This piece of overstatement is from the Science and Theology News site:
Finches on the Galapagos Islands that inspired Charles Darwin to develop the concept of evolution are now helping confirm it - by evolving.
A medium sized species of Darwin's finch has evolved a smaller beak to take advantage of different seeds just two decades after the arrival of a larger rival for its original food source.
The altered beak size shows that species competing for food can undergo evolutionary change, said Peter Grant of Princeton University, lead author of the report appearing in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
Grant has been studying Darwin's finches for decades and previously recorded changes responding to a drought that altered what foods were available.
It's rare for scientists to be able to document changes in the appearance of an animal in response to competition. More often it is seen when something moves into a new habitat or the climate changes and it has to find new food or resources, explained Robert C. Fleischer, a geneticist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and National Zoo.
One of the difficulties of evolutionary theory is that the timescales involved are often so large that much of the data has to be inferred. While the scientific community finds such data - primarily the fossil record - compelling, the data can be incomplete, leaving room for critics to cry foul. However, documented changes occurring within the timescale of a human life are, one might say, a different sort of animal.
Why a journalist might think this constitutes evolution is not hard to understand. What is difficult to grasp is why a scientist would call it evolution. There's no speciation involved here, no reproductive isolation, no indication of an alteration in the finch's genome, no "different sort of animal," just a simple modification of the size of an anatomical structure triggered, apparently, by the unavailability of a particular food source.
This is only evolution if evolution is defined in such a way as to include any variation that occurs in a population of organisms, but such a definition renders the concept meaningless.
The amusing and disingenuous ploy at work in reports such as this is that they are used to support the claim that evolution is a fact. Darwinists will argue that evolution (meaning molecules to man evolution) is as firmly established as gravity, that anyone who questions it is either ignorant or malicious, but when the public meekly requests a crumb of evidence to support that claim it's shown pictures of finches with diminished beaks. We may as well be told that since humans, because of better nutrition, have grown taller in the last century and a half, and live longer, evolution is therefore a fact.
