Ok, here goes:
Give me some feedback on the intro, please, then I'll try to sort out the technical information into some semblance of order. I've gone with the strictly amateur approach, being strictly an amateur myself.
The Idiots' Guide to Evolution Facts.
Evolution. We go to school, we learn some very basic facts about evolution and think we have it sussed:
Primordial soup -> life + ~3-4 bn years = humans doing repairs in space to a vehicle capable of carrying them there and [hopefully] getting them back.
What this thread hopes to do is show how the process works, but in such a way that techo-dummies like me can understand it, and far more importantly, so we can all use the information in it to explain the facts to others with a degree of authority. It's a very big jump from a few amino acids sitting on a rock to a species capable of space travel, but luckily, no big steps are required, just millions and millions of tiny little ones and it has taken an extraordinarily long time to do it in. Since life began, all of humankind's history since the invention of the wheel accounts for roughly 0.0002% of it.
Oddly, and maybe thanks to the basic nature of the information given to us as kids on such an enormous subject, in the past 40-odd years, significant numbers of people have started to believe that evolution is wrong and that the earth was literally created in 4004 BC.
Now, that is plainly silly; there are trees almost that old, glaciers far older and also the most perfect preservation system the planet has, the
Antarctic ice sheet. Since the precipitation rate is incredibly low and the evaporation rate zero, antarctic ice can be read far more accurately than any tree's rings. We know when Krakatoa and Santorini erupted and we can tell when the ash deposited in Antarctica, and by tracing back through millions of years, there is no question at all that the planet is far older and the question can be dismissed without recourse to further discussion.
With a vast subject like evolution, it's important to approach it rationally, asking the most basic questions of "why" "when" and "how".
The study of evolution is a science which comprises many other branches of science - it started in biology when Charles Darwin made a number of famous discoveries and wrote a book called
Origin of the Species. Darwin lived a long time ago, however - long before the discovery of DNA - and the science has come a long way since then.
To ensure that we deal with the science of evolution rather than opinion, let's look at the prescriptive formula for "science": the knowledge gained must be based on observable phenomena and capable of being tested for its validity by other researchers working under the same conditions. That's the level to aspire to when dealing with any subject rationally, and it's fortunate, with evolution as the subject, that the JREF forum has a strongly scientific-based membership who are also highly qualified to ensure factuality.
