Micro and Macroevolution

religious fundamentalists really don't want to understand evolution they don't even want to know what it is they like to argue against it using arguments that don't make any sense because they don't know what they're talking about and they don't want to their definitions when they use them at all show that they've distorted everything into parodies that no scientist would recognize much less teach they can only argue against straw men because they don't want to know the actual facts because that would mean learning forbidden knowledge if you knew the truth of the matter you might understand it and thus risk believing it and you can't have that not when you're afraid of a fate worse than death for anyone who doesn't make believe in a dogmatically literal interpretation of an obviously figurative fable a story whose only possible truth or value is as a metaphor one of the misdefinitions believers use is the idea that evolution is philosophical naturalism every science related to the origins of anything including theories of cosmogony physics and chemistry that have nothing to do with the actual theory of evolution so the biggest challenge explaining evolution to creationists is getting them to understand what it is as opposed to what it's not for example evolution is not a religion i don't know why believers got to pretend that a demonstrably accurate evidence-based understanding is the same as a faith-based belief it's as if they know how indefensible faith is and they want to pretend that everyone else is just as bad as they are but evolution is not just a belief or baseless speculation like religion is no this is something we know and can show to be true evolution is science an aspect of biology it doesn't meet any of the definitions of a religion because it doesn't need or even allow faith and it doesn't have anything to do with whether there's a god or not plenty of people believe in god and accept evolution at the same time many of the historic pioneers of evolutionary theory and some of its best champions have been and are christian they understand that when the bible says let the earth bring forth the living creature after their kind yes that's exactly what evolution is it's a theory of biodiversity meaning that it is a scientific explanation for how living things diversify it's an inescapable fact of population genetics that is valuable in practical application testable and traceable via morphology physiology embryology paleontology as well as genetically which makes it verifiable too sometimes it's even repeatable because some evolutionary events have actually been repeated in the lab but if you try to explain that to a dogmatic believer they'll change the subject to talk about something else because they don't want to accept that scientists actually know something about this and they don't want to know it themselves either they only care about what they think science doesn't know because they think that whatever science hasn't yet explained is somehow evidence of supernatural miracles it's not but the devil is in the details and they don't want that so instead of talking about what evolution really is they push the goalposts back as far as they can to the murky mists of the distant past to the very beginning where they might dare you to show them an experiment where dead chemicals turn into living beings in a single step if you're a science denying religious extremist you don't want to understand that what we know about the origin of life points to a long collective sequence of unrelated autonomous processes in different chemical environments incrementally producing cumulative constituent components of increasing complexity and that many of these processes have already been discovered and experimentally confirmed to work no because that makes too much sense and believers want to remain ignorant of these facts in order to preserve a preferred belief so instead you might demand a machine where you pour a bag of chemicals in and push a button and out comes a bunny because you think that should prove evolution when really that would do more to prove intelligent design if you want to prove evolution wrong find whatever creationists think should prove it right so if you as a believer can admit that every academic source says that evolution is the one and only scientific theory of biodiversity and that it is only that and not also the origin of life the universe and everything then we've whittled what you thought were six different kinds of evolution down to two and really there's only one but that requires further explanation and you might say that there's no evidence that evolution ever happened at which point i would remind you how we've derived so many different cultivars of fruits and vegetables look at the wild type of carrots for example early farmers were eating these hideous roots thousands of years ago and replanted the biggest and best of them hoping to grow only the best possible crop and carrots used to be white like this and then when they got bigger they went through a stage where they were purple and we still have some of those too and then several hundred years ago one group of them came out orange once came the most the much more appealing carrots that are most common now are you old enough to remember when we used to eat watermelon that always had seeds in them well look how much worse it used to be so many generations before that when they were all about seeds with not much left we could eat same thing with bananas did you ever notice their seeds you would if you had a sample of the original wild type because they're full of seeds they're tougher too you have to cook them to eat them the mutation for soft-tissued sweet yellow bananas first occurred in jamaica in 1836 that's how recent that mutation is since then many other cultivars have been developed from them so that we now have the five-sided seedless variety too look how humans derive what are now several different cultivars of corn out of what was originally a mexican grass called tiacente this grass and corn only differ by a handful of jeans early farmers didn't know that they were selecting which ones had the longest ears the biggest and most kernels and