The nature of evidence

[TheRocketSurgeon]

You know, I actually agree with almost every word of this. (The exception being that Double Blind studies, while providing exceptionally good evidence, are not applicable to anything that doesn't involve humans directly. The purpose of the Double Blind is to keep the tester from giving subconscious cues to the tested, thereby altering the results. If the tester does not know, he cannot give anything away.

I can agree with that....We can just stick to observable and repeatable which many espouse here.  I don't think that common descent evolution meets this criteria, therefore according to the arguments here, I can say that there is no evidence for common descent evolution. And if you disagree could you please send me a kit so I can repeat common descent evolution for myself.   I don't want to depend on storybook evidence.  I also find these claims quite extraordinary, which would require extraordinary evidence.  We'll leave this as a vague and  poorly defined standard, which you must meet.

Excellent! Now we're talking. Common descent is not quite child's play to demonstrate for yourself. You will have to teach yourself a bit about genetics, and how "descent" at all can be tracked, but you can technically do it in your living room, if you have the right equipment. You can grab any number of books on genetics to find out for yourself, of course, but the simple explanation is that there are places where DNA does not change between generations because it is in an "inactive" section that serves as a place-holder for other genes, but nevertheless contains a sequence, called a marker, that is copied with each new generation (obviously, point mutations occasionally occur to change the sequence slightly over millions of years, but not so much that it prevents this tracking via those markers). It is this method we use to tell if a person is related to another person... for instance, if you and I were descended from the same person, we would both have their set of markers in our DNA. As the years go by, the number of markers that are exactly the same changes, because of the mutations I described, so based on that amount of divergence (point mutations being, on average, a predictably fixed rate of expected change over time), I can tell how far apart our lineages are. There are, among these markers, the "scars" of ancient infections (retroviruses) that were overcome by our ancestors, yet left their mark on the gene pool, as well. Their scars are large enough to make them easily visible despite the "noise" of the point mutations that have changed them, over time. It turns out that by tracking these markers, we can see that we share a common ancestor with the bonobos/chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans... and we can even track the distance between them to see that the orangutans are the least closely related to us, of the above, exactly as predicted by previous methods (such as morphology comparisons). You can also study the "bands" that show up during gel electrophoresis, directly comparing the chromosomes of allegedly-related species, to see some of the markers directly-- that's the one that can be done in your living room, with the right equipment.

If you're truly interested in finding out for yourself that common ancestry is personally provable, I recommend calling a biology professor at your local university and asking if you can audit a course on genetics (take the class for free, but receive no credit), so you don't have to believe a word I'm saying, but can see for yourself.

For most things involving the physical world, statistical and process analysis are used.) However, eyewitness testimony still remains incredibly weak evidence, as several scientific tests have shown. People can be mistaken, can misremember, can simply make things up with the best of intentions, for any number of reasons.

I did have a discussion on eyewitness testimony in another thread a while ago.   It seems to me, that while I can understand the conclusion of some, to dismiss all of eyewitness testimony if you only read the titles of those studies.  In reading the studies themselves, they dealt with specific aspects of eyewitness testimony, and in particular recognition of a stranger afterwards. Which I would agree with.  The other parts seemed to show, that eyewitness recollection seemed to show that it is not equal to video recording, where any particular miniscule detail can be recalled at will (I hope they didn't spend too much tax payer money on this).

I'll try to post something about your comments on dating later today, or tomorrow.

We did not say "dismiss all eyewitness testimony". We said that it constitutes extremely poor evidence because of the nature of the way humans misremember things, even when trying to remember correctly. It's not merely a matter of getting an identification of a stranger wrong, though that's one issue. People's brains simply "fill in" details that are not necessarily there, and others will get details wildly wrong, even if they JUST witnessed something. When you start talking about writing down an event years after it happen, the transformation can be radically different from the "videorecorded fact of the event" to which you're referring. Another issue, in this particular case, is that humans love storytelling, and stories tend to grow over time, even if the intent of the people telling and retelling the story is to accurately detail what they saw. There are scenarios in which witnesses recalled surprisingly well, such as a shocking, violent crime... but when it came to storytelling memories (the kind we're discussing here), the accuracy slipped significantly.

There was a famous experiment conducted in 1932 by Frederick Bartlett, in which people told a folk story called "The War of the Ghosts", and they tracked how the story changed with retelling. They found that people recalled the gist of the story they heard, but added or omitted details that were not in line with their own personal life-experiences, as their brains worked to grasp the meaning of the story. This was, of course, a short-term storytelling experiment, and did not reach the effect that the 20 years between the alleged eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus and the first people who thought to write it down might have had. My personal evidence for the growing mythology that was being added to the life of Jesus is the difference between the Epistles, the Synoptic Gospels, and finally the Gospel of John, in which (if you write down the details on a parallel chart, and make it a "timeline" of when each was written) you can see Jesus becoming increasingly magical, and then increasingly divine, until by the time of John you have him performing more miracles than the other gospels by far, and calling himself the Son of God directly. This screams "building a legend into a myth", to me.