(December 24, 2019 at 9:58 am)Yukon_Jack Wrote: Still waiting on evidence that macro evolution was observed in a lab; or did I miss it
What you never heard of fruit flies evolving under the watch of scientists?
Once upon a time, creationists openly dismissed both macro- and microevolution and argued accordingly. Today, such zealots tend to accept microevolution while confidently proclaiming that macroevolution is a matter of faith because (they say) no one has ever seen a new species evolve. When they don’t know any better, they feel safe dismissing speciation as impossible.
First a proof of an unobserved speciation event: British biologist Julian “Lulu” Skidmore went to Dubai determined to prove a familial relationship between llamas and camels. She didn’t just adhere to fossil similarities, definitive traits, or genomic sequencing—things that creationists habitually misunderstand and reject; she found more conclusive proof than that. In 1998, she managed to cross-breed a 990-pound camel dad with a 165-pound momma llama to produce Rama the “cama.” These two lineages have been genetically isolated for roughly 30 million years. After extensive research, she devised a means of using laboratory assistance to breed viable hybrids that could neither reproduce nor even exist naturally.
The first time evolution was observed was at the hand of geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky back in the 1960s, but it has happened a number of times since then too.
Like described in this article by New Scientist “Bacteria Make Major Evolutionary Shift in the Lab.”
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1...n-the-lab/
A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers’ eyes. Evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait. And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events. Twenty years ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing, US, took a single Escherichia coli bacterium and used its descendants to found 12 laboratory populations. The 12 have been growing ever since, gradually accumulating mutations and evolving for more than 44,000 generations, while Lenski watches what happens…. All 12 evolved larger cells, for example, as well as faster growth rates on the glucose they were fed, and lower peak population densities. But sometime around the 31,500th generation, something dramatic happened in just one of the populations—the bacteria suddenly acquired the ability to metabolize citrate, a second nutrient in their culture medium that E. coli normally cannot use.
In 1419, Portuguese sailors settled on a few volcanic islands west of the strait of Gibraltar and accidentally imported a few European mice to each of these settlements. Five centuries later, French biologist Janice Britton-Davidian discovered that these very small and isolated populations of mice have evolved into six different different genetically distinct species. They all look about the same, but the ancestral European mice have 40 chromosomes, and the Madeiran mice range from 22 to 30 chromosomes. They didn’t lose DNA; rather, some of their chromosomes fused, much like chromosome 2 in humans which apes still have scattered in two different chromosomes (which I mentioned in earlier post), packing more DNA into fewer units.
And so on.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
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