Evolution; chicken mutation rates (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, October 28, 2015, 11:54 (3096 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The mutation rate in chickens seems faster than thought:-http://phys.org/news/2015-10-chicken-reveals-evolution-faster-thought.html-David's comment: Still no speciation. Still the same chickens with 'surprise' mutations. Note the growth in size is due to selective breeding, not evolution.-Thank you for this very important comment. The article doesn't set out to prove common descent, so what follows is not directed at the article itself but is meant as a general observation to elaborate on your comment. Scientists often point to minor changes and adaptations that leave species intact, and tell us this is evolution at work. They are right, but they gloss over the real problem, which is innovation: not how we get different types of chicken, but how we get chickens, snakes, elephants, mosquitoes, dinosaurs and humans from the single cells with which the whole process began. Innovation as such has not been observed during the modern age, and remains unexplained, and although I am a firm believer that evolution happened, it is another common kind of misrepresentation (often inadvertent, I'm sure), as if one can take the part as representative of the whole.