Adaptation and science, Part Three

 Adaptation: 
 A physical trait or behavior due to inherited characteristics that gives an organism the ability to survive in a given environment.

Consider a woodpecker pair off the Ark. The pair may contain genes (information) for long and short beaks. As the birds spread out into the lush new world growing in the newly deposited soil, they produce offspring that contain both long-beak and short-beak genes. (Although the actual control of beak growth is complex, we will assume that long is dominant over short for this simplistic example.) Areas populated by trees with thick, soft bark would tend to select for woodpeckers with longer beaks. Areas where the bark thinner and harder would tend to be populated by woodpeckers with shorter beaks. Two new species, with slightly different adaptations, could arise if the two populations were geographically separated. The population of short-beaked woodpeckers would have lost the information for long beaks. No more long-beaked woodpeckers would be produced without a significant addition of genetic information affecting the beak length. The long-beaked woodpeckers would still have the ability to produce short-beaked offspring, but they would be less able to compete and those genes would tend to decrease in frequency in the population. Due to their isolation, two new species of woodpecker would develop, but within their kind. Observable science supports this type of subtle change within a kind but not molecules-to-man evolution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ACCIu3jPrc