slevesque writes:
The first assumption is the one that I have mentioned in the other thread, and it is also the one that Darwin made in his time. That the small changes in today's species from generation to generation can accumulate, with enough time, as to produce major changes such as new organs, new proteins, etc.
Small changes adding up to large changes is something well evidenced and well documented. It is the norm. Do you really expect your country to be the same as it was in the year 1800 at some time in the future? If you found a new cave with a stalagmite in it, and you observed the stalagmite grow a few millimetres over a few years due to the addition of material from a dripping cave roof, wouldn't you infer that this observed micro-stalagmite formation was the process responsible for the macro-stalagmite formation which had taken place before your discovery of the cave?
slevesque writes:
This was very much an assumption in his time, and it was what permitted him to construct his famous 'tree of life'. I think it is still an assumption today, and here is why. When is the last time someone asked a question like this: can the small changes that we observe today be extrapolated to big changes with enough time ?
Darwin put forward the hypothesis that the small changes accounted for the diversity of life we see today, everything having descended from one or several original organisms. That hypothesis makes predictions and can be falsified. Its current status as a very strong theory is because many of its predictions have been shown to be true, and it has yet to be falsified. No assumptions required.
If the small changes add up to large changes, then there must have been proto-humans, proto-horses, proto-whales, etc. And, on a grander scale, there must have been proto-mammals, proto-reptiles, and proto-amphibians. We have found all of those things, slevesque, and unless you're a great believer in one-in-a-billion sets of coincidences, Darwin must have been right. That's just on the fossil record alone, without starting on molecular and other lines of evidence.
Discoveries related to the formation of complex organs are being made all the time. Last weekend, for example:
Another mammalian ear transitional
slevesque writes:
Or when the new field of genetics was being discovered, did anyone ask if their was a barrier between species or families, that would prevent such thing from happening ? Personnally, I do not think that any question of the sort was ever adressed, and so the answer was assumed to be yes for both questions. My personnal opinion was that it was assumed to be yes because the 'fact' of evolution was a certainty.
In your personal opinion, what is the limit to the number of mutations that can go to fixation across a population, and why is there a limit, and why haven't creationist scientists identified that limit?
And in your opinion, is there not obvious evidence of speciation in the wild around us that could easily have been observed when the new science of genetics was getting underway? What would you expect to see if groups of organisms were diverging from recent common ancestry?
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