AC>Those are fancy (and oft repeated) words. Let me issue you
AC>the Patterson challenge: tell us one thing you know for
AC>sure about the theory of evolution...other than that "it
AC>shouldn't be taught to high school students"
Patterson's challenge was broader, asking whether anyone knew
any one thing about "evolution" to be true.
Let's see... true things about evolution. That would make an
overlong list. I'll just give some of my favorites.
- Inheritance is particulate, not blending.
- Inheritance is not perfect. Changes can and do happen in
heritable information.
- More organisms are produced than can be sustained under
prevailing ecological conditions.
- Those heritable variations which correlate with differential
survival of organisms tend to have higher proportional
representation in the population.
- The distribution of traits in a population can be influenced
by chance effects, such as population bottlenecks and sampling
from a limited pool of variant.
- Fossils are the traces of organisms that were once alive.
- Fossil forms show that extinction of species happens. Certain
fossils represent organisms common enough, large enough, and
distributed in areas where if they were present through the
present day could not have been overlooked.
- Fossils are distributed in a stratigraphic pattern indicating
change in fossil assemblages over time.
- Fossil assemblages show that mass extinctions have happened
at widely different times in the earth's history.
- The canonical genetic code is consistent with the theory of
common descent.
- Patterns of differences in sequences of proteins and heritable
information support the idea that these differences have accrued
since the time of a last common ancestor.
- Evolutionary interrelationships have been used to advantage
in medical research.
- The principles of natural selection have been used to
advantage in computational optimization and search.
- Species have been observed to form, both in the laboratory
and in the wild.
- A novel symbiotic association has been observed in the
laboratory.
Well, that should get us started, anyway.
Wesley