Gabriel Hanna wrote:
Since your definition of evolution seems to be “one species turns into another”,…
My definition?
In the introduction to his book ‘The Origin of Species’, Darwin’s states:
In considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that naturalist, reflecting on the mutual affinities of organic beings, on their embryological relations, their geographical distribution, geological succession, and other such facts, might come to the conclusion that each species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species. Nevertheless, such a conclusion.
[...]
I am fully convinced that species are not immutable, but that those belonging to the same genera are lineal descendants of some other and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the acknowledged varieties of one species are the descendants of that species.
(The Origin of Species: Complete and Fully Illustrated; Gramercy Books, 1979; pp. 66, 69)
Indeed, the whole premise of Darwin’s theory was that, as quoted above, species are not immutable.
In their book The Myths of Human Evolution, Eldredge and Tattersall state:
[M]ost major change is related to speciation events. Certainly no one has ever shown much real evolutionary change to occur in lineages where there has been little or no speciation.
Stephen Jay Gould’s huge book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory is filled with passages like the following:
But punctuated equilibrium suggests another, remarkably simple, explanation once you begin to think in this alternative mode…If evolutionary rate correlates primarily with frequency of speciation – the cardinal prediction of punctuated equilibrium – then living fossils may simply represent those groups at the left tail of the distribution for numbers of speciation events through time.
(p. 816)
Further, Berkeley’s evolution website defines evolution thusly:
Biological evolution, simply put, is descent with modification. This definition encompasses small-scale evolution (changes in gene frequency in a population from one generation to the next) and large-scale evolution (the descent of different species from a common ancestor over many generations). Evolution helps us to understand the history of life.
On Berkeley’s speciation page, they define the term:
Speciation is a lineage-splitting event that produces two or more separate species. Imagine that you are looking at a tip of the tree of life that constitutes a species of fruit fly. Move down the phylogeny to where your fruit fly twig is connected to the rest of the tree. That branching point, and every other branching point on the tree, is a speciation event. At that point genetic changes resulted in two separate fruit fly lineages, where previously there had just been one lineage. But why and how did it happen?
This isn’t my definition of evolution – it is Darwin’s and that of nearly every evolutionist that followed him.
Gabriel Hanna wrote:
…and since species are simply labels put on organisms for scientific convenience, your argument is dishonest.
Hardly – I am merely following Darwin and his disciples on this point. You are misinformed or ignorant at best and dishonest at worst.
Gabriel Hanna wrote:
No evidence can satisfy you. If the two organism are too similar, you’ll say they’re different but “the same species”; if they are too different you will say they are “different species” and I didn’t show you one “tunring into another”. It’s like asking me to show you two 2’s turning into a four. .
Not so. For instance, there must have been innumerable intermediates between a ‘mouse-ish’ creature and a bat. Somewhere (say, 2/3 along the way), there must have been a ‘mouse-ish’ thing with some very strange looking leg/wings. And they would be where?
However, it does seem that any evidence will satisfy you. To wit:
Evolution is the change, over time, of gene frequencies in a population. It’s not “one species turning into another”.
Nice dodge. Nobody disagrees with ‘change, over time, of gene frequencies in a population’. That is observable and repeatable. What many take issue with is the completely baseless extrapolation of that observation to claim that all of life descended from one or a few common ancestors.
Apparently, you believe that ‘change, over time, of gene frequencies in a population’ can explain how, for instance, all mammals descended from a ‘shrew-like’ ancestor. That’s some pretty strong faith you have there.
