Empirical Evidence for Evolution

The critique is by Ashley Camp and appears at http://www.trueorigin.org.Douglas Theobald has already drafted a response, and it can be found at Theobald Response.

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John Paul wrote:
What you want us to believe is that small changes + eons of time = great transformations.

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In the movie The Man Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain a small village becomes upset that the British geological survey has discovered that their local mountain, in which they apparently take great pride, is not actually a mountain but a hill, because it falls a few feet short of the required height of a mountain. Through trickery and skullduggery they delay the filing of the surveyor's report, then mobilizing the entire town and using shovels and wheelbarrows and whatever they can find add 20 feet to their hill and turn it into a mountain.The movie was based upon a true story, and while the movie was being made it was discovered that settling and erosion had again reduced their mountain to a hill, and so the final scenes of the movie show the modern town once more restoring their mountain.The point of this brief tale is that, yes, indeed, small changes accumulate over time into large changes. Erosive forces eventually reduce all mountains to range. The Alleghenies were once a taller mountain range than the Rockies, but they're much older and hence now much smaller.What I find puzzling is why any rational person would question that small changes eventually accumulate into great transformations. If you save a few dollars a week you can eventually retire. If you start walking you will eventually reach the opposite coast (or if you're starting in the middle, pick a direction). Michael Jordan began his NBA career with 0 points, but by accumulating points 1, 2, 3 and sometimes 4 at a time, he eventually amassed his current total of nearly 30,000. This isn't rocket science.--Percy

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John Paul wrote:
But can you apply geological observations to biology? Too bad geology isn't biology.

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Who said it was? You challenged the view that small changes could accumulate into large ones, and all I did was provide real world examples of just such a thing taking place. I was no more saying that geology is like biology than I was saying basketball (one of my other examples) is like biology.

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John Paul wrote:
Just because I can walk across the USA doesn't mean I can walk from Boston to Malbourne Australia.

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And Michael Jordan will retire someday. Some things have limits, some don't. The problem for you is that if there's some barrier that limits the scope of evolutionary change, you haven't found it yet, have no evidence for it, and have no idea what it might be.That being said, there are some obvious natural limits to evolution. For example, we can be pretty certain that life as we know it can't evolve to exist at temperatures above, say, 500^oC because organic compounds break down at temperatures well below that.--Percy

Hi John Paul,I'm having trouble following your posts because I can't tell if you're quoting yourself from a previous post or actually responding. If you stop putting "John Paul:" above your responses it would really help. Or you could use any of a variety of quoting mechanisms. There's a "reply quote" link that will quote the message you're replying to automatically. You'll have to do some editing to break it up into sections, but once you see how it's done it's easy.

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John Paul wrote:
So you want to play games? Or are you saying you didn't understand the context which I was speaking? The link should have made it perfectly clear.

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The context was perfectly clear, but you seem to be operating under some weird misimpression:

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John Paul wrote:
Excuse me, but evolutionists are the ones making the claim that small changes can add up.

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Small changes adding up are the norm. If there are limits the burden is upon you to explain what they are. This is precisely what you did with the analogy of walking when you pointed out one couldn't walk to Melbourne. Now you have to do the same for evolution.It is already the position of YEC Creationists that speciation can happen. The problem for you is identifying what prevents speciation beyond the boundaries of a kind, first defining kind, of course.--Percy

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John Paul writes:
I say the burden is on you to show the is no limit to small changes adding up and you respond by saying it is up to me to show there is a limit.

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This is simple addition. In the case of walking, if one step nets you 2 feet, then 2 steps nets you 4 feet, 3 steps nets you 6 feet, and so forth. You can keep doing this endlessly. On the walk from the US to Australia the limit is the US shoreline.In evolution the steps are mutation and gene selection. If we keep this simple and just consider mutations at the rate of one per generation, first you have one mutation, then you have two, then you have three, and so forth. What keeps an organism from accumulating mutations endlessly? On the way from one kind to the next, which you believe to be impossible, the limit is caused by...what?--Percy