At Science Friday Jonathan Losos recounts the story of how two biologists studied the Galápagos finches for more than thirty years and recorded empirical evidence of natural selection:
Starting in 1973, the Grants spent several months each year on the small, crater-shaped Galápageian island of Daphne Major. Their goal was to study the population of the medium ground finch (so named because there are both larger and smaller ground finch species) to see whether and how the population changed from one generation to the next and to attempt to measure natural selection driving such change.
To do so, the Grants had to capture and measure all of the finches on the island every year. Only in that way could they see if the characteristics of the population—body mass, beak size, wing length, and so on—were changing from one generation to the next.
Read the whole thing. It’s an interesting story of the painstaking, detailed way in which real science is actually done.
Real science is boring and, generally, not economically rewarding. There is a fairly narrow set of practitioners.
Sexier, more media friendly, and more profitable to predict the end of the world, after drowning the residents of Miami, NYC and SF. And then, of course, there’s the darling polar bears.
Among the reasons I decided not become a scientist.
I was more interested in solving real problems in real time for real people.
That IS evidence for natural selection, for sure. But,what I have trouble wrapping my mind around is that, no matter how you morph the physical characteristics of species,(people, wolves to dogs), they still interbreed and so no proof of origin of the species. Everybody seems to fall back on deep time, (Carl Sagan) millions and millions of years.
But how many millions? Or more accurately, generations? We have an excavation called ashfall here in Ne. that they date to 30 million years ago. A volcanic eruption in I think, Wyoming, sent a huge plume of ash east and these animals, suffocating, fled to water in a river bed, there they died and were preserved as skeletons.
None of them resemble animals present at European, or even Native contact, and no modern beasts are represented.
I know sites like this are fairly rare, but we need evidence of intermediate forms before I’m a believer.
https://visitnebraska.com/see_and_dos/ashfall-fossil-beds-state-historical-park
The entire point of the study is that evolution can happen very, very quickly given the right circumstances.
My own view has been that, like Teilhard de Chardin, I believe that God works through natural forces, the arising of new species through natural selection being one of them. I also believe that our species is much, much older than used to be believed and there has been plenty of time for our species to develop. The emerging evidence supports my view more strongly practically every year.
gray shambler: we need evidence of intermediate forms before I’m a believer.
Intermediate forms are ample in the fossil record, and more and more are being discovered. We also have the nested hierarchy. When we classify organisms, they fall into groups within groups, the same pattern as would be expected from branching descent with modification from common ancestors.