email - November 2003

Compelling Evidence

Subject: Compelling evidence in favor of evolution...
From: Roberto
Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2003

Hello Mr. Do-While

I hope you don't mind, but I had borrowed a question you asked on your latest article, "September was a busy month" , where you asked, "What do you think is the most compelling evidence in favor of evolution?". I thought this was a very good question and posted my own version of it on the "The Creation/Evolution Debate" "Evolution" forum. I was really curious what the response would be and thought you may be as interested in some of the responses I received as well. Of course all this may be old news for you. This was my question:

I just wanted to ask. What do you think is the most compelling evidence in favor of Macroevolution? Say you had a class of new students who have never heard of it and you're given just one day to show them clearly the fact that evolution, particularly Macroevolution, has occurred and does indeed still occur today. Is there some particular evidence of Macroevolution that just simply blows you away and makes it so obviously true?

I'm just curious and must apologize ahead of time if I don't debate the issue. I'm more interested in what you guys think.

Thanks

These were the responses so far:

I'd stack up the fossil record, step back a bit and look at it. Once this or that wasn't there, now it is! How hard is that?

Well I'd go to talkorigins.org and print up a bunch of copies of this article. 29+ Evidences for Macrovevolution

I'd point out that cladistics produces similar results regardless of data set, & that it matches stratigraphy.

I'd step back and define and discuss the term "macroevolution". Many creationists define it as "evolution which has not been observed" and therfore can say that anyting you can demonstrate is not macroevolution.
I think that the whole "macro" vs "micro" classification is meaninless, anyway. That's like defining walking to the store as "microwalking", and walking across the continent as "macrowalking". Is there a difference? Of quantity, sure. But no matter how far you walk, it's the same process. Macroevolution and microevolution are both evolution. They're both driven by natural selection + random mutation. When reproductive isolation comes into play you get new species. Don't buy into what's essentially a creationist classification.

I would have to agree with observations made in the fossil record. It was the first piece of evidence that really supported evolution. If I were talking to a room of creationists, I would ask them what they thought the fossil record would look like if all they had to go on was the Torah. Then I would ask them to try and apply that view to the actual fossil record. I believe, personally, that their preconcieved ideas from the Torah and actual observations would not line up.
Second, I would then show genetic evidence. This is important because at the time phylogenies were first constructed along morphological lines DNA had not even been discovered yet. The huge amounts of genetic similarities that follow common ancestory when compared to stratigraphy and morphological phylogenies is very impressive.
If you're looking to show how dramatically genes are capable of changing when under strong selective pressure for just a few hundred years, show them pigeons. Then ask them to think of how dramatically things would change in *billions* of years. Remind them that each new niche that a species expands to puts it under brand new, strong selective pressures... etc.

Ironically, some of the responses cite geology. This is strange because geology is the soft underbelly of evolution. Darwin listed the fossil record as being one of the strongest arguments against his theory, but believed that some day, when more fossils were found, fossils would confirm his theory. As it turned out, the fossil record is even more troublesome to evolutionists today than it was in Darwin's day.

If evolution were true, one would expect to find fossils of just a few kinds of simple creatures in the lowest rock layers. As one goes higher in the rock layers, there should be more and more different kinds, similar to those below, but slightly more complex. This isn't at all what the fossil record shows.

Some people believe in evolution because they don't understand the true nature of the fossil record. They don't know the true nature because evolutionists have been successful in censoring the science text books.

Clearly some of the respondents don't understand macroevolution at all. The difference between microevolution and macroevolution isn't anything like the difference between walking to the store and walking across the country. It is like the difference between walking to the store and flying across the Atlantic Ocean. The ability to walk short distances doesn't imply the ability to fly long ones because walking and flying are two entirely different mechanisms. It isn't a matter of distance.

Macroevolution is not just a whole lot of microevolution accumulated over a long period of time. Microevolution involves expression of recessive genes by removing dominant genes from the gene pool. Macroevolution would require the creation of new genes from scratch. They aren't the same thing at all.

The person who defined macroevolution to be "anyting [sic] you can't observe" clearly doesn't understand the difference between microevolution and macroevolution. If the difference were taught in public schools he would know better.

We were amazed at the statement, "I'd point out that cladistics produces similar results regardless of data set, & that it matches stratigraphy." Nothing could be further from the truth. Obviously the person who wrote that had not read the October 23, 2003, article in Nature magazine featured in this month's Evolution in the News column. Cladistics generally produces entirely different results depending on the data set, and those results often don't match what the fossil record predicts.

The common thread in all these responses is that people who support evolution don't know the facts. They don't know that the fossil record doesn't support evolution. They don't know how microevolution works, and how macroevolution is supposed to work. They don't know about the DNA dilemma.

These people aren't stupid. They have just been misinformed for most of their lives. They have been misinformed because they have been taught from censored textbooks, and biased "educational" TV programs.

If you feed incorrect data into a computer, you get incorrect results. The people who responded to Roberto have been given incorrect information for a long time, and have therefore come to incorrect conclusions.

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