Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Microevolution and macroevolution

There are no such things, according to some opponents of ID. It's all the same.

Those people who are prepared to think beyond a presuppositional framework don't have a problem with there being different degrees of evolution. The quote below is picked up from "Darwinian Fundamentalism", and gives evolutionary steps of seven different sizes - the aim being to see what likelihood people give out of 10 for a darwinist explanation being a valid explanation to them personally.

I honestly find it hard to believe that, once the science is explained to him, Joe Public would think that step 1 is functionally identical to steps 5 to 7 - which is what is implied by squashing "microevolution" and "macroevolution" together. For the record, the only one of these that the blogger at Darwinian Fundamentalism tags as "microevolutionary" is step 1 - step 2 he tags as a "minor macroevolutionary event".

It doesn't suit darwinists to draw a distinction between degrees of event, because it makes their case much stronger if they can argue that events of type 1 imply events of type 7*. Well, that's why I both distinguish between micro and macro (even if they aren't tightly defined) and don't believe that darwinism is an adequate explanation for macroevolution.
1. evolutionary changes such as bacterial resistance

2. minor evolutionary events such as the appearance of varieties of beetle species with no significant morphological changes.

3. minor evolutionary events such as the appearance of horses and zebras from a common ancestor.

4. moderate evolutionary events such as the appearance of horses, cows and sheep from a common ancestor.

5. evolutioary events such as the emergence of whales and bats from a common mammal ancestor.

6. the Cambrian Explosion (the apparently sudden appearance in the fossil record of many complex, multicellular animals, dated at about 540 million years ago).

7. the origin of life itself - the first appearance of life on earth.
*Actually, before I am corrected, darwinists will often draw the line at step 7, and argue that "Evolution is nothing to do with the ORIGIN of life. Oh, no, of course not. I don't think we ever said we were talking about that, did we George? No. Definitely not." Unfortunately, the fact that evolution supposedly makes no claims about the origin of life is a distinction that is far more subtle than Joe Public is ever likely to realise, and also one that is kept very hush-hush until it is needed to "refute" their opponents.