so on so when a mutation happens that makes any of them better than what they were already eating they will of course prefer that and plant more like it so the pretty soon you know several generations or seasons later the whole crop looks like that so we developed these foods and nearly everything else in the produce department through several sequential centuries of artificial selective breeding while religious extremists may pretend that there's no evidence of evolution we've actually been using evolutionary principles throughout the entire history of agriculture and we've only just recently begun to understand the mechanisms for how selective breeding works to refine and develop better produce the same goes for how we we evolved all the different breeds of dogs and cattle poultry fowl and so on now believers usually respond to that in one of two ways most commonly you'd say well that's just micro evolution we accept microevolution of course but not macro evolution because they're not the same thing one is real legitimate science and the other is darwinism i've been debating with creationists almost daily for a quarter century or so and every time they redefine and misdefine evolution macroevolution darwinism all of it to date none of them have ever understood what macroevolution even is and they make up distorted definitions to hide that from themselves but to my experience none of these creationists really understands what micro evolution is either they don't even like to say that word they try to say that it's just adaptation or use some other term that doesn't really apply no evolution in general is a process of varying allele frequencies among reproductive populations leading to usually subtle changes in the morphological or physiological composition of descendant subsets when compiled over successive generations these can expand biodiversity when continuing variation between genetically isolated groups lead to one or more descendant branches increasingly distinct from their ancestors or cousins so that from one original ancestor you end up with two distinct variations of that where either one has a suite of diagnostic characteristics that are shared with every member of their group but that are not shared with any member of the other group the description of evolution as a whole is exactly what microevolution is too so is macro the same definition applies to both but i can't remember arguing with a single creationist ever who understood what either of these words really mean microevolution is commonly described as small-scale variation within a single species like those hundreds of breeds of dogs despite all their obvious differences that go all the way down to the bone they're all the same species canis lupus familiaris i'm talking about domestic dogs here similarly kale kohlrabi cabbage cauliflower broccoli and brussels sprouts are all the same species as the wild mustard plant basilica oloracia although these all look very different from each other they're all part of the same pangino meaning that they all stem from the same genetic ancestry they're just different modifications of that and remember that each of these might have their own subsets too like there's different types of cabbages for example but the mother of all cabbages was itself derived the same way as all these other crops by selecting mutations that changed the leaves or the bulbs or the flowers into new varieties according to new genetic information that was never in the original form that's a problem for creationists because they typically insist that all the potential variety for every possible daughter group must already exist in the ancestral genome but it's not there only the basis of it is evolution all of it micro and macro is summarily described as descent with inherent modification and every new variant has their own unique set of alterations to that original pattern that's why 20 percent of the genes in this pan genome are only present in some of the subsets that's why scientists find the pen genome of wolves within domestic dogs but you can't find the genome of a dachshund or a pit bull within the genome of a wolf because domestic dogs descended with new modifications that never existed in the wolf even the strictest fundamentalists admit that these are all the same species domestic dogs and that each variant is a product of artificial selection but they can't account for the origin of these variations or why selective breeding works to enhance them the answer is whether we're talking about agricultural crops or dogs cattle people or any other organism at the population level every physical difference from their common ancestor is caused by a relatively recent change in genetics and that means mutation this college textbook on modern genetic analysis says there are two processes responsible for genetic variation recombination and mutation mutation is the ultimate source of genetic change new alleles arise in all organisms some spontaneously others as a result of exposure to mutagenic agents in the environment these new alleles become the raw material for a second level of variation affected by recombination now as an example of the dunning-kruger effect some creationists may be uneducated laymen yet still pretend that they know more about genetics than any geneticist so the wanna believers often insist that mutation cannot produce new information in the genome despite the fact that we've now documented many specific examples proving that it does even identifying exactly what type of mutation had what effect and precisely where it is in the genome a single individual with a mutation is not yet evolution it doesn't become evolution until those traits are inherited and spread through a wider network of descendants remember that evolution is a population level change and this takes several generations depending on the size of the breeding population the larger the gene pool the more likely variances to be restricted or inhibited but smaller groups evolve faster because of the increased chance that inherited traits will persist through subsequent recombinations with other breeding pairs mutations happen a lot more than you realize too every sibling of every generation everyone