evolution and the standard responses...

[acroyear]

Finches on Galapagos Islands evolving - Yahoo! News:

A medium sized species of Darwin's finch has evolved a smaller beak to take advantage of different seeds just two decades after the arrival of a larger rival for its original food source.

The altered beak size shows that species competing for food can undergo evolutionary change, said Peter Grant of Princeton University, lead author of the report appearing in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

scientists: well, it never hurts to document the obvious...

creationist wackos: but it's sitll a bird!

Comments

[javasaurus.livejournal.com]

If I misinterpreted something, I'm sorry. If I went off on tangents, well, that's what I do. I thought we were engaged in a fairly good discussion about the meaning of evolution. Didn't mean to step on your toes.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

sorry if i seemed harsh - i didn't want to get into the "meaning" of evolution as much as the application of it. messing with semantics wasn't (and normally isn't) my game when there are bigger issues at stake than what i saw as mere vocabulary.

my point was its evolution and evolution is evolution at the main level, even if in the details it gets, well, detailed. as all science theories do.

to creationists, "its still a bird" is going to be their standard reply even if scientists did decide that its a new species. they widened their net by talking about "kinds" instead of species when the fruit fly speciation experiments were published ("well, its still a fruit fly").

to them, macro evolution means a dog giving birth to a cat and no amount of evidence or definitions to the contrary will break them of that strawman - which is why i didn't really feel like getting into that distinction. it was irrelevant to my point.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

this kinda said what i was trying to say - that this isn't trying to "prove" evolution so much as demonstrate how the process is ongoing and a specific example.

from a scienceblogger

But the Grants never set out to prove evolutionary theory. The "this" in Pennisi's story isn't evolution itself, but one of the details of the mechanisms behind evolution. In the current paper, the Grants deal with a process until now never documented called "character displacement," in which one characteristic of a species changes in response to competition. In this case, the character is beak size: when times got tough, the beaks shrank, as the finches with larger beaks died off and those with smaller beaks fared better. Sounds bit dry for those who don't study evolution for a living, but this has been the meat and potatoes of evolutionary research since, well, Darwin's day.

Indeed, the very fact that biologists don't waste their time trying to prove evolution is real should tell the creationists something. Unfortunately, instead of marvelling at the how complex and fascinating evolution really is, the more hard-core among them will probably jump on the first sentence of the paper's abstract, pointing out that language like "Competitor species can have evolutionary effects on each other" proves how narrow-minded biologists have become.

"Look how they assume the very thing they're trying to prove," is what they'll say. Never mind that they aren't trying to prove anything.