Evolution, religion, and ignorance.

[Mister Agenda]

Now, stop. If something is observed to happen, and we have evidence of it happening, then is that not reason enough to infer that it will continue to happen, without the intervention of some outside force?

No, it isn't. rasetsu already explained this, and Mister Agenda kudoed it. To my knowledge they're not YECs, yet they see the error in your method. This isn't some creationist trick. Your argument is faulty - it's an extrapolation fallacy coupled with an argument from ignorance fallacy.

I thought rasetsu made a good post, but I didn't agree with absolutely all of it, I just thought she brought up some good points. As I mentioned elsewhere, I agree with Esquilax broadly that with no mechanism to explain how microevolutionary changes would be prevented from accumulating to the point of speciation, assuming that microevolution can't lead to speciation given enough time is like assuming gravity wouldn't work the same way in another galaxy. However, if what we observed was no apparent genetic relationships between different species, we would be justified in concluding there is some mechanism preventing speciation even if we didn't know what it was, so I lean more to rasetsu at this point. So the fact of microevolution alone doesn't get you to speciation, but what we observe is a nested hierarchy of genetic relationships that indicate common descent, and the observed occurrence of microevolution readily explains those relationships and allows us to make predictions that check out, like related species having the same ERVs.

That said, the arguments for and against assumption of microevolution being something that can't accumulate into macroevolution have been made, and I think it would be productive to move on to other liines of evidence,

Key line is, "At some point in their history..." This is the same as your skink. You see differences and assume change. Further, IIRC the only definition of macroevolution introduced in the thread was given by Mister Agenda: "Macroevolution is evolution above the species level leading to taxonomic divergence." Speciation itself is not macroevolution by this definition.

I may not have phrased that well. By 'evolution above the species level, I meant 'not confined to within a species'. Speciation would still count as macroevolution. Is this a 'kind' issue, where closely-related species count as the same kind? If so, a definition of 'kind' would be helpful so we can focus on evolution at that level. Would you agree that for practical purposes, 'kind' is equivalent to 'family', such as the Family Felinae (cats)?