Don't tell me there's no proof for evolution

Then how 'bout addressing what I've asked in regard to this:

Why was B 'selected for' if it did not have a 'survival advantage' over A?

You want to have it both ways. B evolves from A, but then B loses out to A.

Evolution allows this because there really isn't any scenario that can't be concocted that will contradict evolution.

If the critter survived.......well it's evolution. He was better adapted.

If the critter didn't survive.......well it's evolution. He wasn't better adapted.

It's unfalsifiable.

Encyclopedia Of Life (EOL) Draft Species Pages Now Available
(By Breen Byrnes, Public Information Officer, Encyclopedia of Life, Nov 7, 2007)

Do you know what a Sphyrna zygaena is? How many pounds of krill does a blue whale consume each day? What plants are endangered in Italy?
How are monarch butterflies affected by climate change in northern California?

Soon, with the click of a button you will be able to access this kind of information on all the world's plants, animals and microorganisms.
An international group of scientists, research institutions and museums is currently working to assemble the most comprehensive online biodiversity encyclopedia on the planet.

This project is called the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) and it was launched in May of 2007.

The EOL will help educate the world's citizens about biodiversity and promote a sense of awareness for our natural surroundings. It will also accelerate the discovery of new species as well as the cataloguing of biodiversity.

According to Graham Higley, head of Library & Information Services at the Natural History Museum in London, "On a planet of shrinking resources, this information will help people make wiser decisions about preserving our natural world."

Demand for biodiversity information by the scientific community, naturalists, conservationists, educators and the public is growing. In recent years the scientific community has recognized its responsibility for making accurate biodiversity information more accessible and, at the same time, technology has advanced to the point where this knowledge can be linked together and made available in an efficient and cost-effective way. The time for the EOL is now.

A project of this scope and magnitude has never been executed before. The EOL is a dynamic Web environment that will provide access to information on each of the approximately 1.8 million species now known to be present on Earth.

For example, each page will present such facts as the scientific and common names of the species (in several languages), photos and illustrations, habitat and natural history information, conservation status and human uses, and keys for how to identify the species. All this data will be verified by scientific experts, providing the user an authoritative set of information.

From the entry page, users will be able to jump to a wide variety of more specialized pages, including ones for molecular biologists, horticulturalists, students and teachers, and the general public, just to name a few. Biodiversity literature will be available, too, through the EOL's partnership with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) consortium.

The BHL consortium is made up of ten major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions from around the world that have joined forces in an effort to digitize all of the published biodiversity literature held in each of their respective collections. As part of the EOL, the BHL will digitally scan millions of pages of the world's biodiversity literature to make old and rare documents freely available to everyone on the Internet. To date, more than two million pages of literature have been scanned, and a new scanning center recently debuted in Boston. BHL has a small center operational at the Smithsonian (one scanner), one at Natural History Museum London (one scanner), and two scanners are running at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) doing Field Museum titles.

The Encyclopedia of Life's core activities are led by five working groups: Species Sites, Biodiversity Informatics, Scanning and Digitization, Biodiversity Synthesis, and Education and Outreach. Each team works from their home site at different research institutions or museums around the country to further their group goals for the EOL.

The Species Sites group, based at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, works with the scientific community to develop entry-level species pages for all the 1.8 million known and named species. These species pages are at the heart of the EOL. Each site consists of an entry level page, designed for the general public, and more specialized resources for particular audiences. This group also recruits experts from the scientific community to act as ?'curators' to ensure that the information on each page is up-to-date and correct.

The Biodiversity Informatics group, housed at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, is developing the software to seamlessly move data into the species pages. Unique tools will help the team capture, organize, and reshape knowledge of biodiversity. Visitors will also have advanced search capabilities and the ability to personalize the Encyclopedia pages based on the information they seek.

The Scanning and Digitization group works closely with the BHL consortium to ensure on-line access to the contents of many of the world's preeminent scientific documents and literature. These efforts will allow anyone, anywhere to read, search, and download scientific articles that were previously unavailable to them. The digitized literature will be especially valuable to individuals in developing countries who do not have access to comprehensive libraries.

