Does microevolution logically include macroevolution?

That's your misunderstanding. Mutations can also be involved here. See Some mutations sound too good to be true. You would not have a variety of genes to shuffle, were it not for occurence of mutations. So that's pretty much the same thing.It seems that you have refuted your own claim.

Try to fathom the errors in the calculations ... see another thread on this topic:
the old improbable probability problem
EvC Forum: the old improbable probability problemor you can find more on it on the web at
Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Probability of Abiogenesis CalculationsBut the real problem with the calculations is that to model the reality with the math you have to understand the reality system very well, to the point where you can judge what assumptions are valid and what are not.Creationists typically make the calculations in such ways as to maximize the improbability of the calculation and not to make the system model reality.Enjoy.

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RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
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So long as your claims can be simply answered you are going to get simple answers. If you could come up with a real argument maybe you would get somewhere. Instead you persist in making assertiosn that you can't back up.And it seems that you don't have much of a clue about evolutionary theory.

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First of all, the difference between an otter and a dog is not only one protein substituion. It would require many simultaneous beneficial substitutions.

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If we're talking about evolution you should talk about SEQUENTIAL substitutions to turn a dog into an OTTER-LIKE mammal. Evolutionary theory predicts that that is possible but exactly reproducing an otter would be far less probable (possible in principle but highly unlikely).

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Better yet, let's how close someone can get to making an otter from a dog by artificially inducing random mutations.

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Without selection that would be futile. Increasing the mutation rate at selected points could make the process faster but that's all it could do.

No they are not. The whole micro/macro thing is creationist piffle. Evolution is evolution, there is no micro or macro. I don't see a significant difference between "shuffling around genes" and beneficial mutations.You seem to accept that what you call 'microevolution' happens. I'll use these terms if it makes it clearer for you. Ok, so if a population of a particular animal is dispersed into a few smaller groups that are isolated from each other, is it acceptable that 'microevolution' will still occur within these groups? Lets say yes for now, is it then reasonable to say that in the different groups, different genetic alterations or mutations will take place, and of those, different ones will be naturally selected according to the specific environment that each group lives in? Imagine this happenning over and over again, over millions of years. The separate groups keep having these little bits of 'microevolution' until they have changed enough that are not reproductively compatible with the other groups anymore, or to put it simply, they can't get it on. Well, they can try but they won't be able to produce any offspring. So what's left is a few groups of animals that may have many similarities, but enough differences that they cannot interbreed. Therefore they are now different species. This would be what you call 'macroevolution'. It's not a single big step, it's just a series of little steps that end up going off in a particular direction, achieving a unique result.Like, I cannot imagine my pet cat 'Jeb' would have much success mating with an African Lion, even though they're both feline!

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On the 7th day, God was arrested.

ToE will gladly agree with you that dogs will always exclusively give birth to dogs. Any offspring of dogs will always remain dogs, unless we as classifiers decide that we don't call them "dogs" any longer.What's the problem???(editops... I had to change 'any ancestors' in 'any offspring', obviously )This message has been edited by Annafan, 01-10-2005 05:12 PM

Hi Springer:I've jumped into this discussion a bit late, but I would like to ask why you keep making statements about breeding dogs to produce otters and other such nonsense, such as this:What point are your trying to make here? Seriously, what are you trying to convey with statements like this? Show me where ANY evolutionary biologist has ever made the claim that otters came from dogs, or bats came from rodents.
Look, a dog is a dog and an otter is an otter. Dogs will produce other dogs and otters will produce other otters. What the ToE tells us is that otters and dogs share a common ancestor...NOT that one gave rise to the other. They have diverged from this common ancestor to become what we call dogs and otters. By asking us to produce an otter from a dog, you are simply demonstrating complete ignorance about what the ToE actually says.I guess it would be possible to set up a dog breading program in such a manner that we could theoretically produce an animal that resembles an otter more than it resembles a dog, but it still would NOT be an otter. Hey, a good starting point would be to start crossing Labrador Retrievers with Dachshunds. Labs already have an oily coat and webbed feet while Dachshunds have the basic, tube-like body forms of an otter. What we would end up with, I have no idea. What I do know is that while it's entirely possible that it would no longer be a dog, it would also not be an otter, so what’s your point?Evolution can (and often does) result in the convergence of two species. Perhaps this is the area that leads to your confusion. Convergent evolution does not mean that two separate species will evolve into a single species. It simply means that two species may very well share many morphological, physiological, and behavioral characteristics if they have evolved in similar habitats, even if these habitats are on separate Continents. Perhaps this is the area of evolutionary biology that has led to your confusion.

