On Sun, 30 Nov 2003, Budikka wrote:

How can you be posting from a .edu email address and be asking a
question like this? Do you really want to learn about evolution or are
you just wanting to stir things up?

Any good bookstore will supply you with what you need. A good one to
start with is Carl Zimmer's "Evolution" - the book which companioned the
PBS TV series on evolution. This consists of over 360 pages of
introductory material including nine pages of suggested further reading.

Where exactly in Carl Zimmer's _Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea_ (2001)
should I go to see evidence of "evolution," where "evolution" is defined
using Gould's characterizations of the term on the book's pages x (the
first complete paragraph) and xi (last paragraph)?

The evidence for evolution is spread far and wide. Yes you can find
out about it from museums, yes, you can find out about it from
peer-reviewed literature, yes you can find out about it from books.
You can also find out about it from studying the fossil record, from
studying the genomes of various species, from studying biochemistry,
comparative anatomy, from geology, from medicine, from paleontology
and a host of other avenues. It all depends on how serious you are
and how much you want to learn.

A good online source of information to get up and running is the
talk.origins archive (www.talkorigins.org). This consists of all
manner of material including "informally peer-reviewed" articles on
the topic, many of which have references to formally peer-reviewed
papers that have been published in professional, refereed journals.

Your request to learn about it as defined by Carl Sagan is rather odd.
Why choose his definition? He was an astronomer, not a biologist or
someone in some similar field of study. If you are interested in
learning about evolution "as controlled by some god", then science
cannot help you.

Scientists are in the business of studying the natural world, not the
supernatural. Evolutionists can only try to understand what nature
tells us about the way it came to be the way it is, and the evidence
so far reveals that everything we see came to be as it is without the
*requirement* of divine intervention. Science cannot go beyond that
and state categorically that this means there is no god, or that it
means there is a god.

Clearly no one has been alive long enough to see evolution in the
broad sense of a migration from inanimate material to the first cell
to modern organisms, so like a detective piecing together clues from
an unwitnessed crime to catch the culprit, scientists are forced to
use what clues are available to understand our origins. Ever since
Darwin first put the subject out there with a proposed mechanism to
explain part of it, scientists have been steadily building a massive
amount of support for the theory.

The definition of evolution is essentially a change in allele
frequency in a population. This, together with speciation has been
observed. Pathways from from non-animate material to living organisms
have been suggested (such as in "Vital Dust" by Nobel Laureate
Christian de Duve), although this isn't strictly part of evolution.
From that point on, the fossil record, the diversity and distribution
of life, biochemistry, comparative anatomy, and the study of and
experimentation on various genomes or parts thereof have provided so
much evidence that no competent scientist who knows what they're
talking about doubts that it happened.

You are apparently posting from an educational institution. You are
privileged to be there. Do not waste your time blundering around or
waiting for "education" to settle upon you like a dove from Heaven.
Educate yourself.

Budikka