Of the Way

Many biologists, even most Christian biologists have stated that “microevolution” has been substantiated in antibiotic resistant bacteria and the like.

I dispute that such things have been observed. They have been inferred, but not observed.  (And I would say they were poorly inferred.)  I would argue that all you see is differential reproduction and not microevolution. One may want to define mircroevolution as differential reproduction, but in doing so he would be equivocating on what he means by “evolution.”

The danger of capitulating to this claim without evaluating it critically is that you essentially concede the argument to the evolutionist.  After all, what is “macroevolution” other than “microevoluton” over a period of millions of years?

I’ll give you a parallel. Supose a virus came along that killed everybody who had a positive Rhesus Factor for their blood type. About 84% of the human population has positive blood. This would likely wipe out several other genetic characteristics. (For example, 99% of China is RhD+.) Over time you will have a repopulation and this repopulation would all have RhD- blood (because RhD- is recessive). Would it be correct to say that humans had microevolved if this happened?  Of course not.  A bunch of people dying and not passing on their genes isn’t evolution—it’ just changes the relative prevalance of different genes that already exist.  Microevolution implies something new in the genome that wasn’t there before, especially if you ever want it to account for the eventual origin of the species.

There is a second problem with calling antibiotic resistant bacteria “microevolution” as well. This change in the relative population of bacteria was caused by an intelligent source, not pure chance. Although it was not the intended effect, this is similar to a dog breeder selecting out a particular characteristic for his dogs. (This also comes with unintended effects.) In the nature of the case, the true evolutionist has no basis for importing an intelligent factor that selects one characteristic over another. All you have is pure blind chance.

Every observed mutation ever has resulted in a sorting or loss of genetic information.  You will never get “amoeba to man” evolution that way, as man has more genetic complexity than the amoeba.  You also won’t get “amoeba to man” evolution by killing most of the existing amoebas.  You’ll just get a thinner amoeba gene pool.  If you want to call the differential reproduction due to loss of massive amounts of genetic material I described above “microevolution,” then I won’t quibble over words.  However, if that’s all you’ve got, then you cannot explain origins at all.  You will never get more advanced species this way, even if you had trillions of years and the whole universe was a thick soup of protein chains.