Why are Darwinists hiding from their own ideas?

Busting another Darwinist Myth: Have ID Proponents Invented Terms like "Microevolution" and "Macroevolution"?

Casey Luskin September 13, 2007 12:54 AM |

In 2005 I busted the Darwinist myth that ID-proponents have invented terms like "Darwinist" or "Darwinism" by noting that, well, Darwinists themselves have long-used such terms to describe themselves and their viewpoints. Jonathan Wells also recentlybusted this same myth, and Anika Smith recently busted the myththat evolution is not "random." In 2006, I also busted the myth that skeptics of neo-Darwinism don't exist outside the United States.

When engaging in debates, every once in a while I hear the claim that Darwin-critics also invented terms like "microevolution" or "macroevolution." For example, Jonathan Wells reports, "In 2005, Darwinist Gary Hurd claimed that the distinction between microevolution and macroevolution was just a creationist fabrication. ... Hurd wrote to the Kansas State Board of Education: "...'macro' and 'micro' evolution ... have no meaning outside of creationist polemics." (Jonathan Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, pgs. 55-56). This is also a Darwinian urban legend, for such terms have been used regularly in the scientific literature. Indeed, textbooks commonly teach this terminology, including two of the textbooks I used in college when learning about evolutionary biology.

The glossary of my college introductory biology text, Campbell's Biology (4th Ed.) states: "macroevolution: Evolutionary change on a grand scale, encompassing the origin of novel designs, evolutionary trends, adaptive radiation, and mass extinction." Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology, a text I used for an upper-division evolutionary biology course, states, "In Chapters 2h3 through 25, we will analyze the principles of MACROEVOLUTION, that is, the origin and diversification of higher taxa." (pg. 447, emphasis in original). Similarly, these textbooks respectively define "microevolution" as "a change in the gene pool of a population over a succession of generations" and "slight, short-term evolutionary changes within species." Clearly Darwin-skeptics did not invent these terms.

Other scientific texts use the terms. In his 1989 McGraw Hill textbook, Macroevolutionary Dynamics, Niles Eldredge admits that "[m]ost families, orders, classes, and phyla appear rather suddenly in the fossil record, often without anatomically intermediate forms smoothly interlinking evolutionarily derived descendant taxa with their presumed ancestors." (pg. 22) Similarly, Steven M. Stanley titles one of his books, Macroevolution: Pattern and Process (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998 version), where he notes that, "[t]he known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphological transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid." (pg. 39)

The scientific journal literature also uses the terms "macroevolution" or "microevolution." In 1980, Roger Lewin reported in Science on a major meeting at the University of Chicago that sought to reconcile biologists' understandings of evolution with the findings of paleontology. Lewin reported, "The central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macroevolution. At the risk of doing violence to the positions of some of the people at the meeting, the answer can be given as a clear, No." (Roger Lewin, "Evolutionary Theory Under Fire," Science, Vol. 210:883-887, Nov. 1980.)

Two years earlier, Robert E. Ricklefs had written in an article in Science entitled "Paleontologists confronting macroevolution," contending:

The punctuated equilibrium model has been widely accepted, not because it has a compelling theoretical basis but because it appears to resolve a dilemma. ... apart from its intrinsic circularity (one could argue that speciation can occur only when phyletic change is rapid, not vice versa), the model is more ad hoc explanation than theory, and it rests on shaky ground.

(Science, Vol. 199:58-60, Jan. 6, 1978.)

Finally, in 2000 Douglas Erwin wrote a paper the journal Evolution and Development entitled "Macroevolution is more than repeated rounds of microevolution" where he explained the historical controversy over whether microevolutionary processes can explain macroevolutionary change:

Arguments over macroevolution versus microevolution have waxed and waned through most of the twentieth century. Initially, paleontologists and other evolutionary biologists advanced a variety of non-Darwinian evolutionary processes as explanations for patterns found in the fossil record, emphasizing macroevolution as a source of morphologic novelty. Later, paleontologists, from Simpson to Gould, Stanley, and others, accepted the primacy of natural selection but argued that rapid speciation produced a discontinuity between micro- and macroevolution. This second phase emphasizes the sorting of innovations between species. Other discontinuities appear in the persistence of trends (differential success of species within clades), including species sorting, in the differential success between clades and in the origination and establishment of evolutionary novelties. These discontinuities impose a hierarchical structure to evolution and discredit any smooth extrapolation from allelic substitution to large-scale evolutionary patterns. Recent developments in comparative developmental biology suggest a need to reconsider the possibility that some macroevolutionary discontinuities may be associated with the origination of evolutionary innovation. The attractiveness of macroevolution reflects the exhaustive documentation of large-scale patterns which reveal a richness to evolution unexplained by microevolution. If the goal of evolutionary biology is to understand the history of life, rather than simply document experimental analysis of evolution, studies from paleontology, phylogenetics, developmental biology, and other fields demand the deeper view provided by macroevolution.

