- Science
- The Loom
Deep Time In a Bird’s Beak
Evolution works on different scales. In a single day, HIV’s genetic code changes as it adapts to our ever-adapting immune system. Over the course of decades, the virus can make a successful leap from one species to another (from chimpanzees to humans, for example). Over a few thousand years, humans have adapted to agriculture–an adult tolerance to the lactose in milk, for example. Over a couple million years, the brains of our hominid ancestors have nearly doubled. Sometimes scientists distinguish between these scales by calling small-scale change microevolution and large-scale change macroevolution. Creationists have seized on these terms and used them to build one of their central canards: that they accept microevolution but can then reject macroevolution. That’s a bit