Chapter 3, Problem 5Q

A common creationist criticism of the finch study is, “But it’s just a little change in beak shape. Nothing really new has evolved.” Or put a different way, “It's just microevolution and not macroevolution.” The finch team continues to spend a great deal of effort on their project — traveling thousands of miles to the remote Galápagos every year, just to try to band an entire population of birds and all their nestlings and measure their bills. How would you respond to the creationists’ criticisms? Do you think the ongoing 30–year–effort of the finch bill project has been worthwhile? Is it useful to try to document microevolution, and does it tell us anything about how macroevolution might work?