[PatrickHenry]

Everybody be nice.

[PatrickHenry]

Evolution Ping! This list is for the evolution side of evolution threads, and maybe other science topics like cosmology.
See the list's description in my freeper homepage. Then FReepmail me to be added or dropped.

[martin_fierro]

Is a Darwin Award appropriate here?

< |:)~

[PatrickHenry]

Pic from the article:

[RightWhale]

What is the difference between this goby and its ancestral goby? Future goby experts want to know.

[AndrewC]

sought refuge in another species of coral that wasn't being used at the time.

No other fish could pay the rent. HAHAHA

[megatherium]

A colleague where I teach studies sympatric evolution in leafhoppers. These are very partial to specific host plants. (Leafhoppers suck plant juices for a living.) Populations in close geographic proximity can form new species if they happen to jump to new host plants. Leafhoppers are well-studied because they are significant plant pests (they are disease vectors in corn and also grapes).

The opposite of sympatic speciation is allopatric speciation, where new species form when a species is cut into subpopulations that are not in contact with each other (e.g., by the formation of a mountain range that geographically isolates populations). This is offered as an explanation for the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record: new species form in out-of-the-way, isolated regions; cut off from the main population. Imagine a mountain range forming, and isolating a subpopulation, which is subject to changing conditions and therefore adapts to the new conditions. A new species forms but is still isolated. But suppose conditions change, so a wide area is now hospitable to the new species. It will spread to the new area. This has the effect of making the new species suddenly appear in the fossil record (the relatively few transitional forms are only in a relatively limited geographical area, which may well have not been preserved in the fossil record).

[SC Swamp Fox]

So....those folks over at Liberty Post are forming separate species?

[Southack]

"Species form when fish booted out of home [Speciation]"

More accurately, new species form when their old DNA is changed.

What is in dispute is how, who, or what instigates such genetic reprogramming.

5 Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires

[Mamzelle]

re: The new species was estimated (by whom?) to have diverged from its ancestor between 200,000 and 700,000 years ago. )))

The passive voice--always the friend of the scientist making unaccountable and unverifiable claims. Also useful for shamans and witch doctors who want grants, too.

[stremba]

It's just one fish becoming another fish. Nothing to see here. No evidence for evolution </creationist mode>

[Ahban]

Slow thread? OK, I'll play for a while.

700,000-800,000 years for one species of Gobie to split into two visibly indistinguishable forms is a great example of speciation, but not of the kind of leaps you need to make macroevolution a plausable hypothesis. To get that, you would have to find examples of where new FAMILIES formed every four or five centuries. That is based on estimates of the number of families there have been on Earth since the Cambrian explosion (1.25 million) divided by the number of years since that explosion (543 million). I am using your sides numbers for all of this, and the numbers don't add up if all you can show me is a species split in 700,000 years.

Even that is weak, because the genes of the original host may have had the latent genes all along. There is no evidence that any "new" functioning gobi genes are required to become the "new" species. Those genes could well have been a subset of the original group. THAT does not prove macroevolution.

[Old Professer]

Is this related to another thread here on convergent evolution?