Pretty much back to the first chemotrophic organism we can generate a consistent line of evolution...a 4 billion year line of evolution!
Could you point me to a good site or referrence with a decent write up of how this trace was done? I'm assuming we don't have DNA from 4 billion year old bacteria. All evidence I've seen is a fossil record which, while incomplete, suggest animals evolved over time, and phylogeny trees that are more guesswork than science. Once more, there's a good emperical case but until the mechanism(s) of evolution are found, and until someone explains how seriously complex organs evolve, as I said I think you're further from the 99.999% mark than you'd like to admit.
No one in this thread has addressed the evolution of the eye. I've seen and read repeated claims that there's plenty of evidence for how the eye evolved, but haven't actually seen any presented as to how the ability to tell light from dark with a few specialized cells evolves to a modern human eye. Yes, the existence of varying forms of the eye in various species
suggests it did evolve, but that's not evidence
for evolution, it's merely observation
consistent with it. That's the circular reasoning BP is talking about. The mechanism is what would serve as proof. It might even provide falsifiable predictions which could be investigated. And that would be the difference between evidence consistent with evolution and evidence that proves evolution.
Someone has to explain how the various parts of at least one version of the modern eye evolved and then were incorporated into the larger organ that become the modern eye. Someone has to explain how a lens develops minus a retina to focus on. Say the retina or something similar developed first, probably more likey. How did the lens then develop, and the eyeball to keep it the proper distance from the lens? How did the muscles surrounding the lens develop to focus it? How about the cones and rods as was pointed out before? Mutation and natural selection isn't enough. The more complex organisms get the more likely it would seem any mutation would be either negligible or detrimental. I forgot who said it in a prior post, but a basic version of every single part of the modern eye would have had to come into existence through random mutation and be useful in some way minus the whole so it would be incorporated into the more primitive whole and kept through the process of natural selection until it could join with the other parts, also products of mutation, and eventually become the modern eye. That's a tall order, and not something that can be proven to 99.999% certainty by looking at old bones or bacteria in a petri dish. And, since so many species have some version of the modern eye it's obviously a development that happened a long, long time ago. Primitive versions of the eye are found in cambrian fossils. That's going from a few cells to a complex organ in a relatively short time span it seems.
It would be nice instead of reading there's plenty of evidence for this type of evolution to see, perhaps, at least a proposed line of evolution that gives some plausible order for the development of the various parts of the eye and how, when and why they were incorprated. As of right now I'm the most irreligious person you'll every meet, despite what a nice set of tits might make me say occasionally, and I'm not convinced that random mutations and natural selection can take a single cell organism to a human being at the bus stop, no matter how long those processes have been in play.
The point of the thread is that we've got a common ancestor with all life. And yes, we really are primates...sorry bud.
Something I personally don't doubt in a general sense, but until the specifics are more ironed out I'm not buying the 99.999% certainty line. The support of science doesn't mean anything in the end. Most scientists are convinced one cycle of steroids will melt your liver. Doctors used to do cigarette commercials. I don't think science is as solid as most people suggest because the people needed to carry out the process of inquiry are very fallible.
Before I buy the 99.999% certaintly line I want to know
how macro evolution occurs. I want to know
how speciation occurs. I want to see evidence as to
how random mutation leads to complex organs that have parts that seem fairly useless if the system isn't in place as a whole to make use of them. I want to see one example of a
beneficial mutation in a complex orangism. Not examples of detrimental mutations, not examples of swapped proteins in DNA that lead to no change whatsoever. Some guesses in a book as to how this all hapens that are mathematically
workable do not constitute
proof.
