You can’t see a horse evolve in the same way you can’t see a rock erode. It takes hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years to see any substantial change for the non-expert.
You don’t just wake up one day and have some weird looking non-horse, just like you don’t wake up one day and see the Grand Canyon where only a river used to be.
All species are evolving. But it’s a process that takes thousands of years to observe in practice. So people that want to deny its existence can claim nobody can see it happening so it doesn’t exist.
It’s like somebody who doesn’t want to believe in the atomic theory. If they’re going to insist that they won’t believe in atoms until you show them one, then you’re never going to convince them.
Wrong. All populations of living things are subject to evolution. In the overwhelming majority of cases it occurs so slowly that an individual can’t observe the progression directly, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
Now that’s just silly, ridiculous even. It makes as much sense as saying you’re not growing taller now, so you can’t ever have grown taller.
That phrasing seems to accept her contention that horses are not currently evolving, but otherwise you are correct.
ETA: Not that there’s much hope that any of this will alter her opinion. Sometimes people insist on believing what they want to believe, regardless of logic and facts.
Evolution has two basic components - to get very, very simplistic. There’s random mutation and selective reproduction. In the case of domesticated animals the selective reproduction - the ones with the beneficial mutations have more offspring (that survive) - is directed by humans. So, in fact, domestic animals 'evolve" much faster than their wild counterparts, who rely on chance and the difference in survival rates.
If you want a perfect example of evolution in action, pick on the poor dogs. The massive variety of dogs are “evolved”, or selectively bred, for specific different genetic traits. Of course, we use inbreeding a lot to ensure these genes and their traits are not lost. For further ammunition, google the experiments by the Russian biologist who spent several decades breeding Siberian foxes to domestication (selectively eliminating pups that seemed aggressive and unfriendly to humans). the result was surprisingly like dogs - they got white patches on their foreheads etc.
IMHO humans are “evolving” in the opposite direction. Since agriculture, we have generally evolved away from intelligence and toward dumb docility. The most aggressive of us go off to war and die. The dumb and unimaginative stay behind to till the fields. You need a lot less brains to till a field than to stalk game. The problem has been exacerbated by advances in civilization - people with poor immune systems, bad eyesight, mental diseases and inheritable diseases like diabetes survive to reproduce. In fact, demographically, the richer you are the fewer children you have, and there’s a rough correlation between brains and money.
But I fear the other posters are correct. You can’t argue logic with a brick wall.
Well we could stop or seriously impact any of those conditions.
This is why I generally think it’s better to put humans to one side when discussing evolution. Not because we’re not products of nature or whatever, but because to trivially say evolution is continuing in a business as usual way in humans you have to define the term so broadly it loses virtually all meaning.
At some point, maybe in just a few centuries, humans will be able to customize their entire genome. Would you say that is still evolution? I wouldn’t hesitate to say it is not; it’s something similar, but not the same concept as natural selection or survival of the fittest. And if that isn’t, then already some of the things humans have done to themselves, their environment and other species have moved us towards this other form of selection.
Regardless, a random mutation can still happen and be passed on through progeny, and so on. Natural selection is only part of the equation.
What we are doing with technology is simply altering the environment, and therefore the strength of the various selective pressures that drive our evolution. But we are not stopping evolution, and we cannot.
This might explain why my children are able to pick up wifi in their teeth!
I would agree with that.
I maintain that the word loses all meaning if we just say it’s whatever survives.
For example, let’s say it turns out that humans are fashioned by the gods of Olympus and our deaths are really caused by them growing bored of particular individuals.
Well, if we use the super broad meaning of evolution, this too is evolution. But this is very far away from what people normally mean by the term, or anywhere where the concept can be used to make useful predictions / extrapolations (obviously it’s hard to make predictions in the silly reality with gods, but my meaning is this definition of the concept would be an empty tautology in any reality).
If they say that there were a greatly reduced number of animals needed because the “kinds” branched out to the millions and millions of species we have today, they’ve killed their own argument that evolution can’t happen.
Because if one pair of “bear kind” has evolved into black bears, grizzly bears, polar bears, panda bears, koala bears, etc., in just the last 4000 years, then they’re saying that they believe in a super-charged version of evolution where change happens way way way more quickly than what we observe. Ask them for any evidence that evolution can occur that quickly. At that rate, the ancient Israelites could have been australopithecus afarensis (Lucy)!
Evolution is natural selection or differential reproduction.
If the gods of Olympus or random meteor strikes take out half a population, That’s not evolution. If the deaths are due to something that some genetic characteristic can help prevent or mitigate, then the ones with that characteristic survive. Do this often enough for the same characteristic, and that trait will come to dominate.
Not only that, they swap genes, not only among their own genus, but between completely non-related bacteria. And virus genes get mixed into all kinds of other beings.
Back to the horses: the website Distractify recently had a collection of photos showing the biggest and smallest of various kinds of animals. Would a comparison of mini horses to shire horsesbe of any use to you?
That’s how the first cellular organisms reproduced, and how their descendants still reproduce today. And they evolve all the time, as do viruses and those are even simpler (and cloning themselves).
I just wanted to get less simplistic for a minute and point out that even random mutations aren’t really all that random.
In addition to changes driven by the phenotype, genes also evolve on the genomic level. Different genes have different structures and some structures lend themselves to mutation more easily than others. Genes that are tightly packaged without a lot of activity don’t mutate as readily as genes with lots of activity. Repeating base pairs are another trigger for mutation as sometimes these get misaligned during the copying process.
If a mutation is never beneficial - think of the genes that control body segmentation - then those genes will not evolve much and remain very similar over many species. If a mutation to a gene is often beneficial such as genes that are involved in the digestive process - those gene will evolve to a structure that changes easily.
