For the umpteenth time, modern animals do NOT evolve into other modern animals, who told you that ? No reputable biologist ever claimed that a modern cow evolved into a dolphin or a penguin evolved into a whale. These animals simply had a common ancestor if we were to travel far back enough in time, that was emphatically NOT a modern animal itself but a predecessor to modern species. It’s amazing how people who ‘disagree’ with evolution have a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is.
So, this common ancestor that was not a cow, but walked on land, then decided to go back into the water, was somehow less of an animal adapted to land?
Well I have no background or interest in quantum mechanics but if you’re argument is that the past does not exist, well yes it’s undeniably possible that the world started 5 minutes ago, and we were all sent here with implanted memories and are all victims of a giant confidence trick, played out by being part of someone else’s computer simulation. Why such an argument is never used for any other discipline or study, like the study of history or archealogy is beyond me. I could argue, using your logic, that president Reagan never existed but was an implanted memory in the hearts of all neo cons .
You do not understand.
What is real and what is fake, anyway? For all the billions of people throughout history who may as well have never lived, for all the lack of impact they made... what is different if they never existed at all? Or if they only existed as a sort of mathematical accounting of the labor it would have taken to achieve something? What is it all for, if not for nothing?
If we're going to play in the world of fake memories, we have to properly deal with the subject of nihilism. Though it's venturing off topic, just a tad.
Nevertheless, biologists dont distinguish between divergence in ‘ simple’ terms and the longer scale macro evolution, which is essentially the same process over a larger time frame.
Which biologists?
Bio-Chemists have a lot of trouble with the idea that proteins gradually evolve. When entirely new organs appear, or even just specialized cells - we end up having a bit of a problem with the idea of gradual evolution. Take the human brain, for example. While it may first appear that our massive intellect is a boon - this is not exactly the case. Our brain is a resource hog and consumes around 30% of our calories. Moreover, we have a range of protein enhancements over our more primitive chimp cousins that have shrunk the neuron to allow for more surface area and tighter interconnections. The 'progressive' enhancements do not lead to any major increase in competitive success for our species. Chimps have not evolved greater intelligence, nor have many other apes. As far as we can tell, they are still apex predators and foragers within their environments. Our gains in intelligence didn't really begin to pay off until well after we'd already arrived at a very similar brain size to what we have, today. This was a massive drain on our resources with very little to no competitive edge gained until we began shanking things and developing ways of shanking things from increased ranges. Even then - the gains were marginal until we began to figure out farming.
The only logical explanation is that a group of female chimps (or our 'common ancestor' - who was not a chimp but was like a chimp) found displays of curiosity and intellect hot as hell and jumped their bones in a social trend that continued for tens of thousands of years and pushed our intellect into the range of the peacock's feather.
Lack of selective power? Have you seen the variation of animals, even within the same species in a single generation? Let alone multiple hundreds of thousands of generations that are involved in a larger time frame. The domestication of the dog, is a very illustrative example of marked physical change over relatively short time frames . Also look up ‘belayevs fox experiment’ for further elaboration. What we find from this and countless other case studies, is that variation and on rare instances, mutation occur within populations all over the natural world. Some of those survive better, and since these variations are heritable(I.e can be transferred to the next generation), then it automatically and obviously follows that populations change over time. The selective pressures can range from anything like artificial or man made pressures, to pressure for mates (sexual selection, incidentally the reason why male hens and male peacocks are more colourful and have more adornments than females of the same species, because females over generations only mated with males who had those traits, till selective power made a few bright feathers into the remarkable sight that is a fully expansive male peacock), pressure to hunt prey, to evade predators(with adaptations like the chameleon) and to carve out a niche and survive, natural selection.
The problem is that very few of these pressures are consistent toward any one productive goal. Once again - we arrive at the peacock's feathers. The survival burden on the peacock for those feathers is quite high. Yet, the current strata of the peahen is able to overwhelm the survival burden.
Thus, the survival burden can only be considered a minor factor in the reproductive success of a trait within a species. Thus, unless the genetic stars align and many minor and inconsequential variations culminate into a single individual having a massive boost to a new role - such as a not-cow suddenly leaping into the water to graze on a new food source with substantially increased success over its counterparts (while not freaking the ladies out), then none of the very gradual changes can be seen as being very effectual in the long run outside of very limited concepts like finch beaks - where shape influences food source and very minor changes can result in statistically significant outcomes.
If you still insist on macro evolution being a stretch, consider the division of animals, into sub groups. Like mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish etc. Or further subdivisions like the cat family, the great apes, etc. Not only do these groupings fall into a perfectly hiearchial family tree (each individual species being the branches), the DNA similarity between animals is exactly what we should expect if they had evolved from common ancestors, and the similarity being directly proportional to the proximity of the animals to each other within said tree.
Animals move around within the taxonomy tree all the time. There is no real agreed upon method for classifying animals. Sure - the main groupings of mammals, reptiles, fungus, etc are pretty solid, but as you get deeper into the tree, who is related to whom and even what defines a genus becomes a subject of debate.
The lie that is being peddled is that all of this is 'resolved science' - when, in reality, it is very much a work-in-progress theory that has far more holes than answers.
Further, I'm not really sure anyone can say "this is exactly what we would expect in DNA..." We are the only examples we have of an ecosystem - evolved by chaos, guided by supernatural forces, or magically poofed into being; we have only this system to use as a reference. If we had data from a fully engineered world, would we truly see some kind of radically different genetic system at play? Let's speculate a bit. If DNA is code for how to create an organism, and most organisms on our planet use many of the same organic systems... then it would make sense that most of our DNA is fairly similar. Why would a chimpanzee have a completely different genetic code base from a Gorilla, even if engineered?
I suppose this question holds value: what would you expect a world with engineered animals to look like, in terms of genetic structure and inter-relationships?