There have been several blantant strawmen of evolution that have been posted here, I think it is time for me to go after some of the ideas that have been presented.
[1] Why did different hominids co-exist?
Because evolutionary change doesn't happen like a ladder does, with one species giving rise to another and immediately going extinct! Divergence by speciation allows a branching pattern to develop, with gene flow not possible between the descendent populations, in effect forming descendent species that can co-exist with the ancestral species.
[2] Why aren't there transitional forms between a gorilla and
Homo sapiens?
Because Gorillas are not the ancestors of humans, and aren't on the same branch of the evolutionary tree.
------------------------------------ Gorilla Lineage
CA ----------------------|
------------------------------------- Human Lineage
Why did all hominids not evolve like humans did?
Someone had it right, Mutations... , the buildings that selection can be imagined to build are restricted by the material available for construction. Mutations determine the form and function of the organisms that are part of a population, and any selection that may act will only determine which forms and which functions predominate/gain an edge/become prevalent, just putting different genomes under the same selective pressures will not cause them to evolve convergent features all the time.
Is Darwinism falsifiable?
Depends on how you define it, if you define it as strict adaptation, all cases of neutral evolution falsify that approach. If you define it according to Neodarwinism, we would need complete evolutionary stasis with no change in allele frequencies at all, so yes it can be falsified but it hasn't been falsified because evolution is a fact.
Now, let us come to complex features and the evolution thereof, complex features are a function of genomes, i.e the genes present in organisms and the interactions of the products they produce, and ergo all that evolution needs to do is to account for the production of new genes and genomic features, and amongst mutational processes there are plenty of known candidates that can do this. We start off with point mutations, which involve the substitution of one nucleotide with another, then we have alternative splicing, which enables one gene to produce different protein outputs, we have transposons, which jump around in the genome inserting themselves into various spots, we have gene duplication, where we acquire extra copies of genes, free from selection, which can then be acted upon by point mutations, and we have whole genome duplications, where an extra copy of the whole genome is gained, this means that the number of potentially new genes in the genome = number of preexisting genes in the genome, even if a minority of them form paralogues we have novel genomic features, and consequently novel phenotypes.
All that evolution has to do is produce genomic complexity to produce phenotypic complexity, and the known processes of mutation can do this, case closed.
