Today's nytimes.com has yet another article on Intelligent Design Theory.
Amazingly this article uses Darwin's finches as evidence of macroevolution. "The finches that Darwin observed in the Galápagos Islands provide the most famous example of this process. The species of finch that originally found its way to the Galápagos from South America had a beak shaped in a way that was ideal for eating seeds. But once arrived on the islands, that finch eventually diversified into 13 species. The various Galápagos finches have differently shaped beaks, each fine-tuned to take advantage of a particular food, like fruit, grubs, buds or seeds.
Such small adaptations can arise within a few generations. Darwin surmised that over millions of years, these small changes would accumulate, giving rise to the myriad of species seen today."
It is likely true that Darwin's finches, for evolutionists, "provide the most famous example" of natural selection. But this "most famous example" demonstrates only microevolution. To get macroevolution out of the finch example is to extrapolate from the data. Again, Darwin's finches provide evidence for micro-, not macro- evolution. The criticism regarding Darwin's finches has especially come from Jonathan Wells and others.
