- Apr 21, 2010
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You miss his point.There are no laboratory demonstrations of speciation, millions of fruit flies coming and going while never once suggesting that they were destined to appear as anything other than fruit flies.
More than six thousand years of breeding and artificial selection, barnyard and backyard, have never induced a chicken to lay a square egg or persuade a pig to develop wheels on ball bearing.
In a research survey published in 2001, the evolutionary biologist Joel Kingsolver reported that in sample sizes of more than one thousand individuals, there was virtually no correlation between specific biological traits and either reproductive success or survival. Important issues about selection, he remarked with some understatement, remain unresolved. selection exists at all. Computer simulations of Darwinian evolution fail when they are honest and succeed only when they are not. Thomas Ray has for years been conducting computer experiments in an artificial environment that he has designated Tierra. . . . Sandra Blakeslee, writing for the New York Times, reported the results under the headline Computer Life Form Mutates in an Evolution Experiment: Natural Selection Is Found at Work in a Digital World.
The above from Berlinski's "Devil's Delusion," p. 189-190
I got his point quite well. He and you don't understand the basics of evolutionary theory. Critters don't suddenly become some other critter for no apparent reason. 55 million years ago horses evolved from some other critter (forgive me but my paleontology is weak) and they were tiny little dudes the size of a cat. Through time they split into many different types of horse and grew in size because that gave them a competative edge.
Horses today are basically the same as horses from 55 million years ago genetically. However, the species has grown in complexity and size to where they are today. They will remain horses until they die out due to some horrendous catastrophe or some other critter comes along that out competes them and they go the way of the Moa.
"He and you don't understand ...(forgive me but my paleontology is weak)"
So, horses have remained horses?
No new species, huh?
So....where is the 'evolution'?
You're not another zombie who has fallen under the sway of concepts that he doesn't quite understand are you?
But...I'm perfectly happy to have you believe whatsoever you choose to...just realize that you are accepting based on faith.
But, to help you in your search for knowledge......
. ". . . no human has ever seen a new species form in nature." Steven M. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1981), p. 73.
"There are no fossils known that show what the primitive ancestral insects looked like, . . . Until fossils of these ancestors are discovered, however, the early history of the insects can only be inferred." Peter Farb, The Insects, Life Nature Library (New York: Time Incorporated, 1962), pp. 14-15
"Thus so far as concerns the major groups of animals, the creationists seem to have the better of the argument. There is not the slightest evidence that any one of the major groups arose from any other. Each is a special animal complex related, more or less closely, to all the rest, and appearing, therefore, as a special and distinct creation." Austin H. Clark, "Animal Evolution," Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 3, No. 4, December 1928, p. 539.
"When we descend to details, we can prove that no one species has changed; nor can we prove that the supposed changes are beneficial, which is the groundwork of the theory [of evolution]." Charles Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. 2, editor Francis Darwin (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1898), p. 210
"But the curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps: the fossils go missing in all the important places. When you look for links between major groups of animals, they simply aren't there; at least, not in enough numbers to put their status beyond doubt. Either they don't exist at all, or they are so rare that endless argument goes on about whether a particular fossil is, or isn't, or might be, transitional between this group or that." [emphasis in original] Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong(New Haven Ct,:Ticknor and Fields, 1992) p. 19. (See my articleThe Coelacanth, Living Fossils, and Evolution).
There is no fossil record establishing historical continuity of structure for most characters that might be used to assess relationships among phyla." Katherine G. Field et al., "Molecular Phylogeny of the animal Kingdom," Science, Vol. 239, 12 February 1988, p. 748.
"And let us dispose of a common misconception. The complete transmutation of even one animal species into a different species has never been directly observed either in the laboratory or in the field." Dean H. Kenyon (Professor of Biology, San Francisco State University), affidavit presented to the U.S. Supreme Court, No. 85-1513, Brief of Appellants, prepared under the direction of William J. Guste, Jr., Attorney General of the State of Louisiana, October 1985, p. A-16.
". . . there are no intermediate forms between finned and limbed creatures in the fossil collections of the world." G.R. Taylor, The Great Evolution Mystery, ( N.Y: Harper and Row, 1983) p. 60.
". . . the gradual morphological transitions between presumed ancestors and descendants, anticipated by most biologists, are missing." David E. Schindel (Curator of Invertebrate Fossils, Peabody Museum of Natural History), "The Gaps in the Fossil Record," Nature, Vol. 297, 27 May 1982, p. 282.
"Gaps at a lower taxonomic level, species and genera, are practically universal in the fossil record of the mammal-like reptiles. In no single adequately documented case is it possible to trace a transition, species by species, from one genus to another." Thomas S. Kemp,Mammal-like Reptiles and the Origin of Mammals (New York: Academic Press, 1982), p. 319.
Don't be deliberately obtuse PC, it is unbecoming of you. At one time there was the prototypical horse, then through time, many more types of horse have evolved. Man too has had a hand in that. Percherons and Clydesdales were bred for size to become the heavy warhorses of the medieval knights, the Morgan was bred by an American farmer to be the best possible work horse.
They are all "horses" but they are also all different in some fasion that enabled them to compete in their particular environment. A Mongolian Steppe Pony is far hardier and can travel for far greater distances in the most atrocious weather then any fine bred Arabian (once again anothe man derived species going back over 4500 years ago).
But, the Arabians are faster by a long mile then a steppe pony.
Here is some further reading that has more of what I have been saying.
"Evolution, the overarching concept that unifies the biological sciences, in fact embraces a plurality of theories and hypotheses. In evolutionary debates one is apt to hear evolution roughly parceled between the terms "microevolution" and "macroevolution". Microevolution, or change beneath the species level, may be thought of as relatively small scale change in the functional and genetic constituencies of populations of organisms. That this occurs and has been observed is generally undisputed by critics of evolution. What is vigorously challenged, however, is macroevolution. Macroevolution is evolution on the "grand scale" resulting in the origin of higher taxa. In evolutionary theory it thus entails common ancestry, descent with modification, speciation, the genealogical relatedness of all life, transformation of species, and large scale functional and structural changes of populations through time, all at or above the species level (Freeman and Herron 2004; Futuyma 1998; Ridley 1993).
Common descent is a general descriptive theory that concerns the genetic origins of living organisms (though not the ultimate origin of life). The theory specifically postulates that all of the earth's known biota are genealogically related, much in the same way that siblings or cousins are related to one another. Thus, macroevolutionary history and processes necessarily entail the transformation of one species into another and, consequently, the origin of higher taxa. Because it is so well supported scientifically, common descent is often called the "fact of evolution" by biologists. For these reasons, proponents of special creation are especially hostile to the macroevolutionary foundation of the biological sciences.
This article directly addresses the scientific evidence in favor of common descent and macroevolution. This article is specifically intended for those who are scientifically minded but, for one reason or another, have come to believe that macroevolutionary theory explains little, makes few or no testable predictions, is unfalsifiable, or has not been scientifically demonstrated."
29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: the Scientific Case for Common Descent