With the exception of the forensic evidence you mentioned --- most of the evidence you mentioned has corrected some false conclusion made in the past.
One of my favorite examples is geocentrism.
Scientific (i.e. empirical) evidence led them to conclude geocentrism back then --- and it will do the same thing today, too.
Evidence can be misinterpreted.
I'm 99% sure I've suggested Asimov's essay
The Relativity of Wrong in the past, but it's worth plugging again and again.
Always laughter from the godless. You haven't changed. But your laughter will change to sorrow. I warn you.
Ad baculum fallacy. Try again.
I asked you to use your brains. Adding change is not like adding pennies.
This is true. However, that's only an argument against an analogy, not an argument against "macro"evolution.
(Did I bring up the evolution of mammalian middle ear bones from jaw bones, one of the best documented gradual transitions in the vertebrate fossil record? If not, consider them brought up
)
What we see is variations of the same feature ie. beaks That's all.
Actually,
most evolutionary novelty is considered to be "variations of the same feature". Gill arches and jaws, arthropod legs and mouthparts, fins and limbs, digestive enzymes and blood clotting factors; the latter of each pair is thought to be a variation on the former. Evolution is not expected to build anything from scratch! (Although I've just discovered that some think novelties from scratch
occur surprisingly often on the molecular level. Whoever cited that paper in the Wikipedia entry on nylon bugs has my eternal gratitude.)
Or coloration - lighter, darker, deeper (every color in the rainbow is possible I imagine)Many small changes or differences are possible. But what do they add up to? Is a parrot not a bird? Is one population of parrot not related to another if it looks different?
Yes, parrots are birds. And parrots are also vertebrates, as are newts and lampreys. Parrots, newts and lampreys are also animals, as are flies and sponges.
You are used to thinking of parrots as "birds" because "birds" is a more intuitive and useful everyday classification than "vertebrates". However, I see no logical reason why you couldn't repeat the same argument with a higher-level grouping - and indeed, I've seen people arguing that "bacteria who evolved X are still just bacteria" - "bacteria" are a
higher level group than "animals"!!!
So where does this stop, and why?
An important thing about evolution that most creationists don't seem to understand is that an organism
cannot evolve out of its ancestry. If your ancestors were mammals, you'll always and forever stay a mammal (and an amniote, a tetrapod, a lobe-finned fish, a gnathostome, a vertebrate, a deuterostome, an animal... and so on, down to "living thing".)
Let's say you have two populations of the same kind that separated from each other and began to look a little different. The change is now you have two populations instead of one. The limit to change (the number of possible different populations) - dependant on available land, available food and other resources for life.
Actually, there is another important limitation, that which comes from the inside (
developmental constraints, for example).
Speciation occurs at a higher rate near the equator because of the strong mutagenetic effect of sunlight.
Citation please? Never heard of this hypothesis.
In this area we find the Galapagos Islands where Darwin hit on his theory. I think we can say beneficial traits become isolated.
Isolated from what? I'm not sure I understand.
A word of caution: speciation on the Galápagos (or Hawaii, or the great African lakes) has more to do with them being islands than them being tropical. When islands are first colonised by organisms, they are completely empty ecosystems, full of unexploited new habitats for the few (for remote islands, at least) colonisers.
So far I've outlined two changes. Change in the frequency of alleles (related to populations) and change in the alleles themselves (like adding colors and shapes to a palette - to existing features)
That's about right. So your problem is with evolutionary novelty. But that happens all the time - it's possible to observe in the lab, even though obviously it's much easier to observe in microbes.
Here is
brand new multicellularity for you, and here is
a novel anatomical feature that appeared in a population of lizards within a few decades. If you'd like to read either paper, PM me.
Now let's redefine the problem. Micro and macro evolution will now be refered to as Evolution (speciation) and Evolution (common descent).
Technically, speciation is not microevolution
Grr, have I mentioned I hate the micro-macro terminology?
These two theories are not related in my opinion. In other words, one doesn't logically follow from the other. If one makes sense it doesn't mean the other has to be accepted.
Perfectly true. Even if we know that organisms can change extensively, common descent doesn't logically follow. Common descent requires (and has, in absolute shiploads) its own evidence. (Wanna talk about it?)
I disagree with the godless.
Do you also disagree with the
Christians? (If you feel like pulling out the
No True Scotsman fallacy, I advise you to take it up with him.)
I disagree with your interpretations of the evidence. I find your words not just unconvincing but I marvel that God has blinded you to the truth. It's almost a miracle. We are not against any field of study, including science (though it feels like you have hijacked science ... and history and literature) No. We are struggling against the powers and principalities of darkness - against the ignorant proponents of Evolution(common descent).
Wow, did you
really just call 99% of the biological research community ignorant?
They may be ignorant of a lot of other things, but I can assure you they'll know a thing or two about biology.
I would argue that no feature would keep changing like the video suggests. The neck, for example, would not keep getting longer. An unusually long neck, in fact, would suggest two creatures are unrelated (not descended from the same ancestor) though they might belong to one kind. We've been breeding animals for a long time (thousands of years) and we've seen nothing like what's in the video. Animals don't acquire necks longer than what is allowed within the parameters of the kind.
Or what's feasible for their body plan.
But breeding should be the very thing that shows you just how far you can get from the original in not so many generations. Dogs?
Maize?
A swan, for example, might have a longer neck than a sparrow, but I would think it belongs to a water fowl. We see longer necks in that family. But both swans and sparrows are birds.
Rrrright... Both swans and ducks belong to the same family. Swans have much longer necks with about 10 extra vertebrae compared to your average mallard. Based on your reasoning, if you only knew ducks, would you say they couldn't obtain swan-length necks, or what?
(Incidentally, in mammals, there
does seem to be a
developmental constraint on necks. The
Hox genes that determine how many neck vertebrae you have are also involved in other kinds of processes that a mutation can mess up, and people with six or eight cervicals have all sorts of problems including being prone to cancer.)
It's like a life span. You don't get longer life spans than the limit of the kind. While some species of a kind might be longer lived, all species of its kind would fall within a certain inherent range. It's the same with any feature. There's a range inherent in the kind.
And you have no other reason to say that than
(1) the preconceived notion that there
are such limits
(2) the fact that, quite trivially, properties of living things
do fall within certain ranges (but, then, so does EVERY kind of measurable data!)
Am I correct?
Neither of those premises implies
in any way whatsoever that traits can only evolve within the limits of a kind. The first is your opinion, and the second is just a property of any dataset that doesn't include infinities.
