And does Evolution by Mutation and Natural Selection has real evidence or predictions?
Some would argue that Evolution is a result of accumulations of adaptations!
This claim is a result of outdated science!
When Wallace and Darwin made their observations, they only understood external features of the creatures that they were investigating (phenotypes). They looked at external body shapes and on skeletons in fossils, but they had no idea about genetics, which is the source of those manifestations, simply because genetics was not discovered yet!
The matter is that we have three facts that are observable and reproducible, which are inheritance, migration, and adaptation, that can work together very well to explain the geodiversity of the living creatures around us.
When an animal’s environment gets tough the animal migrates gradually away from the tough environment to the more amicable environment.
1. Animals migrate to environments that are more suitable to them when their own environments change.
2. Epigenetics, mechanisms which control the expression of certain genetic features according to environmental conditions, will cause a shift towards the expression of features that are more suitable to the environment.
3. Natural selection, (including selection of the fittest male by females (or vice versa)), would push to give advantage to the traits that are more fit to survive in the environment and reproduce more, and hence, new offspring, through inheritance, will have a drift towards features that make them more fit to the specific environment.
All the above mechanisms operate within the existing genetic and epigenetic possibilities of the creature. Making the same animal look different in different geographies, weathers, altitudes, and ecologies.
Now, what happens in the vast majority of Evolutionary propaganda that is fed into pop culture is that they would extrapolate the effect of Adaptation and claim that those changes will just continue indefinitely to the extent that an animal will morph into a completely different animal, forming new species that has radically different features versus the first one, and will stop mating with it!
But, this is false for many reason, key of which are:
1. Genetics:
At the end, all adaptation mechanisms will still select from an existing set of possibilities within the genotypes of the organism, so, no matter how many times the length of the bones of a limb, or the shape of the fingers are selected from, the hand will never become a wing. The wing has a different density of bones, and has feathers, and is specifically engineered for flying. The genetic code generating the design of the wings is simply not existent at all in a creature that has hands so that the wing will be developed by any selection of options from such hand-genetic-material.
2. Observation:
Lets say it this way: No matter how much we would wish for having a Pegasus, no matter how many times and whatever environmental stress we put on a horse for whatever time, there is not a way that we will be able to generate a Pegasus.
Humans have been breading dogs for thousands of years, maybe hundreds of millions of dogs have been subjected to change of environment and severe stresses! It caused many variations in the shape and features of the dogs through planned mating and continuous artificial selection of features; but dogs remained dogs.
And house cats remained house cats. After thousands of years, they still can’t talk to humans and would still meaow till today.
And horses remained horses.
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Notes:
Small adaptations in terms of expressing existing genes are acceptable, as the genetic code already exists.
Yet, Evolution through mutation, essentially copying errors during reproduction, in terms of re-editing the genetic code, or adding new genes is not acceptable, as errors and their accumulation will not create a better version of the creature, but rather a diseased, deformed, or disabled version, that will soon fail to survive. The unlikely and very few events of beneficial mutations are by no means capable of writing a new program/code, and for sure will not have mutual constructive mutations to come later in the course of time to the extent that a consistent direction of chance is maintained; randomness does not have direction. To expect that natural selection will do the trick through ruling out unbeneficial mutations and keeping only the ones that are mutually constructive suffers from the same fault of assuming order will come from a random and blind process; natural selection does not have an objective function! It is not reasonable to expect that adding two random and blind processes together will find a (very rare) correct solution in an exponentially increasing search space with the increase in the number of mutually constructive mutations needed.
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It should be noted that similarity in DNA between any two creatures with similarity in the general appearance will be quite significant. DNA is responsible for building proteins. If two creatures are using similar proteins, and have similar body shapes, DNA will have plenty of similarity.
Similarity is not evidence for evolution (Homoplasy does not imply Homology unless common ancestry is first established).
Similarity and diversity together is the observation that makes us look for an explanation.
Evolution is a proposal for an explanation (a theory is an explanation).
To prove the theory you cannot refer back to the basic observations.
In this context, it is worth noting that just being able to predict finding a certain fossil is not evidence for the Theory. Fossils do not have DNA, are very deficient evidence, and do not represent the smooth gradient predicted by the theory. They just reflect the same observation that the Theory has originally set out to explain.
You need to prove the mechanism that you claim is responsible for evolution, for example, put a certain creature under certain stress, and show that random mutations caused it to created a new function that did not exist in its genetics before and hence cope with the stress (not just express an existing genotype but totally new genotypes created and then phenotypically expressed). You have to SHOW that it works and delivers the required result.
For the theory to stay for pragmatic reasons, it needs to make USEFUL predictions, and then show that those predictions, which are based on the theory, do actually occur, and are useful. It must yet be established that those predictions are not occurring due to other effects not attributed to mutations+NS, and hence the same predictions could have been made without needing the Theory.
None of the above is established for evolution.
For example, predicting that a certain anti-biotic against a bacteria is possible to work against another bacteria in its taxonomic category does not need evolution as a backdrop. The genetic / phenotypic homoplasy between the two creatures could have driven us to this conclusion as easy without needing to invoke an unproven homology. Likewise, predicting that a medication would work for two animals according to their taxonomy does not need the premise of evolution to predicted. This is essentially because the phylogenetic trees are based on similarities in body shape (morphology), or similarity in biochemical traits, or using DNA sequencing, all of which can be objectively established irrespective of ancestry.
Until serious proof is presented for the ToE, it remains an unproven hypothesis.
Finding Truth