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To: medved
Micro changes yes, macro changes, no.

And yet, a million micro-changes would certainly equal a 'macro' change.

If I understand you correctly, you simply disagree that there has been enough time on Earth for that many micro-changes to happen. I don't necessarily agree with your interpretations of the evidence, but I am intrigued by your concepts and eagerly read your posts.

I'm just interested in the notion that you actually do, at the heart of it, agree with Darwin. All of ya'll, it appears, agree with and believe that species evolve.

You simply have differing opinions on the limits, actual mechanisms, and the environment it has happened in.

I find that fascinting.

412 posted on 07/11/2002 9:36:08 PM PDT by Dominic Harr
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To: Dominic Harr
If I understand you correctly, you simply disagree that there has been enough time on Earth for that many micro-changes to happen.

There's more to it than that. Aside from happening, the microchanges would have to happen in combinations which are simply prohibited by the laws of probability, and they would also have to spread through large populations of animals.

At that point, you get into the Haldane dilemma and other problems of population genetics. Even assuming macroevolution were possible which it isn't, the kinds of time spans which you would need to have our present biosphere from such a process would be, minimally in the quadrillions of years, and not millions or billions.

421 posted on 07/11/2002 10:03:58 PM PDT by medved
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To: Dominic Harr
And yet, a million micro-changes would certainly equal a 'macro' change.

That's wrong and the best case for seeing the problem with it is probably the fruit fly experiments. Fruit flies produce new generations every few days and experiments were conducted over many years in the first part of the 20'th century which amounted to subjecting large numbers of fruit flies to everything known which causes mutations and then deliberately recombining the mutations, i.e. a process which should have speeded up evolution millions of times to the extent that evolution was possible. All they ever got was what the breeders told Chuck Darwin was all he would ever get, which was sterile individuals and individuals which returned, boomarang-like, to the norm for a fruit fly,

All they ever got was fruit flies; no spiders, ants, wasps, butterflies, or anything else but fruit flies. A number of the scientists involved in the experiments gave up on evolution as a result, the most famous case being that of Goldschmidt.

444 posted on 07/12/2002 4:05:53 AM PDT by medved
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