Faith writes:
Has anybody calculated it out? Seems to me I've read that genetic experiments with insects, such as with fruit flies, produce changes quite rapidly.
But they're still fruit flies. (Jeepers creepers, I am beginning to sound like a creationist!) What you are suggesting is that just short of a million insect species - and that's only the species we know, there might be many more we have not discovered yet - have evolved from a small base of insects
in about 4000 years.
You are asking if anybody has done some calculations on this. Well, it turns out the answer is yes. In
this study you can see that speciation rates are of the order of less than one to a few species per
million years.
Even if we assume that the small base on the Ark was as large as half of all insect species extant now, then that would still mean a speciation rate of about 125 species per
year. That's a far cry from what scientific studies like the one I mentioned are telling us.
Also there would have been more potential for change back then, more genetic possibilities.
How so? What's your basis for this assertion?
As for your ad hoc explanation and mine, the one to be chosen is the one that fits with the Bible. Yours doesn't. Mine may not either, but that's the idea anyway
Only if the Bible is true. Which it can't be, because it was only created yesterday. (Or rather, the day before yesterday. How time flies when you're having fun...)
But joking aside, if that's your answer, then my question becomes: why should we choose the Bible as the touch stone for our theories, and not ancient Egyptian, Chinese, or Indian creation myths, for example? Or other "holy" texts of non-Christian religions still in sway?
Edited by Parasomnium, : Being more precise about the order of magnitude of speciation rates.
Edited by Parasomnium, : Also being more precise about the creation date of the Bible.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.
™ Version 4.2