Is evolution true?

@USArmyParatrooper , Charles Darwin himself said that if there was not lots more fossil evidence by 100 years after he was dead (which is now in the past) then evolution would not be true...

A few years ago the Pope announced evolution is real, and that it doesn’t conflict with Catholicism. I totally disagree with him (that it doesn’t conflict), but I was really happy he took that position.

Being honest I’m not a fan of religion and I think it has been, and will always be harmful to society. BUT, I have less of a problem with it when people make their religion fit science instead of the other way around.

People like Ken “the earth is 6000 years old” Ham are poisoning the minds of children. As are all the dimwits who want to remove the *science* of evolution from schools, and force science teachers to teach religion (intelligent design). 

First of all [citation required]

Second, IF he said that, why would you accept a single scientist from the 1800’s as a greater appeal to authority than the consensus of the modern scientific community?

Yes, the record's incomplete but again things are much more sophisticated now and we can estimate stratigraphic completeness for a given section.  The calculations are actually quite complex and if I recall correctly, Pete Saddler from the University of California, Riverside pioneered that work.  So for example, if a stratigraphic section has an estimated completeness with resolution down to the 1 million year level that would means any evolutionary or cladogenic/speciation events that took longer than a million years to occur should be represented in the biostratigraphic/fossil record...

The dominant pattern we see in the fossil record is morphological stasis--little to no change...Stephen J. Gould recognized that this was not an artifact of an incomplete record by a signal and from this was born his punctuated equilibrium theory.  The idea that speciation happens rapidly (by geologic standards) in geographically isolated small peripheral populations that have been cut off from the main population (so they are less likely to be fossilized) (a speciation mechanism proposed by Mayr) and are then reintroduced.  This was Gould's explanation for the dominant pattern we see: long periods of morphological stasis with little to no evolution (equilibrium), punctuated by abrupt speciation events in rapidly evolving peripheral isolates...

I did my own research on this with fossil sequences I studied and thought it was going to be the answer we'd been looking for.  But unfortunately, even here we run into big problems because even when factoring in stratigraphic incompleteness we're not just missing single "missing link" speciation events, but more often than not dozens of speciation/cladogenic events (or "missing links") in a sequence/series are absent (along with long intervening periods of stasis), where we would expect to find them based on the resolution of the record. 

This begs the question of whether the "missing links" are "missing" because they never existed in the first place....Now again, we have excellent examples of gradualistic evolutionary transitions, but these are the exceptions, not the rule...We see "saltational" leaps in the record, which is unthinkable to biologists and also why I'm more ambivalent about the standard evolutionary mechanism of evolution by means of natural selection acting on mutations...this predicts gradualism and random speciation events, yet the major evolutionary events in the history of life are usually coordinated and occur around the same time instead of randomly--completely unexpected...We have evidence for common ancestry...I think the jury's still out on mechanism(s)...Novel ideas and paradigm shifts like the one we've talked about before from Shapiro at the University of Chicago may be on to something...Regulatory genes like Hox genes may hold part of the answer given their ability to abruptly change the location of serial appendages, but these genes are also tightly controlled....There is so much we still don't know.  It will be interesting to see what is learned in the future.

@Thebackwardpawn you are right, the more time unfolds the more arguments there will be that can make a belief one way or the other more desicive.

USArmyParatrooper--I'm not sure religion or non-religion is to blame, but people in power.  Just like we are biased toward only looking at a tiny part of the fossil record (vertebrates) there's a tendency to focus on the atrocities of religion so much that the positive influences on civilization are forgotten or overshadowed (e.g. government organized welfare systems, charity/helping the poor--stem from religion).  We've seen plenty of atrocities committed by secularized states so I'm not sure religion or non-religion is to blame...But people in power at the time--absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely, regardless of whether that power is religious or secular-based.  Humans seem to be very good at messing things up...Just some food for thought.  I'm not tied to this position.

@Thebackwardpawn are you a Christian?

@USArmyParatrooper- How did this happen?  We got side-tracked on religion.  OK, back to the rules of the thread...What I want to know is what you thought about the three layers of evidence for common ancestry from ERVs.   Three Layers of Endogenous Retroviral Evidence for the Evolutionary Mode

@Stevie-Knickers please only comment on this page if it has to do with evolution

Everyone, Stevie is trolling.

@USArmyParatrooper you are so right

I don't think evolution is true

How does natural selection not die out? Why does everything get better not worse? That's no coincidence.

@Hihowrudoing , u r right there should be more in between skeletons than there are

Comment #200 !!!

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