I’m sorry, Scott, but thinking you can engage Vox Day in a serious discussion of evolution is an act of hyper-optimistic lunacy. Hatfield has set the terms, and Day has replied … and his argument against evolution, if not nuts, is dishonest. He doesn’t believe evolution could have occurred because he doesn’t think theoretical predictions have been met.
Based on the information from Talk Origins, it could theoretically take as little as 20 years to forcibly evolve a species of mouse into a species of elephant given the rate of darwins observed in the laboratory and the number required for that level of transformation.
If you aren’t familiar with the unit Darwins, it’s a measure of the rate of evolutionary change —basically, if you increase a quantifiable measure of morphology by a factor of 2.7 over one million years, evolution has occurred at a rate of 1 Darwin. It’s an awkward number — because the paleontological perspective views a lineage over a very long period of time, short term periods of change are averaged over periods of stasis, so it doesn’t give you a good feel for possible rates of change over periods of time like a handful of generations. Talk Origins does have a short description of observed evolutionary rates:
In 1983, Phillip Gingerich published a famous study analyzing 512 different observed rates of evolution (Gingerich 1983). The study centered on rates observed from three classes of data: (1) lab experiments, (2) historical colonization events, and (3) the fossil record. A useful measure of evolutionary rate is the darwin, which is defined as a change in an organism’s character by a factor of e per million years (where e is the base of natural log). The average rate observed in the fossil record was 0.6 darwins; the fastest rate was 32 darwins. The latter is the most important number for comparison; rates of evolution observed in modern populations should be equal to or greater than this rate.
The average rate of evolution observed in historical colonization events in the wild was 370 darwins–over 10 times the required minimum rate. In fact, the fastest rate found in colonization events was 80,000 darwins, or 2500 times the required rate. Observed rates of evolution in lab experiments are even more impressive, averaging 60,000 darwins and as high as 200,000 darwins (or over 6000 times the required rate).
(I should mention that the papers I’ve read that get those remarkably high rates are ones where fast breeding microscopic marine invertebrates, for instance, achieve a 10% increase in size over several weeks of breeding, not sustained rates over long periods of time achieving huge increases.)
That should give you a rough feel for the reasonable rates of evolution: on the order of 1 to tens of darwins for paleontological data, observed rates over short terms of hundreds of darwins, and tens of thousands of darwins in specific, tightly constrained experimental situations (where I’d argue that darwins isn’t even a valid unit anymore). Now if I assume a large mouse, 1 cm at the shoulder, and a small elephant, 3 m at the shoulder, Vox’s theoretical experiment of a 300 times greater size in 20 years corresponds to an evolutionary rate of … 280,000 darwins. That’s pushing the limits hard, and also breaking the concept with some serious physical limitations — elephant-size mice are not going to breeding very fast. It would be silly to propose such a radical increase, and I really doubt that anyone on talk origins claimed it.
Oh, wait … if we look at the very next paragraph from that TO article …
Note that a sustained rate of “only” 400 darwins is sufficient to transform a mouse into an elephant in a mere 10,000 years (Gingerich 1983).
That’s so darn close to what he demands that I have to assume this is where he got his mangled expectation. So Day takes a very high estimate for a sustained rate of evolution, divides the duration by 500, and then rebukes scientists for not replicating this theoretical experiment in the lab. Unless we greatly increase the period of indentured servitude for grad students, as well as the duration of human civilizations, I don’t see it happening.
Of course, if Day had read that article with something other than a desire to cherry-pick the arguments, he’d have also noticed that it actually references field observations and experimental measures of rates of evolution that are very high — not as high as he demands, and also in systems where the amount of change over measurable time scales isn’t absurd — and his argument is refuted by the very source he draw it from.
See what you’re in for, Scott? You’ve engaged an innumerate incompetent who will blithely make quantitative claims on subjects on which he knows nothing, and you’re going to have to make arguments based on a fairly broad knowledge of the scientific literature and considerable background explanation to refute him. All he has to do is confidently assert a lot of patently false statements. It’s the typical creationist debate, in other words.