years we're getting new calibration curves to the radiocarbon dating.

How much of a difference do these make, I wonder? Some thirty-odd years ago, remnants of my home towns' palisades were carbon-dated to 3300 years, give and take a century (the tourist office gave twice and claims that the town is 3500 years old, to the chagrin of my physics teacher). If someone held that old measurement to a new calibration table, would the outcome be much different?

[magnemoe]

There's really nothing to prove or disprove anymore.

Evolution is the inevitable result of the processes of Heredity (no need to debate whether offspring always take after their parents), Natural Selection (artificial selection in domesticated animals proves natural selection), and Random Mutation (again, nobody can deny that mutations occur).

Even if all life on Earth really was created only a few thousand years ago by a higher power, Evolution would still happen and continue to happen into the future.

(unless of course the higher power was actively intervening to stop it from happening... but why would it do that?)

Yes, the problem with evolution in the 19th century for scientists was the timespan, they did not know advanced life is half a billion year old but thought earth was some million years old so it was not time enough for species to evolve.

We might never know how life begin as something who took millions of years with the entire earth as playground can not be replicated in a lab.

Note that a million year is very fast in this setting,

[Red Iron Crown]

The theory of evolution has a tremendous amount of empirical evidence supporting it. The alternate theories do not, so we rightfully treat evolution as our best theory to explain those observations. Does that mean evolution is 100% correct? Not at all. Like all scientific theories it is subject to refinement, expansion, or even overturning. Though with the amount of evidence supporting evolution it is extremely unlikely to be overturned.

We shouldn't think of it in terms of prove/disprove; science isn't in the business of proof, that's for mathematics. A theory can never be proven. Think in terms of more- or less-supported by observational evidence.

[magnemoe]

How much of a difference do these make, I wonder? Some thirty-odd years ago, remnants of my home towns' palisades were carbon-dated to 3300 years, give and take a century (the tourist office gave twice and claims that the town is 3500 years old, to the chagrin of my physics teacher). If someone held that old measurement to a new calibration table, would the outcome be much different?

The issue is the accuracy say +-500 year instead of 100, On the other hand the city would predate the palisade as it was build to protect the city

[EdFred]

How much of a difference do these make, I wonder? Some thirty-odd years ago, remnants of my home towns' palisades were carbon-dated to 3300 years, give and take a century (the tourist office gave twice and claims that the town is 3500 years old, to the chagrin of my physics teacher). If someone held that old measurement to a new calibration table, would the outcome be much different?

It shouldn't but the anti-science crowd will say, "well, if there's a margin of error of 10%, why couldn't the error be a million percent? If you're wrong about this, you're wrong about everything."

I got into a discussion about my mom about dating with tree rings, and her response was "yes, for THAT tree, but you can't prove that every tree has tree rings unless you test every single one." I gave up.

[Nikolai]

I got into a discussion about my mom about dating with tree rings, and her response was "yes, for THAT tree, but you can't prove that every tree has tree rings unless you test every single one." I gave up.

Let's say you're in a field with one million boxes in it. Every time you open a box -- and you open thousands of them -- there is a kitten inside.

Now, if you're intellectually honest, you'll continue to open boxes, because you don't know for sure that there isn't a box containing only a purple Post-It note with the number "10" written on it in black Sharpie. But until you get to that point, doesn't it seem logical to assume that all the boxes contain kittens unless proven otherwise?

[Camacha]

If such proof existed several fields of science would be in major upheaval, as it would mean throwing out most of the theoretical basis for their work.

Then again, scientists are just as flawed as most other humans, so not everything believed in science is true. The second part or your sentence is a good reason the first part of my post might cause problems, as people tend to ignore evidence that does not suit them or their work. It has happened it science before that good evidence and people have been ridiculed, it is happening now and will happen in the future. It goes against what science is, but happens because scientists are humans too. It is good, necessary even, that you make sure that theories are still true. If you lose your critical edge and stop examining evidence, you are not doing science any more.

That being said, I think this is a matter that is studied so closely that I can hardly imagine major flaws being present within the current proof. Incomplete, yes. Completely wrong? Very unlikely. Evolution is such a beautifully simple mechanism that leads to incredibly complex emergent behaviour that is will take quite a while to figure out completely, but every step of the way has been wonderful and awe inspiring so far.

I got into a discussion about my mom about dating with tree rings, and her response was "yes, for THAT tree, but you can't prove that every tree has tree rings unless you test every single one." I gave up.

She it totally right. Just as we cannot be sure the sun will come up tomorrow (for as far it even comes up at all, but that is another discussion). It has for quite a few million of years though, or at least for as long as I can remember. Both make it a pretty good bet that it will happen tomorrow. And, this is the key part, a better bet than any other bet we have.

Edited August 13, 2014 by Camacha

[Kryten]

Evolution by natural selection, on it's own is not a theory that can be disproved; it's a mechanism, which will occur given a specific set of conditions. If you have competing entities with mutations and heritable traits, populations will shift towards traits more suitable to their environment, whether those entities are animals or computer programs.

