Is talkorigins.org a propoganda site?

Brisk biters
Fast changes in mosquitoes astonish evolutionists, delight creationists.
by Carl WielandAbout 100 years ago, bird-biting mosquitoes called Culex pipiens entered the tunnels then being dug for the London Underground (the ”Tube’). Cut off from their normal diet, they changed their habits to feed on rats and, when available, human beings. During WW2, they attacked Londoners seeking refuge from Hitler’s bombs. Their plaguing of maintenance workers may be the reason the underground variety has been dubbed molestus.British scientists have now found that it is almost impossible to mate those in the Tube with the ones still living above ground, thus suggesting that they have become a new species1 (or almost so). This has ”astonished’ evolutionary scientists, who thought that such changes must take many times longer than this.2Informed creationists have long pointed out that the biblical model of earth history would not only allow for the possibility of one species splitting into several3 (without the addition of new information, thus not ”evolution’ as commonly understood), but would actually require that it must have happened much faster than evolutionists would expect.

Actually, creationists have long suspected that organisms had ”built-in’ genetic mechanisms for rapid variation”even beyond the normal processes of adaptation where genes, reshuffled by sexual reproduction, are selected in various environments.6 Thus, recent discoveries of such mechanisms being still viable today are of very great interest.For example, there are genes which can ”jump’ around the chromosome. These are normally kept in check, but Drs Jenny Graves and Rachel O’Neill of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, have found that in hybrids, these can undergo ”rampant’ changes.This may even be ”the general mechanism for speciation in all multi-cellular creatures’ (by making it impossible to ”back-breed’ with a parent population). Graves says, ”We thought it took millions of years of long-term selection for a jumping gene to be activated. We’ve now shown that it can happen maybe in five minutes after fertilization.’7 These are exciting times to be a creationist.We think that expanding genetic research will likely reveal even more examples of built-in, ”pre-fab’ mechanisms for rapid change in response to environmental pressures. Ironically, as more such created mechanisms (very far from normal Darwinian ideas) are discovered, they will probably be misconstrued as support for evolution, at the same time as biblical Christians are exulting in their true significance.

Creationists have long proposed such ”splitting under selection’ from the original kinds, explaining for example wolves, coyotes, dingoes and other wild dogs from one pair on the Ark. The question of time has, however, been seized upon by anti-creationists. They insist that it would take a much longer time than Scripture allows. Artificial selection is quick, they admit, but that is because breeders are deliberately acting on each generation. The usual ”guesstimate’ of how long it took for Darwin’s finches to radiate from their parent population ranges from one million to five million years.However, Princeton zoology professor Peter Grant recently released some results of an intensive 18-year study of all the Galápagos finches during which natural selection was observed in action.1 For example, during drought years, as finches depleted the supply of small seeds, selection favoured those with larger, deeper beaks capable of getting at the remaining large seeds and thus surviving, which shifted the population in that direction.While that is not very surprising, nor profound, the speed at which these changes took places was most interesting. At that observed rate, Grant estimates, it would take only 1,200 years to transform the medium ground finch into the cactus finch, for example. To convert it into the more similar large ground finch would take only some 200 years.Notice that (although the article fails to mention it) such speedy changes can have nothing to do with the production of any new genes by mutation, but are based upon the process described, that is, choosing from what is already there. It therefore fails to qualify as evidence for real, uphill (macro) evolution ” though many starry-eyed students will doubtless be taught it as ”evolution in action’.Instead, it is real, observed evidence that such (downhill) adaptive formation of several species from the one created kind can easily take place in a few centuries. It doesn't need millions of years.

Evolutionists do not beleive that speciation events take millions of ears.

23.2 Haeckel's Biogenetic LawErnst Haeckel and the Biogenetic Law (An informed opinion)
In the early 1900s, a fusion of evolution and embryology was wrongly interpreted to support a linear (as opposed to a branched) model of evolution. The interpretation of Ernst Haeckel was that every organism evolved by the terminal addition of a new stage to the end of the last "highest" organism. Thus, he saw the entire animal kingdom as representing truncated steps of human development.

Firstly there is nothing in creationism itself that requires any degree of evolution.

You are right that the creationists try to minimise the differences between the various "Darwin's Finches" - but what you miss is that such a view is directly at odds with using them as an example of the hyper-evolution their views requires.

My point has consistenly been that creationism in itself does not require any degree of evolution.

The relevance of pointing out that creationism can accept a wide range of positions on evolution is that it shows that the "prediction" is not a prediction of creationism.

And I beleive you have already been referred to the fact that PE was invented by applying evolutionary theory to the fossil record - so we might more justly call the pattern predcted by PE a prediction of evolutionary theory than the "phyletic gradualism" Eldredge and Gould opposed.

Further you are wrong to say that I cloud the issue

Your invocation of "adaptive mutations" is also unfortunate because there is considerable doubt that they occur.