08 OCT 2013 by ideonexus

 Evolutionary Theory Does Not Justify Greed

Human nature as it now exists was formed in accord with the laws of evolution under conditions pertaining well before recorded human history. Fossils discovered in Ethiopia and Kenya now date human ancestors back at least 5 or 6 million years. Distinctly human species arose in Africa at least 2 million years ago, while present evidence indicates that modern humans are only about 100,000 years old. Therefore the conditions relevant to which genetic mutations were advantageous and which were no...
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Many economic theories relying on "human nature" assume we are greedy, but this is not supported by the evidence. We might just as likely be generous and that is our evolutionary advantage.

16 SEP 2011 by ideonexus

 Vestigial GLO Pseudogene

And the evolutionary prediction that we’ll find pseudogenes has been fulfilled—amply. Virtually every species harbors dead genes, many of them still active in its relatives. This implies that those genes were also active in a common ancestor, and were killed off in some descendants but not in others. Out of about 30,000 genes, for example, we humans carry more than 2,000 pseudogenes. Our genome—and that of other species— are truly well populated graveyards of dead genes. The most fam...
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Used to produce Vitamin C, alive in most mammals, but dead in humans, primates, and others.

16 SEP 2011 by ideonexus

 DNA as Evidence of Common Ancestry

By sequencing the DNA of various species and measuring how similar these sequences are, we can reconstruct their evolutionary relationships. This is done by making the entirely reasonable assumption that species having more similar DNA are more closely related—that is, their common ancestors lived more recently. These molecular methods have not produced much change in the pre-DNA-era trees of life: both the visible traits of organisms and their DNA sequences usually give the same informatio...
Folksonomies: evolution evidence
Folksonomies: evolution evidence
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The idea of common ancestry leads naturally to powerful and testable predictions about evolution.