Ruskin wrote:
The argument they would make here is that you have natural selection and you have different finches they aren't accumulating genetic changes toward anything that isn't a finch or something that isn't even a bird. The natural selection is only operating on the genetic structure of a particular kind of bird which in this case is a finch.
That circle represents concurrent varieties within a single species. It does not represent evolution.
That would be a very tall, very old, very complex tree structure.
So regardless of how long you would leave this natural selection to occur you would ever have on your hands would be a group of finches living on different islands. They wouldn't become anything else through random genetic mutation and selection upon that change
Regardless of how long? Try going back 75 million years
sciencedaily.com/terms/feathered_dinosa ... osaurs.htm and then work your way up the tree toward birds. You get to a proto-pigeon
theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2 ... n-taxonomy
about 60 million years ago, which differentiates into all the modern songbirds, including finches.
because there isn't any non-finch or non-bird genetic material entering the population and building towards something entirely new.
You don't need outside genetic material. Mutation means a change - usually very small - in one of the existing genes. Selection means that
some mutations confer an advantage on their bearer, who will then have a better chance at breeding. If he passes the improvement on to his progeny, they will out-breed, and eventually replace the normal population.
Another similar point is you can breed all kinds of different dogs but all you can ever breed from dogs are dogs
Human directed breeding doesn't tell you much about natural selection: most of our artificial dog-breed would die out in two generations in the wild.
you couldn't eventually breed a dog into a cat even if you had millions of years in which to do it.
You don't have millions of years - the most time human may have been breeding dogs at all in about 100,000 years - so what is that statement based on? No species turns into another existing species. However, both dogs and cats (and a few dozen other species) come from the same ancestor.
dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-253 ... -dogs.html In another fifty million years, neither dogs nor cats ass we know them will exist: they will each have given rise to a dozen new species that we've never heard of - and never will, because by then," we " will have given rise to a dozen new species, and we won't exist anymore.
Why do people argue about evolution if they have not even bothered to learn the basics?
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_02
-- Updated July 19th, 2015, 12:43 pm to add the following --
The brief introductory course "does not suffice" to explain every step of every stage of every adaptation. For that, you'd need to read quite a lot more science. There
is more science, and it has more detail. But it's longer than three chapters of Genesis.
Those who can induce you to believe absurdities can induce you to commit atrocities. - Voltaire