who has ever lived is a mutant this study estimates an overall average of 128 mutations per human zygote that's right from the point of conception and you accrue more mutations as you age there aren't as many beneficial mutations as detrimental ones but in either case they're usually slight not significant and the vast majority of mutations are neutral which if anything leads to genetic drift one example of genetic drift is when two isolated groups continue to build up unique mutations over time that are not shared with the other group because there's no gene flow between them and the differences that arise distinguish the two groups with one becoming greener or red or fluffy or smooth or with different patterns or whatever but where those uh where those differences don't necessarily affect survival or reproduction so they're not subjected to selective pressure for example you can take one species of animal from its ancestral home and drop two groups of them in different places different environments where they're geographically and thus genetically separate so they will continue to grow apart eventually several generations down the road each group will have their own recognizable peculiarities such that should you find a lone wanderer in the no man's land between them you could likely tell which group it came from just by looking at it genetic drift is just one evolutionary mechanism continuously producing new variety but if those variations impact reproduction or survival then they may be subjected to selective pressure detrimental mutations tend to be eliminated very quickly if not immediately while beneficial mutations have a preferential advantage for example in wild plants the tastiest and most colorful fruits tend to dominate because being eaten by birds is a good way to for a plant to spread at seeds the plant isn't trying to make more attractive fruit it's just that the ones with the best fruit end up being the best distributed so it's an emergent product of incidental design artificial and natural selection are both evolutionary mechanisms that work on the mutations and the new traits that come from them but there's an important there are two important differences between them one is that artificial selection is much faster because it is deliberately orchestrated bypassing all the normal testing periods that would improve viability of the organism that's where many of the weaknesses in the new breeds come from too where there's not enough time or generations to work out all the kinks because natural selection works for the benefit of the organism making an animal better stronger faster or otherwise better adapted for where it lives and what it does whereas artificial selection works according to the whim of the breeder who often has entirely superfluous criteria working for our benefit rather than that of the organisms we're experimenting with now if you say that you accept microevolution that means that you accept the mechanisms i just explained for how this process works at the very least you should accept natural selection creationists don't have any argument with natural selection we thought of it first okay so god gave all the creatures a gene code with a variety of options coming out in the babies some might have longer hair some have shorter hair some longer legs some shorter legs and gradually over many generations the ones that are best suited to that environment will survive and take over that area so the dogs with long hair survive better in alaska and the dogs with short hair thin legs thin body survive better in the desert like the dingo that's not evolution it is natural selection this is one of those creationists who says he accepts microevolution but denies that it is evolution and it turns out that he actually rejects microevolution because he refuses to admit the fact that mutations are confirmed to really be the source of new information in the genome at least he accepts the mechanisms of natural selection even if he can't explain where that variation comes from he understands that these variations can be selected either intentionally by breeders or unintentionally by a matter of population genetics amid environmental dynamics with that another way he can't accept mutations because that's blind chance but he can accept a selection process that is also blind to chance because that process is at least eventually deterministic so many different breeds of dogs cats cattle and fowl were derived via artificial selection and there were many different species of dogs cats cattle and fowl in the wild that came about by natural selection and genetic drift in 1735 careless linnaeus worked out his system of taxonomy and he revealed that life did not fit into the separate boxes that you might expect from created kinds instead everything was in an interrelated hierarchy in a branching tree pattern like a family tree showing that everything was related somehow he couldn't explain that because he believed that new species had to conform to the biblical word for kind meaning that they had to bring forth fertile offspring which breeding pairs from different species could not do at best they could only produce infertile hybrids if anything at all a century or so later darwin realized that the origin of species could happen via the process of natural selection back then in the 19th century that was a profound announcement and religious fundamentalists insisted that species could only come about as a special act of creation by god and for more than a century they kept saying that no one has ever seen the evolution of a new species then when they eventually found out that speciation had been directly observed and documented dozens of times both in the lab and in naturally controlled conditions in the field they changed their story carolus linius is famous for his work in taxonomy the science of identifying naming and classifying organisms plants bacteria et cetera he was born in 1707. linnaeus thoughts on evolution are very different from the modern day theories he believed that species were immutable mean species can't change now he was wrong about this he's he would say if there are 30 different kinds of sparrows then god made 30 different kinds of