knell wrote:kay said that he's holding out for real-time evolution, something that he sees happening right at the moment that it happens, that is not influenced by humans in any way.
Think about if a particle physicist took the same approach, and said that he/she was going to wait until he could witness a subatomic event, rather than gather evidence of the event happening. That train of thought would get him/her nowhere, and would stall scientific progress dramatically. It's a little different with evolution of course, but not much. Ignoring the best theory of the fossil record that we have in lieu of holding out for absolute, observable, perfectly controlled proof is a little silly as far as science is concerned. Yeah evolution isn't a law, but it's a theory. Things don't become theories overnight.
A better method would be to look for something within known evolution that's falsifiable, at least then you'll be actively engaging in scientific thought rather than waiting for the proof to present itself.
Your analogy is not appropriate. Subatomic events, and a significant proportion of the particles predicted to exist by the Standard Model, do not occur on a regular basis in the Universe in general under its current conditions. They simply require high energy conditions to be observable. The Universe in its current state contains very few natural locations where the majority of these interactions would be observable. One of those locations would be within a star, and our current technology does not allow us to look in there. To generate the energies required for such interactions to be observed and to generate such particles, you need to produce an artificially high energy environment.
The subatomic particles that are alluded to in your analogy are in actuality more akin to the DNA that takes part in evolution. From that point of view, the analogue system to evolution are the atoms and molecules that take part in chemical reactions. We can't actually observe atoms and molecules reacting with one another to form other compounds, but we can still theorise how it works, show that it works and prove that the compounds that are produced are made up of the atoms/molecules which re-combined in some stoichiometrically predictable way. The interesting, less known fact, however, is that we still do not actually have a complete understanding of HOW atoms actually bond together to form molecules.
Our current state of knowledge of evolution is similar. We can theorise how it works, we can show that it works, and we can even predict how it works. But we have not actually seen it happen. That doesn't mean that it is wrong. It just means that we have a good model that can be used to predict what happens to organism A when X environmental factor occurs.
Finally, by definition, evolution has to occur naturally. Otherwise it would have to be classified as selective breeding or genetic modification. Hence my point about observing it happen in nature. And to be perfectly honest, if our current catalogue of organisms had been in existence 200 years ago, we probably would've observed some degree of evolution by now. I am unconvinced that evolution cannot take place on a rapid timeframe, since random genetic mutations are, by definition, random. My bets are actually on pigeons.
Edit: Anyway, I'll leave you to telling the creationist/intelligent designist that he's wrong.
