Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Where is the new evidence for evolution?

As explained in the new issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach, it hasn't been necessary to claim "new evidence" for more than a century.

Over the past 150 years, [Darwin's] initial list [of evidence] has been supplemented by countless observations in paleontology, comparative anatomy, developmental biology, molecular biology, and (most recently) comparative genomics, and through direct observations of evolutionary change in both natural and experimental populations. Each of thousands of peer-reviewed articles published every year in scientific journals provides further confirmation (though, as Futuyma (1998) notes, “no biologist today would think of publishing a paper on ‘new evidence for evolution’ ... it simply hasn’t been an issue in scientific circles for more than a century”). Conversely, no reliable observation has ever been found to contradict the general notion of common descent. It should come as no surprise, then, that the scientific community at large has accepted evolutionary descent as a historical reality since Darwin’s time and considers it among the most reliably established and fundamentally important facts in all of science.


Read the article "Evolution as Fact, Theory, and Path" by T. Ryan Gregory (pdf).

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