This is one of the most common misconceptions about evolution.  I inhabit the Yahoo Answers site and generally confine myself to the sections on philosophy and anthropology.   Many of the questions are seriously stupid, but now and then I post something.
 
At any rate, that is still one of the most common questions posted.   "If man evolved from the apes, how come we don't see apes evolving into humans?"
And questions along similar lines.
It betrays even the most basic understanding of natural history and evolution, and I can only blame our thoroughly-miserable science-education in this country.   It's easy for the youngsters to be so ignorant when educational curricula either gives the subject short shrift or simply ignores it altogether.
 
The college I work at has to have "make-up" courses in biology and natural history available to the incoming students as so many of them are deficient in the most basic instruction in these fields.
 
This is all wound up in religion and politics, of course, rather than scientific disagreement.

Okay, maybe this isn't appropriate here, but I think it should be fine, and if not, I will remove it post-haste.
 
My question is posed directly to those, such as Dan and I believe Greenman, who are firmly against evolution.  Before I ask, I must tell a tale.  
 
During the industrial revolution in England, there was a certain type of whitish moth that would land on the light colored bark of the trees and be camouflaged.  Sometimes a black mutant would be born and it would rarely survive long because it could not blend with the light colored trees as well.  The smoke from the new machines eventually turned many of the tree trunks black.  The dark moths flourished and reproduced and the white moths, no longer able to blend, died.  Eventually the entire local population of moths was black.  This happened and was recorded over the course of just a few years.
 
My question, then, this being "micro-evolution", is why can this not happen on a grander, more global scale?

TC, We actually had that example in my Christian science textbook. I thought it was really obvious to answer, I didn't think anyone would believe it. I guess people do.
 
Say you have 500 black butterflies and 500 white butterflies in a white background with several birds. Which do you think the birds will eat, the black ones. And if the background was black they would eat the white butterflys.  
 
 Does this mean that the black or white butterfliess changed into another kind of butterfly to avoid being eaten? No. You have a simple subtraction problem, and whichever ones the birds don't eat survive. Will these butterflies become stronger and change into fish (or whattever comes next in the evolutionary order)? No. Even if they did change, all that has been proven is a butterfly being turned into... a butterfly. Which would be fine if were a a planet with only butterflies, but we have millions of species of different animals and insects which don't resemble butterflies.
 
Micro evolution cannot happen on a larger scale, simply becuase it's impossible. If you breeded dogs for millions of years, do you know what you would have? Lots of Dogs. You wouldn't have a fish or a monkey or a human, you would have a dog.
 
   Keep in mind all of the above was from a pretty secular standpoint. Now, if an animal does have the ability to adapt to it's enviorment, I can assume that it's not becuase it evolved over millions of years. It's becuse an Omnipotent Omnicient God made the animals to be that way. And if there is this God who created animals, he created people too. And then there's a whole lot of stuff that comes next.
 
Hopefully that answers your question.

However, if you breed foxes for domesticability for several hundreds of generations (a few seconds on the scale of evolution) you get foxes that are not only remarkably dog-like in behavior, but also begin to look much less like their wild cousins and become spotted, longer furred, and aquire other traits that are ....Doglike.
The Russians have done exactly this in an experimental facility that was started up some 50 years ago.
 
We know from genetic study that modern dogs, all of 'em, are very closely related to wolves.  So closely that they can interbreed; Alaskan and Canadian sled dogs are frequently mated by male wolves, and have viable offspring.
 
It's really difficult to grasp the time scales involved in natural selection.   We do this at an accellerated rate with selective breeding.  All contemporary domestic animals are the result of this.   The incredible varieties of "fancy" pigeons", the vastly-different breeds of dogs, cattle, sheep, etc.
All of these remain the same species, of course, but thats because we don't isololate the populations.  Most domestic critters are constantly being tampered with along the lines of infusions of new genetic material.
 
In speciation, a population is normally isolated and then adapts further to it's unique environment without input from the primary population group.   Changes accumulate, and become great enough so that the ability to breed with the original population is lost.
This can take a very long time with most species; longer than human history.   Nature has had billions of years to work with.  
The wildly differing forms of the dinosaurs occurred over almost 200 million years.   We humans, having been around for a mere 150,000 or so, are a mere blip in natural history.

Quote from Dan on Jun 11^th, 2012, 8:35am:

 
Why not? Why can't it be extended  in very small episodes indefinitely.  Why can't the black moths with mutated fuzzy antennae gain an advantage over the non fuzzy antennae, making all the moths black with fuzzy antennae?  And then the ones that happen to have mutated laser-beam eyes win out over those that don't and then we have moths that are black, with fuzzy antennae, and laser-beam eyes; a very different creature than what we started with.  Things evolve (in the evolutionary short term) into things similar to themselves.  Fish to fish, birds to birds; not fish to birds.  The thing is over billions of years, with enough microscopic changes things at either end (i.e. fish at the start and bird at the end) do end up very different, but each step on the path to get there is very similar to the one before it.
 
Also don't tell me "it's impossible", I want reasoning, not rhetoric.  Belief in evolution does not betray your belief in God.  Nowhere in the Bible does it say that the animals stayed the same throughout the timeline.  God and evolution are compatible.  I personally think it would be even more amazing if God allowed or assisted his  beasties to evolve rather than keeping them static in a changing world.  

When the evidence for evolution became overwhelming, creationists were forced to retrench slightly.  Instead of simply denying that it occured at all, they came up with the terms "micro evolution" and "macro evolution".   This all goes back to Genesis and the notion of "kinds" which figures strongly in creationist thinking.
It was, in light of the overwhelming evidence, perhaps OK that the original "kinds" of organisms could, grudgingly, change somewhat... As in Darwin's finches.   Still recognizeably finches, but different species.  
They decided they could live with that.
However, the notion that gross changes could take place was too much.  That a wolf-like land-dwelling carnivore could, over millions of years, morph into seagoing cetateans... Well, that could never happen.
 
Even though we can trace the lineage of contemporary whales quite nicely, and even though contemporary whales bear in their bodies still the vestigial hip and femur structures of their "wolfie" ancestors....
Likewise pythons, which in several species have vestigial hips and upper leg-bones.
 
Creationists want to be shown "transitional" fossils, fossils that would show some major change taking place.  Of course, the record is full of transitional fossils; essentially all organisms are transitional but fossils are a snapshot rather than a movie.
Still, we have feathered dinosaurs, and partially-winged dinosaurs, and toothy birds, and fish with nascent legs and lungs, and hundreds of more examples.  Creationists deny all these.  
They apparently want to see some sort of fossilized chimera, and that's not going to happen.    
Chimeras occur, but such massive mutations are invariably fatal.  We call them "birth defects" today.
 
Dan, perhaps your particular brand of Christianity finds evolution incompatible, but this is not the case with Christianity in general.
I and others have pointed out repeatedly that many of the 2000+ Christian sects find no incompatibility whatever.  The Catholics accepted it long ago.  I have pointed out that even more-progressive Evangelical sects have accepted what the evidence shows.  
Evangelicals like the Francis Collins I mentioned earlier have said flatly that they see evolution is "how God did it", and see Genesis as the creation myth it is.
 

Quote from Dan on Jun 11^th, 2012, 3:31pm:

And that is something that evolution likewise doesn't cover.