The ToE is based on forensic evidence. Aside from dating and chemical analysis, exactly how is evolution tested in the lab?
What predictions is it capable of making?
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"If Darwin was right, for example, then scientists should be able to perform a neat trick. Using a mathematical formula that emerges from evolutionary theory, they should be able to predict the number of harmful mutations in chimpanzee DNA by knowing the number of mutations in a different species' DNA and the two animals' population sizes.
'That's a very specific prediction,' said Eric Lander, a geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., and a leader in the chimp project.
Sure enough, when Lander and his colleagues tallied the harmful mutations in the chimp genome, the number fit perfectly into the range that evolutionary theory had predicted."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/25/AR2005092501177.html
Now isn't that amazing?
See, although she thinks she's asking a witty rhetorical question, there's a part of me that say: "Well, funny you should ask..."
[Aside from dating and chemical analysis, exactly how is evolution tested in the lab?]
Plants. Fruit flies. Bacteria.
[What predictions is it capable of making?]
It predicts that bacteria will evolve and develop resistance to antibiotics. They have.
It predicts that we will find transitional fossils. We have.
There are lots of lab-experiments that have supported portions of evolutionary theory (which is a big bundle of hypotheses), and these generally involve manipulating model organisms. One of the interesting predictions that has held up is that some traits are more amenable to selection than others based on their degree of additivity (all alleles contribute in some way to a phenotype rather than having some completely masked by others). However, you might ask...OK model organisms may not be representative of organisms as a whole...what about real organisms?
Many facets of evolution are difficult to manipulate in a laboratory simply because evolution sometimes takes a while. However, you should get a good look at the evolutionary work done on sunflower (mosty Loren Reiseberg, now at UBC)...the evolutionary history of these organisms has been traced at a fine scale using many different kinds of data, and in the case of hybrid-speciation events, the hybrids have been recapitulated in the laboratory* with the same kind of chromosomal rearrangements. Its rad.
The field of phylogenetics also provides predictions about what we should see when obtaining new data. For instance its frequent that one group of researchers uses a gene sequence to infer the evolutionary history of a group of organisms and this history is in large part corroborated by sequences collected and analyzed later and by other researchers.
*People can make species. It happens.
Keep in mind that the sciences of meteorology and astronomy are performing NO laboratory manipulations for the most part. However, astronomers and meteorologists are often able to link hypotheses with prediction and use observation to refute or corroborate those hypotheses.
"The ToE is based on forensic evidence"
Scientific evidence, not forensic.
@El Guapo:
I thought you were doing rather well actually.
Both sympatric and allopatric speciation have been reproduced in the lab, along with assortative mating. That is, a species has been induced to split into two 'strains' with reduced (or eliminated) reproductive success when interbred, and positive selection for more compatible mates (i.e. same strain) has been seen to arise in response. So, in a lab, an environmental factor has caused one species to branch into two forms that not only can't interbreed with one another, but don't by instinct.
I.e. macro- evolution by natural selection.
Lots of references, but a good starting point is "The evolution of reproductive isolation as a correlated character under sympatric conditions: experimental evidence." by WR Rice and GW Salt, Evolution 44:11401152 (1990).
How is creationism tested in the lab? What predictions is it capable of making?
Apply it to yourself, stupid fuck.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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