It's okay, SavedToTheBone! No hard feelings! I just hope we haven't overly scared you on your first visit here. First-time muckups are common.
I think one of the neatest things about the net is the ability to "see" ideas moving through the population. People come here, or to any other discussion forum, to express ideas that they have probably heard somewhere else. A little bit like the game we called chinese whispers as a little kids. That is why watching new people come here, before they've learned the rules, but most importantly before they've learned the vocabulary. For it is that vocabulary that "betrays" the movement of ideas. Macro-mutation, is this a chinese whispers mistake for macro-evolution? not if you look carefully at the posting, is is saltation, or jumps in TofE.
we've seen the "no benefical mutations" many times, but this evolution= saltation is new to me. i'll watch this person's id and see what happens with his time here.
lol, rmswilliams, you sound like a stalker!
I think that "macromutations" is indeed a chinese-whisper copying error, though. If you look closely there is the implicit assumption that small mutations cannot cause "macroevolution", eg the evolution of the heart. The normal argument is:
Macroevolution is required.
Macroevolution requires an improbably many beneficial mutations.
Improbably many beneficial mutations are not observed.
Therefore macroevolution is impossible.
Whereas this argument assumes that this is already agreed upon and goes on to argue:
Macroevolution is required.
Macroevolution may have been achieved through "macro-mutation".
However, macromutations would kill the organisms which inherited and expressed it.
Therefore macroevolution is impossible.
Interesting twist, never seen this one before, a conflation of the "genetic boundary" idea and the "lethal mutations outweigh beneficial mutations" idea. Also, isn't it interesting that there is a convenient micro-macro boundary that lets creationists believe just enough science but not more?
Microevolution, but no macroevolution.
Radiodecay rates are constant over the past few years of measurement, but maybe not over the past thousands of years.
The speed of light is constant in everyday laboratory experimentation, but you never know if it could've been grossly larger a few thousand years ago.
Avoiding reasonable and logical extrapolation without giving feasible physical boundaries of scale.