DoughtyOne:
"I do not believe a squirrel becomes a horse.
I don’t believe a maple tree becomes a sequoia." First and foremost, you must address your own problem of truth-telling -- you don't seem to grasp the concept, and somehow think it's perfectly **OK** to lie about what science actually says.
You need to fix that problem.
Now that you are practicing honesty, let me advise you that no scientist has ever claimed "a squirrel becomes a horse", or that "a maple tree becomes a sequoia," -- those are ridiculous mischaracterization of evolution theory.
Indeed, if you will think back to who first told you such nonsense, that is the source of your current truth-telling problems.
Eventually you must confront it.
What evolution theory actually says is that every generation, without exception, experiences some small mutations causing changes from those generations which went before.
Frequently confirmed observations show us that most such mutations have no effect on us, and of those which do effect us, most are negative.
But just a few mutations actually help in survival and reproduction, and those get passed on to future generations.
Short-term, that's called "adaption", while longer term changes slowly accumulate, leading to "evolution".
So there's no difference between "adaption" and "evolution" except the length of time under discussion.
DNA and fossil records show that after about a million years, separated populations, which could previously readily interbreed (i.e., races, breeds & varieties) become unwilling, if not yet actually unable, to interbreed.
At that point, we refer to them as not just different sub-species, but separate species.
Yes, they may well still look like others closely related, but their willingness and ability to interbreed is key to our classifications of them as different breeds, species, genera, orders, etc.
For example: Zebras, while generally looking all the same, actually come in a dozen different breeds and sub-species in three different species and two sub-genera:
First of all Bro, I didn’t say there wasn’t mutation.
I merely said that you don’t get a horse from a squirrel or a maple tree from a sequoia.
And what I said was correct wasn’t it.
I don’t buy into evolution as the origin of the human species.
I don’t buy into the idea that every animal came from some space spill on isle 6 or a lightening bolt in a pond.
Science does not prove that was the case. That’s the end of the story for me. We all have our gods, some of us are just willing to admit to it.
Err not exactly there bub...
Adaptation aka natural selection aka micro-evolution are changes in the natural selection process choosing traits between the 2 sets of DNA [mother vs father] while mutations are damages to the DNA code that may get corrected through the copying processes, may have no effects, often have damaging effects leading to disease and premature deaths, while a very few are actually described as beneficial even though it represents a loss in the genetic code it can in rare instances produce slight beneficial results but often at a cost somewhere else in the normal life cycle. Gradual decay of the DNA is one of the 101 signs of a young earth and universe and is thought to lead to species becoming extinct. Basically the observational evidence of DNA indicates devolution.
“The decay in the human genome due to multiple slightly deleterious mutations each generation is consistent with an origin several thousand years ago. Sanford, J., Genetic entropy and the mystery of the genome, Ivan Press, 2005; see review of the book and the interview with the author in Creation 30(4):45–47,September 2008. This has been confirmed by realistic modelling of population genetics, which shows that genomes are young, in the order of thousands of years. See Sanford, J., Baumgardner, J., Brewer, W., Gibson, P. and Remine, W., Mendel’s Accountant: A biologically realistic forward-time population genetics program, SCPE 8(2):147–165, 2007.”