The Fullness of Time

I think this snippet from a talk by Richard Dawkins does a good job of putting microevolution and macroevolution in perspective.

Darwin was inspired by the example of the Galapagos finches; he was also inspired by the examples of domestication.

These are all domestic dogs (Slide 1) except the top one which is a wolf. The point of it is, as observed by Darwin, how remarkable that we could go by human artificial selection from a wolf ancestor to all these breeds - a Great Dane, a Bulldog, a Whippet, etc. They were all produced by a process analogous to natural selection - artificial selection. Humans did the choosing whereas in natural selection, as you know, it is nature that does the choosing. Nature selects the ones that survive and are good at reproducing, to leave their genes behind. With artificial selection, humans do the choosing of which dogs should breed and with whom they should mate.

These plants (Slide 2) are all members of the same species. They are all descended quite recently from the wild cabbage Brassica olearacea and they are very different cauliflower, brussels sprouts, kale, broccoli, etc. This great variety of vegetables, which look completely different, has been shaped - they have been sculpted - by the process of artificial selection from the same common ancestor.

That's an example of what can be achieved in a few centuries when the selection is powerful enough. When the selection goes on for thousands of centuries the change is going to be correspondingly greater - that's macroevolution. It's just microevolution going on for a long time.

It's difficult for the human mind to grasp how much time geology allows us, so various picturesque metaphors have been developed. The one I like is as follows: I stand with my arm outstretched and the distance from the center of my tie to my fingers represents the total time available since life began. That's about four thousand million years. Out to about my shoulder we still get nothing but bacteria. At my elbow you might be starting to get slightly more complicated cells - eukaryotic cells - but still single cells. About mid-forearm you start getting multicellular organisms, animals you can see without a microscope. At my palm you would get the dinosaurs. Somewhere toward the end of my finger you would get the mammals. At the beginning of my nail you would get early humans. And the whole of history - all of documented written human history, all the Babylonians, Biblical history, Egyptians, the Chinese, the whole of recorded history would fall as the dust from a nail file across the tip of my furthest finger.

This is hard for the human brain to grasp, time spans of that order. Remember that the time represented by the dust from the nail includes the time it took these cabbage varieties to evolve by artificial selection (human selection) and dogs to evolve from wolves. Just think how much change could be achieved by natural selection during the thousands of millions of years before recorded history.

From Richard Dawkins' THE "ALABAMA INSERT": A STUDY IN IGNORANCE AND DISHONESTY.