[Avodah] evolution [was: Clear Thinking about Male Homosexuals]

[Chanoch (Ken) Bloom]

On Mon, 2012-02-27 at 21:18 -0500, T613K at aol.com wrote:

> 
> You are correct, and it is unfortunate that we have only one word --
> "evolution" -- to describe two different processes, which have been
> loosely and somewhat clumsily called "micro-evolution" and
> "macro-evolution."
> Microevolution -- e.g., microbes developing immunity to antibiotics --
> is a fact, as you say.  Macroevolution -- the development of one
> species into another completely different one, like dinosaurs to birds
> -- is an unproven hypothesis.  Darwin's "explanation" of the mechanism
> -- "natural selection, survival of the fittest" -- is a trivial and
> tautological "explanation" that explains nothing, except that those
> individuals that survive and reproduce, were capable of surviving and
> reproducing.  

Please name some specific physical/biological processes that would be
required by macroevolution, which are not required by microevolution.

I'm convinced that the only difference between "microevolution" and
"macroevolution" is either the time scale (and therefore the ease with
which we can watch all of the parts work in concert, which is inversely
related to the ease with which a denier can wave his hands and dismiss
the evidence), or the theological necessity for denying it. I'm not
convinced that there is any fundamentally different process at work.
However, I challenge you to name some.

Once we determine specific processes necessary for macroevlution, we can
search to see whether evidence of that process has been reproduced
experimentally on a microevolution timescale. For example, one might
propose that speciation events (where a species whose members could all
interbreed splits into two species that can only interbreed within their
new species) are example of such a process. To which I could answer that
there is a long list of experiments that have observed speciation events
at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html