How do you define the word Evolution?

Curiously in both cases we note that science has moved on since those times, so what they said in the past does not necessarily apply to evolution science today ...... and most of the time Darwin is quoted is to correct false claims by creationists over what his work says.Keep the one-liners coming ... LOLEnjoy

Agreed. Do you mind if I keep a copy of this? There are a couple of other threads I could use this on. Indeed, but I'm also not sure that a Chihuahua and a Great Dane would breed voluntarily, even though artificial insemination would likely produce results. We are not in a position to force hybridization on them, no, but we can observe the gap between them and assume that at that point they were not interbreeding voluntarily. I would not be surprised if genetic incompatibility had not developed at this point, as that generally takes time, if it does occur (it would also take mutations to block compatibility, as in the diversification of zebras, donkeys and horses making their hybrids sterile).What we can also observe is that descendant fossils show increased diversion between one and the other branch.We can also observe that anagenesis was occurring from Pelycodus ralstoni to Pelycodus jarrovii:

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Anagenesis, also known as "phyletic transformation", and in contrast to cladogenesis, is the process in which a species, gradually accumulating change, eventually becomes sufficiently distinct from its ancestral form that it may be labeled a new species (a new form). When this is deemed to occur, no branching or splitting off of new taxa in the lineage is shown in a phylogenetic tree. When no populations of the ancestor species remain the ancestral species can then be considered as being extinct.

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This is also called "arbitrary speciation" because the distinction point is arbitrarily chosen and a bit subjective.We can also observe that if we ignore one branch at a time that we see continued anagenesis. It is only when we observer both branches that we see cladogenesis occurring:

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Cladogenesis is an evolutionary splitting event where a parent species splits into two distinct species, forming a clade.[1]

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Again this would be similar to a "kind" reproducing and generating new species within the "kind" Then we are in general agreement at this point.Enjoy

Possibly there is an "early warning" system that the fetus unchecked would become bigger than the mother ... It might be more useful to consider them a "ring species" where there can be gene flow between intermediates but the extremes wouldn't breed. Agreed, and camel/llama, tiger/lion hybrids have been made via artificial insemination, so I don't think we can insist on genetic incompatibility as a necessary aspect of speciation, to me all that is required is isolation behavior -- failure to breed when there is opportunity, because incompatible behavior (wrong bird mating song, wrong sexual display dance, etc) -- so that gene flow is interrupted.Curiously we can see a pattern in hominini history of separation, rejoining that mixes separately selected mutations, and then separation again: [quote]And I also recall the discussion on New Species of Homo Discovered: Homo nalediHomo[/i] Discovered: Homo naledi of a "braided" history ... from the article:

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This Face Changes the Human Story. But How?

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Berger himself thinks the right metaphor for human evolution, instead of a tree branching from a single root, is a braided stream: a river that divides into channels, only to merge again downstream. Similarly, the various hominin types that inhabited the landscapes of Africa must at some point have diverged from a common ancestor. But then farther down the river of time they may have coalesced again, so that we, at the river’s mouth, carry in us today a bit of East Africa, a bit of South Africa, and a whole lot of history we have no notion of whatsoever. ...

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Because Homo naledi is a mosaic of features some modern derived features and some preserved ancestral features, and that applies to other species, such that there is some mixing and matching going on, this suggests some hybridization in the past. We also know from DNA analysis that there was some hybridization with Homo neanderthalus (alt Homo sapiens neanderthalus )[/quote]Also see Interweaving Evolution & Hybrid VigorIt should come as no surprise that some hybridization occurs in the early stages of daughter population division.Enjoy

And also as a shorthand for the Science of Evolution as a field of study.Evolution is often referred to as "Biological Evolution" when people are distinguishing it from the other types, and the theory is often referred to as ToE to distinguish it from the process of evolution: My problem with the "allele definition" is first, that it is difficult to apply to fossils, and second, that it doesn't refer to selection. Thus my definition has been developed on this forum to include these in as concise a manner as possible. Many here have had input to it and critiqued it (peer review?), so it has been modified along the way to get to this version.see MACROevolution vs MICROevolution - what is it? for more, especially Message 157Enjoy

Correct. I posted a rather complete rundown of microevolution and how it becomes macroevolution (as defined by evolution science) in Message 157 on MACROevolution vs MICROevolution - what is it?, where I express the theory as You'll have to read that post to see what anagenesis and cladogenesis are. Both. Selection is mostly on the phenotype, but some occurs on the genotype. Indeed, and this is pared down from an earlier version because it was getting unwieldy. Genetic drift is important to explain some results, especially when a stochastic event causes a bottleneck or where a founding population moving into a new ecology is small.All neutral mutations are reserved by chance, perhaps tacked onto a beneficial gene and taken for a ride (or a deleterious one and lost) until another mutation turns the combination beneficial.Enjoy

