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Index to Creationist Claims,  edited by Mark Isaak,    Copyright © 2004
Previous Claim: CB901.1   |   List of Claims   |   Next Claim: CB901.3

Claim CB901.2:

No new phyla, orders, or classes have been observed appearing. Macroevolution remains unobserved.

Response:

  1. Evolution works almost exclusively by gradual changes. It has taken hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary divergence to produce the existing phyla, and probably hundreds of thousands of years at least for classes to develop. For a new phylum, order, or class to arise suddenly would be creationism, not evolution.

  2. Macroevolution is evolution at or above the species level, which has been observed.

  3. Evidence is not limited to seeing something happen before our eyes. Evidence for macroevolution includes the pattern of homology between organisms, the fossil sequence (including abundant transitional fossils), biogeography, and other evidence. Furthermore, there are no plausible mechanisms that would prevent macroevolution, given the variation which we observe. Indeed, plausible mechanisms leading to diversity do exist (Lee et al. 2003).

Links:

Theobald, Douglas, 2004. 29+ Evidences for macroevolution: The scientific case for common descent. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

References:

  1. Lee, P. N., P. Callaerts, H. G. de Couet and M. Q. Martindale, 2003. Cephalopod Hox genes and the origin of morphological novelties. Nature 424: 1061-1065

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created 2003-8-19, modified 2003-8-28