Quote:Evolution is evolution whether you are a bacterium, a finch, or a human. The only difference is the timescales on which they happen. Bacteria can accumulate mutations in only a few generations but they also have a extremely short replication process. A bird or a human may require 1000s of generations which can range anywhere from 5,000 to 30,000 years.
Evolution (general definition): The change in allele frequencies over time. This is as simple as redheads representing 4% of the population in one generation and 3.5% of the population in the next generation.
Common ancestry is the idea that organisms, within a population, over time, through certain evolutionary changes (mutation only being one proposed mechanism), will become reproductively isolated as a separate species (biological definition of species & the process of speciation.)
The lack of stasis in allele frequencies doesn't inherently extrapolate to speciation level change, let alone the kind of massive speciation level change espoused by the idea of UNIVERSAL common ancestry. We do know that within a given reproductively isolated population of organisms (species) that certain traits become more or less prevalent over time as a result of both chance (meosis in sexual reproduction and conjugation in unicellular asexually reproduction) and external reproductive pressure. This natural ebb and flow doesn't mean that within that population a new trait will magically emerge and cause a subset of organisms to achieve a new level of reproductive isolation and the formation of a new species.
As an analogy, just because my legs are capable of achieving mechanical work against the force of gravity (jumping) doesn't mean that I can achieve escape velocity (jump to the moon). Just because my cells exhibit certain properties of regeneration (healing) doesn't mean that I can recover from an infinite amount of injuries to critical parts of my anatomy (wolverine.)
The change in allele frequencies has been directly observed and is not in question. In fact it is Corroborated in the book that shall not be named. The mechanisms by which one species changes into another have not and are more a matter of faith. At the time Darwin wrote the origin of species, he didn't have to write it in the context of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and the vast complexities that come along with it. At that time it was still thought that if you leave cheese in the corner of a room, that the cheese over time turned into the mice that were eating it (spontaneous generation.) At that time he theorized that a small subset of gradual mutations over long periods of time would lead to a gentle arc of macro-evolutionary change. This would be evident through enumerable links in the fossil record. Those predictions have been found wanting over the last century and a half. To explain the relative stasis in the biological record and contemporary observations we have developed the theory of Punctuated equilibrium (the magic monster). This theory calls for massive violent periods of radical mutation (x-men).
So the idea that the full implications of secular evolutionary doctrine have been empirically verified is a little bit of a stretch.
That says nothing about the actual origins of life itself. The theory of spontaneous generation was disproven in the 19th century. It is a matter of natural law (biogenesis) that all living systems generated from previous living systems. The idea of non living inanimate matter becoming a living system (abiogenesis) isn't even theorized. IT's a fig leaf hypothesis with no observations or plausible theories.
Between the law of conservations of energy and the law of biogenesis it is not only reasonable for someone to adopt the belief that forces greater than our current scientific understanding have played a role in the existence we all experience, it's the current state of our scientific understanding that forces we cannot currently account for are responsible.
