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Summary of problems with claim:The link between evolution on short timescales and longer-term evolutionary processes is thoroughly testable and not a mere extrapolation.
Natural selection operates at different speeds under different circumstances. Scientists agree that natural selection over long periods of time can produce larger evolutionary change than natural selection can produce in shorter periods, but exactly how much more is a subject of ongoing research.
In its effort to debunk natural selection, Explore Evolution reiterates the debunked claims from the creationist book Icons of Evolution. That book claimed that textbooks misrepresented evolution by incorrectly characterizing certain popular experiments. Explore Evolution repeats the earlier book's arguments, reuses several of that books images without change (or attribution), and does not update its arguments to reflect more recent research.
Explore Evolution begins its discussion of natural selection with a discussion of artificial selection. Artificial selection, in which differential survival and reproduction in animals, plants, or other organisms is driven by the choices of human breeders selecting among natural variations in a population, is treated as an analogy for natural selection, in which differential survival and reproduction of organisms is driven by natural processes acting on natural variation in a population.
When WNYE broadcast Unlocking the Mystery of Life on July 6, 2003, the following disclaimer appeared:
WNYE presents documentaries that represent many different viewpoints. The following documentary supports the thesis that Creationism rather than Evolution is the explanation for the history of life on our planet. WNYE believes that this is a position worth studying, but makes no representation as to its factual accuracy.
July 6, 2003
by Bob Park
AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY
PUBLIC TELEVISION: "UNLOCKING THE MYSTERY OF LIFE."
by Daryl Domning
by Andrea Bottaro
Mr. Laing Kandel
Dr. Joe Klein
Dear Mr. Kandel and Dr. Klein:
Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution is Wrong
(originally published in Science Jun 22 2001: 2257-2258)
If someone were to charge that textbooks present atomic theory using evidence that is erroneous, misleading, and even fraudulent, and that we should therefore question whether matter is composed of atoms, eyebrows would be raised — at least at the accuser. If someone further claimed that distinguished physicists crassly participate in this fraud to keep the research dollars rolling in or to promote a materialist philosophical agenda, scientists would be angry at the attempt to besmirch the
Washington, DC: Regnery, 2000. 352 pp.
This is a continuation of the Pandas Update series. The name has been changed to reflect the fact that subsequent creationist publications, such as Sarfati's Refuting Evolution and Wells' Icons of Evolution, cover essentially the same topics as Pandas and People which was the first Intelligent Design "textbook".