"The i'iwi (Vestiaria coccinea) is a Hawaiian honeyeater which, as records
from the last century show, used to feed largely by extracting nectar from
lobelioid flowers. The i'iwi's long, downcurved bill is well adapted for
extracting the nectar from the base of the deep corollas of these flowers,
which they pollinate in the process. But lobelioids are no longer abundant,
and in a paper in Conservation Biology Smith and colleagues describe evidence
that teh i'iwi's bill is evolving in response to the bird's enforced change in
feeding habits.
"Lobelioids used to be a prominent component of Hawaiian forests. In
the past 100 years, however, a quarter of the species have become extincet and
the remainder are rare as a result of habitat changes and grazing by feral
ungulates. I'iwi now feed largely upon the flowers of the ohia treee,
Mestrosideros polymorpha. According to nineteenth-century naturalists, i'iwis
were excluded from this tree by the aggressive behaviour of another
honeyeater, th 'o'o (Moho nobilis). But the 'o'o was extinct by 1900.
"Ohia flowers lack corollas and the other honeyeater species that feed
upon them have short bills. Smit et al. thus predicted that the i'iwi should
evolve a shorter bill and they compared measurements of museum specimens
collected before 1902 with measurements of live speciments. This analysis
showed that i'iwis have undergone statistically significant declines in upper
mandible lenght by about 2-3 percent, whereas characters such as wing or
tarsus length are the same. No such change in mandible length was recorded in
a related honeyeater species, the aparine Himatione sanguinea, that had not
altered its diet.
"The classic example of a microevolutionary change in bill morphology is
that in one of Darwin's finches, Geospiza fortis, on Daphne Major Island in
the Galapagos. There the population shows rapid declines in bill depth and
width after severe El Nino events, as a result of a short-term fall in the
abundance of large seeds and an increase in small ones. The especial interest
in the case of the i'iwi, however, is that the adaptations in bill lenght are
a response to extinctions and are likely to be long-lived."~William J.
Sutherland, "I'iwis fit the Bill," Nature May 4, 1995, 375, p. 14.
The introduction of the apple to the New World is having a rapid effect on
insects over the past 4 centuries.
"A fly (_Rhagoletis pomonella_) that normally eats hawthorn fruit
during its larval stage gave rise to a race that infests apples (apple
maggot) about 170 years ago. This race originated in the Hudson River
Valley and then spread over the eastern and midwestern U.S. The
apple and the original hawthorn races now mate and lay eggs at
different times, so interbreed only rarely. Clear genetic differences
exist, and the apple maggot may now be on its way to becoming a new
species (_Nature_ 336:13-14, 61-67, 1988)."
While I considered the possibility you suggest, I reject it as unnecessary
unless you are going to believe that God created these new forms as we
speak. If this is the case, how do we tell the gradual alteration of a beak
or the gradual change of reproductive timing which is created by God from
that which might be created by evolution? You may say that this is only a
minor change, but you haven't observed things very long. In point of fact,
the i'iwi's mouth piece is rapidly evolving.
>2. That the Designer engineered flowers, by various natural and/or
>non-natural mechanisms to be perfectly suited to the mouthpieces of
>insects that had been created tens of millions of years before.
>
>You said "flowers evolved", and that is all the evolutionist ever
>says--this came from that, one thing gave rise to another, such and such
>*evolved*.
We see it happening today so what is the problem with saying it happened
yesterday?
>These terms have become something of a magic bullet for
>evolutionists. Just because an evolutionist can *say* something evolved
>does not *prove* it did so by purely naturalistic mechanisms. The
>evolutionist starts with his conclusion and justifies himself by
>pointing out that *some* adaptations have been observed in species--he
>conveniently overlooks the fact that this isn't the kind of adaptation
>that involves new species or even new organs. (Forget speckled moths in
>this debate because in that case there were always some white and some
>brown moths for natural selection to work on--there was never anything
>new, just varying numbers of the two variations.)
>
If we didn't see it happening today, then I would agree that one might be
able to reject evolution. But as it is, one can only reject it if one has
not delved into the details. We see new rats arise over the past 400 years
which have very different chromosomal patterns from all other rats in the
world. Yet the island they live on didn't have rats prior to 1600!
(references upon request)
>I realize Darwin did not develop his thesis in the form of these two
>theories, nevertheless they are reasonable conclusions of the
>evolutionist's position. It is the General Theory of Evolution that I
>challenge because no positive proof has ever been offered to support it.
Let me suggest an analogy. You say that no one has observed major
evolutionary change. No one has ever seen the sun orbit the Galaxy. So are
we to believe that the sun does not orbit the galaxy? It takes about 26
million years for the sun to orbit the galaxy. It takes, sometimes, two or
three million years for a species to change. (The average lifetime of a
species in the Tertiary fossil record is three million years). Which is
more likely to be the case? The thing which we can observe occuring at a
rate of 1 event per 3 million years or 1 event per 26 million years?
Remember, that mutations are passed on to the offspring and mutations are
cumulative. We share 98% of our DNA sequence with chimps and fossil
evidence says we split 5 million years ago. Are you sure that there is no
pathway through the DNA sequence space which allow an ancestor-descendant
series to go from chimp to human? You are saying that I could not take a
chimp DNA and alter one nucleotide, produce an offspring, then alter one
more and produce another etc until the DNA sequence is human? Are you sure
this is true?
Chimp and human cytochrome c is identical! You have chimp cytochrome c!
>Its position is no better scientifically than the creationist's, and as
>such it is not unreasonable to challenge it in every single domain of
>human knowledge in which it rears its head.
No, evolution is much better than the creationist position. Do you believe
that this can happen? Send 4 friends to different distant cities and have
them copy the encyclopedia britannica, but somewhere in the process each is
to choose a random spot to insert a randomly chosen paragraph into their
copy. The point of insertion and the paragraph are randomly chosen out of
the entire encyclopedia. Do you think that this broken segment of the
encyclopedia would be identical when your 4 friends came back together? Of
course not. The odds are that each paragraph would be different and the
insertion points would be different. But in the case of pseudogenes, we
have the same BROKEN gene inserted at the same spot in the genome of chimp,
human, gorilla and gibbon. The fact that the pseudogenes are broken means
they weren't designed to do anything. There is no reason why God would
create broken parts of the genome to make us think species are related if
they aren't.
>
>For example, since last Friday, we have been listening to the major
>media going on about two things ad nauseum: life on Mars and UFO's at
>Roswell.
Who cares what the media say. They never get it right anyway.
>There is one difference between the evolutionist's position and mine:
>he tries to pass his off as real science whereas I recognize the
>religious nature of both positions. Naturalistic Evolution is the
>cardinal doctrine (read dogma) of the humanist religion.
So explain why God would make broken genes and insert them into the
identical places on unrelated species?
see
http://earth.ics.uci.edu:8080/faqs/molecular%2Dgenetics.html
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm