By dynamics I mean the way the process interacts. Its scope. How big a change it can make at any one time. The nitty gritty that you gloss over. You make grandiose connections and assertions but do not have the details to back them up. How many changes would it take to change an Archaeopterix into a sparrow? You don’t care! You just assume it can happen.
The examples of the Galapogus only prove that you ca adjust the size and charachterstics within a limited scope. They are still all finches.
I don’t assume it can happen. We have the evidence that it did. We have the transitional fossils, a nested hierarchy, and a whole host of other evidence.
You should read of David Lack on the subject of Finches and evolution. (It’s really more accurately “David’s Finches” than “Darwin’s Finches”, but Dr. Lack is the one who modestly popularized the term “Darwin’s Finches”. Lack became a devout Christian as an adult, and knew a lot about the evolution of Finches.
Your retort - which is a fairly common theme among young-earthers about small observed changes “yeah - but they’re still just _____” - is a lot like a mosquito making observations of human beings. One mosquito populist takes issue with the mosquito scientists …
“They say that these human babies eventually become human adults! … can you believe that! Who’s ever seen even just one of those chubby little things suddenly sprout long apendages, hair everywhere, and be able to go running and jumping about?!”
mosquito scientist: “Yes, but we have seen slight changes happen with these babies - granted it takes most of our lifetime to see it - several days even! But the careful observations show some slight change!”
retort: “Yeah - but they’re still babies! Have you ever actually seen one change into an adult?”
scientist: “Actually we see lots of intermediate forms. Some adults are smaller than others. And others even smaller yet. We’ve seen transitional forms that fill in these gaps pretty well!”
retort: “They may be smaller, but they’re still adults! And besides there are so many little gaps that you haven’t completely filled in. Have you actually observed one of these babies turning into a big person - even looking back to records from your mosquito great-grandparents? Were you there to see it? Sure little changes can happen. But common sense and intuition easily tells us that there is no way you get a giant human from one of these little squishy species.”
And the beleaguered mosquito scientist just goes back to his work.
Evolutionary change is supposed to be an unusual event. Something that happens now and then. If you calculate the diversity of life and the time involved it would have to happen virtually every minute. Even time iis not eternal. (I will waitf for a reation to that)
This is what I mean by dynamics.
No, you have a few examples that do not prove anything of the sort…
I am not denying the existence of evolutionary change.
But, the examples do not prove it can do what ToE claims.
If it is, then evolutionary theory would be proved wrong. Because it doesn’t happen in fits and starts. It happens gradually and continually.
It is happening every minute. And would indeed have to be at a hyper-frenetic pace if the world were only six thousand years old. And back when Lord Kelvin (devout Christian believer and renowned thermodynamics physicist) had demonstrated to everyone’s satisfaction that the world had to be between seventy million and 140 mlllion years old, the evolutionary biologists of the time were fit to be tied because they knew that evolution as they understood it then needs a whole lot more time than that to happen. And as it turned out … they were right! And Kelvin was wrong - but for good reasons. His models were still missing an important mechanism (radioactive decay) that was only just being discovered during his time. So with that taken into account, the age of the earth could now be seen (measured) to be over 4 billion years. And there is your ‘eternity’ needed to account for all the slow and continuous change.
I am not a YEC as you should know by now. It doesn’t matter. ToE changes to fit what it needs. So DNA is perpetually mutating? So why has humanity not really changed in 6000 years or so? A few adjustments in height and build, but no new sub-species let alone species. Even Hitler failed on that one.
I am sorry, but ToE is cloud cuckoo land in terms of speciation and Universal ancestry. The figures just don’t add up, and neither does the evidence.
Although I agree with Mervin, this statement does not reveal the full scope of evolution. Gradual change is one possibility but there may be long periods with very little change, followed by a relatively rapid change (the theory of punctuated equilibrium). It may be that in the majority of the population, there happens very little change but a small part of the population ends up in a different environment where the creatures change relatively rapidly. Rapidly might mean something like a million years or less.
Evolution happens in all these cases, it is just a matter of where and how rapidly. As an ecologist (by training), I tend to stress the importance of the environment or rather, the interplay of a changing environment and natural selection on the gene pool of a population.
Which is all very well but it doesn’t explain niche changes or changes that manage to fill a void or “gap” in the ecology. ToE seems to suggest an intelligence that can locate and fill such gaps, which, of course, is not possible. How on earth a Hummingbird came into existence,for instance?
