What would falsify evolution?

Hi,A quick question for the scientists out there.I am preparing an introduction to a seminar about different types of history writing. At the moment I am explaining 'Positivist' history and 'meaningless' statements, and how a positivist historian will only accept statements that are verifiable or falsifiable.I thought I could include evolution as an example of a falsifiable theory. (don't worry I can relate it to history writing!)What I need though are two or three examples that would falsify evolution.The examples would have to be pretty basic, as the course is not a science course, the course is about history writing in the Old Testament.Could anyone help here please?Cheers.

Simple - if they found the fossilised bones of humans in Mesozoic rock, or any rock older than the time that humans were supposed to have evolved. Evolution depends on stuff evolving in the right order - like you get mammals before humans and all that - so something drastically out of place would falsify it.

Hi,So, if I said something along the lines of 'if a human fossil is found that is far older than the earliest whale fossil that we have, then that would falsify evolution', would that be accurate?Brian.

Assuming that you wanta) A refutation of the historical course of evolution (rather than some other part of the theory)b) something that can't easily be accomodatedthen you're on the right lines.However I'd choose something that is on the line of human ancestry - the earliest non-human primate for instance. There's no theoretical difficulty in humans predating whales.

Hmmm... ok try this:"If a human fossil was found that was far older than the earliest dinosaur fossil, then that would falsify evolution."For "dinosaur", you could also say "earliest mammal fossil" or "therapod" or even "earliest fossilised tree" if you want to be extreme. Any of these would falsify evolution.

This is a bit difficult, because evolution has already been so thoroughly tested that it’s hard to come up with predictions -- they tend to be postdictions. That is, things that would falsify it, but which we already know aren’t the case.One could take any of the lines of evidence for evolution, and reverse it: ‘if evolution were not the case, we would / would not find... do[/I] / don’t find, which is hence evidence for it’. That is, not finding the evidence that we do find. For instance, if human genetics had been entirely different to that of other apes; finding some mammal species that uses uracil in place of thymine in its DNA, perhaps. Or maybe humans having retinas wired the cephalopod way. But we already know these aren’t the case.It’s worth noting however that these are postdictions now, but they didn’t use to be! Any of our modern knowledge in these areas could have undermined evolution.Also, evolution is a theory of pattern, so finding a single anomaly would not necessarily falsify it. But conversely, a radically different pattern would falsify it completely.But here’s some of off-the-top-of-my-head prediction -- things that might still turn up, in principle.Undoubtedly Precambrian (ideally, though Cambrian would do) mammalian fossils. Note, plural, because this is about pattern. If mammals were generally found before there were even amphibians, it would be pretty inexplicable. Bat fossils have been found in the fine-grained Messel oil shale; perhaps some might turn up in the Burgess shale too? Note that you’d need later things found before their ancestors, not the other way round. I am flummoxed as to how ‘living fossils’ are supposed to refute evolution.Biogeographical anomalies -- apparently ‘closely-related’ and pretty immobile organisms found on different continents, something like Orchidis prettiflowerii subspeciesalpha in India and Orchidis prettiflowerii subspeciesbeta in North America. Or species of lizard on a 4myo volcanic island in the Pacific whose nearest presumed relatives live on islands off the west coast of Africa. Again, an odd case might have some explanation within evolution; but a large number of examples would be pretty damning. After all, evolution is the reason for the biogrographical distributions we see, but there’s no reason -- other than that -- why prehensile-tailed monkeys, say, should only be found in the New World.Features matched purely to their function, not to their lineage. So a bat with avian lung ventilation, not it’s mammalian one; a new whale species with fishlike gills instead of lungs, and so on.Finding any new species -- and there’s plenty out there to go find -- whose genetics was radically different to anything else. Specifically, some ‘higher’ organism, which in principle should be related to something already known, that has completely different genetics to the known species.The utter non-matching of non-coding DNA between morphologically similar species. The coding stuff should be similar perhaps, because it builds similar bodies. But the non-coding stuff -- which is easily most of it -- has no reason to be similar.Observation of... oh, pick your own creationist caricature! ... a dog giving birth to a cat, or something. Or marginally more plausibly, a fish egg developing into a salamander.An earth that did turn out to be mere thousands of years old; a universe a mere million, etc.A mechanism for making offspring that prevented mutations; the observed mechanism for descent that made accumulation of mutations impossible. (Not sure what that might look like, but it’d prevent evolution.)And here’s a couple of links on this sort of thing (though I think my list above is more comprehensive than these!CA211: Evolution falsifiable How Fossil Evidence Supports EvolutionHope that helps!Cheers, DT

Hi Paul,What I am looking for is really a short sharp example or two.I really want to get across what 'falsifiable' means.I have started by saying that Genesis 1:1 for the positivist historian is a meaningless statement because it cannot be verified or falsified. Religious staements are meaningless so they are not a part of positivist history.I wanted to give an example that most of the class could relate to. The evo-creo debate comes up a lot so I wanted to say that the statement 'the theory of evolution proves that creatures evolve' is not a meaningless statement because the statement can be falsified. Evolution can be disproven, all anyone would have to do to disprove evolution would be to..........It really will take up no more than a minute of the course time, so it doesn't need to be too indepth. Something like finding a T-Rex on the same strata as a dwelling built by humans may do (I think, I am not even sure that it would LOL, now you see why I went into theo- archaeology rather than biology or physics!), but I wanted to make sure that I wasn't making an arse of myself!The course is theology, Old Testament and genres of history within the Old Testament, the evolution example would be a simple one off statement. But I need something very simple, something that the average man in the street could understand.I think that giving the TOE as an example of what is 'faslifiable' would really interest the students as they really do seem quite keen on it.Thanks for your help here, and yours too RoxBrian.

