falsifying evolution

[Don McAllister]

John Grehan wrote:

> I agree its a long way from a random pattern. I was looking at incongruence
> as total for those groups of characters that are incongrunet. In many cases there
> is a predominent grouping of characters, but there appear to be many cases where
> the situation never seems to get any better.

Congruence in character sets would certainly be predicted by evolutionary theory.
But that may not be so in all cases, even according to theory. If character
reversions are to be expected from time to time, then would not in the 10 thousanth
case, one find that more than half, or even rarely all the examined character states
were reversed.

Here you run into the problem that the theory lets you explain away instances that
go contrary to the <general prediction,> even though the theory admits the general
prediction will not always hold.

Of course most of us lack the time and financial resources to push the search to the
limits potential cases which conflict with theory.  What is we had the resources to
look at a thousand characters instead of the usual few dozen(s).

Many taxonomists know of at least one taxonomically "messy" group where the data
just does not seem to make sense.  There is no evident hierarchical pattern - it
seems, as far as we can tell from the data in hand to be a random assortment of
character states.

On top of these theoretical obstacles to obtaining perfect cladograms or
evolutionary trees, there is hybridizations and symbiogenesis.

Perhaps there is light to be shed, on the whole from internal consistency of
evolutionary expectations = predictions. One cannot expect perfect congruency from
the nature of the beast.  That general prediction would therefore be a statistical
one and not an absolute one.

In additions we might have statistical expectations from allied complementary areas
of study - biogeography, paleontology, ecology, ethology, etc. If those areas of
endeavor produce, on the average, coherent pictures with evolutionary/phylogenetic
lineages, then does this not too constitute some sort of proof?

don
Don McAllister