Who Owns the Standard Definition of Evolution

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It's one thing if your family tree's records have questionable reliability, it's quite another if you doubt common descent. You have no doubt that you have two parents, and no doubt that they each had two parents, and no doubt that they each had two parents, and onward back through time. So you don't really doubt common descent.What you actually doubt is biological change over time. But cell division is imperfect and almost every one creates mutations, so every sperm, every egg, possesses some mutations, 50 or so would be a reasonable ballpark estimate. This means change is inevitable, and the fossils we find in geological layers evidence this change with increasing difference from modern forms with increasing age.So when you ask if we "use our present-day biological observations to understand ancient events/processes", the answer is an unequivocal yes. Though much ancient life was very different from modern life, it still experienced the exact same environment pressures as modern life. There was heat and cold, humidity and dryness, good years and bad years, hurricanes, blizzards, tornados and earthquakes, flood and drought.And the environments changed over time, mountains becoming plains, plains becoming deserts or sea bottom, and sea bottom becoming land, deserts becoming forests, and land being pushed up into mountains, continents drifting about.Ancient life experienced mutations in the same way as life today, and because of that they changed over time. Some of the mutations conferred an advantage in the changed environments, making it more likely that they would produce offspring. This is what we see happening today, and this is what must have happened in the past.How can we be so sure that what happens today was happening in the past? If the process of evolutionary change over time did not happen in the past then we would find a much different fossil record. We would find fossils of modern horses and dogs and so forth all the way down to the bottom of the geologic layers.But that's not what we find. We instead find a record of change over time, exactly what we would expect to find if the same forces operating on life today also operated in the past.--Percy

If you mean that it's not an example of speciation then you're correct. White and brown bunnies are the same species. But it's still an example of evolutionary change, just not enough to cause speciation.In order to deny speciation you would have to identify a mechanism preventing mutational change from accumulating to the point of loss of interfertility.--Percy

Important because this diagram is typical of evolution presentations - an apparent explanation/representation/definition of evolution - and my underlying purpose here is to understand why one could have an unshakeable belief in evolution, what is that has proven this to him. This understanding starts necessarily with the definition of evolution. I am getting more and more of an understanding.The outward implication is that A eventually became N. I am trying to understand how this diagram shows us when one species/kind/lifeform evolved from one to the next, if its purpose is to demonstrate common ancestry.Also, N is chosen as representative for modern, contrasting sharply with J,K,L,M. Everyday I can see live humans whose skull shape more closely resembles J,K,L,M than N, mine included. If it was possible for J,K,L,M,N to interbreed, what's to prove that these are not just a variety of different humans. If it was not possible for these to interbreed, then what's to prove that they are not just distinct species/kinds/lifeforms.If potential interbreeding is indeterminate, then how is this uncertainty reflected in the conclusions?

Are we caught up in semantics regarding assumption and conclusion, or does conclusion mean there is no longer consideration for other potential conclusions, i.e., the item is "closed".

Once again wise1, the acerbic wit does not disappoint! Some might argue that such diatribes are inappropriate for such settings, but I would strongly disagree. I am staunchly free-speech even if derision is directed at me.The greater hazard here is that of the message getting lost in the entertaining linguistics.

Conclusions are invalid if they involve questionable assumptions. The only significant evolutionary assumptions I can think of at the moment:

• The laws of physics were the same in the past as they are today.
• Life in the past reproduced and was based upon DNA just like life today.

