Slate's Today's Blogs feature leads with the blogosphere reaction to Sam Brownback's NYT's piece on evolution. I posted on this a couple of days ago. Here is a bit from Slate:
Secular Skeptic takes issue with Brownback's endorsement of microevolution: "[W]hat makes it so obvious that Brownback has no understanding of evolution, is that microevolution and macroevolution are the same thing! Macroevolution is what happens when microevolution goes on long enough.
To which I reply: no, they are not. Microevolution, change within existing species, can be directly observed. Indeed it has been, in very many cases. The breeding of St. Bernards and teacup poodles from the same original stock of domesticated wolves is an example. Macroevolution involves speciation: the splitting of existing species into two that eventually lose the ability to interbreed. This process usually involves time spans longer than the time it takes the Cubs to win another World Series. No wonder we haven't observed a case of speciation yet. Here is a bit from Evolution 101 page:
We have several plausible models of how speciation occurs—but of course, it’s hard for us to get an eye-witness account of a natural speciation event since most of these events happened in the distant past. We can figure out that speciation events happened and often when they happened, but it’s more difficult to figure out how they happened.
Now I have no doubt that speciation has occurred frequently in the past, and that it explains the difference between your average chimpanzee and your average certified public accountant. But speciation is speculative in a way that micro-evolution is not. If Senator Brownback wants to hold on to the idea that all the species were created at the same moment, well, I think that is a bad strategy. But it is not a strategy based on ignorance.
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