Reply #91: Additional refutations. [View All]

[Xithras]

I'm not trying to be hard headed here, just instead taking a critical look at these references.

Chris Stassen Examples:

#1 Describes a lab event
#2 Describes speciation following random genetic mutation, not Natural Selection
#3 & #4 are untested for speciation. It's highly debatable to say that a species is separate simply because size or mating habits, even genetically programmed ones, cause two groups of related animals to avoid each other. That's like saying that homosexual human males are a different species because they're biologically programmed to dislike sex with human females. The descriptions of these final two examples admit that inter-fertility tests have not been conducted, meaning that speciation is unconfirmed.

James Meritt Example:

Again we have a reference to speciation through hybridization. Nobody is debating the fact that we can create a hybrid of two related species, or even two different variants of the same species, and create a new, third species. Ligers and Mules are great examples of hybridized species, but no major scientific body, and very few scientists, suggest that hybridization drove evolution on Earth. It's interesting, but unrelated to the topic at hand.

The second Rhagoletis pomonella example didn't offer enough information to tell whether or not it was a speciation event. The cite would need to be looked up and read.

The rest of the examples are either cites to journal articles that I can't look up immediately, are only marginally related to the topic at hand (the geographic distribution of birds in the Pleistocene and Holocene periods doesn't sound like a scientific analysis of an observed speciation event by any stretch), or in one case again admit that the actual speciation status is unknown.

For what it's worth, I DO believe that natural selection is the driving force behind evolution, but as a scientist I have to admit that the evidence simply is NOT there. Unlike the fundies, I don't believe that the lack of evidence implies a false answer, but instead implies something far simpler: Speciation due to natural selection is a slow process primarily driven by environmental change (environmental in the sense of all outside influences combined). It takes a substantial amount of change to induce adaptive genetic alteration and speciation in the natural world, and we simply haven't been around long enough, as scientists, to observe and record these types of divisions.