This was definitely what solidified my position a few years ago, changing my stance from “evolution is very likely to be right” to “it’s basically impossible for it to NOT be right.” The defining moment was learning about the Avida code, which demonstrate that “irreducible complexity” was basically inevitable.
For this e-mail, I’m thinking of glossing over most of the pre-genetic evidence. Point out that it DID heavily lean towards evolution being true, but the ultimate test was genetics. Evolutionary theory made predictions about how genetics would turn out to work, and if that prediction had turned out to be wrong, we would have had to make major changes to the theory or scrap it completely. But it didn’t. Related species shared the percentage of genes we’d have expected them to, and the rate of mutation that we’ve observed demonstrates that it’s mathematically inevitable.
I’m not sure that’s the “best” argument in an absolute sense, but I think it makes the most sense to focus on in the allotted space/attention-span.
This was definitely what solidified my position a few years ago, changing my stance from “evolution is very likely to be right” to “it’s basically impossible for it to NOT be right.” The defining moment was learning about the Avida code, which demonstrate that “irreducible complexity” was basically inevitable.
For this e-mail, I’m thinking of glossing over most of the pre-genetic evidence. Point out that it DID heavily lean towards evolution being true, but the ultimate test was genetics. Evolutionary theory made predictions about how genetics would turn out to work, and if that prediction had turned out to be wrong, we would have had to make major changes to the theory or scrap it completely. But it didn’t. Related species shared the percentage of genes we’d have expected them to, and the rate of mutation that we’ve observed demonstrates that it’s mathematically inevitable.
I’m not sure that’s the “best” argument in an absolute sense, but I think it makes the most sense to focus on in the allotted space/attention-span.