Perhaps this would help clarify things a bit. Consider the 2 different ways the term evolution is used.
1)We can speak of bacteria evolving immunity to antibiotics. Now, the bacteria are still producing bacteria! This kind of evolution is probably accepted by just about everyone (I seriously doubt you would find a creationist who would dispute this!)
2)According to the theory of universal common descent, bacteria (prokaryotes) evolved into eukaryotes. Here, the word evolution is taken in a different sense.
The distinction is a bit tricky to grasp, but a more formalized way of putting it is that microevolution is a modification of structures that are ALREADY in place. Whereas in macroevolution, new structures appear out of seemingly nothing. For example, when evolutionists speak of fish evolving into amphibians, creatures without lungs, over sufficient time, produce creatures with lungs. This leads to other problems, namely how a transitional form could survive, etc. But anyway that's another topic.
But then, what sense of "evolution" do creationists accept? That fish and amphibians both evolve is accepted by all creationists. That is populations do not remain fixed, they change over time. So, a creationist would say that the frogs that existed millions of years ago are not exactly the same as the frogs that are there today. They've "evolved".
I'd like to emphasize this point again--all the icons of evolution, the evolution of horses, the formation of new species, the evolution of flowers--there are no new structures forming at all. That is, explaining how horses change over time says nothing about how the first horse (err..every horse has a mother and father that's a horse, so it's more accurate to say the first 2 horses) got there. Once you've created a creature, you can then have the various creatures evolve over time. So, yes, what I mean is that these creatures are "designed" for their specific niches, not evolved to match their niche (for example, a fish has to have gills to breathe underwater, if one of the ancestors of modern fish didn't have gills, how would it have breathed? If it was able to breathe perfectly well without gills, then what evolutionary advantage do gills have? If there is no evolutionary advantage for gills, then how can we say that natural selection is the force that drives the evolution? All these problems are avoided if we accept some initial population of fish with gills that are created).
I realize that this concept of "first" flowers is a little hard to grasp for many evolutionists. They think of the evolution of life as being a continuous progression from single celled bacteria to multicellular creatures like plants and humans. This meaning of evolution is rejected by creationists, and IMHO it's impossible to prove that all life is descended from a single cell.
Even in cases like polyploidy we're simply duplicating what's already there, so if there's DNA specifying how gills are to be constructing, duplicating that DNA won't give us the DNA that specifies how lungs are to be constructed. Modifying (evolving) the structure of gills won't give us lungs. And no, it doesn't suffice to point out the existence lungfish. Lungfish produce other lungfish and come from other lungfish. There's no rationale for thinking that it or some creature similar to it was a transitional form between ancient fish and modern amphibians.
Monsieur Lynx
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