> Evolution is a very mechanical process, a process of constantly accessing
> benefits and costs to every aspect of the body plan of the organisms it
> evolves, and evolving its forms to exploit untapped resources in the most
> efficient manner possible.

After a brief discussion at the breakfast table, my wife told me that the
path to finding the proof of macro-evolution is going to be through the DNA
analysis and not computer modeling, lab work, or fossil records. The history
should be visible in the genome. She said to check out the Galapagos
finches. Sure enough:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E00E0DA143FF932A25756C0A96F9
58260

When Charles Darwin landed in the Galapagos Islands on Sept. 17, 1835, he
paid little attention to the finches, which seemed much the same from one
island to another. He assumed they were varieties of a single species that
had reached the remote islands long before and thought no more about them
until after the British ship Beagle returned to London.

There, John Gould, a leading ornithologist, told him that the finches
belonged to many different species, none known from anywhere else. The
surprising news helped set off in Darwin's mind the train of thought that
led him to the daring conclusion that the earth's species might not have
remained fixed and unchangeable since some moment of divine creation.

The finches of the Galapagos Islands have become a foremost example of
evolution at work. They display what biologists call adaptive radiation, the
evolution of a founding population into an array of different species, each
adapted to its own ecological niche.

Biologists now have applied modern methods of DNA analysis to Darwin's
finches. Not surprisingly -- for Darwin was almost always right, though he
knew of neither genes nor DNA -- they have found that the finches are all
descended from a single ancestral species.
...

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