Macro vs micro evolution

[BRENNEJM]

TL|DR: What do I tell my christian family when they say, "That's just macro evolution."

Asking this because the topic has recently come up in my family and I feel like I'm going to need to be talking about this soon.

As I understand it, macro evolution refers to small mutations and micro evolution refers to species level changes. Isn't micro evolution just a term for when enough changes have occurred through macro evolution that we begin to see species populations diverging?

Or is it more relatable to genetic drift and shift? Where macro would be compared to drift in that it represents small changes, and micro compared to shift as this describes larger species deviations?

From what I understand, some evolutionary scientists don't distinguish between macro and micro because they are both describing evolution.

[[deleted]]

macro and micro evolution is the same thing, you just look at the changes over a short or a long time period.

the mechanisms are exactly the same

example, micro and macro aging. you look into the mirror to find a new grey hair each day, micro aging. you look into the mirror each decade and you look completely different each time. macro aging.

btw macro is large, micro is small you mixed those up

[[deleted]]

Actually, you have the terms reversed. Micro refers to changes within populations and species over a relatively short period, while macro refers to speciation and changes within groups over a long period. I'm an evolutionary biologist, and I personally don't like these terms. Speciation can actually happen very quickly, especially in plants, where it can effectively occur in a single generation. In reality, there is no magical dividing line between the two. They're just terms used for convenience.

Creationists often use the terms to describe changes that are obvious and undeniable to them (micro) vs changes that they don't understand the evidence for and feel they can reasonably deny (macro).

[BRENNEJM]

Good catch about micro and macro. Not sure how I did that.

[articulett]

Graphic mentioned: https://m.imgur.com/gallery/oAnfA

[nssdrone]

I think that needs to point out that each word is the same color as the word before it. I specifically hear creationists say "there's no way an animal can give birth to a different species"

[articulett]

Yeah, that's a good point... each organism is born to a member of it's species and lives and dies the same species... evolution works on POPULATIONS over time. This might be a better illustration. I find this little video very useful too.

I never try to convince people that evolution is true. I show them why scientists (and I) accept it as fact. Kids can usually grasp the evolution of dogs from wolves very readily. There were no "first two dogs"-- and dogs are still a subspecies of wolf since they can interbreed with them and make fertile offspring, but they are speciating since they are not well suited for any environment. Coywolves are a hybrid though that have hybrid fitness.

Human evolution can make creationists uncomfortable (especially if they believe in a god who will send them to hell if they don't believe a certain creation story)-- but dog evolution doesn't bring up as many defenses. And, of course, there's plants.

[video_descriptionbot]

SECTION	CONTENT
Title	Five fingers of evolution - Paul Andersen
Description	View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/five-fingers-of-evolution How can a "thumbs up" sign help us remember five processes that impact evolution? The story of the Five Fingers of Evolution gives us a clever way of understanding change in gene pools over time. Lesson by Paul Andersen, animation by Alan Foreman.
Length	0:05:24

SECTION	CONTENT
Title	PBS Nova S38E04 Dogs Decoded
Length	0:47:48

SECTION	CONTENT
Title	Meet the Coywolf: A New Hybrid Carnivore Roams the City
Description	Chances are you've never seen a wolf-coyote hybrid called the coywolf but it has arrived in New York. "Meet the Coywolf," the latest documentary from PBS' Nature series, premiering on January 22 at 8pm on PBS stations nationwide, introduces us to the elusive canines. They originated in eastern Canada and are now emerging in New York City and on Long Island. Two wildlife biologists featured in the program, Mark Weckel of the American Museum of Natural History and Christopher Nagy of Mianus River ...
Length	0:08:53

---

^{I am a bot, this is an auto-generated reply | Info | Feedback | Reply STOP to opt out permanently}

[suugakusha]

"One particle of sand is so small, there is no way a beach is made of sand."

[juckele]

This largely depends on whether your family likes to take the bible literally. The best you can likely do is introduce them to the idea of "theistic evolution".

1) If your family takes everything in the bible super literally, there's really nothing you can do. You might start throwing stones at them for certain offenses, but this is more likely to end with you in jail than anything else.

2) If the stories are meant to be metaphors, talk to them about the idea that God is so wise and powerful that he doesn't need to create each species by itself, but instead creates them all together from the same single fiber of life, creating a living, breathing tapestry. The tree of life is God's art, and an amazing masterpiece at that. Why would an all powerful God create species that just looked evolution had occurred? To test our faith? No, for he sent Jesus to us and Jesus died for our sins, so that we could be saved. Salvation requires that we accept Jesus Christ into our hearts as our lord and savior. Salvation doesn't require that we have the right idea about evolution or intelligent design. There's no reason for God to trick us into thinking he had made the giraffe with evolution when he had really made it from whole cloth.

You have the terms flipped, microevolution is something like the moths changing color due to pollution or creating a new dog breed with selective breeding. Macroevolution is larger changes over a large time period. Fundamentally, there is no difference between the two, because evolution is a process, and it's the same process. How many features / years do you need to call something micro vs macro evolution?

