(March 29, 2016 at 12:04 pm)Esquilax Wrote:(March 28, 2016 at 9:25 pm)AJW333 Wrote: I am fully accepting of the fact that species will adapt to their environment and to threats to their survival. Genetic variation and the appearance of random and occasional positive mutations isn't an issue either. But to take isolated cases of such occurrences as proof that simple cell bacteria evolved into fish, dogs, birds crocodiles and humans is a completely different argument. On the one hand you have small changes to the genetic code that don't change the identity of the organism, and on the other you have a complete change of one organism into a completely new species. You're arguing apples and oranges here.
"I am fully accepting that you can walk a step. I just don't accept that taking steps will allow you to walk a mile."
That's what you're saying here. You're asserting that small changes to organisms are acceptable, but that a collection of small changes, accumulated over many generations, will never result in an organism sufficiently different from its ancestor all those generations ago to qualify as a new species, which is a weird position to take given that we derive species definitions based on the morphological and genetic changes that you've already agreed occur in organisms. If you agree that organism 1 can have offspring and that that offspring (organism 2) will be slightly different from 1, and that slight differences across generations is a consistent pattern such that each organism is slightly different from its parent (and thus progressively more different than organism 1) then why is it that you don't think organism 1,000,000 will be extremely different from organism 1? What mechanism are you proposing to prevent small changes from continuing to accumulate, and how do you intend to demonstrate the existence of that mechanism?
Thanks, Esquilax, you said what I wanted to say much more eloquently than I could.
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