Re: Evidence of "evolution," sensu Sagan: Where should I go to see?

On Sun, 30 Nov 2003, Budikka wrote:

> How can you be posting from a .edu email address and be asking a
> question like this?  Do you really want to learn about evolution or are
> you just wanting to stir things up?
>
> Any good bookstore will supply you with what you need.  A good one to
> start with is Carl Zimmer's "Evolution" - the book which companioned the
> PBS TV series on evolution.  This consists of over 360 pages of
> introductory material including nine pages of suggested further reading.

Where exactly in Carl Zimmer's _Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea_ (2001)
should I go to see evidence of "evolution," where "evolution" is defined
using Gould's characterizations of the term on the book's pages x (the
first complete paragraph) and xi (last paragraph)?

> The evidence for evolution is spread far and wide.  Yes you can find
> out about it from museums, yes, you can find out about it from
> peer-reviewed literature, yes you can find out about it from books.
> You can also find out about it from studying the fossil record, from
> studying the genomes of various species, from studying biochemistry,
> comparative anatomy, from geology, from medicine, from paleontology
> and a host of other avenues.  It all depends on how serious you are
> and how much you want to learn.
>
> A good online source of information to get up and running is the
> talk.origins archive (www.talkorigins.org).  This consists of all
> manner of material including "informally peer-reviewed" articles on
> the topic, many of which have references to formally peer-reviewed
> papers that have been published in professional, refereed journals.
>
> Your request to learn about it as defined by Carl Sagan is rather odd.
>  Why choose his definition?  He was an astronomer, not a biologist or
> someone in some similar field of study.  If you are interested in
> learning about evolution "as controlled by some god", then science
> cannot help you.
>
> Scientists are in the business of studying the natural world, not the
> supernatural.  Evolutionists can only try to understand what nature
> tells us about the way it came to be the way it is, and the evidence
> so far reveals that everything we see came to be as it is without the
> *requirement* of divine intervention.  Science cannot go beyond that
> and state categorically that this means there is no god, or that it
> means there is a god.
>
> Clearly no one has been alive long enough to see evolution in the
> broad sense of a migration from inanimate material to the first cell
> to modern organisms, so like a detective piecing together clues from
> an unwitnessed crime to catch the culprit, scientists are forced to
> use what clues are available to understand our origins.  Ever since
> Darwin first put the subject out there with a proposed mechanism to
> explain part of it, scientists have been steadily building a massive
> amount of support for the theory.
>
> The definition of evolution is essentially a change in allele
> frequency in a population.  This, together with speciation has been
> observed.  Pathways from from non-animate material to living organisms
> have been suggested (such as in "Vital Dust" by Nobel Laureate
> Christian de Duve), although this isn't strictly part of evolution.
> From that point on, the fossil record, the diversity and distribution
> of life, biochemistry, comparative anatomy, and the study of and
> experimentation on various genomes or parts thereof have provided so
> much evidence that no competent scientist who knows what they're
> talking about doubts that it happened.
>
> You are apparently posting from an educational institution.  You are
> privileged to be there.  Do not waste your time blundering around or
> waiting for "education" to settle upon you like a dove from Heaven.
> Educate yourself.
>
> Budikka