So, turns out my mother-in-law is a creationist. I hadn’t cottoned on to it before, as we don’t have a lot in common (she’s also a tea-partier, so she’s fitting the stereotype pretty well), but yesterday my in-laws and I went to London’s Natural History Museum. All went pretty well until we encountered a small display explaining the evolution of the horse over the last 50 million years.
Anyway, that ended the conversation for the moment. But was I accurate? It sounded so at the time, but having done a quick google, it seems creationists latch on to the ‘horses aren’t evolving’ thing as some kind of ‘proof’ that evolution is false.
Obviously it’s crud. I’ve found plenty for other animals, but any indications of present horse evolution?
I’ve found examples such as a butterfly that adapted the colour of its wings to hide in polluted areas, or that human evolution is still going on so we are adapting to new diets and so on.
I specifically hoped for something about how the horse is presently evolving as it seems it’s a point my MIL latched on to.
Even with examples of changes in horse phenotype in wild horses over the last few hundred years, your m-i-l will just move the goal posts to “that’s just microevolution”.
The horse has probably evolved more in the last thousand years than at any time prior to that.
IIRC there’s mention in one of the ancient greek historians of army horses being roughly shoulder-to-head height. That’s obviously fairly different to today
Did it? Or did some members of the species already have wings of that colour, and it is only those and their descendants that we predominantly find in polluted areas? Can new features arise spontaneously, and if so, how? Are the butterflies with the non-polluted colouring still alive and well and living in rural environments? Has speciation in fact occurred?
…Probably more fertile ground to explore than snarking on the Biblical account of the flood, or poisoning the well by saying “they’re just going to move the goalposts” as though the existence of different-coloured butterflies proved that the modern horse is a lineal descendant of Eohippus.
All I can suggest is that you take her to see the Harriet and Robert Heilbrunn Cosmic Pathway in the Natural History Museum in New York. If that doesn’t convince her, nothing will.
Actually no, and this goes to the heart of why you can’t really reason with many people on this.
On the ark, there were the original “kinds”. Only a few hundred or possibly thousands of these. But over time, their descendants’ genes because corrupted by the Fall, resulting in the millions of species we see today.
Now, this corruption may sound like evolution, but importantly: something, something information, no further questions.
So in terms of the OP, it wouldn’t even matter if you found a species of horse that could deep sea dive for turtles and communicated via radio waves. It can be hand-waved the same way.
You can at least try to explain to your friend though, that one difference between evolution and creationism is the former makes testable claims: about what fossils we may subsequently find, or how different species genotypes may relate etc. Creationism makes no testable claims.
Aren’t ALL animals always evolving? I mean, with humans, I get that we’re keeping the weak genes alive through the wonders of modern medicine (and social morality) but we haven’t stopped it completely have we?
All organisms are still evolving. Evolution is the inevitable consequence of meeting a small handful of conditions (imperfect reproduction, competition, etc.). We couldn’t “stop” or “prevent” evolution any more than we could stop the earth from revolving around the sun.
Then we, as humans, are exerting selective pressure, eliminating new mutations. Keep in mind that the vast majority of life on this planet - bacteria - has been reproducing asexually since day one. Each bacterium is a clone of its parent. And they’ve evolved just fine.
