John's Blog

"Macro" vs. "micro" evolution

So about 6 years ago was the first time I heard a fundamentalist Christian make a distinction between "macro-evolution" and "micro-evolution." The former (supposedly not observed) refers to speciation over long periods of time whereas the later refers to adaptation that can be seen over shorter periods in the lab, like antibiotic resistance for example. Anyway, this week on fark of all places, somebody posted the the best simple rebuttal to this arbitrary (and artificial) distinction I have read.

Macro-evolution is just micro-evolution over a really long time. Most people who say this kind of thing have no grasp on how long billions of years actually is.It's like me saying that walking from one end of my living room to the other is "micro-walking", and walking from New York to Los Angeles is "macro-walking". The only difference is related to scale and time; the process itself is exactly the same. Biological evolution is change in the gene pool of a population over time. That's all it is.

So anyway, micro-walking now joins intelligent falling as one of my favorite concepts.

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