LOki
The Yaweh of Mischief
- Mar 26, 2006
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I keep reading about "microevolution" and "macroevolution", who came up with those ideas?
from wikipedia.Misuse
The term 'microevolution' has recently become popular among the anti-evolution movement, and in particular among young Earth creationists. The claim that microevolution is qualitatively different from macroevolution is fallacious as the main difference between the two processes is that one occurs within a few generations, whilst the other is seen to occur over thousands of years (ie. a quantitative difference).[1] Essentially they describe the same process.
The attempt to differentiate between microevolution and macroevolution is considered to have no scientific basis by any mainstream scientific organization, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
- Macroevolution, far from being "an entirely different story" from microevolution, is actually the same story, just on a larger scale. Creationists have not come up with a reasonable explanation why evolution should stop at the boundary of a species, rather than include the process that changes one species to another over time. Fact is, there is no such reason. No hard and fast distinction can be drawn between "micro" and "macro" evolution. It's all one process.
- The common creationist argument citing the difference between microevolution and macroevolution holds that, although microevolution is clearly observable, macroevolution is not observable, and therefore requires a leap of faith. Virtually all scientists, however, agree on the existence of macroevolutionary processes — although they might argue about the actual processes themselves — and most would say that the distinction between microevolution and macroevolution is a fabricated one. In the most common theories of evolution, macroevolution is simply a large collection of microevolutionary changes that accumulate over time to the point at which they cause speciation.
- Within the Modern Synthesis school of thought, macroevolution is thought of as the compounded effects of microevolution. Thus, the distinction between micro- and macroevolution is not a fundamental one - the only difference between them is of time and scale. However, it should be noted that time is not a necessary distinguishing factor - macroevolution can happen without gradual compounding of small changes; whole-genome duplication can result in macroevolution occuring over a single generation. One of the most significant applications of this is found in the evolution of the vertebrates, which was mediated by duplications of the hox gene complex.
- The terms macroevolution and microevolution were first coined in 1927 by the Russian entomologist Iurii Filipchenko (or Philipchenko, depending on the transliteration), in his German-language work Variabilität und Variation, which was the first attempt to reconcile Mendelian genetics and evolution. Filipchenko was an evolutionist, but as he wrote during the period when Mendelism seemed to have made Darwinism redundant, the so-called "eclipse of Darwinism" (Bowler 1983), he was not a Darwinian, but an orthogeneticist. Moreover Russian biologists of the period had a history of rejecting Darwin's Malthusian mechanism of evolution by competition.
In Theodosius Dobzhansky's Genetics and the Origin of Species, he began by saying that "we are compelled at the present level of knowledge reluctantly to put a sign of equality between the mechanisms of macro- and microevolution" (1937, page 12), thereby introducing the terms into the English-speaking biological community (Alexandrov 1994). Dobzhansky had been Filipchenko's student and regarded him as his mentor. In science, it is difficult to deny a major tenet of one's teachers due to filial loyalty, and Dobzhansky, who effectively started the modern Darwinian synthesis with this book, found it disagreeable to have to deny his teacher's views (Burian 1994).
- An ongoing debate in evolution is whether there is a distinction between macroevolution and microevolution, and if so, how to define that difference. Since the advent of molecular biology, with its insight into the molecular details of mutation, there has been a surge of thought that there is no fundamental distinction: evolution is evolution.
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