Evolution Takes Time
True, breeders haven’t turned a cat into a dog, and laboratory studies haven’t turned a bacterium into an amoeba (although, as we’ve seen, new bacterial species have arisen in the lab). But it is foolish to think that these are serious objections to natural selection. Big transformations take time—huge spans of it. To really see the power of selection, we must extrapolate the small changes that selection creates in our lifetime over the millions of years that it has really had to work in nature. We can’t see the Grand Canyon getting deeper, either, but gazing into that great abyss, with the Colorado River carving away insensibly below, you learn the most important lesson of Darwinism: weak forces operating over long periods of time create large and dramatic change.
Notes:
A river formed the Grand Canyon, so we know that small processes can have huge effects given enough time.
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Why Evolution Is True