So we can sequence DNA, and we can compare the amino acids to match other strands, but how do we know it means anything bordering on similarity of what it actually represents?
I’m a programmer so the best I can give an analogy to is binary, I guess. Just because you have a bunch of 0s and 1s that match from one part of the machine to another doesn’t mean it acts the same among the “thing” it is a part of when compared to the other.
How do we know our DNA does with a level of certainty to say “this organism is similar to that one?”
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It is a lot of observation.
We can look at the DNA of various animals that look alike (dogs for example) and see that they have very similar DNA, compared to say a dog and a cat. If we look at animals that reproduce we can see that their offspring tend to resemble them (like a cow that produces a lot of milk is likely to have offspring that produce a lot of milk too) and that their DNA is very similar, but with minor alterations. It doesn’t take much brain power to extrapolate that minor changes over many generations results in a gradual changing of DNA and the resulting alteration of organisms.
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