This has been explained many times and you either ignore it or don't understand it. Which is it?
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Try explaining it.
~TW~
Here we go... again...
Evolution - the observed phenomena of organisms gaining, changing or losing traits over generations.
The Theory of Evolution - the post-Darwinian theory that suggests the observed phenomenon of evolution occurs via natural selection acting upon otherwise random variation within communities of a given species to favour those traits which give a competitive (i.e. reproductive) advantage within a given environment.
Natural Selection - the process whereby circumstance favours the continuance of traits that offer an advantage to a species in a given environment: i.e. traits which make it more likely an individual will feed, survive and/or reproduce, leading to those traits being preserved in the descendant generations.
Random variation - the emergence of minor (and very occasionally significant) differences between individuals and their offspring.
Natural selection acts upon random variation (which we now know to be primarily genetic in origin) to lead communities of an organism towards localised optimisation. Where different environments place different selective pressures on communities of similar organisms then the communities tend to diverge until they are sufficiently different that we classify them as different species - this is called 'speciation'.
Now, which part of this is that you either a) still don't grasp or b) think you have a reason to discredit?
O.
Try this http://creation.com/attenborough-darwin-tree
~TW~
Why, it's repeatedly debunked lies, misrepresentation, selectively misquoted nonsense and ad hominem attacks, which even within its own pages accepts all the elements of the Theory of Evolution depicted above but then claims that it didn't happen. Why don't YOU try explaining what YOU think is the problem, seeing as I went to the effort of actually responding to your challenge.
Anyway, here you go:
“He called the process ‘natural selection’. That would explain the differences that he had noted in the finches that he had brought back from the Galápagos.”
Not correct on two counts:
Darwin did not originate the term ‘natural selection’.
No-one said he did - he defined it in a way that hadn't been popularised before, and he did so within a work that explained why that was a vital element in evolution and the presence of the vast diversity of species in the world.
Darwin did not note any differences in the finches he collected in the Galápagos Islands, as his biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore point out. They wrote:
In all, he [Darwin] shot six types of finches from three islands, and his samples from two of these were mixed together. … he had tagged his specimens in a desultory manner and had rarely bothered to label by island. It had not seemed important.2
He remained confused by the Galápagos finches, believing that they fed indiscriminately together, unaware of the importance of their different beaks. Come to that, he still had trouble identifying the species, or their locations; and he still thought that his collection contained finches, wrens, ‘Grossbeaks’, and ‘Icteruses’ (blackbird-relatives). He had no sense of a single, closely related group becoming specialized and adapted to different environmental niches. The birds did not seem that important when he donated them to the Zoological Society, rather badly labelled, on the 4th [January 1837].
From the Wikipedia entry on 'Darwin's Finches' (accessed 15/10/15)
"Darwin had been in Cambridge at that time. In early March, he met Gould again and for the first time got a full report on the findings, including the point that his Galápagos "wren" was another closely allied species of finch. The mockingbirds that Darwin had labelled by island were separate species rather than just varieties. Gould found more species than Darwin had expected,[11] and concluded that 25 of the 26 land birds were new and distinct forms, found nowhere else in the world but closely allied to those found on the South American continent.[10] Darwin now saw that, if the finch species were confined to individual islands, like the mockingbirds, this would help to account for the number of species on the islands, and he sought information from others on the expedition. Specimens had also been collected by Captain Robert FitzRoy, FitzRoy’s steward Harry Fuller and Darwin's servant Covington, who had labelled them by island.[12] From these, Darwin tried to reconstruct the locations from where he had collected his own specimens. The conclusions supported his idea of the transmutation of species."
So no, at the time, not being an ornithologist and not having formulated his theory, he didn't place any particular significance on them. Later, though, with more data... he produced a world-changing scientific theory that has been repeatedly validated over the following century.
However, this is what biblical creationists (both before and after Darwin) believe happened, not as the result of evolution but as a consequence of Noah’s Flood and the subsequent migration of animals (including birds) via continents and islands, following their disembarkation from the Ark on the mountains of Ararat.
There is no evidence of a world-wide flood. Geological, anthropological and cultural evidence suggests that humankind has been around for more than 6000 years. Genetic morphology suggests that humanity has existed for tens or hundreds of thousands of years (depending on the exact cut off in the tree that you consider to be humanity). Archaeological evidence shows that life has been around for billions of years. The distribution of life-forms is not consistent with a six-thousand year diaspora from the middle-
East, but it is consistent with the geological model of plate tectonics splitting a supercontinent around 200 million years ago.
