Posted by AF [AF] on November 27, 1999 at 18:31:59 {nwG7wj0NI.1EwaxRomAMdaOt1gg/Zk}:
In Reply to: Evolutin Phase III posted by Amazing on November 27, 1999 at 17:00:56:
: If, as many contend, that evolutionary science has progressed to the point where overwhelming evidence exist that we evolved, then do we not have at least enough evidence on hand to commence a macro-scale test forward?
In one sense this test has already begun, by the great amount of recording of many aspects of the world around us that is a natural part of the operation of news media and all other writing done today about the world around us. It's "history" in raw form.
Whether this would do any good is another question. From everything I've read it appears that evolution can occur at extremely widely varying rates. When the environment settles down to a steady state, it appears that life also settles down and does not change over long periods of time. But when the environment changes drastically, due to local phenomena that isolates a small population or due to global phenomena such as a massive asteroid strike, evolution can occur surprisingly rapidly. Why this should be I have no idea, but it's an observation from the fossil record. It also goes against the more traditional notions among evolutionary thinkers that evolution always proceeds slowly, but more recent thinkers, in the usual fashion of scientists, have had to rethink the theories. Thus we have ideas such as "punctuated equilibrium".
We have no idea whether any programs of observation begun today will in the long run bear fruit. That's because we can't predict what will happen in 10 years, much less in the tens of thousands of years it would take to actually observe and confirm evolutionary trends. If human society exists for such a long time it seems reasonable that people will solidly confirm or disconfirm such notions as darwinian evolution long before any actual observations could take place, and that on mostly theoretical grounds. One would expect that projects such as today's human genome mapping project will eventually lead to a fairly complete understanding of biology.
AF