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If macroevolutionary change has been so ubiquitous in the past, then why can no one demonstrate it in a laboratory?

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Um, because it takes a very, very long time?

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"Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism -- biblical literalism -- is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true." -- Katha Pollitt

I would think that if the various breeds of dogs were being classified now, and we didn't know that they had been bred from the same stock, that they would probably be classified as different species?It seems to me that there is a greater morphological difference between an Irish Wolfhound and a bulldog then there is between some of the other species of Canidae.

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Asgara
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Okay, I understand you probably aren't very good at math, so let's tackle this together.If the probablity of a mutation between a dog and an otter is ".0000000000000000002", and for easy math we'll say that dogs and otters breed at the same rate and put it at 3 years. That's longer than it takes dogs or otters to breed.Also, we're going to assume that the dogs only get to breed once and only produce one offspring. Both of which we know is wrong.So, then the question becomes how many cycles (attempts at hitting that number) have happened in 4.5 billion years?1,500,000,000 cycles. So, 1 dog produces 1 other dog which produces 1 other dog, etc 1,500,000,000 times.But there isn't only one dog on the planet. There's millions of them. According to this source
World Animal Protection UK | Animal welfare charity
there are some 600,000,000 dogs.Now, obviously we're not talking about all the dogs that are alive right now. We're talking about all the dogs that have ever lived. That would be a much higher number. Probably around 20,000,000,000. But, then we have to pair them off for sexual reproduction, so 10,000,000,000.So how many cycles have taken place between those pairs over that time. That would be 10 billion times 1.5 billion. So, roughly 15,000,000,000,000,000,000 attempts.15,000,000,000,000,000,000 times .0000000000000000002 is 3.That means, by these numbers we'd expect it to have happened 3 times.We're suggesting that it only needs to happen 1 time.
You're suggestion that it never could have happened.Now, this numbers are rough. There have been WAY more dogs. There have been WAY WAY more offspring. Dogs haven't been around 4.5 billion years. It's not one step between dogs and otters. Etc.And, more importantly, the .0000000000000000002 is a total fudge probability. It's a made up number.The point of this post is to show you how the math works out.

My experience is that people who are impressed by probability calculations don't know how to do them. Creationists love to use them because they so easily impress the gullible.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
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RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
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Damn straight it isn't. Its a a big leap from that. I'm replying to this since it is response to my demonstration earlier Message 156 I did not say 'the difference between an otter and a dog is only one protein substituion' what I said was in response to your challenge in Message 141: And I showed you how it was possible that a dog can become more otterlike. I showed how it was possible I then asked you present evidence that demonstrated that it is impossible. A good start would be to find the sequence of mutations that would be required that were impossible to achieve.We know that ancestors can be rebred into existence (on a morphological side), so I guess the best way to breed an otter from a dog would be to start with a wolf, and breed that backwards to something morphologically like Tomarctus, and breed that morphologically back to Cynodictus. (images can be found on this page)We are already getting quite close to an otterish shape...we just go back and back, and then start going forward towards the otter. It probably won't look exactly like an otter, unless we were being very strict in our selection, had millions of breeding animals and a lot of time on our hands (a small army of breeding experts will probably be needed).I've shown you how it might be possible, can you show it is impossible?

