If the environment is just so hostile that a lifeform can’t possibly survive it, then you’re going to get extinction – not evolution.

And unfortunately, extinction does happen. The reality of extinction is actually a part of our understanding of evolution.

You can’t crush roach after roach and then eventually one notices and says, “hey, I should do something to prevent that…”

Instead, what you may have is a unique type of roach that has evolved something like armor (we see this in millipedes, which are a similar and related form of bugs) which would favor the survival of that species.

Or it might not matter and that species gets killed anyway.

Evolution works in respect to the environment. Dinosaurs were so huge because the atmosphere at that time had enough air of the right quality to allow them to grow to gigantic sizes, of course the same goes for the ancestors of the millipedes that were many many feet long and could stand eye to eye with a human being.

If there were a creature so big that it couldn’t even breathe or walk, evolution wouldn’t favor that and it would die out.

That’s the reason many creatures died out and ended their own branch: they weren’t fit to survive in whatever environments, because evolution is random and thus does make negative changes occasionally.

Your argument is an argument of ignorance. You should really read some evolutionary textbooks.

Why not?

Because those microevolutions you see in animals such as dogs eventually lead to macroevolutions into new species. But this takes millions of years to happen. A dog is a dog, since we’ve only been breeding them for about 10,000 years.

If you walk one foot per hour you’ll eventually reach a mile.

Evolution works in the same way. Different coats of fur, different strides, different snouts, different teeth, different sizes, different shapes, etc. All of this can be seen within the same species, but eventually if those traits change enough (we’ve made interesting strides from wolves to the chihuahua) we’ll be left with something that isn’t a dog.

This is fact. This is observable.

If you’ve any links to deny this, bring them up and I will destroy them publicly, because I have the science.

Erik John Bertel
Author of Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot and the MillenniumWriting.com Blog

Basically, there is an argument for intelligent design that goes like this:

Microevolution happens in small scales, like when we artifically breed a new kind of dog or cow. But cows still only give birth to cows, and dogs still only give birth to dogs. Take pigeon breeders – you can take any population of specialist pigeons and breed them together and wind up with the original ancestor again! Dogs come from dogs, cats come from cats. We just don’t see macroevolution happening, but evolution is meant to be an ongoing process! It’s not true!

This sounds pretty reasonable, but there’s two problems with it.

Firstly, evolution takes time to happen. Lots and lots of time. It took millions of years for chimps and humans to evolve their seperate paths starting from their common ancestor, and that’s only a 2% change in our DNA. That’s really, really slow. Evolution should only be expected to be observable on geological timescales.

Secondly, despite the fact that we shouldn’t expect to see evolution as it happens, we can see it happening anyway!

At the end of the day, if someone wants to have faith in the literal word of the Bible and if rebranding creationisim as ‘intelligent design’ makes them feel better about it, that’s their business. But it annoys me to no end when these very same people try to pretend that intelligent design is science.

I know I’m just using a straw-man argument to repeat you – but I just thought you might find it interesting. That and I’m waiting for a Bill Hicks skit to download, and needed to kill the time doing something.