Evolution is a contentious topic.
There's been a rash lately attempting to say that it doesn't exist because we both do not know exactly we went from puddles of reducing chemicals to life AND that we can't duplicate the feat.
But not knowing where life started and exactly how does not nullify evolution.
Do you have a dog?
Notice that most dogs don't look a thing like a wolf. Yet just 33,000 or so years ago there was just wolf. And for many years after the split, dogs looked lots like wolves.
Now there are pekinese and chihuahuas.
Selective breeding and domestication prove evolution using artificial selection to achieve a desired goal.
Evolution is simply natural selection working on the genes of the wild animals.
That's it.
We can back-track a really long ways through the fossil record and we can, indeed, show evolution working its magic.
Just because we don't have a record from before a certain date, doesn't mean that it only began once we can study fossils. The falsification is to find earlier fossils that continue the regression or that all fossils from before are identical.
And stop blaming/crediting Darwin for the idea! His contribution was noticing that isolated populations of birds were adapting to take over niches they didn't fill on the main-land.
Thank you.
ReplyDeleteWhat disturbs me is how many people consider themselves well-read on the topic of evolution because they've read a lot of "anti evolution" books. It's really no different than considering yourself well-versed on the gun debate because you've read a lot of anti-gun literature.