Genetic comparison shows, for instance, that the orders Felidae ("The 41 known cat species in the world today are all descended from the same ancestor.[1] Cats originated in Asia and spread across continents by crossing land bridges. Testing of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA revealed that the ancient cats evolved into eight main lineages that diverged in the course of at least 10 migrations" - Wikipedia 'Felidae') and Canidae (Dogs and wolves) split around 50 million years ago from a common ancestor ('Canids have a long evolutionary history. In the Eocene, about 50 million years ago, the carnivorans split into two lineages, the caniforms (dog-like) and feliforms (cat-like). By the Oligocene, some ten million years later, the first proper canids had appeared and the family had split into three subfamilies, Hesperocyoninae, Borophaginae, and Caninae. Only the last of these has survived until the present day.' Wikipedia - 'Canids')
Suppose some finches with the genetic information for a wide variety of beaks came to the islands in a storm. And that some were on an island where the main food source was hard seeds. Birds with genes for thick and strong beaks could cope with them better, so would be better fed, and thus more likely to leave offspring. But birds on an island with few seeds but lots of grubs would do better with longer and thinner beaks, so they could poke deeper into the ground and pull out their prey.
This is indeed an example of adaptation and natural selection. But note that it actually removes alleles (gene variant) from the populations—on seed-rich islands with few grubs, information for long slender beaks would likely be lost; while the information for thick strong beaks would be lost on grub-rich (seed-poor) islands.
Sarfati's hypothesis is perfectly valid, but there is no evidence for a species with all this genetic capacity. Given that the genes that control beak-form all occupy the same spaces on comparative genomes from finch species to finch species, there would have to be a markedly different gene structure on any predecessor according to Sarfati's idea, which would have meant that the first selected bird wouldn't have been able to successfully breed with any others and the species would have died out.
So this change is in the opposite direction from goo-to-you evolution, which requires new genes with new information.
No, evolution does not require new genes or new information - it requires new data, which we see in random mutation of existing genes. There is no information until the data is processed.
It can hardly be over-emphasized: natural selection is not evolution;
Nobody ever said it was - natural selection over time operating on variation leads to evolution. Evolution is the observed phenomenon.
Readers may be surprised to know that some evolutionists are now rejecting the concept of the evolutionary tree of life, as indicated by the cover story of New Scientist 24 January 2009. According to New Scientist Features Editor Graham Lawton (p. 34): “The tree of life … has turned out to be a figment of our imagination.”
Yes... and no. The idea of common ancestry is not the part that's being revised, the part that's being revised is the idea that branches, once separated, remain independent. There is evidence that, particularly in the interactions between unicellular life such as bacteria and more complicated lifeforms, that traits are acquired from other species and passed on, resulting in a form of merging of branches.
Recombination of existing genes can produce enormous variety within a kind, but the variation is limited by the genes present. For example, if there are no genes present for producing feathers, you could breed reptiles for a billion years and you would never get feathers.
Except that, with time, we see viable structural changes to genetic structure of organisms and to gene sequencing. Purely as an example, the condition known Down Syndrome is caused by a third copy of an entire chromosome. This is a rather drastic variation, but nevertheless biologically viable and a demonstration of how genetic structure can alter and then be subject to selective pressures which could result in novel features.
Humans can and do produce different breeds of dogs or cattle or horses, etc., but such artificial selection proceeds in the same way as natural selection, i.e. by removing genes.
No, natural selection and artificial selection do not work by 'removing genes'. They work by concentrating particular variants of specific genes to reduce variety.
...and why is this done? For no other reason, I am sure, than to make us independent of a Creator.
Sedgewick is entitled to his opinion, but Darwin's own words suggest that he published because, as a scientist, he though that the evidence supported the idea and it should be discussed.
Why “imaginary illustrations”? Well, when you can’t cite a single real-life example of natural selection producing anything new, the only resources left are imaginary ones.
As we now have sufficient evidence to know that evolution occurs over thousands of generations, which can take tens of thousands of years with macroscopic organisms, that's hardly a surprise. The theory stands, though, on the evidence presented at the time, and has been vindicated by experiments and observations of rapidly reproducing organisms where evolution has been observed to occur.
There's more crap about 'transitional species', but frankly I'm bored with the deceit, ignorance and futile self-indulgence.
Evolution is a fact, we see it happening. The theory of evolution is remarkably well-attested, widely tested and fantastically capable explanation of how evolution happens.
O.
