Creation/evolution3

[Anomalocaris]

Drich thinking he's schooling Parker strikes me as hilarious.

Show some respect when speaking of that revered presence whose monkey like spelling skills is asserted, by no less august an authority than himself, to be indicative of intellectual parity with "Enistein", "Churchhill", and "eddison", no doubt all rolled into one.

oh, and his enisteiness wishes to avoid the impression of unwarranted modesty, so he throws in Charles "Schawb" as well.

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Evolution actually happens quite quickly but in spurts. The 'hair' gene mutates in a dinosaur and this dinosaur now has feathers. It is not a disadvantage, so the mutated gene is passed on. Pretty soon there are more and more feathered dinosaurs and as it turns out, this is an advantage and they tend to thrive while the others do not. This can happen in a very short time, less than a thousand years. Depending on the mutation, less than a hundred.

But decent post anyway. Kudos

I think you're both right. Yes, mutation is one of the features of evolution. However, even a successful mutation is limited to an individual. It will take very many generations for that mutation to face enough environmental trials to propagate through the species.

Not if parts of a species become geographically segregated. Not all successful mutations are successful because they confer a survival advantage. Mathematical modeling show many mutations of no survival advantage whatsoever can nontheless be expected to quickly displaces all other versions of the same genes in small to moderate populations thanks to quirks of population genetics.

So the gene pool of small to medium population can drift without the direction of drift conferring any selective advantage. If the drift occurs for long enough, a new species may arise as a result of this.

In theory, it is possible for 2 daughter species to arise in two isolated but very similar environments, the two daughter species would be basically identical in physical attributes and behavior, because each are well adapted to the same environment. But they would be genetically incompatible because their genomes have drifted too far apart during their isolation.