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To: Wormwood
it just doesn't hand-wave the process away by invoking invisible spirits

Uhmmm.. Yeah, actually it does. The invisible spirits of evolution exist in the form of Macro-evolution - so completely invisible it has never been and will never be seen. But it's waved about as though it were a proven fact.

23 posted on 09/13/2005 4:48:09 AM PDT by Havoc (Reagan was right and so was McKinley. Down with free trade. Hang the traitors high)
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To: Havoc; Wormwood
"Uhmmm.. Yeah, actually it does. The invisible spirits of evolution exist in the form of Macro-evolution - so completely invisible it has never been and will never be seen. But it's waved about as though it were a proven fact. "

Macroevolution is just evolution that includes changes in reproduction over time, therefore inhibiting interbreeding and creating a new species by definition.

"There is no difference between micro- and macroevolution except that genes between species usually diverge, while genes within species usually combine. The same processes that cause within-species evolution are responsible for above-species evolution, except that the processes that cause speciation include things that cannot happen to lesser groups, such as the evolution of different sexual apparatus (because, by definition, once organisms cannot interbreed, they are different species).

The idea that the origin of higher taxa, such as genera (canines versus felines, for example), requires something special is based on the misunderstanding of the way in which new phyla (lineages) arise. The two species that are the origin of canines and felines probably differed very little from their common ancestral species and each other. But once they were reproductively isolated from each other, they evolved more and more differences that they shared but the other lineages didn't. This is true of all lineages back to the first eukaryotic (nuclear) cell. Even the changes in the Cambrian explosion are of this kind, although some (eg, Gould 1989) think that the genomes (gene structures) of these early animals were not as tightly regulated as modern animals, and therefore had more freedom to change. "

The theory doesn’t look short of support.
67 posted on 09/13/2005 6:02:48 AM PDT by elfman2 (2 tacos short of a combination plate)
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