Summations Only

That's not how I would characterize things. You were insisting on a bogus definition of evolution over the repeated objections of most of the posters here, including the ones who worked in biological fields and were familiar with the subject. That was not generosity. That was just plain pigheadedness.And of course, your objective, which I assume now you'll have to punt on, was to attack the theory of evolution by murmuring about common descent not being proven. Looks like that "generous" attack vector is also off the maneuvering board.I'm sure you will dredge up something else. Can't wait.

‘ resistance to poisons is rarely a free ride for either insects or other organisms, because the selective trade-offs imposed by pleiotropy often maintain polymorphism either within or between populations of a species. Some populations of Norway rats, for example, have evolved resistance to the rat poison warfarin. Where the poison is in widespread use, homozygotes for the allele that confers resistance are common. But that allele also lowers rats’ ability to synthesize vitamin K, a compound essential in allowing blood to clot, and they bleed more easily. For that reason, in places where warfarin is not used, individuals homozygous for this allele are at as much as a 54 percent selective disadvantage compared to wild-type rats, and the allele is far less common. The same sort of phenomenon has been demonstrated for the alleles that confer resistance to DDT and to dieldrin in mosquitoes.’
Levine, J. and Miller, K., Biology: Discovering Life, D.C. Heath, Lexington, p. 257, 1994.Researchers monitoring Culex pipiens mosquitoes overwintering in a cave in southern France (in an area where organophosphate insecticides are widely used) noted a decline in the overall frequency of insecticide-resistant mosquitoes relative to susceptible ones as the winter progressed, indicating a large fitness cost.
Gazave, E., Chevillon, C., Lenormand, T., Marquine, M., Raymond, M., Dissecting the cost of insecticide resistance genes during the overwintering period of the mosquito Culex pipiens, Heredity 87:441—448, 2001

Rejection of the ToE is directly proportional to the incidence of wisdom.Creation is the theory that fits the facts.
Evolution is the theory the facts don't fit.

Design by an omniscient Designer explains it all just fine.

"Useful to applied science" is not a defining criterion in science.What is not useful now may be most useful in a few years.And in either case, creationists are not the judge of what is useful to science and what is not. They are more like fleas trying to tell the dog which path to take.

Acceptance of bible literalism is inversely proportional to scientific knowledge.

And you seem to think the opposite. Very misguided of you.Understanding how something works is never useless, whereas ignorance of how it works is never useful.One of the most useful by-products of an answer to a scientific question (ie, "how does this work?") are more questions. In fact, it is a very poor scientific answer that does not produce more questions. Those new questions that you didn't even know to ask before are what direct further research. Without those new questions, science would grind to a halt. Please note that "goddidit" is an extremely poor answer in science because it does absolutely nothing towards answering the question of how things work, plus it raises no new questions thus killing science.Part of the benefit of understanding how something works are clues about how something else works. Which extends a scientific answer's new questions to other related scientific problems. That is most definitely not useless.And eventually somebody does find a practical use for the results of pure research. What about Einsteinian relativity? Pure theory, right? Useless according to you, right? Really? Really?Ever use GPS (Global Positioning System)? Or know somebody who uses GPS? GPS depends on measuring time very precisely, particularly the time that it takes for a GPS signal to travel from a GPS satellite to your GPS receiver. A fundamental problem with that is created by the relativisitic effects on the GPS satellites and your GPS receiver because they are in very different places within the earth's gravity well. For that matter, you see the same effect on the various atomic clocks that maintain our time standard which is then uploaded periodically to the GPS satellite constellation (twice a day, I think, but at the very least once). The various atomic clocks are located at different elevations and hence at different levels of the earth's gravity well and hence are themselves subject to relativistic effects.Relativity is a theory. You would proclaim it to be useless. Ever use GPS or know somebody who uses GPS? Duh?Also, in another message you used that old creationist canard, "Evolution is just a theory." In doing so, you proclaimed your own abject ignorance of science and how it works. Thank you for admitting that you have no idea what you are talking about -- or else you do know better but have chosen to lie because your god can only be served by lies and deception (according to standard Christian doctrine, wouldn't that god be Satan?). Reading suggestion for you: The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage by Clifford Stoll (1989). It is the story of how PhD Astronomy candidate Clifford Stoll accidentally became a computer security expert. He was the subject of a Nova episode on PBS, "The KGB, the Computer, and Me", in which he played himself -- that is how I had learned about him. Don't worry; it's a very easy and entertaining read.That cloak-and-dagger cyber-adventure happened when he was completing his PhD Astronomy and had to work in the meantime as a sysadmin at UC Berkeley. In the book, he describes his oral exams.One professor asked him, "Why is the sky blue?" Simple question to answer? Not in the least! I forget exactly, but it took him between two to four hours to answer that question. Physics of light, chemistry of the atmosphere, and I forget what else.Answering that question taps into all aspects of physics, which themselves are the foundation of so much other physics, some of which have also produced practical technological applications.Do you see a pattern here?

As you have now apparently discovered, common descent is not a theory. Progress of sorts. Yes, wrongly as you now accept.I've been here a few years now and have noticed that the crazier creationists - the real fruitcakes - speak of themselves in this third party way. You need to keep a watch on yourself.

The change was caused by a mutation in the early 19th century.

quote:

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Scientists have discovered the specific mutation that famously turned moths black during the Industrial Revolution.
In an iconic evolutionary case study, a black form of the peppered moth rapidly took over in industrial parts of the UK during the 1800s, as soot blackened the tree trunks and walls of its habitat.
Now, researchers from the University of Liverpool have pinpointed the genetic change that caused this adaptation.
They have also calculated the most likely date for the mutation - 1819.

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"We knew that within that 400,000 bases, there was some sequence that had to... cause the actual difference between the black type and the typical type," Dr Saccheri explained.
"So we went about an excruciatingly tedious process of identifying every single difference between the two types."
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Specifically, they estimate the DNA jump happened in a 10-year window centred on 1819 - a date that fits perfectly with a gradual spread of the mutation through the population, until black moths were first spotted in 1848.

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Famous peppered moth's dark secret revealed - BBC News

Cornelius Hunter has a different view in his blog post How the Peppered Moth BackfiredWhile agreeing that it is a recent mutation he says;
First, changing colors is hardly a pathway leading to the kinds of massive biological change evolution requires.
Second, research strongly suggests that the cause of the darkening, at the molecular level, is an enormous genetic insertion not in a DNA coding sequence, but in an intervening region (intron), which have been considered to be junk DNA in the past.

and this "backfires" how?Enjoy

I see that Tangle has provided some additional information. I am curious as to what it would take for you to check your answer before posting. While I am aware of how selection works, I am also aware that mutations occur, and I wouldn't assume without checking that a relatively recent (the early 1800s it turns out) mutation was not involved.Your peer CRR at least has not made the same mistake.Everyone should know better than to speak repeatedly from ignorance, yet you do not.Edited by NoNukes, : acknowledge CRR's post

Yes, by god, it's still a moth! Yes, a mutation.So we have a beneficial mutation plus natural selection leading to a change in phenotype in response to a change in the environment.A perfectly demonstrated example of the predicted components of one form of the evolutionary process.

If you took a polar bear and plopped it down in the Sahara desert it probably wouldn't last but a few days before dying. Does that mean the polar bear is not well adapted to its native environment? Is there a large fitness cost for adapting to the cold?

How so? Why would a designer create life so that molecular phylogenies correlate to phylogenies based on physical characteristics?