--Percy

I wrote this here 12 years ago when I was less scarred by experience and imagined that some minds might be changed if we tried. But anyway, try this, it's an explanation of common descent and explains those fossil skulls. If we descended from apes, how come apes are still here?
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What’s wrong with this picture?
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Well nothing or pretty much everything — depending on what you think it shows.
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If you see it as man evolving over millions of years from ape-like ancestors, you’re right. But if you see it as a picture of how modern monkeys change into people, that’s probably why you may ask the question:
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If we descended from apes, how come apes are still here?
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To ask that question means that there’s a vital piece of information missing from the questioner’s understanding of what evolution is. That vital piece of information is the concept of the tree of life, that all things are related to each other.
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An evolution scientist on hearing that question might ask you a question back. Such as:
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"if I'm descended from my grandfather, how come he still exists?"
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or
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If dogs are descended from wolves, how come there are still wolves?
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Here’s fuller explanation.
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Chimpanzees are apes and one of our closest animal relatives - their scientific name is Pan troglodytes.
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Now, imagine that you are standing face to face with a female chimpanzee - let’s call her Pan. With your left hand you are holding the hand of your mother and your mother is holding the right hand of her mother and so on for thousands of generations back into the past. By doing this, you know as an absolute certainty that you are descended directly on your mother’s side to everyone in the chain.
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Imagine that Pan is doing the same but with her right hand.
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You now have two imaginary lines of women and female chimps holding hands going backwards in time - like a railway track with women and chimps lining each side.
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You can now walk down the centre of the rails and look carefully at your mother's family line and the chimp's family line going back millions of years.
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So what would do you see?
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Walking back about 200,000 years on the human side you see a mother who’s husband was a chap science named Heidelberg Man (Homo heidelbergensis ) she’s distinctly human, using tools and standing upright, probably hairless and very tall — the males are up to 7 feet tall. This is the first different species that we’ve come across in our chain. But you wouldn’t be able to tell exactly when Homo sapiens (people) merged into Heidelberg because each mother would look almost identical to the next — you can’t see the join. The changes from mother to mother are so gradual that you only see a change by comparing mothers thousands or millions of years apart. We only now know that Heidelberg is different from us because we’ve found his fossilised remains and we can compare it to ourselves today.
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This is why there’s no such thing as a transitional fossil or a missing link; every fossil is a transitional fossil and every living species is in transition to the next — if we had a fossil for every mother in the lines, even the experts wouldn’t be able to say where a separate species had been formed. We can only guess with hindsight.
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If you find this hard to grasp or you think it’s impossible for one species to change slowly into another we can see it happening today. For example, we call species that change slowly over geographic areas rather than over time, ring species.
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Here in the UK the Herring Gull and the Lesser Black-backed Gull are distinct and non-interbreeding species. But if you physically follow the Herring Gull west towards North America it gradually blurs into something more like a Lesser Black-backed Gull. It carries on changing towards Siberia and when it finally returns to Western Europe the Herring Gull has become a Lesser Black-backed Gull and the two species don’t interbreed. At no point in the ring can you say exactly where it changed species — it’s a gradual merging of characteristics over distance.
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As you walk back further, at about 500,000 years ago, you’d see a branch form and go off sideways from our human line, these are the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis). They lived along side us but developed separately. There may even be Neanderthal mothers in our line, because we think that for some time there was interbreeding.
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And so on down the line of mothers through increasingly apelike creatures until at about 2.5 million years ago we reach an animal called the Southern African ape (Australopithecus africanis). This creature is small — around 4 feet, with a brain a third the size of ours and although she stands upright like us, she’s covered in hair and is distinctly apelike. We used to think that this is roughly where chimps split from the human line but modern molecular genetics tells us that it was earlier.
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We have to walk much farther down the lines to get to where most evolution scientists think chimps branch off - somewhere about 7m years ago. This mother would have looked something like a chap called ‘Taumai’ (Sahelanthropus tchadensis). He has the same brain size as a modern chimp but his face is a little more like a human than a chimp.
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No one knows for sure whether Taumai is the point where chimps start off on their own line but we do know one thing for certain:
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Wherever the split actually happened, at this point in the two lines of human and chimp descendants you would see that the right hand of a mother from the chimp line is now holding the left hand of a mother from the human line.
The lines have met — the ancient chimp and the ancient human have the same mother.
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This mother starts the lines to both Pan and you, so Pan is your distant cousin. And both you, the human, and Pan, the ape are still here.
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So the apes developed along one line and we humans along another. We were in competition with each other whilst in the forest but the reason that there wasn’t only one final surviving winner is because our ancestors moved from the trees onto the open savannah grasslands whilst the apes stayed in the forest.
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Once in the open we HAD to adapt to survive in the new environment; walking upright in order to run quickly and for long durations, losing hair to keep cool, developing tool use in order to hunt. The apes in the forest were already adapted to their environment so they developed along their own arboreal paths.
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In a nutshell then, we assume that the present results from the past, without fully understanding the process in between, and then apply present processes to explain the past, such that it fits our theory of the process in between. In simple terms this is known as circular reasoning, but we know that science does and must employ this deficient logic, in the effort to inch ever closer to the truth, when analyzing something that is no longer observable.Not trying to be clever, just demonstrating that either application of observations and processes, or the combination of the two, do not categorically remove doubt.The crime scene analogy is perfectly apt in this case, but the peripheral thoughts you introduce are for another thread.