The Biodiversity Synthesis group works from their base at the Field Museum of Natural History to develop tools and procedures for searching across and mining information from large numbers of species pages to synthesize new knowledge about biodiversity and the evolution of life. The group will also forge links among diverse communities of researchers and users to demonstrate how the EOL can be a tool for improved conservation of the planet.

The Education and Outreach group, based at the Harvard Museum of Natural History and in coordination with the Smithsonian Institution, seeks to take advantage of the EOL by exploring and promoting its educational uses in schools and universities. They will also collaborate with ?'informal education' groups such as natural history museums and nature centers to show how the Encyclopedia can extend learning beyond classroom walls.

Evolution is falsifiable. It states quite clearly that genetic mutations arise, which are selected for by environmental pressures and that through continued selection, the trait is maintained in a population.

Wolf_ODonnell wrote:

Evolution is falsifiable. It states quite clearly that genetic mutations arise, which are selected for by environmental pressures and that through continued selection, the trait is maintained in a population.

Does this 'always' happen, or 'sometimes'?

real life wrote:

Wolf_ODonnell wrote:

Evolution is falsifiable. It states quite clearly that genetic mutations arise, which are selected for by environmental pressures and that through continued selection, the trait is maintained in a population.

Does this 'always' happen, or 'sometimes'?

I don't see why you need to ask this question, RL.

The survival of a genetic mutation is quite clearly dependent on environmental pressures and whether or not they change, and whether or not they affect other traits an organism has. Genetic mutations are not always selected for if the environment doesn't put any pressure on it.

How exactly does this prove Evolution wrong, RL?

The Theory of Evolution quite clearly talks about new genetic mutations that are selected for by environmental pressures. It discusses quite specific situations as to when it works and how it works.

To disprove Evolution, RL, you have to prove that it doesn't work if the criteria it specifies are present.

.............and claims like the eye having evolved independently on 40 separate occasions.

And that's why it's tautologous.

If the critter didn't survive.......well the criteria were obviously not present.

If the critter did survive........well, see evolution explains that too.

It used to be that similar traits were said to indicate a common ancestry.

But then it became apparent that there were too many critters with similar traits in cases where even evolutionists couldn't say they evolved.........

........so then we have things like 'convergent evolution' http://www.txtwriter.com/backgrounders/Evolution/EVpage14.html

.............and claims like the eye having evolved independently on 40 separate occasions.

- this is just graffiti.

real life wrote:

.............and claims like the eye having evolved independently on 40 separate occasions.

Liar.

......serviceable image-forming eyes have evolved between 40 and 60 times, independently from scratch, in many different invertebrate groups. Among these 40-plus independent evolutions, at least nine distinct design principles have been discovered.........

But even with these conservative assumptions, the time taken to evolve a fish eye from fiat skin was minuscule: fewer than 400,000 generations. For the kinds of small animals we are talking about, we can assume one generation per year, so it seems that it would take less than half a million years to evolve a good camera eye.

pulling out one quote to attack a single quote by someone else.

The article actually supports hingehead more than it does you.

whats the point rl, are you saying that , despite the evidence of light sensitivity and development of an eyespot into a true eye (though massively demonstrated by fossil evidence, genetics, and body plan) that somehow some miraculous intervention was needed?
Seems to me that there wasnt any way to STOP the evolution of an eye, but you know me, Im willing to learn any new tricks (if they work)

So far youre battin 0.000

So , citing the fossil record for some continuous chain of evidence is really smoke and mirrors in this instance if you think that the eye evolved dozens of times separately anyhow.

If you preach that we should question everything, why dont you include questioning a bit of the the Bibles version of science?.

the Bible clearly states and implies the carfeul unifromity of forms as representative of the work of a sentient creator.

How does the rise of the eye in diverse classes of animals deny anything that evolution explains?.

evolution was "messing around" with various solutions and theres never only one solution to a problem.

Youve claimed that its all a matter of "interpretation", while that true, you seem to boldly misinterpret and ignore key areas of development. (Like the existence of eyespots in annelids of the preCambrian and more complex eyes of same phyla in the early Paleozoic)