Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
Haha... let's say as much then. I "know" just as well as you do. 100%.
Why?
Yes it is.
More evidence in support of your lack of thinking skills.
You still don't get it do you?
There has already been plenty of evidence presented.You would if you could, but YOU CAN'T
I absolutely did!
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/lines_01
Overwhelming evidence supports this fact. Scientists continue to argue about details of evolution, but the question of whether life has a long history or not was answered in the affirmative at least two centuries ago.
The history of living things is documented through multiple lines of evidence that converge to tell the story of life through time. In this section, we will explore the lines of evidence that are used to reconstruct this story.
These lines of evidence include:
-Fossil Evidence:
Nicholas Steno's anatomical drawing of an extant shark (left) and a fossil shark tooth (right). Steno made the leap and declared that the fossil teeth indeed came from the mouths of once-living sharks.
The fossil record provides snapshots of the past that, when assembled, illustrate a panorama of evolutionary change over the past four billion years. The picture may be smudged in places and may have bits missing, but fossil evidence clearly shows that life is old and has changed over time.
Early fossil discoveries
In the 17th century, Nicholas Steno shook the world of science, noting the similarity between shark teeth and the rocks commonly known as "tongue stones." This was our first understanding that fossils were a record of past life.
Two centuries later, Mary Ann Mantell picked up a tooth, which her husband Gideon thought to be of a large iguana, but it turned out to be the tooth of a dinosaur, Iguanodon. This discovery sent the powerful message that many fossils represented forms of life that are no longer with us today.
Additional clues from fossils
Today we may take fossils for granted, but we continue to learn from them. Each new fossil contains additional clues that increase our understanding of life's history and help us to an
Indication of Interactions
The amonite fossil (see right) shows punctures that some scientists have interpreted as the bite mark of a mosasaur, a type of predatory marine reptile that lived at the same time as the ammonite. Damage to the ammonite has been correlated to the shapes and capabilities of mosasaur teeth and jaws. Others have argued that the holes were created by limpets that attached to the ammonite. Researchers examine ammonite fossils, as well as mosasaur fossils and the behaviors of limpets, in order to explore these hypotheses.
Clues at the cellular level
Fossils can tell us about growth patterns in ancient animals. The picture at right is a cross-section through a sub-adult thigh bone of the duckbill dinosaur Maiasaura. The white spaces show that there were lots of blood vessels running through the bone, which indicates that it was a fast-growing bone. The black wavy horizontal line in mid-picture is a growth line, reflecting a seasonal pause in the animal's growth.
-Homologies
Evolutionary theory predicts that related organisms will share similarities that are derived from common ancestors. Similar characteristics due to relatedness are known as homologies. Homologies can be revealed by comparing the anatomies of different living things, looking at cellular similarities and differences, studying embryological development, and studying vestigial structures within individual organisms.
In the following photos of plants, the leaves are quite different from the "normal" leaves we envision.
Each leaf has a very different shape and function, yet all are homologous structures, derived from a common ancestral form. The pitcher plant and Venus' flytrap use leaves to trap and digest insects. The bright red leaves of the poinsettia look like flower petals. The cactus leaves are modified into small spines which reduce water loss and can protect the cactus from herbivory.
Another example of homology is the forelimb of tetrapods (vertebrates with legs).
Frogs, birds, rabbits and lizards all have different forelimbs, reflecting their different lifestyles. But those different forelimbs all share the same set of bones - the humerus, the radius, and the ulna. These are the same bones seen in fossils of the extinct transitional animal, Eusthenopteron, which demonstrates their common ancestry.
-Distribution in Time and Space:
Understanding the history of life on Earth requires a grasp of the depth of time and breadth of space. We must keep in mind that the time involved is vast compared to a human lifetime and the space necessary for this to occur includes all the water and land surfaces of the world. Establishing chronologies, both relative and absolute, and geographic change over time are essential for viewing the motion picture that is the history of life on Earth.
Although the history of life is always in the past, there are many ways we can look at present-day organisms, as well as recent history, to better understand what has occurred through deep time. Artificial selection in agriculture or laboratories provides a model for natural selection. Looking at interactions of organisms in ecosystems helps us to understand how populations adapt over time. Experiments demonstrate selection and adaptive advantage. And we can see nested hierarchies in taxonomies based on common descent.
There. Are we done here?