ALL living organisms are subject to selective pressures. Those that leave the most descendants “win”. Since random mutations and genetic drift happen all the time, and different individuals leave different numbers of descendants, all life-forms are subject to evolution at all times.
It just happens incredibly slowly.
Yes, some members already had darker wings, evolution can only work with traits that actually exist, it doesn’t cause a particular trait. Yes, the dark moths are mostly in polluted areas and the lighter ones in non-polluted areas. Yes, new features can arise spontaneously, we call that “mutation”, although most are not beneficial and are rapidly eliminated. (Prior to modern pollution levels, being a darker moth of the indicated species was NOT beneficial and they tended to be eaten first. It was only when the environment changed that being darker was a good thing and suddenly the lighter moths were being eaten first.)
Has speciation occured? Not quite yet - that is the first step towards it, or one of the first steps. Until the two varieties of moth diverge enough that they can no longer breed with each other and have fertile offspring they’re still the same species. Becoming two species will require 1) further changes and 2) a sufficient period of time where the two groups do not intermix so they do not share changes between them.
Random mutations will still occur from time to time in the cells that are cloned, resulting in new traits which will them be acted upon, leaving differing descendants.
Incorrect. This presupposes that evolution is going somewhere and it isn’t. It’s all about who has the most most grandkids. If dumb farmers with bad eyesight and eventual diabetes leave more descendants than smart hunters with eagle eyesight and impeccable blood sugar levels then in fact the “weak” farmers are the more fit in evolutionary terms.
And, actually, because the farmers live in crowded conditions among the various feces of their fellow humans and livestock they tend to have BETTER immune systems - as demonstrated by the way European diseases decimated native population of hunter-gatherers whenever the two met.
As for the poor have many kids/rich have few kids, that’s the divide between the r and K reproductive strategies. One group has few offspring and invests a great deal of resources in each one, the other has more offspring but gives less to each one. Both are viable strategies with their own benefits and drawbacks. Neither is inherently superior, nor does one guarantee success (including outbreeding the other group) over the other.
You have to understand that this isn’t how science works for creationists. Evolution can happen on a relatively small scale, if it’s compatible with belief in a great flood and a remotely plausible ark. But the fact that things have been evolving for the past 4000 years doesn’t prove things evolved 5000, or a billion, years ago. “Were you there?”
Nothing proves anything if it contradicts the Bible. They say it’s only faith that leads us to assume that, because we can only observe plate tectonics, palaeomagnetism, dendrochronology, sedimentation, radiometric dating, the speed of light, etc. working in a certain way today, that’s how it worked in the past. It doesn’t matter how much one dating method backs up another, how much evidence has been amassed to confirm the accuracy of these figures, when we have a book telling us something different. If you can prove evolution is happening right now, why not? It’s certainly a mysterious way in which to work, after all. But that doesn’t mean it happened before. In fact, we know it didn’t, because otherwise, surely, the scientific document that is the Bible would tell us.
The fact is that these people are willfully ignorant, arrogant fools. Imagine the lunacy it would take to say that, just because an apple fell the last trillion times, you don’t believe the same laws applied 4000 years ago, or will tomorrow. Imagine how hard you would want to slap someone who says “Atomic theory is only a theory! Can you see electrons? No? Aha!”
I don’t think there’s anything you can do except ignore and marginalize these buffoons. They won’t listen. It’s like trying to talk someone out of a mental illness.
This argument is true but it will backfire if used against an evolution denier.
“See? You admit nobody can observe evolution happening naturally. The only time your so-called evolution works is when somebody is doing it. We call that intelligent design. And just as human beings are intelligently designing lesser creatures, God intelligently designed human beings.”
That, I think is the biggest single impediment for most creationists. For whatever reason, they just can’t wrap their minds around the idea that a LOT of little changes can add up over a REALLY long time into big ones.
Geologic time is one of those things that almost by definition, is abstract. Your average human’s largest time frame to experience is decades. It’s easy enough to conceive of up to a few millenia, but when someone says that the Pleistocene epoch was from about 2.5 million years ago to about 11,000 years ago, that seems like a colossally long time at first blush, but in geologic time, that was a blink of an eye ago. And Pleistocene animals are the classic saber-toothed tigers, mammoths and mastodons, cave lions, dire wolves, cave bears, giant sloths, etc… similar to, but different enough from modern animals to show the effects of evolution. Horses are in there somewhere- I think Eohippus might have been a bit earlier in the Quaternary though.
But thinking over even that relatively short time period just ties a lot of people’s brains up in knots. The idea that the Triassic period was 250-200 MILLION years ago is just so abstract that it doesn’t even register, and as a result, neither does the idea that let’s say… 250 million little changes (assuming a generation per year) might actually result in serious change in a given evolutionary lineage of species.
All SPECIES are evolving. Individual organisms do not.
I’m a little surprised that no one has brought up punctuated equilibrium yet.
The current thinking goes that much of the change in species happens relatively quickly, perhaps in response to changes in selective pressures, such as climate or competing species. Then, a relative equilibrium is reached and long periods go by without substantial change. We don’t really expect to see some gradual continuum of change.
So even if we fall back on the “it takes thousands of generations” argument for why the MIL doesn’t see changes: if we’re in a period of equilibrium, observing a thousand generations with no substantial change wouldn’t really be a surprise. Nor would it be a surprise to see major changes happen quickly, after just a hundred generations.
Punctuated equilibrium addresses horses from both perspectives. No major change in wild selective pressure means no major change in species; they’re in the equilibrium period. Major selective pressure from domestication means significant rapid change in domestic horses; they’re in the punctuated period.