Seriously, drop it.
You cannot change the evidence by pounding me with material that you have internalized from some creationism website. You cannot convince me to just blindly disregard the evidence of evolution, especially when I work with it every day. I’ve already pointed you to some resources that explain complex scientific topics in terms that lay-people can understand. If you do not want to look at them, that is on you, not me. I have no real interest in continuing to discuss science with someone whose only interest in the topic is to try to debunk it.
Off-topic? Let me revisit: the thread started with an article discussing a poll on Americans’ attitudes towards anthropogenic global warming, the age of the earth, evolution, and the big bang. To which I commented regarding the strength of the scientific evidence supporting each subject. Then you leapt in with a lot of creationism. Thus, you diverted me from the topic of discussing the poll.
In answer to your question, “How is it that names such as Empedocles and Anaximander do not spring to mind at once, not to mention Aristotle?”, I will say that the names of what I assume are ancient Greeks whom I’ve never heard of (except for the name Aristotle) do *not* typically spring to mind, ever. However, I will say that the ancient Greeks made some important observations and hypotheses in the fields of science and mathematics—they were not stupid. Making various observations and proposing a rudimentary theory of evolution to explain them really isn’t such a big deal—that has been done by many peoples throughout history—but coming up with a rudimentary atomic theory without *any* of the instrumentation that was finally used to demonstrate it—that is pretty impressive.
Stop what? This is getting amusing, with all due respect; the more I respond, the more you sound like a doctrinarian rather than a scientist. Nobody ever taught me about this particular off-topic subject in college in this manner.
I have not “changed” any “evidence”; I merely see the nature of the observations alluded to here in an open-minded way. You OTOH are quite adamant about denying the roots of this off-topic theory—and since you admit not hearing of the “ancient Greeks” I mentioned (how and why?—their names are mentioned on just about all college websites with respect to the off-topic subject rather than “some creationist website”), this undermines your credibility as to your prior claim of being a scientist, again with all due respect.
Furthermore, no “instrumentation” ever “demonstrated” anything that proves any facet of the theory in question. There are no laws related to this theory—only endless hypotheses. Oh yes, and denigrating the philosophers of the past means scrapping the base of a theory—also unscientific.