Off-Topic: Evolution Caught in the Act

could you possibly give me some links? i'd love to read through some info.

b0n3z:could you possibly give me some links? i'd love to read through some info.

This is a pretty cool page, it has plenty of links that branch off into more specific pages. And as with any use of Wikipedia, if there's information you are going to pay particular attention to it's worth checking the sources (usually linked by a number at the end of the sentence or paragraph). These days Wikipedia is tightly guarded on big articles like evolution (you can't edit them without being a trusted member and even then the edits are moderated closely) but the sources can be great ways to get more specifics.

The origin of life is something we can't know about, at least not at the moment and I suspect not ever, just because it was so long ago and those early signs of life left no traces.
We've seen very simple and early fossils, but of course when life is even more simple it doesn't have anything to leave behind, it's just a cell or less.
We can do experiments to show that our theory is viable but we can't say it's definitely what happened, just probably.

However that's just abiogenesis. Once life is started we have truckloads of evidence. One of the most amazing things is to go to a museum of natural history, most countries have them, and ask to be shown the sorting room.
That's where they keep all the excess fossils they have that aren't on display. In the largest museums they have massive libraries full of fossils showing very fine evolutionary changes over time.
I laugh whenever I see a new article released titled something like "new transitional fossil discovered", well we've had more transitional fossils than we are able to sort for decades.
For every one that is categorised there are 100 more sitting on tables and drawers waiting to be named and dated and filed. It's hard to even find people motivated to do it anymore.
Sometimes I wonder if those popular-science magazines are doing more harm than good. They publish these excessive articles full of supposed controversy in order to sell more copies, but the effect it has on the public is that there is still some controversy. What we should be publishing is the truth, that for the last 100+ years evolution has been accepted by 99.9% of people who study it (and the 0.1% are blocked by their religious traditions) and that there is more evidence than we can deal with.

Anyway Rocket I think that's possible. In the last couple of months there has been a lot of interest in the media about a physics theory seeking to unify special relativity with quantum mechanics which predicts that it's possible for universes with their own timelines to be formed within some black holes, and therefore that our universe might be inside a black hole in another universe, and our universe may have spontaneously given birth to million of universes, some of which may have experienced more time than we have despite having not existed before us (yeah time-dilation and black holes are a crazy combo)
One cool thing is it could explain the arrow of time (why cause comes before effect) and that it is theoretically testable; if we're inside a black hole in another universe we should be able to verify that.

question, within a paradox, wrapped in an enigma...