Evidence for Evolution

Evidence for evolution explained simply.

Just a theory?

Details here to come.  Read Just Not a Theory for now.

Fossil Evidence

It’s a matter of fact that the fossil evidence completely matches the theory of evolution. When you dig deeper down in the soil you find that the deeper you go, the older the fossils you find are.  We do not find anything out of order in the fossil record.  Flowering plants for example never appear before 300 million years ago.  We don’t find mammals appearing before amphibians either.  Never.

The fossil record, for example, completely bears out the Darwinian theory that all land vertebrates (animals with backbones) are descended from fish, and that mammals and birds are both descended from reptiles. In other words, we find fish in early strata where there are no land vertebrates. Then later we find land vertebrates as well as fish. In rocks of just the right age, we find animals transitional between fish and land vertebrates. And we find reptiles and amphibians before we find mammals or birds. Later we find both mammals and birds, alongside reptiles and amphibians. If we were to find fossils of animals with backbones living on land, older than the earliest fossils of fish, or if we were to find mammals and birds in strata earlier than reptiles, or if we were to find whales in strata earlier than land mammals, these would be major shocks to biological theory. They would probably not lead to the abandonment of evolution itself, but would upset some very well-established views about the specific course evolution has taken. If fossils of living things were found randomly in all ages of rocks, with rabbits, birds, and flowering plants in the earliest strata, evolution itself would have to be abandoned as an account of how the different kinds of living organisms came into existence.  (Atheism Explained, D. Steele)

It is a fact that literally nothing that you could remotely call a mammal has ever been found in Devonian rock or in any older stratum. They are not just statistically rarer in Devonian than in later rocks. They literally never occur in rocks older than a certain date. But this didn’t have to be so. It could have been the case that, as we dug down lower and lower from the Devonian, through the Silurian and then even older, through the Ordovician, we suddenly found that the Cambrian era – older than any of them – teemed with mammals. That is in fact not what we find, but the possibility demonstrates that you can’t accuse the argument of being circular: at any moment somebody might dig up a mammal in Cambrian rocks, and the theory of evolution would be instantly blown apart if they did. Evolution, in other words, is a falsifiable, and therefore scientific, theory.  (Greatest Show on Earth, Dawkins)

Also see my post on Islam, Biological Evolution, and Adam

 

Artificial selection

There’s another good analogy for evolution, that is, the natural breeding of humans who have carved the dog into the most varied species on earth. Every feature of the dog has been selectively bred from guard dogs to hunting for drugs to racing to playfulness etc etc….
If so much change can occur in just a few decades imagine what can be achieved in millions of years.

Another example of artificial selection is how humans have modified cabbage to kale to cauliflower
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_30
This is by carefully selecting the genes and breeding for the characteristics you want.

Natural Selection

Evolution works the same way in nature.
Now that we have seen how animals can evolve via artificial selection, for example dogs, or even cauliflower, we can look at how this occurs in nature.

Peahens choose the most attractive male peacock mates to mate with, therefore preserving attractive genes. This is called sexual selection.

Small prey fish choose attractive angler fish (they are fish that live deep in the ocean and they have a glow in the dark “fishing line”), feeding the most attractive ones and inadvertently preserving those genes that produce such attractive features. This is called natural selection. The ones that have less prominent anglers end up starving and thus they don’t survive.

The same profess as molding dogs from chihuahuas to Rottweilers to emphasize certain characteristics happens naturally as well

Also see this video:

If someone says “I believe in micro-evolution (i.e. different type of dog breeds) but not in macro-evolution (i.e ape to human) they do not understand that many small changes lead to big change.  Many many small changes over time would lead to large changes.

 

6 thoughts on “Evidence for Evolution

  1. I don’t understand why anybody claims Islam is against evolution.

    I don’t have a strong opinion one way or another whether humans evolved from animals, but if it turns out that we did then that’s even more amazing than if we just sprang into existence. It’s like how a rube goldberg machine that fries an egg is far more impressive than just frying an egg.

  2. Islam is against evolution because it says that Allah just clicked his fingers which resulted in Adam and Eve magically appearing on this earth and starting the human race. Evolution us shown us that is not the case.

    Also the way the barbaric Sharia law discriminates on the basis of religion again goes against the evolutionary process of mankind’s morals etc…

    1. Yes you are correct. It’s hard to reconcile the idea of Adam and Eve with evolution. Yasir Qadhi tried though. He said evolution is as true as gravity. So at the exact moment where the form transitioned to home sapien is when God inserted Adam and Eve. Seems a bit far fetched and quite desperate to say that though.

    2. Also the way the barbaric evolutionary secular law discriminates on the basis of nationality again goes against the evolutionary process of mankind’s morals etc… evolved law is against evolution! oops! What just happened here?

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