Challenge: Can mutations build new structures?

[pevaquark (Matthew Pevarnik)]

@benkirk

All of the evidence indicates that they did and continue to move slowly. Do you know of any evidence to the contrary?

To my knowledge, the best YEC model ever was John Baumgardner who made a computer model to prove how it was possible to get the continents moving thousands of miles in a year. A nice summary is written up here:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CH/CH430.html

A summary of the summary:

• This best YEC model would release at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Joules from the plate tectonics moving, enough to boil off all of the oceans. To make matters even worse, his model has the mantle extremely hot before the flood so it is viscous enough to travel so fast so quickly. That heat needs to magically disappear too.
• Baumgardner’s own modeling shows that during the Flood, currents would be faster over continents than over ocean basins (Baumgardner and Barnette 1994), so sediments should, on the whole, be removed from continents and deposited in ocean basins. Yet sediments on the ocean basin average 0.6 km thick, while on continents (including continental shelves), they average 2.6 km thick (Poldervaart 1955)
• Yeah I won’t go on. The continents moved quite slowly and we know exactly how fast they’ve moved for millions of years

Also to stay on point, this was linked in another thread recently but many examples of speciation occurring many times even before our eyes:

Some More Observed Speciation Events

@cwhenderson

rather dramatic morphological changes (yes, several other changes, too) really don’t take place without some genetic changes, as well

This is kind of important in discussing these lizards. Can we really pretend that generation after generation the lizards kept up this phenotypic plasticity trick without any genetic changes?

Also, let’s look at some other similar examples also from another thread:

ERV evidence for pastor with a lawyer's mind

Your questions are often based on flawed premises, and that explains why they are sometimes hard to answer. In this case, I think I understand you to be asking about examples of rapid speciation that have occurred fast enough to have been observed in over human history. I may be wrong, though: maybe you are asking about currently living species and how they came about over the long stretches of time that is required for “normal” speciation. Either way, stasis is not really relevant. Sometimes t…

Some examples given (see specific post for links):

• Guppies in Trinidad: rapid evolution and experiments involving “transplantation” of populations between habitats
• Anole lizards in the Caribbean: one famous lab at Harvard is led by author of a very recent book on evolution and convergence
• Stickleback fish in lakes and rivers all over the continent
• Corn and teosinte1 (my own blog, from 10 years ago, great story)
• Darwin’s finches (Peter and Rosemary Grant, two titans of evolutionary biology; the book about them won the Pulitzer almost 25 years ago)
• Cichlid fishes in African rift lakes
• Nearly instantaneous speciation in plants
• Various populations on the “sky islands” of Southeastern Arizona