If you think 'phylogenetic' and and 'adaptation to the environment' are unknown concepts, then you need to open a biology 101 book.
Deeming it impossible is to make a claim about the capacity of all future science, and as such it doesn't belong. So no, it is extremely difficult.
You really think that you would have to be able to predict exactly where a genetic mutation would occur at an exact time for the theory of evolution to be a science?
Ever heard of stochastic predictions? Epistemological randomness does not prevent prediction, it prevents a certain type of prediction. It may even be ontologically random, because some of the events may be due to effects only describable by quantum mechanics and as such ontologically uncertain at the level of singular events and thus they are only describable by stochastic predictions, which is to say probability matrices. Not only that, environmental effects may be, at least in part, due to events that fall within chaos theory, like meteorology, so they are also rather complex.
So now you demand utter randomness? :chuckle: Why would the environment be prone to absolute random events? You speak as though the only thing in nature are cataclysmic events. They happen, but they are rather rare and it is not as though the theory of evolution does not acknowledge that such events destroy the vast majority of life it affects.
It is not, it is rather competition that leads to an advantage for populations that develop the ability to utilize other forms of resources, as was the case in this experiment. Some of the populations evolved a metabolic pathway to utilize citric acid as a resource in addition to glucose and thus would out compete any of the populations that had not evolved this ability. That is evolution. NONE of the populations had the genes for this metabolic pathway at the outset (they were clones of each other). How do you explain the emergence of this metabolic pathway in only a few of the populations if it was not due to random mutations? Did the demiurge of ID descend down with his holy wrench of destiny to manipulate the genes to mask his original incompetence?
The same experiment have been done with lizards. They transported randomly selected members of a lizard population to another island. On the original island, these lizards lived off of insects. The island they transported the randomly selected individuals to, was lacking in insects by ripe with plant life. After almost 40 years they returned to observe. The transported lizard population had evolved in multiple ways. They had evolved cecal valves in their digestion systems, which greatly improves the energy extraction from plant materials which are of course harder to digest. They had also evolved to have larger heads with greater bite force better suited to eat plants.
What you are demanding with the bacteria has been done though, and it can be done by a high school student. Expose a bacterial culture to penicilin and see what happens. Genetic variation due to genetic drift will likely have rendered some bacteria immune and you end up with a population of penicilin resistant bacteria.
You forgot the part where the theory explains the principle and mechanisms by which this adaptation occurs.
Yes, because all the actually trained biologists out there are wrong. And you are not only right, you are right to a degree that it is obvious to "anyone with an ounce of sense". Seriously, do you actually believe that you understand this stuff better than all the professional biologists (and pretty much every other scientist in the world) in the world? You take hubris to a new level.
