The left hand column of the table you quoted defines the drivers for both macro and microevolution. Macroevolution is the accumulation of microevolution events over geological timescales which is the mainstream view of evolution.
I didn't quote from a table in my response. I agree that "Macroevolution is the accumulation of microevolution events over geological timescales" is a mainstream view among evolutionary biologists, but that is the crux of the issue in the creation-evolution debate. The SFI recognizes that there are interesting large-scale possibilities that are not incremental in how life could have developed.
Because the origin of life, especially human life, is such a basic question for us as humans, it encompasses the domain of worldviews or
religion, defined as the organized observance of a worldview - hence the debate that brings God,
Genesis and the biblical and other worldviews into the discussion. For some, the scientific and theological aspects of the issue can be related by realizing that no matter how it occurred and what scientific explanation is ultimately given it, that is how the Creator brought it about.
The
real opponents are the idea that the present physical world is purposive and the product of an intelligence on one side versus what essentially reduces to
nihilsm on the other side - the view that nothing is ultimately of significance because everything is
accidental. Purpose versus accident is a debate conducted behind the facade of science vs religion.
My response was to a creationist who probably gets his information from creationist sites such as AIG and ICR not the American Scientific Affiliation.
AIG and ICR are renowned for their dishonest portrayals of mainstream science, the subjects of macro and microevolution are no exception, their rejection of the connection between the two is not based on any science but on the false dichotomy that no connection automatically validates creationism.
It is not really linguistically honest to refer specifically to the YEC position as "creationism" when anyone who holds a biblical (or for that matter, Vedic Hindu) worldview also has a creationist view of origins. And some of these people have no real conflict with neo-darwinian evolutionary theory.
With regards to your response to
@Hans Blaster, Hans happens to be a physicist and your transistor analogy has a fundamental problem as to have a perturbation you need a fixed or equilibrium starting point around which perturbation occurs. While this is not a problem with transistors, there are no fixed or equilibrium points in evolution as the starting point for evolution namely mutations are by their very nature random.
The word
random comes from probability theory and means that there is no
prior information that would prefer one outcome over another. Consequently,
because the causes for mutations (or whatever drives evolution) are not known, evolution is studied probabilistically, not causally. (SFI is trying to move closer to causality.) That is sometimes criticized by anti-evolutionists, but much of science involves probabilistic reasoning, even in control in engineering, and nobody attacks its use there.
Perhaps I could have made the case better for the difference between incremental and large-signal or total-variable analysis; they are clearly quite different, and that is in part what drives work like that of the SFI and also induces YECers to attack biological evolution generally. ("From fish to Gish", as Dwayne Gish put it.) The key issue is whether the present level of complexity of life can unfold without intelligent input to guide it. That is the issue between evolutionary creationists (ECers) and Intelligent Design advocates (IDers). No conclusive answers have been given to the better arguments of the IDers, from the ECers or anyone else. That is why the issue persists. The SFI work is interesting in this context because some of it explores this very issue. Even Richard Dawkins has his doubts when he says that life appears
as though it were designed. The "as though" is purely a consequence of his presuppositions. The evidence that he observes is that it is designed. (I once wrote a paper on "
Design in Nature and the Nature of Design".)
Perhaps in several decades, if not centuries, we will know enough to properly address these contentious issues! The key to success in research is in knowing how to address the right questions.
While the Santa Fe Institute does challenge the mainstream view of the connection between macroevolution and microevolution it is not an endorsement for creationism and provides an alternate hypothesis at bacterial levels where bacteria are modelled as large population networks. It however does not refute the mainstream model at bacterial levels.
- at the bacterial levels. This is microevolution at an incremental level. We know life has malleability at this simpler level of complexity. How far up the chain of complexity can this be taken? That is an interesting question, one that the SFI people recognize.