Most of that time was spent with microbial life. You can look up more precisely known timeframes for much of it (some of the earliest bits not very precisely known yet.)
What makes you think it hasn’t?
This is like asking “So why has the baby not grown in the last couple of days[hours] if it is allegedly always on its way to becoming an adult?”
Yeah - I’m familiar with Gould’s work - as well as the creationist misunderstanding of it. As you correctly point out, “rapid” in that context still involves millions of years - which is indeed rapid in geological timeframes. But nothing like some creationists have imagined it to be - trying to turn it into some sort of “hopeful monster” hypothesis.
There is not enough time left to get from those microbes to humanity.
And no one has answered myquery about Aborinies existing where no other higher mammals seem to have been. The only surviving mammals other than humans were rodents. Did all the others dies out? If so why did the marsupials survive? It doesn’t work!.
The diversity of humanity belies a single source. And white Caucasians do not make evolutionary sense as pale skin is not an advantage in any climate. Yellow skin? Red Skin? Black and over a hundred variations? One ancestor? Are you kidding?
How so? I’m just following reality as we best see and understand it - regardless of what that does to my feet. There is nothing especially new or surprising to biologists over most of this last cenutry (I think) about the immense portion of that billions-years timeline spent in the microbial phase. And my descriptor ‘microbial’ there was deliberately vague since I would need to refresh my memory to get the details (which can be ably filled in much better by so many others here). But my general sense is that to get from single-celled “protozoan” life into multicellular life was probably not a trivial jump (and I think one not well known or agreed upon yet). It could be that the rest of evolution to follow may have been “child’s play” compared to some of those initial developments. But in any case, the “hockey-stick” like development of life over those geological time-scales is exactly the data that modern evolutionary biologists have been working with for some time now. I’m pretty sure that nothing you’ve described presents any problem for the ToE whatsoever.
As that was not the point of the analogy… Analogies tend to be very specific. It is very easy, and not helpful, to try and take them beyond the specific point they are aimed at.
If you want an analogy for Evolution it would be using a word game, but, as yet, I have not found anyone willing to try it.
Then you don’t understand the dynamics of evolution. Because it does happen every minute. It happens every time an organism reproduces with a genetic mutation or recombination that results in it being different from its parent(s). The changes you are talking about (Archaeopteryx to sparrow) are actually an accumulation of many many smaller changes that happened every generation for millions of generations.
We can measure the generational rates of change in extant species, for both genetics and morphology. We can compare that to the rate of change needed to get from Archaeopteryx to sparrows. There is no problem.
I’ve seen that most recently when reading Denton’s abysmal Evolution: a theory in crisis:
Consider the simple sentence:
He sat on the mat.
If we attempt to reach other meaningful sentences by changing one letter at a time and avoiding nonsensical sequences as we go, we soon discover that only a very small number of other sentences can be reached, such as:
She sat on the can.
We sat on the tram.
Hence we find that there exists a small group of sentences related to one another and interconvertible by unit mutational steps but isolated from all other groups of sentences by the severity of the rules of English grammar. It is impossible to reach even a closely related sentence such as
He stood on the mat.
in unit mutational steps without passing through nonsensical
strings:
He sat on the mat.
He stt on the mat.
He sto on the mat.
He stoo on the mat.
He stood on the mat.
All that tells me is that Denton is terrible at word games.
Thee are a finite number of viable Genetic codes. And they are very complex. To change from one to another… sequentially… you have to have viable transitions. But what if there is no viable transition?
Incidentally my version was using single words, but the same problems occur. There are some words that cannot be broken down slowly because there are not enough viable 10, 11 or 12 letter words in existence.
The point being that you claim to be able to transmute from one type of animal to anther but there are no viable traansitions.
You can change a petrol driven car into a diesel, but you cannot do it bit by bit, you have to change, not only the motor, but the fuel, electrics and cooling systems as well. No transition is possible, it just sits in the garage until it is done. Nature does not have that luxury. You might be able to build up an exothermic or endothermic system from bottom up, but you cannot just switch between the two, they are incompatible. And, without being a broken record, the metabolic system of a bird is different again, having to cope with extreme changes in usage from flight to stationary.
Time cannot achieve the impossible. If the transition cannot exist, no amount of trying will change that.