Scientists can now watch evolution happen

[John Dibble]

In all fairness, the debate between creationism and evolution boils down to epistemology more than anything else.

In all fairness, the debate between the spherical earth/heliocentric model of the solar system and the flat earth/geocentric model of the solar system boils down to epistemology more than anything else.

As afleitch says, there is no debate over this in the scientific community. One side has evidence while the other has none.

[John Dibble]

In all fairness, the debate between creationism and evolution boils down to epistemology more than anything else.

In all fairness, the debate between the spherical earth/heliocentric model of the solar system and the flat earth/geocentric model of the solar system boils down to epistemology more than anything else.

Yes, it does.

You know, when you put it that way epistemology doesn't exactly come out as being a rational school of thought.

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It's shown itself to be better at answering big questions than anything else on numerous occasions. Evolution is one such answer.

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us ... Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." - Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

[John Dibble]

I don't think the heliocentrism/geocentrism comparison is a good one. Geocentrism is scientifically much more valid than creationism could ever hope to be.

True - you can actually make a predictive model based on it.

[John Dibble]

This is a neat story showing adaptation of a species to a new situation. I don't see how it proves  common descent or any of the things about evolution that are actually contentious.

1. Common descent isn't contentious among scientists. It's well accepted as all available evidence points to it.
2. This is not mere adaptation. A species can adapt without any genetic changes, such as putting on thicker clothes to adapt to cold. This is the actual birth of an entirely new trait with the steps of the mutations actually having been monitored. Given that one standard creationist trope is that mutations can't produce new features, this is important as we now have one more solid piece of evidence contradicting that notion.