Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Theory of evolution confirmed?

Okay, maybe that's pushing it a little, but this study represents serious evidence in the matter, especially since morphologic changes in a species of lizard following invasion by a competitor have been observed in 15 years, an incredibly short amount of time in the grand scale of things. Evolution is said to be incredibly hard to observe because of it taking place over such a long period of time, but... 15 years.

They were even serious enough to go out of their way to make sure these changes were caused by what we colloquially call "evolution", and not other factors, and in the end, the 1-in-462 chance of the observed invasion patterns having occured by dumb luck is literally the best excuse one could find to disprove the whole thing.

17 comments:

  1. Well, to be fair, the theory of evolution was confirmed long ago, hence why it's a theory and not a hypothesis. But let's just say this is the end of it and move on. I believe it is actually observable in species that have very short life spans, anyway.

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    1. It's a theory and not a hypothesis, but it's still going to take a fair bit to call it "fact". Don't get me wrong, it's still lightyears ahead of anything else we have, it's just my scientist self getting anal about details like this. Doubt IS the driving force behind science, after all.

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    2. True. I didn't mean to shit all over science by implying that anything we know is 100% confirmed. I'm just tired of people acting like anything they have to say disproves evolution. I'm ready to reach that plateau where the theory of evolution is accepted and understood everywhere.

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  2. The rage of creationists that say God put life on Earth exactly as it is now is like a midnight snack. It's not good for you, but oh, does it taste good when you have it...

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    1. It's especially hilarious when most of those are also considered dumb in their own scientific community. It's proven fact that things change and adapt over time, and evolution is basically that taken to a logical extreme. You'd have to be daft to not know that.

      Most creationists who are actually decent people in the field believe that while evolution is a thing, all life was still created at some point in time - and that the underlying similarities between lives that exist are more a cause of creating things off a similar template than because things have evolved that way for literal billions of years. Which isn't without a point, because even ten billion years is an oddly short amount of time for life to spontaneously start happening without an extreme outside catalyst (one so extreme it eludes us to this day, though we're starting to get closer.)

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    2. Makes more sense than life appearing as it is now 6,000 years ago, at any rate...

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  3. So I go to a religious school,catholic one, and apparently the pope kind of said that evolution and the big bang are reasonable theories, and of course also that God is not a magician, which is kind of a weird concept

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    1. Yeah, apparently he got shit from people in the Bible Belt for that. But what do they care, they're mostly Protestant, they don't believe in his authority!

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    2. If he says something they like, though, they're all over it. Classic religious nutjobs.

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    3. "How can we assimilate Catholics if their leader says such hedonistic things?!" That's probably what they're thinking...

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    4. What Francis said certainly surprised me. Basically throws literalism out the church's window, though there will be plenty of people who will catch that literalism that was discarded and reapply it,

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    5. I think his concept is reasonable. Believing in a God does not make the big bang theory and evolution false by default. That beings evolve does not mean they have never been created and that beings change does not mean that there isn't a power behind it. So yeah good that the pope said that, is most certainly important due to all those creationists...

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    6. But see, the Pope was only voicing a theory that had already started to take hold. What you see of creationists are the VERY LOUD AND VERY ANNOYING vocal minority at this point.

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    7. You mean the type that says Earth is 6,000 years old, and God put every animal on Earth exactly as they are now? Yeah, those lot are very vocal...
      And to Rubin...Maybe God making the universe could be witnessed as the Big Bang to a spectator...

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  4. Actually, what the Pope said was in line with the Catholic Church's official stance for pretty much most the last century. They've actually gone away from the whole bible literalism thing for a while now (and they accept the Big Bang Theory...hell the guy who first came up with it was a Jesuit priest scientist). Some believers might go the literal route but then again most Catholics use birth control so what they do doesn't always coincide with the official views of the church. [Former Catholic]

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  5. Theories in a science context are explanations for observed phenomena based on observations. Populations changing with time (that's it, evolution) is an observable phenomenon, and the theory would be the mechanism behind that evolution, or natural selection so to speak. And nowadays it is a very well supported explanation, as we have tons of data that corroborate it, specially thanks to the field of genetics that Darwin had no access to.

    My apologices for the vocabulary pedantry, but my degree in Biology forces me to speak out in those topics, and also my apologices is this comment went twofold, I'm still not used to Blogspot commenting.

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