One of the most common problems that laypeople have with
evolution is that there doesn’t seem to have been enough time
for it. Given the idea that evolution is relatively slow, and
yet there’s been an enormous amount of change since the first
species a few billion years ago, how could natural selection
(and other processes like genetic drift) have built all these
exquisite, functioning organisms? Part of the answer, of course,
is that people fail to appreciate “deep time,” since we’re
evolved to regard life over years and decades, not millions and
billions of years. Evolutionists often demonstrate this by
compressing all of evolution into a calendar year, showing how
much evolution has occurred in a short segment of that time.
Using this analogy in WEIT, for example, I show that the
divergence between the ancestors of humans and chimps would have
occurred only at 6 a.m. on December 31. Another difficulty is
that people assume that if one species evolves into another by
changing many traits, it seems highly un