Evolution, religion, and ignorance.

[Chas]

In all fairness to Mister and Alpha, here is a great article from Dr. Moran on the micro/macro debate. The point is made that gradualism alone is not sufficient and there are many other things to consider. Micro and Macro evolution are not competing however it is not adequate to simply dismiss macroevolution as a whole bunch of microevolution. Worth a read.

http://bioinfo.med.utoronto.ca/Evolution...ution.html

Great read. As Gould says, "We may attain a unified theory of process, but the processes work differently at different levels and we cannot extrapolate from one level to encompass all events at the next."

And Gould was profoundly wrong. There is only one level at which evolution operates: selection of genes via the proxy of the phenotype.

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Uh, no. The point made in the cited article is "while cummulative micro-evolution alone is already sufficient in itself to cause macro-evolution, other factors also contributed to the actual path taken by macroevolution".

It does not say "micro-evolution" is in principle insufficient to explain "macro-evolution".

In essence, macro-evolution is a series of micro-evolution, guided by conditions and changes in conditions of the ambient environment.

Help me out, I am trying to find where in the article it states what you quoted. Here are some quotes directly from the artice:

"Nobody denies that macroevolutionary processes involve the fundamental mechanisms of natural selection and random genetic drift, but these microevolutionary processes are not sufficient, by themselves, to explain the history of life."

"Since speciation is not a direct consequence of changes in the frequencies of alleles in a population, it follows that microevolution is not sufficient to explain all of evolution."

Those two statements are false. The writer claims that he is not knowledgeable about macro-evolution and then goes on to prove that by giving a very unconventional definition of it.