I don’t buy that as an excuse anymore. Plenty of people are able to conceive of that sort of timescale well enough to grasp the concept of evolution. Intellectually lazy creationists are living the same seven decades as the rest of us.
Can an almighty god turn a frog into an ape? Why or why not?
Why don’t some things evolve? What prevents them from evolving? Are they just naturally resistant to mutation, or are they supernaturally protected from it?
Plenty of things don’t evolve. The technical term for them is “dead.”
No, the average isn’t 6’ nowadays-- it’s aorund 5’ 9" in the US. But you’d probably find the average to be closer to 5’ 6" 150 years ago, probably due to poorer nutrition (and pre-natal care) rather than any genetic change. And there isn’t a “genetic preference” for taller people. In fact, the term “genetic preference” doesn’t even make sense.
One could argue, I suppose, that neither sharks nor alligators are evolving, as they haven’t changed much in the past few million years.
And you’d be wrong. There is more to biology than the superficial appearance of an organism. There are many species of sharks and alligators that have gone extinct. If that’s not evolution, I don’t know what is.
If a creature doesn’t change for a long period of time, it’s because it didn’t need to. It reached a stage where it was perfectly adapted to its environment. If that environment changes, so will the animal, or it will go extinct.
In the case of sharks or alligators, rising water temperatures may eventually force an adaption to keep the animal cool, or they may have to grow tougher skins in order to be immune to the effects of pollution. Since both creatures are at the top of their food chain, it would have to be an enviornmental change which would cause changes. (In some creatures, they adpapt because their predator adapted.
Sorry about the snark, tdn. It’s a comon misconception that some things “aren’t evolving”, and it does seem to appear to be true. But that just isn’t the case.
But isn’t it the case that some groups of plants/animals evolve faster than others?
Sure: species with shorter life cycles evolve more quickly than those with longer. That’s why there’s endless new bacteria species but just the one for humans.
They’d like you to think that, but they’ve really been conducting hybridization experiments in hopes of creating an even more deadly killing machine…behold the Crocodile shark!
Seriously, though, one could also argue that conservative morphologies in a lineage do not translate to an absence of evolutionary effects. Rather, they tend to indicate a slower rate of evolution, but evolution nonetheless. For example, one can typically tell a Jurassic-era croc from a modern one; the modern genus Crocodylus, for example, is thought to have appeared “only” 20 million years ago, and its members tend to possess narrower snouts than their Mesozoic ancestors.
Yes, one would expect mice to evolve faster than humans, for example.
Well, that’s not why there is only one species of human. If you travelled back in time 50k years, you’d find at least 4 species of humans wandering around. The other three just happened to have died off since then.
To be fair, tdn did not make a statement of fact. He simply stated that “one could argue”. And one could. Granted, one would be hard-pressed to make a convincing argument along those lines…
And extinction is often more complex than a simple dying out of a species as a result of natural selection. Extinction factors very heavily into the history of life on Earth, but is not necesarily itself driven by evolutionary mechanisms. Ill-timed asteroids and super-volcanoes represent bad luck more than bad genes.
Yeah, that’s why I said I was sorry for being snarky.
What environmental change couldn’t be described as “bad luck”? And the fact that many species survived the asteroid seems like “bad genes” is just as appropriate a way of describing the extinction as anthing else. After all, evolutionary change is nothing more than a big game of chance with a feedback mechanism, no?
Yep. One could argue that, but I’m not the one to do so.
When I submitted that post, I was thinking “Gee, I wonder if my post will be misinterpreted, and I’ll have to end up defending something I don’t believe in the first place.”
Guess that answers that, huh? 
People have correctly commented that sharks have evolved, but some creationists make the argument “If evolution is true, then how come shark haven’t evolved? Huh?”
I didn’t misread your post, tdn. I knew what you were getting at. One could argue that I misresponded, though (with my snarky reply). 
Didn’t say it was an excuse. Just pointed it out as a high hurdle that must be overcome. And it can be, with effort (note I said it was nearly impossible to grasp the timespan at a gut level, not entirely impossible). Hell, I start to twitch myself when I really think about how in a million years my own lifetime amounts to barely more than half a hundredth of a percent. It’s truly humbling.
Speaking of which, the odd part, for me, is the disconnect in humility: if religious types are supposed to be humbled before their deity’s power, how is it that a smug faith insulates them from being humbled by a simple recognition of awesome reality?
Evolution doesn’t operate on the individual, it operates on populations. A specific animal doesn’t evolve; live or dead.