Evolution by Stages

It is all very well to say that very dissimilar looking structures evolve from common structures evolve from a common ancestral design.

It is true that analysis of the organ structure in fossils allows us to make estimates of how far back evolutionary relationships go.

But those are guesses about what happened in history. Are there any current examples of such a process? The wild cabbage plant is a good example.

Humans have, over more than two thousand years, cultivated wild cabbage as a food plant, and generated different vegetables from it by selection.

This is, of course, artificial selection rather than natural selection. So some farmers have wanted to select for very short distances between leaves, and have bred the cabbage we eat.

Also, a change that is useful for one property to start with can become useful later for quite a different function.

Feathers, for example, can start out as providing insulation in cold weather. But later, they might become useful for flight. In fact, some dinosaurs had feathers, although they could not fly using the feathers. Birds seem to have later adapted the feathers to flight. This, of course, means that birds are very closely related to reptiles, since dinosaurs were reptiles!

Molecular Phylogeny

This is based on the idea that organisms which are more distantly related will accumulate greater number of differences in their DNA. Such studies trace the evolutionary relationships