***
Gabriel Hanna wrote:
That’s evolution. On the human time scale you can seen it in bacteria and insects, for the longer scale there’s the fossil record.
***
Not quite. Alan Linton, in his 2001 review of Niles Eldredge’s book ‘The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism’ (The Times Higher Education Supplement; 14, May, 2007) states:
But where is the experimental evidence [for evoltion]? None exists in the literature claiming that one species has been shown to evolve into another. Bacteria, the simplest form of independent life, are ideal for this kind of study, with generation times of 20 to 30 minutes, and populations achieved after 18 hours. But throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another, in spite of the fact that populations have been exposed to potent chemical and physical mutagens and that, uniquely, bacteria possess extrachromosomal, transmissible plasmids. Since there is no evidence for species changes between the simplest forms of unicellular life, it is not surprising that there is no evidence for evolution from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells, let alone throughout the whole array of higher multicellular organisms.