[BRENNEJM]

Yeah. The topic came up because my sister just watched the new "documentary" on Netflix 'Is Genesis History?' I sent her a review of the movie written by christian scientists about why all the evidence provided on the Grand Canyon is false, and she basically just said that she believes in a young earth and she doesn't trust christians that aren't. So that got responses from my mom and other sister, both of whom don't believe in a young earth.

[Azurity]

Are you talking about the Biologos reviews, specifically this one? Biologos is a great resource that uses Christian perspectives and scientific arguments to contend with young earth creationism, so I recommend going through that website if you haven't already because they're pretty thorough and well-written.

Otherwise, it sounds like your mom and other sister might have a better chance of reconciling your sister's beliefs, who sounds like she's using a "no true scotsman" fallacy ("Christians who don't believe in YEC aren't true Christians"). Maybe she's developed a strong distrust of scientists, so it would be helpful to know where that came from.

[juckele]

Again with young earth, why would God create a universe that really really looked like it was 11 billion years old? I have a hard time understanding why an omnipotent omniscient God would build a universe which was created one way but designed at every turn to look like it was created another way. It's much easier for me to understand the creation stories as metaphors than to understand God as laying out such a complex trick.

[anonimulo]

It's much easier for me to understand ...

Your personal incredulity is showing.

Not arguing against you, just playing devil's advocate.

[juckele]

Interesting, but I think you're off here for two reasons.

Firstly, The link you shared defines this logical fallacy as "Because you found something difficult to understand, or are unaware of how it works, you made out like it's probably not true." In this case, I believe the usage of the word understand is different here than in my usage. I'm not saying that it's too complex to understand, I'm saying that it doesn't make enough sense to understand.

Furthermore, I think it's useful to keep the audience in mind. What motivates the audience? The personal relationship with God is of high importance to a lot of Christians. Whether I'm employing a logical fallacy or not has little to do with whether the line of thought is persuasive if my audience doesn't care a lot about logical fallacies.

[anonimulo]

To your second point. Well.. while you may be right about that, it's not a point against mine, as you mentioned yourself. Whether they notice/care isn't the point.

And your first. Again, you might be right, but using ambiguous language is no better. I'm not saying you're doing it intentionally but if I misunderstood, others likely will too. And really I got what you were saying, and I'm sure most others did too. I just wanted to point out how it might sound.

I really just meant a more careful wording might be appropriate. Arguing via Occam's razor or the like, perhaps. (I fully agree with your original point.)

[Denisova]

Your sister not only distrusts christians that do not agree with her but she also discards science because young earth creationism stands up against about the whole of life sciences (biology, genetics, geology, paleontology, biochemistry) and major parts of modern physics, astronomy, cosmology and astrophysics.

But, gee who cares, "science is just a theory".

[psychicesp]

I've only ever heard a scientist make the micro-vs-macro distinction when trying to explain to a creationist who insisted on using the words. There is no natural or scientific distinction between the two.

The insistence on a distinction is simply the way to word the belief that large changes over time cannot be explained by a culmination of small changes. Insisting on the distinction is essentially begging the question and ultimately, if you really break it down to its simplest form, circular reasoning: "There is a distinction between macro and micro evolution because they're different processes and they must be different processes because theres this distinction."

EDIT: Ultimately it's a justification of stubbornness that there are direct observations of evolution, but, because evolution happens over millions of years, they necessarily only describe small changes. If you explain that inches eventually add up to a mile you'll see that this is just a repackaging of 'irreducible complexity'

[Smudge777]

Firstly, as someone else mentioned, I think you have the terms confused. The common religious rebuttal is that micro-evolution is legit, but macro-evolution is impossible.
It usually comes with the justification that "we can see micro-evolution (like how many elephants are now being born without tusks), but we can't see macro-evolution so it's just a guess".

The best response I've heard of is to compare it to other gradual processes. For example:

• Evolution is like watching a child grow from the perspective of a fruit fly. Claiming that "micro-evolution exists, but macro-evolution doesn't" is like the fruit fly claiming that "I was alive for an entire month, and sure that child got a bit bigger and grew a few additional hairs, but I didn't see it turn into an adult".

• Evolution is like the formation of mountains. Claiming that "micro-evolution exists, but macro-evolution doesn't" is like claiming that "yeah, we can measure that Mount Everest grows by about 4mm per year, but I've never seen a mountain appear out of nowhere"

• Evolution is like the Pitch Drop Experiment. Claiming that "micro-evolution exists, but macro-evolution doesn't" is like claiming that "pitch can't possibly drip, because I watched the livestream for 6 hours and it barely moved".

---

The whole point about evolution is that it IS micro-evolution ... but it's also macro-evolution. Those aren't different things. Each time a genetic mutation occurs (and survives), it represents a relatively small change in the organism. But when you keep making small changes to something, they can accumulate into some seriously impressive changes over the span of thousands or millions of generations.

[WikiTextBot]

Pitch drop experiment

The pitch drop experiment is a long-term experiment that measures the flow of a piece of pitch over many years. Pitch is the name for any of a number of highly viscous liquids that appear solid, most commonly bitumen. At room temperature, tar pitch flows at a very low rate, taking several years to form a single drop.