I've often thought the same thing. If someone who had never seen a dog of any kind before were to come across a wide assortment of breeds, would they intuitively think them all to be the same species, or even closely related for that matter? If the breeds they saw covered a significant portion of the spectrum I seriously doubt it.I did a Google and came across this page, and I must say, I never realized just how diverse a group the domestic dog is. I knew there were many different breeds, and I knew they came in many shapes and sizes, but damn... I didn't realize just how odd some of them are! Can't say I've ever seen one of these before. Looks kind of like that brush I use with the dust bin. Honestly, if you'd shown me that photo removed from its context, I'm not even sure I'd have been able to identify it as a dog!But seriously, why exactly are domestic dogs still regarded as just one species? From Wiki's "Canidae" entry, we are shown the following for Genus Canis...Coyote, Canis latrans
Wolf, Canis lupus
Domestic Dog, Canis lupus familiaris
Dingo, Canis lupus dingo
Red Wolf, Canis rufus
Ethiopian Wolf, Canis simensis
Golden Jackal, Canis aureus
Side-striped Jackal, Canis adustus
Black-backed jackal, Canis mesomelasIf you follow the links, most of these have images and, as far as I can tell, there is far, far more diversity among domestic dog breeds than there is among all of their cousins combined.Now, I realize that this is largely due to the artificial selection that humans have imposed on them since their domestication, but is their wide morphological diversity not sufficient to classify modern domestic dogs as multiple species (or subspecies) branched from the initial stock?Is it because their cousins (wolves, coyotes, etc) are further removed from them, in terms of how long ago they branched away, than they are from each other? Or are there, in fact, larger genetic differences, despite their respective appearances? For example, is there actually a greater genetic difference between, say, a German Shepherd and a Gray Wolf than there is between a German Shepherd and a Pekingese?Or, alternatively, we could amend that slightly from the perspective of species. So, with regard to the relative genetics of the given examples and their respective comparisons, is there a greater difference between, say, a wolf and a coyote (which are different species), than between the aforementioned German Shepherd and Pekingese (which are the same species)?I realize that I'm just going on photographs and not the living creatures themselves, and, for the record, I can see differences between the wolf and the coyote... My point is that they seem to have much more in common than many breeds of domestic dog do with each other.Honestly, I could forgive someone for confusing the animals in those two photos... though, to be fair, they have captured them in very similar poses; I might think differently if I saw them both up and walking around. Still, I doubt there is any pose or camera angle that could make me mistake a photo of a German shepherd for a photo of a Pekingese, or vice versa.Something else I've wondered about domestic dogs is whether or not they are all inter-breedable. Obviously, there is the question of the physical practicality of certain couplings, but is it possible to do, even if only in principle? For instance, could you cross, say, a Great Dane with a Chihuahua via artificial insemination? Would it produce viable offspring? And if you could not, or if the offspring were sterile, would this qualify the two breeds as having become significantly diverged to be classified as separate species?As a slight aside, I was surprised to see that even among "True dogs" there are a multitude of genera. Shows what I know. Clearly, I've been mixing up my levels of classification - specifically Canidae and Canis. If I understand the page correctly, all dogs are canines but not all dogs are genus Canis.Also, the article's distinction between "true dogs" and "foxes" is a noteworthy point, itself. I don't know what the current position of biologists/taxonomists is but, if it helps, the page states the following... Ouch! I ramble...This is for anyone, by the way. Asgara simply made the comment that grabbed my attention. All are welcome to answer.

Don't forget the Bush Dog - a rare breed found in the jungles of S. America | CanidsTalk about being closer to badger than bloodhound

I would say that with our current usage of 'species', some dog breeds could be considered different species. I don't know but I would like to know. Aren't there some ring species that could interbreed, genetically, but don't because of morpholigical differences? If they are considered different species not because they can't interbreed but because the don't interbreed, the same could be said of some species breeds of dogs.But just to muck up the distinctions some more... A dog and a wolf can, and will, interbreed to produce viable offspring. I don't think that a great dane and a chihuahua would ever reproduce, naturally.So where do you draw the line? Do you redefine the word species just because the dogs screwed it up?

To presume macroevolution based on microevolutionary changes is very sloppy science and is one of the greatest fallacies of evolutionary thinking. The fact is, there isn't a shred of scientific evidence to support macroevolutionary claims, only suppositions based on assumptions. Furthermore, macroevolution is, as far as is known, biologically impossible. No amount of selective breeding can change a bacterium into an elephant, and yet that is precisely what evolutionists claim. I would offer a suggestion. If evolution occurred in the past, construct a hypothetical pathway as to how a bacterium can be bred into an elephant. Although you have several hundred million years, you should be able to do this in significantly less time than through natural selection. You may think my challenge is absurd, but it is no less laughable than what evolutionists believe actually happened. Everyone knows that there are limits to change that cannot be crossed.