MACROevolution vs MICROevolution - what is it?

Is there any reason why we allow the fallacy of the micro and macro evolution argument to continue?As far as I'm aware, science has no use for the terms as neither condition actually exists; there's simply evolution where a cumulation of small changes can eventually lead to what we call a distinct species - a purely arbitrary condition.How about we bin both terms and move on?

You mean that some random egit from a Christian ministry says this: Yup, bacteria are still bacteria. Weird that.

Aaargh! I did a degree in Zoology without ever hearing the terms - it's irrelevant hair-spitting. Just a smoke screen for creationist to avoid discussing how organisms got to be the way they are. Our definitions are just catch-alls that life itself ignores and laughs at by chucking up huge numbers of discrepancies that defy categorisation.Get beyond the semantics and study the life behind them.

What nonsense. Languages change, by deletions and additions. The number of words in the English language has had to increase to encompass technololgy, medicine, industrialisation and globalism, whilst defunct words from passed ways of life go exinct. It's just change over time - nothing to do with 'information' loss or gain.ABE - having a spare hour I found that English language words are added at a rate of around 5,400 per year. By a number of methods, many of which you could call mutation.

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All new words are created by one of 13 mechanisms:

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1 Derivation
The commonest method of creating a new word is to add a prefix or suffix to an existing one. Hence realisation (1610s), democratise (1798), detonator (1822), preteen (1926), hyperlink (1987) and monogamish (2011).

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2 Back formation
The inverse of the above: the creation of a new root word by the removal of a phantom affix. The noun sleaze, for example, was back-formed from sleazy in about 1967. A similar process brought about pea, liaise, enthuse, aggress and donate. Some linguists propose a separate category for lexicalisation, the turning of an affix into a word (ism, ology, teen), but it’s really just a type of back formation.

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3 Compounding
The juxtaposition of two existing words. Typically, compound words begin life as separate entities, then get hitched with a hyphen, and eventually become a single unit. It’s mostly nouns that are formed this way (fiddlestick, claptrap, carbon dating, bailout), but words from other classes can be smooshed together too: into (preposition), nobody (pronoun), daydream (verb), awe-inspiring, environmentally friendly (adjectives).

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4 Repurposing
Taking a word from one context and applying it to another. Thus the crane, meaning lifting machine, got its name from the long-necked bird, and the computer mouse was named after the long-tailed animal.

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5 Conversion
Taking a word from one word class and transplanting it to another. The word giant was for a long time just a noun, meaning a creature of enormous size, until the early 15th century, when people began using it as an adjective. Thanks to social media, a similar fate has recently befallen friend, which can now serve as a verb as well as a noun (Why didn’t you friend me?).

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6 Eponyms
Words named after a person or place. You may recognise Alzheimer’s, atlas, cheddar, alsatian, diesel, sandwich, mentor, svengali, wellington and boycott as eponyms — but did you know that gun, dunce, bigot, bugger, cretin, currant, hooligan, marmalade, maudlin, maverick, panic, silhouette, syphilis, tawdry, doggerel, doily and sideburns are too? (The issue of whether, and for how long, to retain the capital letters on eponyms is a thorny one.)

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7 Abbreviations
An increasingly popular method. There are three main subtypes: clippings, acronyms and initialisms. Some words that you might not have known started out longer are pram (perambulator), taxi/cab (both from taximeter cabriolet), mob (mobile vulgus), goodbye (God be with you), berk (Berkshire Hunt), rifle (rifled pistol), canter (Canterbury gallop), curio (curiosity), van (caravan), sport (disport), wig (periwig), laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation), scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus), and trump (triumph. Although it’s worth noting that there’s another, unrelated sense of trump: to fabricate, as in trumped-up charge).

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8 Loanwords
Foreign speakers often complain that their language is being overrun with borrowings from English. But the fact is, English itself is a voracious word thief; linguist David Crystal reckons it’s half-inched words from at least 350 languages. Most words are borrowed from French, Latin and Greek; some of the more exotic provenances are Flemish (hunk), Romany (cushty), Portuguese (fetish), Nahuatl (tomato — via Spanish), Tahitian (tattoo), Russian (mammoth), Mayan (shark), Gaelic (slogan), Japanese (tycoon), West Turkic (horde), Walloon (rabbit) and Polynesian (taboo). Calques (flea market, brainwashing, loan word) are translations of borrowings.

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9 Onomatopeia
The creation of a word by imitation of the sound it is supposed to make. Plop, ow, barf, cuckoo, bunch, bump and midge all originated this way.

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10 Reduplication
The repetition, or near-repetition, of a word or sound. To this method we owe the likes of flip-flop, goody-goody, boo-boo, helter-skelter, picnic, claptrap, hanky-panky, hurly-burly, lovey-dovey, higgledy-piggledy, tom-tom, hip hop and cray-cray. (Willy-nilly, though, came to us via a contraction of Will he, nill he.)

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11 Nonce words
Words pulled out of thin air, bearing little relation to any existing form. Confirmed examples are few and far between, but include quark (Murray Gell-Mann), bling (unknown) and fleek (Vine celebrity Kayla Newman).

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12 Error
Misspellings, mishearings, mispronunciations and mistranscriptions rarely produce new words in their own right, but often lead to new forms in conjunction with other mechanisms. Scramble, for example, seems to have originated as a variant of scrabble; but over time, the two forms have taken on different meanings, so one word has now become two. Similarly, the words shit and science, thanks to a long sequence of shifts and errors, are both ultimately derived from the same root. And the now defunct word helpmeet, or helpmate, is the result of a Biblical boo-boo. In the King James version, the Latin adjutorium simile sibi was rendered as an help meet for him — that is, a helper suitable for him. Later editors, less familiar with the archaic sense of meet, took the phrase to be a word, and began hyphenating help-meet.

