The claim has frequently been made on this newsgroup that there is no
experimental verification for evolution.  I will, in this article, present
one such piece of experimental verification.

But first, a definition for experimental verification:

        The hypothesis must make a prediction.  The prediction must be
capable of being proved false, should the hypothesis be wrong.  Then
the necessary experiment should be done, and the results compared with
the prediction.


Experiments have determined that various proteins vary differently in
different organisms.  As an example, globin, a protein in blood, is
quite similar in all organisms that possess it.  But some organism's
globin is more similar to human globin than other's, and it turns out
that we can make a tree like the following:


                        (Original)
                         ABCDEFGHIJK (1)
                              ^
                             / \
                            /   \
                    /-------     --------\
               ABCDEFGHIJZ (2)       ABCDEFGHIJK(3)
                    ^
                   / \
          /-------/   \----\
      ABCDEFMHIJZ (4)     ABCDEFRHIJZ (5)


I think you get the idea.  Note that the difference between (4) and
(5) is in one position.  But between (5) and (3) there is a difference
in two positions.  Note that we can create such a tree no matter what
the organism's proteins are.

Evolution claims that the origin of this tree is that the organisms in
question had a common parent.  For this to be true, the tree must be
the same no matter what protein is tested.  We are therefore led to
the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis:  All mutatable molecules have the same "similarity tree."

Experiment:  Examine molecules from various organisms.  Determine the
similarity tree for each molecule, and compare the various trees.

Guess what?  It turns out that ALL proteins AND DNA have almost
identical trees!  The statistical odds of this happening by chance are
INCREDIBLY small.  The only conceivable cause of this is that the
organisms are related.

Part of the most remarkable part of this is that the useless stretches
of DNA are affected in the exact same way.  If they were created, then
why were they created to have the same similarity tree as the useful
stretches of DNA?

Even better:  most evolutionists, at the time, thought this experiment
would turn out the other way!

It seems there *is* experimental evidence for evolution, after all.


                                        Michael I. Bushnell
                                        a/k/a Bach II
                                        mike@turing.UNM.EDU