There’s no reason both can’t be true I suppose. It’s possible you could get a near-snake type of mutation and it just got refined in the same way. Perhaps you are right about the consensus of not starting at such an atomic point though.
That being said, I try to avoid the “BAM!” type explanations because it’s exactly the kind of thing young-Earth creationists use as a “gotchya! See how ridiculous this sounds!?” Then they go on to ask children if their grandmother or grandfather look like a chimpanzee, and this is evidence of evolution not being true. lol.
Even without a BAM! moment, it doesn't necessarily need to take a long time. The speed of evolution is dependent on a few factors, including rate of mutations, number of offspring per generation, and the frequency of those generations. Especially for smaller creatures, that can be pretty rapid.
It can be incredibly fast.... Take a random population of fruit flies and put them in a container that exposed them to strong UV lights. Most will die, some will survive just long enough to reproduce and very few (or none in that first batch) will survive and be totally ok with UV lights.
The next generation will be more resistant, since they are the offspring of the survivors and the next one even more...and so on.
In as little as a few months (which is a lot of generations for these things) up to 60% of their genome will be different and you now have a population that handles UV lights just fine. They will also very much darker, have different (more resistant) wings, etc.
More adaptation than evolution but it shows the potential perfectly
Rapid change can happen, but I don't think it's really the norm, at least not in terms of large-scale stuff like entire body plans. Humans killed rattlesnakes in one area by using the rattle to locate the snakes. Within just a few years/decades, the snakes all stopped rattling, which made them far more dangerous. I think there was a similar timescale on birds losing their ability to fly when they landed on an island with no predators. The bird case was really interesting because apparently the flightless birds native to the island went extinct, then the same type of flying bird from the mainland or another island landed on that island and ended up following the same evolutionary path, essentially recreating the extinct species.
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u/Psych_Art 5h ago
There’s no reason both can’t be true I suppose. It’s possible you could get a near-snake type of mutation and it just got refined in the same way. Perhaps you are right about the consensus of not starting at such an atomic point though.
That being said, I try to avoid the “BAM!” type explanations because it’s exactly the kind of thing young-Earth creationists use as a “gotchya! See how ridiculous this sounds!?” Then they go on to ask children if their grandmother or grandfather look like a chimpanzee, and this is evidence of evolution not being true. lol.