Another thing I studied had to do with dating methods, and how different
groups had dated a group of fossils from Indonesia and had come up with
totally different dates. This caused a huge contraversy about methods used to date fossils. The point was that they didn't have a fool proof way of
dating, and so no side could show that they were right.>>
And yet a large number of other examples who that the dating methods are quite reliable "when correctly applied" and that different methods find dates that closely coincide.
Donald:
And the fossil record doesn't show much change, only on a small scale,
unless you have some hidden stash of fossils that could convince me, I
haven't seen much to catch my attention.>>
Donald:
We don't know if it is possible for random change to improve an animal, so
I don't think at this stage in our understanding we could say that
evolution is a fact beyond the observable small scale evolution. The reason
mechanism is a big question is because we have no proof that the mechanisms that run micro evolution can effect marco changes.>>
Evolution is as much a fact as the observations show, as a theory which tries to explain how the observations can be explained. For instance 'random changes'. Of course evolution does not claim that it is mere random changes. There is no boundary you can provide that shows that what affects 'micro changes' cannot affect macro changes when allowed to take place over long enough time. 10000 small changes is a big change.
Donald: The fruit fly thing, it's interesting to note that sometimes all the
hybrids were killed, which makes variation less likely, as the gene pool is
reduced.>>
Which is exactly why using these flies as an example that evolution 'failed' is not very useful. Indeed, the hybrids were killed and experiments were interrupted or ended permanently. No efforts to excert a pressure over a long period of time. Just attempts to find out the effects of mutation on the way the flies looked.