EVOLUTION IN ACTION

Where did all these house cats come from? (I ask this question to my wife sometimes when our cat is sitting defiantly in my chair.) DNA tests indicate they all came from five females thousands of years ago:

Five subspecies of wildcat are distributed across the Old World. They are known as the European wildcat, the Near Eastern wildcat, the Southern African wildcat, the Central Asian wildcat and the Chinese desert cat. Their patterns of DNA fall into five clusters. The DNA of all house cats and fancy cats falls within the Near Eastern wildcat cluster, making clear that this subspecies is their ancestor, Dr. Driscoll and his colleagues said in a report published Thursday on the Web site of the journal Science.

The wildcat DNA closest to that of house cats came from 15 individuals collected in the deserts of Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, the researchers say. The house cats in the study fell into five lineages, based on analysis of their mitochondrial DNA, a type that is passed down through the female line. Since the oldest archaeological site with a cat burial is about 9,500 years old, the geneticists suggest that the founders of the five lineages lived around this time and were the first cats to be domesticated.

This seems to be a perfectly plausible scenario, although unproveable in its details. But while we find the house cat developing from a particular species of wildcat, what we also find is the cat came from, well, a cat. This is 'micro-evolution' in action, but evolutionists generally refuse to recognize the distinction. The reason? Since micro-evolution is easily demonstrated they can point to it and say, 'See--evolution is proved!' The problem is while we might prove a cat came from (surprise!) a cat, it is a bit more difficult to prove an extrapolation that a cat came from something else entirely.

Is evolution true? Well, it all depends on the evolution one is talking about.