I was in Ireland the past 10 days playing golf. Lots of airplane and bus time. I got to think a lot, which is always scary I guess.
I found myself thinking about a particular comment I often get from evolutionists on my posts regarding evolution and intelligent design. "Predictability." One of the claimed elements of a good scientific theory are the predictions one can make based on the theory. I don't claim to be an expert on all that. But it made me think about evolution and what I think life should look like if in fact "macro evolution" were true.
As a review, I have advocated that while micro evolution is unquestionably true, it does not automatically follow that macro evolution is also true. It has not been observed, it has not been demonstrated experimentally as far as I can tell from what I read. IMO, Darwinists merely "infer" that macro occurred because they can observe micro. Much like IDist's infer design because they don't believe Darwinian processes can explain the intricate appearance of design. Both make inferences which seems a perfectly reasonable thing for scientists to do.
My thoughts took me down what I thought was an interesting path:
If macro evolution occurred, is it still occurring? Why does it appear to have stopped? I realize some believe there are evidences of change within our DNA. That could be standard micro evolutionary processes at work but not necessarily macro.
I find it interesting that it is NOT OBVIOUS that evolution is still occurring. Think about it. Look at the world around you. Things appear basically complete. It seems to me the theory of macro evolution would predict that we would see MASSIVE evidence of macro evolution still taking place. It seems we would see many species of plants, animals and humans in transition from one thing to another, creating entirely new species. Instead we see nothing at all. That seems rather odd to me. It does not seem to be what Macro Evolution would predict. In fact, we almost daily are reminded the number of species is actually declining. Why is it totally OBVIOUS that species are disappearing during our lifetime and yet no new species are appearing at the same time?
Why would macro evolution somehow take primordial soup and create thru random means this amazingly diverse world we observe and then STOP? I suppose it can be argued it is because of the massive amount of time and the last 5,000 years is just a nit in time. But that seems irrelevant to me. Regardless of where we are on the spectrum of time, there ought to be massive numbers of obvious, incomplete transitional forms for us to observe. e,g, cows with 3 legs and a partial 4th still in the process of evolving. Multiply that across tens of millions of species. The amount of macro evolution we should be observing ought to be massive. And yet there essentially is nothing.
Imagine an area of town where a major real estate development is taking place. Over the course of the development, on any given day one would observe "incompleteness." But there would come a time when it basically would be complete. Some stores will go out of business and a different store takes it's place, but no big changes as a whole. If random macro evolution is responsible for what we see, why would it not be like a massive development where things NEVER appear finished or complete? What brought macro evolution to a halt? Could it be that it simply never happened?
To me this makes the "Cambrian Explosion" all that more troublesome for evolutionists. This refers to the fact that in the fossil record entire species suddenly appear totally complete. No transitional forms at all. This in total contradiction to what the theory of macro evolution seems would have predicted.
Now take what Intelligent Design would predict. In my own words, say an intelligent being created what we see, including the ability for species to "micro evolve" to allow adaptation to changing environmental conditions. And say that being, at some point, reached a place where the creation was basically "finished." (I am NOT saying that happened in 6 days, blah, blah, blah.) I think Intelligent Design predicts the world would appear essentially finished.
I am sure my evolutionary friends will have many points to make I have not thought of, and I welcome their input. But to this observer it seems odd that things appear complete considering they supposedly were created by totally random events. Seems those events would still be happening in a very obvious way apparent to us all.
Just to test my thinking, I googled "Evolution Finished". Turned up some interesting hits. I liked this one called "Is Evolution Finished?". And here is an article arguing the opposite of my thinking. I note it seems it argues that micro evolution is still rapidly occurring. I don't argue that point. I think the ability for species to adapt through micro evolution is one of the characteristics of the design. The danger is to make the mistake in logic to infer macro evolution based on the reality of micro evolution. If true, we should be regularly observing both.
