Summations Only

And for reference, I have been taking animal pictures for years. About 50% of all my pictures are "staged", including some of the best. Although the staging includes framing the shots to resemble the organism's natural habitat as much as possible, nature photography has as much "art" as "science" to it. Most organisms are simply uncooperative - even insects - and for some reason won't sit still to have their pictures taken. Baiting, using captive animals, dead insects, etc, is fairly standard practice. IMO, staging doesn't constitute fraud of any kind. Only someone who's never tried to work in the wild could think this.

Heh - no kidding. I have a totally staged - but breathtaking - photo of an owl butterfly (Caligo indomeneus) sitting on a branch that shows its crypsis capability to very good effect (one of the few that I've bothered to blow up and frame). What you can't see in the picture is: 1) it's dead - I carefully crushed it's thorax after capture, and 2) it's pinned to the tree by a small pin pushed through its off-side abdomen. People keep telling me what a wonderful shot it is and asking how I got it.

Right, we know that. However, the observations DO quite clearly show how natural selection acting on variations in a population can change the frequency of alleles in that population. In "real time", no less. Which, of course, is the topic of this thread. Anyone who tries to claim the observations show something else is creating a strawman. Well, duh. They didn't even speciate. What's your point? This is bizarre. You need to dig up one of the myriad threads on "information" and defend this contention there. Again, duh. And again, yet another strawman of evolution.I think you have a couple of options here: 1) learn something about the subject you are attempting vainly to criticize - because your insistence on things like "genetic code increasing" and the old canard about a chicken from a lizard's egg that part C indicates, shows you know very little about what the ToE actually says; 2) Open a thread to defend the general basis - in detail - any given one of the three contentions you've made here, because all of your assertions are evidently based on misunderstanding some of the very basic concepts of biology and evolution. Of course, you could surprise us...Edited by Quetzal, : changed experiment to observation in the first sentence

However, my take on this particular case (as with the finches the Grants study, for instance), is that it represents a positive demonstration of one of the key mechanisms of evolution, not evolution writ large. Arguing the peppered moths or changes in beak size in Geospiza fortis on Genovese - especially since the allele frequency in both those cases reverted to something approaching the original distribution - shows only how natural selection operates over the short term. It provides one line of evidence for evolution, but in neither case does it show the other key elements of evolutionary theory (such as descent with modification, etc). Therefore, when a creationist claims the experiments with industrial melanism or variation in beak size due to environmental pressures don't show evolution (by which they either mean speciation or long-term evolutionary change and descent with modification = macroevolution), then they are making an extremely trivial observation. Hence my "Duh, no kidding" response.My two cents.