sparrows he went overboard in that regard god might have made two sparrows and noah might have had two sparrows on the ark and they've now diversified to 30 varieties of sparrows so you not only have a kind called sparrows but you can also have different kinds of sparrows where one kind the sparrow kind can become several different kinds of whatever they came from which is why the sparrow kind is still part of the bird kind and why the bible says that there are different kinds of birds if so then a kind is the same thing as a clade meaning a monophyletic taxon and thus there is no contradiction with evolution at all using this guideline from the creationist mindset let's see how much evolution y'all will accept according to wikipedia the true sparrows are the old world sparrows and that family is divided into eight genera which is then diversified into 43 species then there are also new world sparrows that family diversified into 29 genera which are further diversified into 138 species collectively they're not true sparrows in the same sense that the parrots of new zealand or australia are not considered true parrots yeah but they're obviously still parrots and all of the sparrows in the new world where i live are still sparrows that's how we know them so in each case parrots or sparrows they differ only because they're isolated on a different continent so what we call sparrows are actually two taxonomic families comprised of 37 genera amounting to 181 various species this is according to the biological species concept which exactly matches the definition of a biblical kind when applied to sexually reproductive animals because males and females from the same kind slash species should be closely related enough that they can still bring forth fertile offspring after their kind but if two groups are genetically isolated long enough to diversify they each become uniquely distinct and their chances for interbreeding dwindle when they've grown so far apart that they either can't or won't interbreed and thus do not bring forth anymore then they have become two different species and they may diverge even further and faster now that the gene pools have entirely separated and of course this process repeats over and over again throughout their descendants that's what it means to diversify creationists have to use evolution to explain how noah had all of those animals on his mythic floating box having just two of one species that can then produce multiple taxonomic families with dozens of genera and hundreds of species each solves that problem but you talk about macroevolution we're talking about a super accelerated hyper caffeinated electro mega evolution to get this huge variety of species and global distribution just in the first thousand years after the flood that never happened ideally if all things in nature and biology were consistent it should be that two different species could only produce infertile hybrids and then only if they're in the same genus but if they come from two different genera even in the same taxonomic family then they shouldn't be able to produce any viable offspring at all thus the division of species becomes the most important taxonomic division and the only one with definition that's where we have to draw the line between micro and macro because every higher taxonomic clade still begins with speciation after which they can no longer bring forth because they're now different species see the bible says clearly they will bring forth after their kind that's all i've ever seen i think that's all any farmer in the world has ever seen how many have ever done any farming before we got several here now for the farm okay do you know of any exceptions to the idea that corn produces corn and cows produce cows and dogs produce dogs now you might get some screwball varieties like the chihuahua or what but it's still a dog barely but it is still in the dog kind okay yes you get new varieties which is the point of evolution but you do not get one kind of thing giving birth to or turning into another fundamentally different kind which creationists often describe as being so completely different from its immediate ancestor that it's not even related anymore like an amoeba turning into an elephant or a pine tree into a dog or or bacteria turning into people those are all examples that creationists have seriously given as a matter of public record without even being embarrassed about their own stupidity every part of that view is wrong and it's all a deliberate distortion in taxonomy there's no such thing as a kind the creationists will not define what that's supposed to mean because they already know that no definition works for what they want there was never any point in evolutionary history that calls for or even allows a change in kinds nor changing clades either in fact that would violate two of the natural laws of evolution instead the law of biodiversity holds that one group branches into two or more notably different groups and then their daughter groups continue to diversify into form even more diverse subsets in the next taxonomic generation or rank then those four continue to diversify into eight and then 16 and so on accepting for those groups that become extinct and every sibling set is more different from each other than their ancestors were that means that at every level evolution is just a matter of incremental proportional changes being slowly compiled atop successive tiers of fundamental similarities and those tiers of similarity indicate taxonomic clades remember that evolution is descent with inherent modification thus every genus or species that ever evolved was just a modified version of whatever its ancestors were and still belongs to every ancestral clade that they did in other words they're still the same kind nothing ever turned into a different kind because you can't grow out of your ancestry according to the law of monophyly cladistics a monophyle phylo mono phyletic group or clade is a group of organisms that consists of all the descendants of a common ancestor oh so a clade is all the ones that came from a common ancestor i would be willing to say probably all the dogs came from a dog well the domestic dog can agree with each other and