How do you define the word Evolution?

Actually I did concede that the Peppered Moth could be an example of macroevolution (without speciation), using Durston's definition, but that it has not been confirmed as such.Speciation could be a micro or a macroevolutionary change depending on what caused it.

Totally silly.Both varieties of Peppered moth freely interbreed. There is no process of macroevolution, it's purely a way of describing when an accumulation of evolutionary changes have resulted in non-interbreeding populations. It's irrelevant what caused it. The word macroevolution could be dumped without changing anything in biology - and in my opinion should be.

But the real question is how do you define the WORD (biological) evolution as opposed the THEORY of Evolution?

It's easy. Biological refers to life.It's a fact that the first forms of living (hard to define) organisms changed from something like forms of prokaryotes, to the variety of different forms of life we see today.That's the fact.The theory of evolution (ToE) tries to explain the mechanisms involved in those changes. The hows. Edited by Pressie, : No reason given.Edited by Pressie, : No reason given.Edited by Pressie, : No reason given.

No, that's a theory or hypothesis.

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.

Nope. It's a fact. The oldest fossilised forms of life (as we know it) are prokaryoytes. Fact.

The fact that it takes reduction of genetic diversity for evolution to occur at all, meaning to get a new population with new characteristics, is not recognized in the ToE. People just go on and on dementedly talking about how microevolution just seques into macroevolution without a hitch, without recognizing that to get a new species requires the loss of all competing alleles. You keep theorizing about how more genetic diversity can be produced so that macroevolution can occur, but1) this is NOT the ToE which thinks there's no stopping point at all, and2) you couldn't get enough useful change in thousands of years to begin to suggest a transition from micro to macro. All mutations do is replace an allele in a given gene, so all you can EVER get is a new version of the trait governed by that particular gene -- and in most cases you don't even get that. What you get is at best a neutral mutation that doesn't change the phenotype, and at worst, of course, destruction of the gene itself. In any case mutations will never get you past the genomic parameters of the Kind.The ToE has been proved wrong in so many ways it's astonishing to see how it just goes on limping along as if nothing had ever happened.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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The fact that it takes reduction of genetic diversity for evolution to occur at all, meaning to get a new population with new characteristics, is not recognized in the ToE.

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Completely false. The role of natural selection in fixing alleles is a central part of evolutionary theory.

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You keep theorizing about how more genetic diversity can be produced so that macroevolution can occur, but

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It's not just theory it is fact.

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1) this is NOT the ToE which thinks there's no stopping point at all,

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It's the standard theory of evolution as described - for instance in Dawkin's The Blind Watchmaker

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2) you couldn't get enough useful change in thousands of years to begin to suggest a transition from micro to macro. All mutations do is replace an allele in a given gene, so all you can EVER get is a new version of the trait governed by that particular gene -- and in most cases you don't even get that. What you get is at best a neutral mutation that doesn't change the phenotype, and at worst, of course, destruction of the gene itself. In any case mutations will never get you past the genomic parameters of the Kind.

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That is your assumption and it completely ignores the actual biology. The interactions between genes and their products, gene duplication and the role of regulatory sequences for a start. And what on earth are these "genomic parameters of the Kind" that mutation can't get past ? When we can't even show that "Kinds" meaningfully exist it seems rather odd to be talking about their "genomic parameters" (if that even means anything)

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The ToE has been proved wrong in so many ways it's astonishing to see how it just goes on limping along as if nothing had ever happened.

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You don't get to be believed by making silly rants full of falsehoods or by abusing those who try to talk sense to you. In fact nothing of import has happened to disprove evolution - creationism is just bad religious apologetics rightfully rejected by science - and anyone who cares about the truth.

Not a fact, nor a theory nor a scientific hypothesis, but your personal opinion, falsified by polyploidy speciation:

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Polyploid cells and organisms are those containing more than two paired (homologous) sets of chromosomes. Most species whose cells have nuclei (Eukaryotes) are diploid, meaning they have two sets of chromosomesone set inherited from each parent. However, polyploidy is found in some organisms and is especially common in plants. In addition, polyploidy occurs in some tissues of animals that are otherwise diploid, such as human muscle tissues.[1] This is known as endopolyploidy. Species whose cells do not have nuclei, that is, Prokaryotes, may be polyploid organisms, as seen in the large bacterium Epulopiscium fishelsoni [1]. Hence ploidy is defined with respect to a cell. ...