(Douglas Erwin, "Macroevolution is more than repeated rounds of microevolution,"Evolution and Development, Vol. 2(2):78-84, 2000.)

So the next time a Darwinist tells you that scientists don't use terms like "microevolution" or "macroevolution," remind them why this claim is a long-debunked myth!

Sleight of hand.

Flying Fish in the Darwin Magic Show

Evolution News & Views November 6, 2012 5:56 AM 

First there was one; now, like magic, there are two independent flying fish families that "evolved." They just evolved.

Saying something doesn't make it so. Darwinists have a bad habit of saying this or that wonder "evolved" with no sense of obligation to say how it evolved. Tracking down the individual lucky accidents that led to a complex adaptation (behavior included) is too hard, so here's what they do: assume evolution, then just assert that the trait evolved, because evolution is already assumed to be a fact.

Worse, they say that it "evolved so that" the animal could do something, like fly. This is a technical foul in evolutionary theory. Evolution cannot plan to arrange mutations toward a goal. If it were a law of nature that one animal "evolved to" fly, then science would predict every animal would fly, including pigs. In the following case, we see how evolutionists commit these fouls. Most fish evolve to swim, we have been taught, but two families independently "evolved so that" they could fly as well.

The BBC News reports the discovery of an "exceptionally preserved" fossil of a flying fish in Middle Triassic strata from China, dated 235-242 million years ago. Nothing in the data or pictures would lead an impartial observer to conclude unguided Darwinian evolution produced this fish. The artist reconstruction shows a beautifully adapted fish with fins outstretched to glide over the water, as modern flying fish do.

The observations, please:

The study shows that the new flying fish, named Potanichthys xingyiensis, was 153mm long and had the "unusual combination of morphological features" associated with gliding strategy in fishes.

This is the earliest known fossil of a flying fish, and it is already well adapted for flying. Moreover, it was found on the opposite side of the world (China) from previously known fossils of its family, found in Austria and Italy.

Weaved around these sentences are statements about geographical distribution, species count and other empirical matters. The magic act begins when we are told that these fish are among the survivors of a mass extinction that destroyed most of earth's species:

The Triassic period saw the re-establishment of ecosystems after the Permian mass extinction.

The fossils represent new evidence that marine ecosystems re-established more quickly than previously thought.

In evolutionary parlance, "re-established" does not mean simply that the numbers of survivors increased. It means that Evolution told life to be fruitful and multiply, to once again fill the earth and the seas. The agent of this creation is natural selection, producing endless forms most beautiful after destroying 90% of them.

At the end of this Darwinian trick, the magician announces the evolutionary climax:

Gliding has evolved many times in animals, such as in frogs, lizards and mammals but has "evolved only twice among fishes", according to the study: once in the Triassic Thoracopteridae fishes and again in the modern-day Exocoetidae family.

Scientists suggest both families of flying fishes evolved so that they could escapemarine predators by "gliding" over-water to safety. (Emphasis added.)

You may applaud now, please.

It may well be that flying fish gained their adaptations from fish that did not have them. It would seem improbable, but not impossible, to imagine the fins growing longer as certain fish leaped above the water to avoid predators. Perhaps this kind of adaptability is itself a product of design. But with no fossil record of the transition, we need a lot more than a Darwinian evolutionist's word for it that a blind, purposeless process produced a functional adaptation.

Instead, we are told that these fish "evolved so that they could escape predators by 'gliding' over-water to safety." No transitional forms are needed; no accounting of mutations is required. The magic occurs in a black box the audience can't see, and presto! -- a fully functioning flying fish leaps above the water, complete with brain software to know how to use its new equipment.

If we demanded that evolutionists drop all teleological language to be consistent with their anti-teleological worldview, evolution would be a very boring act. If we insisted on looking into the black box to see how the trick was done, there would be a loud hissing sound as the hot air escapes. What would be left, if anything, would undoubtedly be a finely tuned, designed mechanism for producing adaptive change. That's not natural selection; that's intelligent design.