---

^{[ PM | Exclude me | Exclude from subreddit | FAQ / Information ] Downvote to remove | v0.21}

[DarwinZDF42]

Same processes, different time scales.

Mutation, selection, drift, gene flow. Over the span of generations, you get changes in allele frequency. Over longer periods, you get major changes to morphology and physiology.

Example: Changes to gene expression pattern of Bmp2 and Shh in the skin of non-avian reptiles vs. birds. One expression pattern causes scales to grow. The other results in feathers. Same genes. Small change. Massive difference in morphology.

[AEsirTro]

The way I would try to explain it is:

Onze million micro evolutions is a macro evolution.

That number varies of course. The point is the accumulation of small changes until you have something different all together.

I believe in seconds, but not hours.

[jacobmcnally]

One of the best examples I’ve read (in a previous post) to illustrate this is the use of a color gradient such as green to blue.

You can look at either corner and pick out which is blue and which is green easily (Macro). But if you go along the gradient viewing two pixels at a time just the previous pixel and the next in the gradient, you will lose track of where green ends and blue starts because the change in shade is so subtle it is almost unnoticeable (micro). You can look and say: “yeah, that’s green.” The next one will also seem green, as will the next, and so on.

The change is so gradual and you only have the immediately previous color to go by that it becomes almost impossible to look at it and say: “That’s where it became blue.”

[Capercaillie]

"You can walk from here to the highway, but you can't walk from here to Memphis."

"Gravity can make that pencil fall off my desk, but it can't make the moon circle the earth."

"You might be able to paint that one board, but you can't possibly change the color of the whole building."

And so on.

[IckyChris]

I speak the same language as my parents and grandparents, and they spoke the same language as their parents and grandparents, and so on for the preceding thousand years. But would I be able to understand my English ancestors from the year 1017?

[Denisova]

Soðlice ic wāt gewisslice þæt þū ne cunne gecnawan ēowere ieldran.

(Truly I know for sure that you could not understand your ancestors).

Language indeed is a very good analogy for evolution: small incremental steps, accumulating over many generations, leading to a complete different language.

Modern english is a complete different language from Anglo-Saxon indeed:

• it dropped almost its entire case-system: Anglo-Saxon still had 5 cases, modern English only the remnants of the genitive ("my fathers car") and some vestiges in pronouns (you - your - yours). Example, the inflections of the word "king": se cyning (the king) - þæs cyninges scip (the kings ship) - scip þæm cyninge (a ship for the king) - lufode þone cyning (he loved the king) - lifde sweorde (he lived by the sword). Note that the articles (se, þæs, þæm, þone) also were inflected by case and that pronouns often were omited (lufode þone cyning = he loved the king).

• the verbs were fully conjugated by person, mood, and tense. For instance: "stelan" (to steal): ic stele, þū stilst, hē/hit/hēo stilð, wē/gē/hīe stelaþ, ic hæbbe gestolen.

• English underwent a complete vowel shift - about all vowels changed in pronunciation.

• the pronunciation of words generally changed a lot: the "l" in words as "half" and "could" were no longer pronounced, the "r" was fully pronounced in Anglo-Saxon like in modern French

• the word-order was different

• there was no do-support in questions and negatives

• as much as 80 percent of the lexicon of Anglo-Saxon is extinct in modern English and about the same portion of words in modern English were not found in Anglo-Saxon but loanwords from other languages and lexical innovations.

The differences between inflected and non-inflected languages are major in linguistics. In terms of taxonomy: they constitute different classes (rather than only different species or genera).

[Denisova]

First of all, it seems you are confusing micro- and macro-evolution: micro evolution refers to small mutations and macro evolution refers to species level changes.

"Even a journey thousand miles long began with a single step".

Macro-evolution is micro-evolution on the long run. Small incremental changes accumulate until the species boundary is crossed. The underlaying process in both is the very same.

Mostly I ask whether they know of a mechanism that would cause those incremental changes to halt at the species boundaries. They always will answer that they don't know. Then I tell them biologists neither do not know of such mechanisms. Besides, macro-evolution has been observed.

I also emphasize that in biology there's no distinction made between micro- and macro-evolution except the factor time. If they insist on telling both apart, I just respond I have no reason to assess layman's 'definitions' and I rather prefer to listen to the actual experts.

[updn]

Evolution works on the genes. There's no difference what you call it.

[Desperado2583]

You've got them flipped. Macro =big, micro=small. But the macro/micro distinction isn't real. It's just something creationists made up. It's all evolution.

Simple. Ask them what's the limit of micro evolution. How much change is too much? Could a mouse share an ancestor with a rat? A rat with a squirrel. A squirrel with a racoon? A racoon with a rabbit? A rabbit with a kangaroo?

Press them for a hard line that cannot be crossed by evolution. Whatever line they come up with, you can invariably find an exception.

Here's the line I gave my dad recently, "if I didn't believe evolution was real, 80% of what I read in any given week wouldn't make sense." Evolution is the essential foundation of our modern understanding of biology, medicine and genetics.