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Examples in animals are more common in non-vertebrates[11] such as flatworms, leeches, and brine shrimp. Within vertebrates, examples of stable polyploidy include the salmonids and many cyprinids (i.e. carp).[12] Some fish have as many as 400 chromosomes.[12] Polyploidy also occurs commonly in amphibians; for example the biomedically-important Xenopus genus contains many different species with as many as 12 sets of chromosomes (dodecaploid).[13] Polyploid lizards are also quite common, but are sterile and must reproduce by parthenogenesis.[citation needed] Polyploid mole salamanders (mostly triploids) are all female and reproduce by kleptogenesis,[14] "stealing" spermatophores from diploid males of related species to trigger egg development but not incorporating the males' DNA into the offspring. ...

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Polyploidy was induced in fish by Har Swarup (1956) using a cold-shock treatment of the eggs close to the time of fertilization, which produced triploid embryos that successfully matured.[17][18] Cold or heat shock has also been shown to result in unreduced amphibian gametes, though this occurs more commonly in eggs than in sperm.[19] ...

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Polyploidization is a mechanism of sympatric speciation because polyploids are usually unable to interbreed with their diploid ancestors. An example is the plant Erythranthe peregrina. Sequencing confirmed that this species originated from E. x robertsii, a sterile triploid hybrid between E. guttata and E. lutea, both of which have been introduced and naturalised in the United Kingdom. New populations of E. peregrina arose on the Scottish mainland and the Orkney Islands via genome duplication from local populations of E. x robertsii.[4] Because of a rare genetic mutation, E. peregrina is not sterile.[5]

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This is objective empirical evidence that genetic diversity is increased and the result is new species by evolution: mutation and selection and survival and reproduction.You lose, and this should be the end of this ridiculous claim. It won't though, because you will deny the evidence ... This too is false. But then you don't really know what the ToE says, because you have a perverted creationist version in your head.EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : .

Polyploidy sounds like anything but beneficial to an organism. The fact that it can't interbreed with nonpolyploids is sure evidence that it has nothing to do with speciation but only genetic dysfunction. It's absurd for anyone to think for half a second that it could be the solution to the inevitable loss of genetic diversity by evolutionary processes. Oh and it IS inevitable. I've probved it logically dozens of times, but it ought to be provable easily enough by observation and DNA testing of a series of daughter populations. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Besides, if macroevolution is impossible with one genome, how could it become possible with two of the same?

And I predicted you would deny reality ... again.If it survives and breeds it is not detrimental. There are many cases of this happening. That is the only test necessary. If it survives and breeds it is not dysfunctional. It does. That is the only test necessary.Curiously the fact it can't interbreed with the parent population means it meets the Biological definition of speciation. You don't get to decide what is and what is not speciation, because that is the purview of actual educated scientists that know what they are talking about. It's insane that you continue to deny reality and refuse to learn when you are wrong. Only in your bubble fantasy world Faith, heck you could probably "prove" that rocks don't exist .... This is the logic you use to disprove the ToE: pure self-delusion.Enjoy

The ToE does recognized that a newly created beneficial allele will replace the less fit allele.It also recognizes that mutations occur in every generation, and that those new mutations increase genetic diversity. You forgot about the addition of new alleles that replaced the old alleles. When you repeat this process over and over you get macroevolution, as I have already shown you in a previous post. Until you show that mutations stop occurring then you must admit that it doesn't stop. Multiple rounds of replacing alleles is exactly what macroevolution is, and it is responsible for the differences seen between the human and chimp genomes.

If the changes needed for macroevolution could not happen, then how is it possible for huamans and chimps to survive with 40 million differences between their genomes? If mutations can't change genomes enough to produce macroevolution, then neither can a designer.