Micro Evolution

There is this thing that I had heard called Micro Evolution.  I listened but the podcast that I was listening to did not explain what it was, so I was curious but not that curious because the people were talking like it was a farce.  But my confusion did not last long.  A friend told me about it.  It was her explanation why there are so many animals in the world but only so much space on the Ark that Noah built to save all the animals from the flood.

The story goes that the animals came to the arc two by two in matched pairs. Then God sealed the Ark caused a world wide storm that rained for forty days and nightstand flooded the world completely the ark floated around until everything on the land was dead and then after 120 days the Ark hit Mount Arart and Noah and all the animals debarked off the boat.

And that worked, because the Ark was big, as big as a tiny cargo ship.  But that was fine, because when the Jews looked around they saw a hundred mammals if they included the stories that they had heard at the time and included camels and elephants that would have fit in the hundred mammals.  Birds are small but still there are only so many in the world where people live.  Snakes and lizards same.  Frogs and fish swim so they did not count.  Then he included all the feed and added more animals of the kind that humans use.  Okay that works.
  
But then people and civilization grows and science expands too.  But the Bible stays the same and it never named the animals that went on this boat trip so it includes all of them.  And then we get the problem.  Currently the number of mammals discovered is numbering over six thousand, and the number of birds number between twelve and twenty thousand some of them can't fly and some of those don't swim either.  Then there are the thousands of snakes, lizards and land amphibians some of them are quite big like crocodiles and Komodo Dragons.  Now the problem is that one would require a modern Aircraft Carrier to put everything on.  Did I mention the millions of insect species?

Well good thing that there is a line in the bible that explains this.  It states that god caused the animals and the people to be fecund, i.e. to be fruitful and multiply.  From that line they infer the lambs and horses and cows had double the normal births and there was food for every one.  The other animals fled into the wilderness and were very fruitful and multiplied and were subject to Micro Evolution.  

Micro Evolution, as it was explained to me meant there was only one great cat on the Ark.  The great cat went out and had kittens with its mate and those kittens had kittens and they traveled the world the ones that settled in Asia grew very large and they lived in forests and developed stripes for camouflage and they are tigers.  The ones that went to Africa went into two different locations and one was bigger that the other the bigger one became Lions and he smaller one split again into two groups one became Cheetahs and the other Leopards. The ones that made it to the Americas became Cougars, Jaguars, Bobcats and Ocelots.  Never mind that there was a no Bering land bridge for them to cross.  So eight big cats from one big cat and we have not even tackled the small cats.  Horses and Zebras, primates, snakes and birds.  Toads salamanders and frogs.  It explains it all.

Except it is wrong.  Evolution cannot happen in leaps and bounds, unless there is an non natural influence, like a scientist augmenting the DNA of a critter to change it.  If Micro Evolution was a fact then we could take a short generation animal like a mouse or rat place it in a cage with water in the bottom and every generation raise the level of the water until it developed fins or flippers. According to Micro Evolution this would happen in a few generations.  When it fails to work, the proponent will state that God removed the fecund state and froze the creatures in their current forms.  There is no way to argue this except to ask where it says this in the Bible.  It is the trouble with the ultra religious, you can not have an argument with them without them invoking deus ex machina.  God made it so.  

I fall back on my stand by phrases, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and simple arguments are countered by simple proof.

The trouble is if there was a God and it is all powerful, then changing the laws of physics would be a breeze and planting all the evidence of prior evolution and prior ages would also be easy, but certainly a lot of work.  And that alone would be reason enough to counter Micro Evolution.  It would be far simpler to have a world with only a few hundred species to save on the Ark, than the millions of extant species that there are.