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13 Portmanteaus
Compounding with a twist. Take one word, remove an arbitrary portion of it, then put in its place either a whole word, or a similarly clipped one. Thus were born sitcom, paratroops, internet, gazunder and sexting. (Note: some linguists call this process blending and reserve the term portmanteau for a particular subtype of blend. But since Lewis Carroll, who devised this sense of portmanteau, specifically defined it as having the broader meaning, I’m going to use the terms willy-nilly.)

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Some words came about via a combination of methods: yuppie is the result of initialism ((y)oung and (up)wardly mobile) plus derivation (+ -ie); berk is a clipped eponym (Berkshire hunt); cop, in the sense of police officer, is an abbreviation of a derivation (copper derives from the northern British dialect verb cop, meaning to catch); and snarl-up is a conversion (verb to noun) of a compound (snarl + up).

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The popularity of the various methods has waxed and waned through the ages. For long periods (1100-1500 and 1650-1900), borrowings from French were in vogue. In the 19th century, loanwords from Indian languages (bangle, bungalow, cot, juggernaut, jungle, loot, shampoo, thug) were the cat’s pyjamas. There was even a brief onslaught from Dutch and Flemish.

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In the 20th century, quite a few newbies were generated by derivation, using the -ie (and -y) suffix: talkies, freebie, foodie, hippy, roomie, rookie, roofie, Munchie, Smartie, Crunchie, Furby, scrunchie. Abbreviations, though, were the preferred MO, perhaps because of the necessity in wartime of delivering your message ASAP. The passion for initialisms seems to be wearing off, perhaps because things have got a little confusing; PC, for example, can now mean politically correct, police constable, per cent, personal computer, parsec, post cibum, peace corps, postcard, professional corporation or printed circuit.

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How new words are born | Andy Bodle | The GuardianI'm particularly fond of:and trump (triumph. Although it’s worth noting that there’s another, unrelated sense of trump: to fabricate, as in trumped-up charge).Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

The thing about real science is that if you actually want to you can find anything you need to just by looking. Here's the World Foramifera Database.Foraminifera - The World Foraminifera DatabaseThis comprises all the know species along with the biologist that described them. Now, as an armchair paeleontologist you'll no doubt dispute individual organisms and their place in the taxa, in which case you need to take that up with the Editors as that's what they're there for. So far they have upwards of 36,000 species.So what exactly is your point of dispute - just more semantics?

And yet it does!So, when confronted with a disproven hypothesis, what does the honest scientist do? And yet it hasn't!So, when confronted with a disproven hypothesis, what does the honest scientist do?

Well you'd be correct about that but are you sure it's biblical?In an article written by a certain Doc J(ohn), Creation.com has it at 4,285 years ago.The Date of Noah’s Flood - creation.com

And so....bigly!Maybe I hoped for too much, too soon. But I really thought that the age of the rational was upon us. Or maybe I'm just seeing its death thoes. We can only hope.Faith, you have absolutely no comprehension of what you would need to do to demonstrate that an idea about our natural world is valid. None. You think that without any education in a subject that has been extensively studied and critiqued for decades and by inventing ad hoc propositions without evidence whilst selectively ignoring evidence and by starting with a supernatural conclusion you, and you alone, Have found the answer?You're the definition of the word 'delusion'. The archetype.

I've seperated those two phrases with '......' because it demonstrates your total lack of understanding of how the accumulation of knowledge works.The opportunity to demonstrate the veracity of your ideas are there right now. Right now, today, you could let the world know about your break-though in evolutionary science by simply submitting your thesis plus evidence supporting it to Nature.They would review it, have a few recognised experts in relevant field poke it around a bit and then, inevitably, publish it. You'd collect your Nobel prize within 3 years. No problem.So what's stopping you? Is it perhaps that you're still working on your paper that disproves modern geology? Or maybe you feel that your ideas on molecular biology are just a little too ahead of their time? God knows it's hard to pick which parts of modern science are the most mistaken.Maybe you just don't have the funding to carry out all this original research in you laboratory - I know you must be pretty pushed for space amonst all those autoclaves and thermal cyclers to come up with new hardware to show that radio carbon dating is just fuck-off wrong.But what the hell, you just have to pick one, prove the entirety of science in that area wrong and move onto the next one. Piece if cake really, it's just about focus.

A couple of years ago a woman said the most hurtful thing that's ever been said to me. I was doing a Master's degree in a science subject and I'd submitted two pieces of work. One got 73% the other 74%. To get a distinction you needed 75%. I had three more pieces of work to submit so I asked how I could get the other 1 or 2%. She said:"You have to say something original."The idea that you can't have ideas is as wrong as you can possibly be. To accumulate scientific knowledge, new ideas are essential, but - and this is the bit your missing - they have to be backed by evidence, real facts that others can test. You have never ever done that. You just have an idea that suits your belief and call it a fact. That's why you hear the phrase 'prove it' so often. New ideas are the bedrock of scientific advancement, but they must be able to survive factual challenge. Yours can't. Has there been at any time over the years you've been here a non-YEC that said you've come up with anything valid and original?The second thing you're missing is that the new idea mustn't be bat-shit crazily, easily provably wrong. The problem you have is that these 'new' ideas of yours are actually very old ideas that have been shown to be wrong many, many times. You don't have the knowledge, training or motivation to develop rational ideas that can hold their ground. If your starting point is always religious, you'll never have anything valid to say.

If you're trying to prove the world wrong, you have to do it with evidence. It's simple really. Of course you are. And of course you're wrong about that too.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.