Peter & Rosemary Grant, Darwin's Finches and Evolution

I've admired the Grants since reading The Beak of the Finch in 1994.I recall thinking about how soundly they had thrashed evolution deniers. Their data were so detailed, so right now: they captured clearly the kind of change in species that defines evolution.That was naive, of course. I see at the bottom of the first page of your linked story (second comment) that someone posted material from the ICR which hand-waves away the work of 40 years with a few hundred words: more micro-but-not-macro nonsense, basically, because magic.I recall thinking back in 1994 that the Grants didn't sound like quitters, and I suspected they'd stay. They look radiantly happy in the photos. Loving the truth will do that for you.

I know, I know...but their work was so magnificent. And when I thought no rational person could deny its rigor and their findings, I was right.I hope I never lose the ability to be astonished by willful ignorance and intellectual dishonesty. If and when that day comes, they will have succeeded in doing something to me that I don't want done.

Hi, Faith. I'm going to violate my longstanding resolve not to respond to your posts (call it my penance for past sins).I appreciate your effort not to denigrate the Grants' work.But that distinction that you make to divorce small changes over short times from big changes over long times?You make that distinction to preserve your belief in magic.Without a young earth, the very notion of which flies in the face of everything we see; without invisible barriers to the accumulation of change, barriers found nowhere else, your beliefs would flounder. Within the realm of your own beliefs, you have (quite logically) deduced what science you must deny; that, and nothing else, determines what science you do deny.But the entire body of science, not just evolutionary biology and geology, contradicts your beliefs: the age of the universe, the sufficiency of natural explanations wherever we look...the science that gave us flight and long lives is exactly the same science that determined evolution is a fact. If you were to examine other areas of research in any depth, you'd soon find more, much more, that you needed to deny.The Grants set out to see what is really happening, just wanting to know the truth. Perhaps you set out that way once.They succeeded.
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Nothing personal. Hope all is well with you and yours.

Your thoughts on genetic reduction as the engine of evolution are bizarre. The development of new breeds of dog (since you chose the breeding analogy) increases that species genetic variability: the mating of two dogs could produce anything from a pocket rocket pooch to a man-killing mastiff. How do you explain that with a reducing mechanism? Even once the species boundary is crossed, and the two species can no longer interbreed, the parent species remains. How does 1 + 1 = less than 1?Also note that animal (and plant) breeders watch closely for new valuable traits and try to preserve them. Mutation--another demonstrable phenomenon you must deny--provides them.You claim to have approached the data with open eyes, but your ideas fail to cohere at even the commonsense level. You turn your back on matters firmly established; you spin unevidenced could-bes to fill gaps in your own position and call it thinking. If a slap in the face would give me a greater apprehension of reality, I'd take it and like it. To see more clearly, to understand more deeply: that is my "creed".If a slap in the face would give you a greater apprehension of reality, you'd contort every muscle in your feisty little noggin to avoid it. To see what you want to see, to understand nothing that contradicts it: that is your "creed". Says the lady who calls everyone who disagrees with her deluded.