Good, then we can go with that and see where the evidence leads us Except that when we follow the evidence through the spacial-temporal matrix we do not see a common bottleneck of breeding populations at a common point in the past, nor do we see any radiation of diversity from a single point on the globe.What we do see are lines of descent tracing paths over the globe that are consistent with evolution of species and the geological changes over time. This explains marsupials in Australia, but not in the Middle East and surrounding continents, it explains marsupials making it to South America and then the lonely Possum making it to North America. It explains placental mammals making it from Africa, Asia and European continents to North and South America, but not to Australia. If that designer uses evolutionary processes with little concern over what species live or die.As a Deist my personal belief is that this designer/god made the universe primed for the development of life, using what we see as scientific processes and laws (from gravity to evolution) with but a single command: "Surprise Me" ...See Panspermic Pre-Biotic Molecules - Life's Building Blocks (Part I)
and Self-Replicating Molecules - Life's Building Blocks (Part II) - Self-Replicating Molecules - Life's Building Blocks, Part IIWhich, sadly for you, is not a history book. A better source are cave drawings that accurately record species now extinct living at the time of early Cro-magnon humans, where the "earliest known cave paintings/drawings of animals are at least 35,000 years old ..."Which gets us back to Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1 ... (which also has evidence that no global flood occurred). Microevolution, anagenesis and cladogenesis, causing the hierarchy of nested clades to expand, grow, and add diversity all around us in a continuous process.Enjoy

It's not a no-no so much as a non-sequitur. The experiments show different lines of anagenesis all starting with one cloned organism and then dividing the offspring of following generation.Why would it be evidence for "the theory that all life shares a common ancestor" Dredge?Enjoy

So why did the creator make all those genetic markers in just the right places to show common ancestry?Enjoy

Somehow I don't think god resting is part of any definition of evolution.Thanks.

There is. It is evolution.(1) is macroevolution, looking at the process of evolution over many many generations, looking back over billions of years of accumulated evolution, while ignoring the generation to generation of specific species in between.(2) is microevolution and macroevolution, looking at the process of evolution from generation to generation. Testing each generation for changes, for adaptations (selected mutations). Observing when new traits emerge causing a functional difference from the original population. Anagenesis, continuing evolution making the offspring species observably different from the parent. Artificial cladogenesis, via forced division of offspring populations into different lineages, that then evolve independent of one another. All within one human lifetime.The connection is that evolution is occurring generation after generation after generation. Nothing more, nothing less.Enjoy

Politicians.They are full of hot air and seldom are grounded in reality, but float in a bubble world of their own making.

The we'll need to define macroevolution ... because you can bet some creationists get it wrong.eg -- what does "evolution above the species level" mean ...EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : .

Because Humans are of one "kind" and apes from another ... so that type of evolution does not occur in their paradigm.Certainly it is according to scientific usage ...

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(Berkeley): An introduction to evolution

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... and large-scale evolution (the descent of different species from a common ancestor over many generations).

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Over a large number of years, evolution produces tremendous diversity in forms of life.

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Through the process of descent with modification, the common ancestor of life on Earth gave rise to the fantastic diversity that we see documented in the fossil record and around us today. Evolution means that we're all distant cousins: humans and oak trees, hummingbirds and whales.

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(UMich): The Process of Speciation

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• Definition 2:

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The gradual change of living things from one form into another over the course of time, the origin of species and lineages by descent of living forms from ancestral forms, and the generation of diversity

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... The second definition emphasizes the appearance of new, physically distinct life forms that can be grouped with similar appearing life forms in a taxonomic hierarchy. It commonly is referred to as macroevolution.

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Note that both these definitions say that the evolution is still within the breeding population and that what makes it macroevolution is the accumulation of microevolutionary changes over many generations.What we do NOT have is some mysterious morphing into a new and different species or a new and different "kind"by some unidentified process.Enjoy

Nope, he tried to define reality out of existence.

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The definition of macroevolution is surprisingly non-precise for a scientific discipline. Macroevolution can be defined as evolution above the species level, or evolution on a ‘grand scale’, or microevolution + 3.8 billion years. It has never been observed, ...