Yet again, you display your typical creationist dishonesty. First, I don't think that word means what you think it means. My college career started with foreign languages, which included some study of linguistics. You keep demonstrating that you have no clue what that word means nor how to use it. Please stop embarrassing yourself ... oh, sorry, I forgot that creationists have no shame.Rather, the greater hazard is that the pearls in Message 489 (and in the more than 400 messages to you trying in vain to explain to you how things actually work) are getting lost in the willful ignorance and agenda of deception in your swinehood. Well, I answered your question even though you didn't bother to even try to read it. You didn't read my counter-question to you. Since you will not go back to read it, I'll repost it right here (so you can ignore it yet again):IOW, what should you conclude when your fallible Man-made creationist theology proves to be so very wrong? Since that has already been proven so many times and so conclusively that its claims are called PRATTs ("Points Refuted A Thousand Times"), so that question is no mere hypothetical.The assertion I have seen from so many fundies and creationists is that if their fallible Man-made creationist theology proves to be wrong, then their only option is to become self-destructive hedonistic atheists. Their theology being wrong would mean either that "God" does not exist or that it is not worthy of worship, and that the Bible is completely false and should be shucked into the dustbin (AKA "thrown into a trash heap").Is that your assertion as well? But WHY?If we find that science is wrong about something, then we take that into account and try to correct it -- that fault is in that part of science, so fix it. But if you find that your theology is wrong about something, then you reject religion and "God" altogether? -- you think that fault is in "God" so you reject Him? Why would that be your choice? (again, that is precisely the choice I have seen creationists insist on, so I am not making this up).What the hell are you thinking?I answered your question, SO ANSWER MINE!

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In a nutshell then, we assume that the present results from the past, without fully understanding the process in between, and then apply present processes to explain the past, such that it fits our theory of the process in between.

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What “process in between” are you talking about?

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Not trying to be clever, just demonstrating that either application of observations and processes, or the combination of the two, do not categorically remove doubt.

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Science does not claim to be infallible. However it has contributed considerably to our understanding of the natural world. Simply setting it aside because it conflicts with the teachings of the religious leaders you prefer does not seem to be very rational.

Very rushed, since I need to be at a trade show today before a full night of duty. So I will have to be very brief and rushed. Quite correct: biological change is inevitable. And that is because of how life works.Which means that for life to remain static and unchanging, something would need to be preventing life from changing. Some kind of external mechanism which erects arbitrary artificial barriers to life doing what life naturally does: change.What could that possibly be? But K.Rose and other creationists insist upon it and depend on it, even to the extent of staking their faith on it. Even though it's yet another thing that doesn't exist.The only thing I can think of which would cause stasis, that would stop, or at least restrict, change would be evolution, the very thing that creationists deny.Think about it: If a population is not optimally adapted to their environment (eg, they just moved into a new environment that they are just barely adapted to), then evolutionary processes (AKA, life doing what life naturally does) will result in rapid adaptation (the less well adapted they are, the more rapidly they will change). But if a population is already optimally adapted to their environment (such that changing would be mal-adaptive), then those exact same evolutionary processes that had previously brought about rapid change will now restrict change away from that optimum. It's kind of like the old joke about the thermos bottle: "It keeps hot things hot and cold things cold ... but how does know the difference?"Ironically, evolution, the only thing that could provide anything close to the mechanism creationists need to prevent life from changing, is also the very thing that creationists deny most vehemently and would use any means to destroy, including lies and deception regardless of how extreme.Doesn't it make you wonder what would happen if creationists were to ever realize what evolution actually is?Gotta go now to find a home for my old TI-99 system.

You are correct, I accept common descent (all of my ancestors had two human parents), but I reject common ancestry (all species/kinds/lifeforms have, ultimately, a common ancestor).Evolution is a complex theory for which there is some level, between great and miniscule, I think it is agreed, of uncertainty.Other complex theories that come into play, time-dating, geographic occurrences, weather patterns, migrations, solar/celestial anomalies, etc., are necessarily intertwined with evolutionary theory, and the level of uncertainty increases exponentially as the theories are applied to support one another. Much more to this debate, of course, and for a later thread.To my own peril I'll say it again, though the repetition may be scolded and the position itself may be rejected out-of-hand, the issue is one of worldviews. The Creationist looks at the world and sees man as a result of God's Creation, and he understands that this cannot be proven by known natural processes and has no interest in arguing that it can be. The Evolutionist looks at the world and sees man as the result of an ancestor that is common to all other life, and is on a perpetual mission to put the final nail in the coffin of evidence, so to speak.Thus the impasse.

Once upon a time there were no humans (H. sapiens) on the planet. There were creatures with a lot of characteristics of humans though.At at time before that there were no creatures that looked all that much like humans but did have more basic characteristics that we have still.Long before there were creatures very different from us but even then some basics were the same.How do you explain that? Somewhere back there our ancestors must have walked (and crawled) the earth. Somehow we got from life forms not much like us, to ones a lot like us to us.

Magic. The only argument he has is magic.