can but would rather not interbreed with wolves they cannot interbreed with the african painted dog or the south american bush dog or the asian raccoon dog notice how many different species of dogs there are they can no longer bring forth because they have become different kinds yet they're all the same kind this chart shows the genetic relationships of all living candidates the family of dogs notice also that bears and seals are genetically just outside this group and the fossil record reveals not only proto-dogs that are not in this jar because we don't have their dna but it also shows fossil bear dogs and dog bears and bear-like seals they can still walk on land so obviously the dog kind is a subset of a larger carnivore kind that includes more than just dogs let's look at cats in this genetic chart notice that the puma caracal and lynx are all different species of felines while lions tigers and leopards are all different species of panthers there's a third group of several species of scimitar cats that are only known from the fossil record and then there's another fossil group of almost cats which differ from modern cats only in the shape of the inner ear people often confuse them with cats so if you saw one you would probably consider them the same kind as cats even though they're a different family as well and all the true cats near cats meerkats civic cats bearcats and everything else in the cat side of the carnivore family tree are all genetically connected to bears weasels and seals and everything else on the dog side of that same taxonomic tree going out of that tree that the bible mentions the cattle kind which in modern parlance normally refers to all these distinct species of the sub-family bovine but the bible seems to include sheep and goats in a sister played within the larger family bovidae which itself is just one of a larger set of ruminants and while all these modern species look different now if you saw the fossil intermediates you'd realize these are all the same group the same goes for every other taxonomic clade you might think of as a kind there is no point where any of them can be separated from the surrounding groups especially when you consider the fossil record too where you can hardly tell them apart so if you accept that so many of these species could have diversified by rapidly succession of speciation events just from noah's ark in only a thousand years and why not all of them over tens of millions of years speciation does not count as macroevolution yes it absolutely does the terms microevolution and macro evolution were first coined in 1927 by russian etymologist yuri philippchenko it was an evolutionary biologist who invented these words so science is the authority on what they mean according to universities teaching this subject microevolution is variation within species and macroevolution is variation between species that means that the emergence of new breeds or subspecies is microevolution but the emergence of new species is macro evolution creationists refuse to admit that that's what that means but if you don't believe me look it up macro evolution is evolution on a scale of separated gene pools macroevolutionary studies focus on change that occurs at or above the level of species in contrast to microevolution which refers to smaller evolutionary changes typically described as changes in allele frequencies within a species or population macroevolution is major evolutionary transition from one type of organism to another occurring at the level of species and higher taxa evolution that results in relatively large and complex changes as in species formation even though each of these is reasonably accurate you can't always trust common dictionaries for lay people when they're trying to talk science so sticking to strictly scientific sources let's start with the university of california berkeley's online primer called evolution 101 microevolution happens on small scale within single population while macroevolution happens on a scale that transcends the boundaries of a single species despite their differences evolution at both of these levels relies on the same established mechanisms of evolutionary change speciation turns one species into two and is thus macro evolution we get the same definition from duke university evolutionary patterns and processes at and above the level of species and from the university of south carolina beaufort macroevolutionists study the processes that cause the origination and extinction of species and from stanford university microevolution is defined as changes within a species that aren't drastic enough to create entirely new species changes that result in a new species are part of macroevolution now let's look at the reference library biology online evolution happening at a large scale eg at or above the level of species over geologic time resulting in the divergence of taxonomic groups every such divergence begins with speciation but creationists have already explained that they accept evolution even beyond that probably so the kind indicates somewhere around the family or genus level everything above that is speculation so micro evolution is variation within species and macro evolution is the creation of new species variations in within species and even creation of new species is possible and has been observed that is science and is no problem for bible believers who say that god clearly said they will always bring forth after their kind exactly that means you accept the origin of species by means of natural selection or to put that another way it means that you actually accept macro evolution and not just at the species level but even higher at the genus or family level if not higher still especially in the case of sparrows but if you don't accept the fact that mutations really are the source of new genetic information then you don't accept micro evolution so don't tell me you accept micro and reject macro because you've got that exactly backwards [Applause] oh [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] do not eat that bone while i am recording

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Length: 31min 49sec (1909 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021