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As I said above, the "evolution above the species level" would be misunderstood (misinterpreted or misused).Unfortunately it does not matter how he defines it, because science gets to define the terms used in science (and if you want to debate the science you need to use the scientific meanings, not something made up).In science macroevolution is anagenesis and cladogenesis, and both have been observed and documented. Thus Macroevolution -- the scientific version -- has been observed and Kirk Durston is simply wrong.Enjoy

But there is -- as I showed -- broad consensus within the biological scientific community on these meanings. And yet every living thing on earth has a unique species name, and there is broad consensus within the biological scientific community on their meanings. The differences, such as they are, are in the details.For instance species encompasses a breeding population -- any organism that can't breed with that population cannot be part of that species -- and the disagreement is whether interbreeding between two populations cannot happen due to genetic changes or whether it just does not occur because of behavior differences: a distinction without a functional difference.

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{wikipedia: Species Problem} Mayr's Biological Species Concept

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Ernst Mayr's 1942 book was a turning point for the species problem.[14] In it, he wrote about how different investigators approach species identification, and he characterized their approaches as species concepts. He argued for what came to be called the Biological Species Concept (BSC), that a species consists of populations of organisms that can reproduce with one another and that are reproductively isolated from other populations, though he was not the first to define "species" on the basis of reproductive compatibility.[8] For example, Mayr discusses how Buffon proposed this kind of definition of "species" in 1753. Theodosius Dobzhansky was a contemporary of Mayr and the author of a classic book about the evolutionary origins of reproductive barriers between species, published a few years before Mayr's.[13] Many biologists credit Dobzhansky and Mayr jointly for emphasizing reproductive isolation.[15][16]

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After Mayr's book, some two dozen species concepts were introduced. Some, such as the Phylogenetic Species Concept (PSC), were designed to be more useful than the BSC for describing species. Many authors have professed to "solve" or "dissolve" the species problem.[17][18][19][20][21][22][23] Some have argued that the species problem is too multidimensional to be "solved" by any one concept.[24][25] Since the 1990s, others have argued that concepts intended to help describe species have not helped to resolve the species problem.[24][26][27][28][29] Although Mayr promoted the BSC for use in systematics, some systematists have criticized it as not operational.[30][31][32][33] For others, the BSC is the preferred definition of species. Many geneticists who work on speciation prefer the BSC because it emphasizes the role of reproductive isolation.[34] It has been argued that the BSC is a natural consequence of the effect of sexual reproduction on the dynamics of natural selection.[35][36][37][38]

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The BSC is fairly well accepted as a means to define species, and what you will likely find in most college textbooks on evolution. While creationists can't agree on what a "kind" encompasses. The better one's imho are those that use cladistics and nested hierarchies, which means accepting evolution and biological species ... Macroevolution is ...

• "the descent of different species from a common ancestor over many generations" Berkeley
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  ie - the development of nested clades of new species ...
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• "The gradual change of living things from one form into another over the course of time, the origin of species and lineages by descent of living forms from ancestral forms, and the generation of diversity." UMich
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  ie - anagenesis, cladogenesis and the formation of nested clades ...
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• "... evolution on a scale at or above the level of species, in contrast with microevolution,[1] which refers to smaller evolutionary changes of allele frequencies within a species or population.[2] Macroevolution and microevolution describe fundamentally identical processes on different time scales.[3][4] ..." wikipedia
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  anagenesis, cladogenesis are evolution over a longer time scale than evolution within a species.

Wikipedia goes on to say:

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Macroevolution and the modern evolutionary synthesis.

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Within the modern evolutionary synthesis school of thought, macroevolution is thought of as the compounded effects of microevolution.[8] Thus, the distinction between micro- and macroevolution is not a fundamental one — the only difference between them is of time and scale. As Ernst W. Mayr observes, "transspecific evolution is nothing but an extrapolation and magnification of the events that take place within populations and species...it is misleading to make a distinction between the causes of micro- and macroevolution".[8] However, time is not a necessary distinguishing factor — macroevolution can happen without gradual compounding of small changes; whole-genome duplication can result in speciation occurring over a single generation - this is especially common in plants.[9]

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Changes in the genes regulating development have also been proposed as being important in producing speciation through large and relatively sudden changes in animals' morphology.[10][11]

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Again macroevolution is anagenesis and cladogenesis, evolution over a longer time scale than evolution within a species.So again there is broad consensus within the biological scientific community on these meanings. But I do get to use the scientific terminology definitions and I get to present them with my own words showing that I understand and accept those scientific usages.What do you suppose "evolution on a scale at or above the level of species, ..." means?When and how do new genera evolve?EnjoyEdited by Admin, : Fix URL dBCode.