Link: Interesting Discussion about My Article on the Possibility of Theistic Freethinkers

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Link: You Can Prove a Negative

[This post was originally published on The Secular Outpost on January 1, 2009. It was republished here on November 7, 2021 with the date manually adjusted to reflect its original publication date.]

Philosopher Steven Hales has written an article disproving the myth, "You Can't Prove a Negative."

Abstract: It is widely believed that you can’t prove a negative. Some people even think that it is a law of logic—you can’t prove that Santa Claus, unicorns, the Loch Ness Monster, God, pink elephants, WMD in Iraq and Bigfoot don’t exist. This widespread belief is flatly, 100% wrong. In this little essay, I show precisely how one can prove a negative, to the same extent that one can prove anything at all.

Link: 15 Lines of Evidence for Evolution

[This post was originally published on The Secular Outpost on January 1, 2009. It was republished here on November 7, 2021 with the date manually adjusted to reflect its original publication date. The link was also updated to its current location.]

Nature just published a resource "for those wishing to spread awareness of evidence for evolution by natural selection."

From the article's introduction:

Most biologists take for granted the idea that all life evolved by natural selection over billions of years. They get on with researching and teaching in disciplines that rest squarely on that foundation, secure in the knowledge that natural selection is a fact, in the same way that the Earth orbits the Sun is a fact.

Given that the concepts and realities of Darwinian evolution are still challenged, albeit rarely by biologists, a succinct briefing on why evolution by natural selection is an empirically validated principle is useful for people to have to hand. We offer here 15 examples published by Nature over the past decade or so to illustrate the breadth, depth and power of evolutionary thinking. We are happy to offer this resource freely and encourage its free dissemination.

From the table of contents:

Gems from the fossil record
1 Land-living ancestors of whales
2 From water to land
3 The origin of feathers
4 The evolutionary history of teeth
5 The origin of the vertebrate skeleton

Gems from habitats
6 Natural selection in speciation
7 Natural selection in lizards
8 A case of co-evolution
9 Differential dispersal in wild birds
10 Selective survival in wild guppies
11 Evolutionary history matters

Gems from molecular processes
12 Darwin’s Galapagos finches
13 Microevolution meets macroevolution
14 Toxin resistance in snakes and clams
15 Variation versus stability