Evolution Evidence Watch
Creation Safari's has details of the latest sensational news confirming evolution. Those famous finches on the Galapagos Isles have been evolving their beaks again. This time apparently getting smaller to get different seeds. The news media are triumphant in their crowing about this latest find.

Darwin’s finches evolve before scientists’ eyes,” writes Sara Goudarzi triumphantly in LiveScience, echoed on MSNBC. The only glimmer of hope in this media circus is that it somehow seems less bombastic than before. Some of the other usual Darwin trumpets (New Scientist, BBC, National Geographic) chose not to sound off on this song for some reason. Maybe they knew they would get a thrashing on the blog. Update 07/15/2006: well, we spoke too soon. National Geographic, naturally, fell for this story hook, line and sinker. In a stupidly gullible report, Mason Inman wrote about “instant evolution” and won Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week with this groaner:

David Pfennig at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill agrees that the study has important implications.
For Pfennig, the study’s greatest surprise was “the apparent speed with which the character displacement occurs—within a single year!”
Usually we think [sic] of evolution as being a slow grind, he says.
But, Pfennig added, the study suggests that evolution due to competition between closely related species “paradoxically may often occur so rapidly that we may actually miss the process taking place.”

Heh...either evolution is too slow to observe or too fast to observe. I have to wonder just what speed will actually allow scientists to observe it.

Creation Safari's of course, has a great reality check on this evidence of evolution.

Folks, ignore the hype and look at the data. There were already specimens of medium ground finches on Daphne with beak sizes in the final range. The shrinkage was less than a millimeter, on average! The only evolution was in the relative numbers of birds with an average length of 10.6 millimeters instead of 11.2 millimeters, and an average depth of 8.6 millimeters instead of the 9.4 millimeters before. That’s it! This is what evolutionary biologists are proclaiming as a textbook classic? If this is all the textbooks can point to as actual field evidence for Darwinian evolution, our students need alternatives.

Yep...variation of the spread of sizes within already existing sizes...great example of evolving new and amazing features. Remember...the researchers were paid money for this.
- posted by Alan Grey @ Monday, July 17, 2006