Iamme said:
How is a cabbage head jellyfish related to a walking stick?
There are multiple ways to prove it. My favorite is that the genetic code is completely identical for cabbage and jelly fish. In contrast, the code for the Microsoft OS and the Mac OS are not; the latter were designed, the former evolved from a common ancestor.
The common ancestor was a minimum of 600 million years ago (ma), and likely several times further back than that. We can't tell specifically because prior to 600 ma we didn't have a whole lot of fossils, and none that are revealing of morphology or genetics (we have what are called chemical trace fossils, which are isotopic ratios that can only be established via specific metabolic processes). Genetic clocks work to some degree, but I'm always hesitant to call anything found from then a conclcusion, since anything found from genetic clocks is an interpretation, while fossils are data. Anyway, that's where the differences comes from--likely more than a billion years of divergent evolution.
To put this length of time into perspective, a billion years is several times longer than long enough for
this to turn into
this.
many of you basically say i dont know what im talking about basically making unsubstantiated claims and stuff, yet you really offer nothing of substance yurself.
I study this for a living. I make it a point to offer professional and considered opinions in these threads. But this format is not ammenable to the types of demonstrations that prove what you're asking. I'd recommend "Evolution: Triumph of an Idea", "Evolution, Time, and Man", or any good university textbook on evolution if you really want to dig into this information.
Evolution is the foundational theory for multiple branches of science. It is going to take some leg-work to learn. Arguing on an internet forum will not suffice.
You say just enough to be in the brown-nose camp with fellow skeptics, and no more.
Well, since I'm not a skeptic I've no interest in brown-nosing with anyone.
You are just guessing that God didnt do it, because you think that sounds like a myth.
Actually, no. I'm saying it because I've studied a few million fossils (no joke there; some came at me ten thousand at a time); because I've studied a few hundred sedimentary units (including spending three months last year in charge of an entire team doing so); because I've found transitional forms myself; because I've studied the anatomy for over a dozen phyla; because I've seen the genetic codes; because I've run the math, both by hand and by computer; because I've read those textbooks--and many, many more--that I recommended to you and verified as much of the data as possible myself.
God is not necessary to discuss life on Earth. Period. Even the Roman Catholic Church acknowledges that (a priest told me recently that the church's stance was that evolution explains the body, while the Bible explains the soul).
Elf Grinder 3000 said:
Google punctuated evolution
I studied under one of Steven J. Gould's graduate students. I can assure you that evolution and punctuated equilibrium are compatible; we studied that compatibility quite extensively. Short version is that Gould argued for quick speciation IN TERMS OF GEOLOGIC TIME. Speciation, once initiated, requires approximately 10,000 generations to complete (well, most types; whenever you hear someone talking about speciation, assume they're referring to animals unless they specifically mention otherwise). If the populations reunite before that, you get a single highly diverse species. Even for a species that reproduces once a year, you're still looking at 10,000 years--the Holocene, in other words. A rounding error when you're looking at 10 million years, but in terms of human time scales we're talking longer than the entirety of human civilization.