is 'macro evolution' and 'micro evolution' made up by churches? is it possible?

Question

can evolution be macro ? as church people said no

Answer 1

They are both acceptable scientific terms. They are really the same process, just on much different time scales.

Answer 2

Microevolution is just Macroevolution on a smaller scale. Evolution is evolution. Religious people keep trying to deny what evolution actually says because they don't understand what it actually says (and are generally unwilling to become educated on the matter).

Evolution does not describe how the first life began, the simple definition of evolution is small changes over a long period of time that accumulate with the possibility of the end result of speciation or destruction. Though evolution never completely stops, and has not even stopped in us.

The church doesn't like science because science gives testable and proveable fact where religion gives none but asks that you be blind to the advent of all knowledge.

Science causes questions and questioning anything within religion will eventually result in the loss of faith, and thus power of the church.

Evolution is known to be true in the scientific community. The word theory that the Creationists love to throw around so often, does not mean what they think it does. A scientific theory is not a guess. Its the whole body of factual work on a given subject, rather like the theory of music. Music is NOT a theory, and yet it is called such. And yet, the Christians don't question the validity of musical theory, only that of evolution because evolution causes uncomfortable questions.

The church is NOT always right. In fact, given the things they tend to often teach their sheep, they should be ashamed.

Answer 3

Claim CB901:
No case of macroevolution has ever been documented.
Source:
Morris, Henry M., 2000 (Jan.). Strong Delusion. Back to Genesis 133: a.
Brown, Walt, 1995. In the Beginning: Compelling evidence for creation and the Flood. Phoenix, AZ: Center for Scientific Creation, p. 6.
Response:

1. We would not expect to observe large changes directly. Evolution consists mainly of the accumulation of small changes over large periods of time. If we saw something like a fish turning into a frog in just a couple generations, we would have good evidence against evolution.

2. The evidence for evolution does not depend, even a little, on observing macroevolution directly. There is a very great deal of other evidence (Theobald 2004; see also evolution proof).

3. As biologists use the term, macroevolution means evolution at or above the species level. Speciation has been observed and documented.

4. Microevolution has been observed and is taken for granted even by creationists. And because there is no known barrier to large change and because we can expect small changes to accumulate into large changes, microevolution implies macroevolution. Small changes to developmental genes or their regulation can cause relatively large changes in the adult organism (Shapiro et al. 2004).

5. There are many transitional forms that show that macroevolution has occurred.

References:

1. Shapiro M. D., M. E. Marks, C. L. Peichel, B. K. Blackman, K. S. Nereng, B. Jónsson, D. Schluter and D. M. Kingsley, 2004. Genetic and developmental basis of evolutionary pelvic reduction in threespine sticklebacks. Nature 428: 717-723. See also: Shubin, N. H. and R. D. Dahn, 2004. Evolutionary biology: Lost and found. Nature 428: 703.
2. Theobald, Douglas, 2004. 29+ Evidences for macroevolution: The scientific case for common descent. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

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Claim CB902:
Microevolution is distinct from macroevolution.
Source:
Wallace, Timothy, 2002. Five major evolutionist misconceptions about evolution. http://www.trueorigins.org/isakrbtl.asp
Response:

1. Microevolution and macroevolution are different things, but they involve mostly the same processes. Microevolution is defined as the change of allele frequencies (that is, genetic variation due to processes such as selection, mutation, genetic drift, or even migration) within a population. There is no argument that microevolution happens (although some creationists, such as Wallace, deny that mutations happen). Macroevolution is defined as evolutionary change at the species level or higher, that is, the formation of new species, new genera, and so forth. Speciation has also been observed.

Creationists have created another category for which they use the word "macroevolution." They have no technical definition of it, but in practice they use it to mean evolution to an extent great enough that it has not been observed yet. (Some creationists talk about macroevolution being the emergence of new features, but it is not clear what they mean by this. Taking it literally, gradually changing a feature from fish fin to tetrapod limb to bird wing would not be macroevolution, but a mole on your skin which neither of your parents have would be.) I will call this category supermacroevolution to avoid confusing it with real macroevolution.

Speciation is distinct from microevolution in that speciation usually requires an isolating factor to keep the new species distinct. The isolating factor need not be biological; a new mountain range or the changed course of a river can qualify. Other than that, speciation requires no processes other than microevolution. Some processes such as disruptive selection (natural selection that drives two states of the same feature further apart) and polyploidy (a mutation that creates copies of the entire genome), may be involved more often in speciation, but they are not substantively different from microevolution.

Supermacroevolution is harder to observe directly. However, there is not the slightest bit of evidence that it requires anything but microevolution. Sudden large changes probably do occur rarely, but they are not the only source of large change. There is no reason to think that small changes over time cannot add up to large changes, and every reason to believe they can. Creationists claim that microevolution and supermacroevolution are distinct, but they have never provided an iota of evidence to support their claim.

2. There is evidence for supermacroevolution in the form of progressive changes in the fossil record and in the pattern of similarities among living things showing an absence of distinct "kinds." This evidence caused evolution in some form to be accepted even before Darwin proposed his theory.

Further Reading:
Wilkins, John, 1997. Macroevolution.

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Answer 4

Macroevolution is controversial in two ways:

* It is disputed among biologists whether there are macroevolutionary processes that are not described by strictly gradual phenotypic change, of the type studied by classical population genetics. Within the Modern Synthesis school of thought, microevolution is thought to be the only mode of evolution (i.e. what is sometimes thought of as "macroevolution" actually consists of the compounded effects of microevolution - the only difference between them is one of time and scale).
* A misunderstanding about this biological controversy has allowed the concept of macroevolution to be coopted by creationists. They use this controversy as a supposed "hole" in the evidence for deep-time evolution.