That's funny.

Dotsman said...What?  You're doubting what God told a goat herder regarding how and when he created the world?  Heretic!

Guilty as charged.  I like Hitchkin's take on this problem.  NOT word for word, but the gist of it from memory: "Religion was man's first organized attempt to understand man, the world, and morality, and being the first, it was naturally the worst." 

However, I am not among those who think that all the writers of the Old Testament were idiots, though many were barbaric.  No, I think that there are signs that some of them were intelligent and wise.  However, in trying to understand the world, they naturally had very little sound data to work with, so they guessed.

>macro-evolution has never been observed directly. I think that is what he means.<

And he's still wrong.

Speciation as a result of selection pressure has been observed both in the wild and in the lab.

That's 'macro evolution' right there.

That some people don't think that two different species of fruit-flies 'count' as two different species merely because they're reproductively isolated is due merely to ignorance.

N_J

>I don’t think that speciation is what is meant by macro-evolution.<

That is exactly what is meant by macro-evolution, as 'micro-evolution' is defined as minor phylogenic changes over time within a particular species.  Like the famous 'black moth vs white moth' thing.

A new species is a new species.  Species are defined as reproductively isolated groups of individual organisms.  (which still is a fairly 'fuzzy' definition, for sure, as both ligers and tigons exist, and yet lions and tigers are still separate species, and 'species' is a bit harder to define for those organisms that reproduce asexually, like bacteria and fungi.)  But regardless of the difficulties regarding the definition of 'species' all speciation events qualify as 'macro-evolution'.

Expecting an elephant to give birth to a hippopotamus is the sort of nonsense that only Creationists from the Discovery Institute would be demanding as 'proof' of evolution.

No, actually, evolution is happening all the time, and speciation events are fairly common.  But a wheat plant doesn't magically turn into corn or barley, it might produce a different SPECIES of wheat, given the right conditions.

Some handy links for such conversations:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/macroevolution.html

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/evolution-watching-speciation-occur-observations/

N_J

Creationist like to teach that evolutionists believe in things like crocoducks.