Cheers Darwins,Very helpful thank you very much.Brian.

If you want a clear-cut example you must first be clear-cut on exactly which part of evolution you want to disprove.When I get home I'll see if I can find something more useful but here's something that might be relevant.At one point it was generally believed that life on Earth had been much the same throught time. The Earth was commonly thought to be only thousands of years old, and the mummified animals found in Egyptian tombs were easily identifiable as modern life - although they themselves were thousands of years old. Then we began to understand geology and paleontology and this view collapsed. The Earth was far older than most had believed and the forms of life on it had changed considerably over time. Without these realisations evolution would never even have been proposed.Alternatively you can go for specific evolutionary hypotheses such as the suggestion I made in my previous post.If you want evolution in the most important sense then I would go for boiling down the phylogenetics section of the "29 Evidences FAQ" at T.O. 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: Part 1This stuff literally should not work if it were not the case that species diversify over time by producing lineages of modified copies.

Careful there, DT. Biogeography has a LOT of this kind of anomaly. Ex. giant land tortoises are found on Aldabra Atoll in the western Indian Ocean (and formerly on nearby islands; species: Geochelone gigantea) and the Galapagos (species: Geochelone elephantus) on the other side of the world. The small tree genus [i]Trochetiopsis[i] contains three species - all endemic to one tiny flyspeck isle perdu in the Atlantic (St. Helena). Its nearest living relative is the genus Trochetia, endemic only to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean - a really looong way away. There's lots of examples like this.A better biogeographic "falsification" would be if two species morphologically and ecologicaly similar were adjacent to each other spatially but shared no genetics - like finding Thylacinus cynocephalus sharing overlapping ranges with Canus lupus. Or two species of squirrel-niche critters sharing the same North American beechwood habitat that were from completely different subfamilies. You get the idea.I do like the rest of your examples, tho'.

From the perspective of fossils and lineages, the evidence would not be particularly disastrous. It would be much more significant to falsify evolution from the vantage point of the mechanism of Darwin's theory itself. If you could prove that natural selection has no bearing on frequency of alleles in a population, evolution is done for. Similarly, if differential reproductive success could be shown to have no effect on a population's genetic makeup, the very basis of Darwin's theory disappears.

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The dark nursery of evolution is very dark indeed.
Brad McFall

Ah, Quetzel, I know I can always rely on you to know what you're talking about, even if I don't! I know biogeography is an important -- and often overlooked in these discussions -- strand of evolutionary theory, but I do tend to make it up as I go along when I want to redress that balance! Thanks as always!The point of course being that if something is a falsification, it will be inexplicable according to the challenged hypothesis. Presumably the Geochelone and Trochetiopsis examples are not inexplicable...? IOW, there are perfectly good reasons why these things are where they are. That's better! Heehee! Careful there, Q. Isn't it nigh on a law of ecology that two species cannot share the same niche (at least, not for long!)? For example, red and grey squirrels... DT

Since everyone is nitpicking DT, I'll join in to

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Finding any new species -- and there’s plenty out there to go find -- whose genetics was radically different to anything else. Specifically, some ‘higher’ organism, which in principle should be related to something already known, that has completely different genetics to the known species.

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The utter non-matching of non-coding DNA between morphologically similar species. The coding stuff should be similar perhaps, because it builds similar bodies. But the non-coding stuff -- which is easily most of it -- has no reason to be similar.

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This is perhaps a minor criticism but you can get such a disjunction of genetics and phylogeny relatively easily and frequently via horizontal gene transfer. A given sequence (even a very large sequence) will be more closely related to the organism from which it jumped than to the DNA of the organism that hosts it i.e. cyanobacterial sequences in the genome of Arabidopsis.Martin W, Rujan T, Richly E, Hansen A, Cornelsen S, Lins T, Leister D, Stoebe B, Hasegawa M, Penny D. Related Articles, Links
Evolutionary analysis of Arabidopsis, cyanobacterial, and chloroplast genomes reveals plastid phylogeny and thousands of cyanobacterial genes in the nucleus.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2002 Sep 17;99(19):12246-51
If the jump is recent this will be even more pronounced. However, you would not find that the majority of the genome behaves this way and in most cases, it is pretty easy to figure out from where the transfer originated.However, if you sequenced an entire genome of a mammal, say pig and genomewide it was found to be more closely related to amphibians than other mammals, then evolution would get a big kick in the ass.

Brian, I'd suggest a thorough browse in the TO macroevolution FAQ that Paul has linked you to. I forgot that that FAQ has a 'potential falsification' for each point discussed, which should cover everything you need!Cheers, DT

That's not a nitpick, that's a better phrasing of what I was trying to say!(Seems that 'off-the-top-of-my-head' is dangerously close to 'pulling it out of my arse'... )