[PakledHostage]

My point being 3 is no more wrong as Pi than 3.1415.

Fair enough, but you don't need a burning bush or whatever to tell you that the circumference of a circle is 3 and a bit times the diameter. You can arrive at a reasonable approximation for Pi via nothing more than a simple experiment.

[ZetaX]

3 pretty close seeing as they did not have super computers. It not like they said it was 4.

Ancient greeks knew much better rational aproximations (archimedes essentially had a sequence converging to it, too), as did the babylonians. 3 is a pretty bad estimate actually, even for that time.

[Mr Shifty]

Let's say you're in a field with one million boxes in it. Every time you open a box -- and you open thousands of them -- there is a kitten inside.

Now, if you're intellectually honest, you'll continue to open boxes, because you don't know for sure that there isn't a box containing only a purple Post-It note with the number "10" written on it in black Sharpie. But until you get to that point, doesn't it seem logical to assume that all the boxes contain kittens unless proven otherwise?

She it totally right. Just as we cannot be sure the sun will come up tomorrow (for as far it even comes up at all, but that is another discussion). It has for quite a few million of years though, or at least for as long as I can remember. Both make it a pretty good bet that it will happen tomorrow. And, this is the key part, a better bet than any other bet we have.

The problem with both of these examples is that they're totally divorced from a theoretical framework. We don't assume the sun is coming up tomorrow because it's always come up before. We assume so because we know the Earth is rotating at a set speed and that the sun is a certain distance away from the Earth and that the interaction between the two is mediated by general physical laws that fall within well-established theoretical frameworks. In other words, we know why the sun will rise tomorrow, which is a more robust knowledge than "it always has before."

Likewise with the kittens; this is a false analogy because there's no framework for the construction of the imaginary box-ridden field. With evolution we have a vast theoretical framework built of and constantly dispensing testable (extremely well-tested) assumptions. We have a prodigious interlocking network of cause-and-effect narratives that correlate extremely well with experimental results. We, in other words, know why there are kittens in the boxes. Our assumption that we're not going to find a Post-it note is based on this knowledge, and only bolstered by the fact that we've always only found kittens to this point.

[Godot]

O.K.:

The Flying Spaghettimonster created the world and everything living on it.

But, being a perfectionist, even during this day he tries to improve everything it created and stretches it noodly appendages out in order to twist here a gene and there a gene to change species (after all it is easier to use already created species as material, than to create something totaly new ... the FSM is lazy, ya know )

It once had a phase where it liked giant lizardlike creatures ... but it grew tired from playing with them and had the great idea, to throw an asteroid on earth and then look how it could change the small ratlike creatures to be more successful.

Unfortunately the result was desastrous, because after several iterations of changing and testing species, the Homo sapiens sapiens was created ... with its destruction, wars and belief in false gods

[PakledHostage]

Ancient greeks knew much better rational aproximations (archimedes essentially had a sequence converging to it, too), as did the babylonians. 3 is a pretty bad estimate actually, even for that time.

This, to me, is the amazing and beautiful thing about evolution: That somewhere along the line our ancestors clicked over a hump and diverged towards the type of intelligence that allows us to rationalize as successfully as we do. Science is about asking questions and seeking answers based on evidence rather than faith. It is about using the gift that we've been given, whether one believes that it was given by a creator or by blind luck. There are multiple streams of evidence for evolution. Whether it be comparative anatomy, fossil records or the more recent DNA evidence for it, they are all consistent. How anyone could deny the validity of evolution in the face of such broad evidence is beyond me.

[crazyewok]

Ancient greeks knew much better rational aproximations (archimedes essentially had a sequence converging to it, too), as did the babylonians. 3 is a pretty bad estimate actually, even for that time.

Sure you could do better. But 3 is not wrong, just not as right as it could be.

As I said depends on the job you want done really.

[ZetaX]

If the question is "what is pi (i.e. the quotient of circumference and diameter of a circle in a flat plane)", then 3 _is_ wrong. If the question is "how do I calculate this and this with sufficient exactness", then 3 might be correct, but only very rarely; even in ancient times, people were using better estimatesm as being off by about 5% is often relevant. And that is one of the reasons why even back then they had better estimates (the other is that it is quite simply to get something better).

[Nikolai]

Likewise with the kittens; this is a false analogy because there's no framework for the construction of the imaginary box-ridden field.

Point taken. What I meant to point out, though, is that this conclusion is reasonable even without an explanatory framework (since the argument was directed at someone who did not accept the explanatory framework). Science can establish that A leads to B with a fair degree of confidence, even if it can't yet explain how. (Note that evolution itself, for example, was well-understood before the science of genetics even existed.)

Of course, as you point out, evolution currently has this explanatory framework, and the framework itself has withstood robust testing, so we really have confidence that we're on the right track.