You mean, recorded history?
You're neglecting a great deal of anthropogenic bias here. First of all, we're spending much more time looking for extinction rather than looking for speciation; and we're hyping the former. And second, we really are changing the world rapidly, and therefore may well be killing species off faster than we're causing new species to evolve. The question needs to be answered over the long term.
If I wanted to argue dishonestly here, I'd claim that, for example, there are more species of wild birds in the continental US now than there were in 1904. In that time we've lost three undisputed species - the passenger pigeon, ivory-billed woodpecker, and Bachman's warbler - but we've gained at least 8 new species of crossbill. Now, it is likely all that happened with the crossbills is that we noticed that superficially similar crossbills are actually divided into 9 different groups that don't interbreed, but the fact is that much speciation is a gradual process, and it's arbitrary where we draw the line. So were there 9 species of common crossbill in 1900? I don't know, and no-one else does either.
Thank you for your reply!
My problem with the theory of evolution is that it seems to have become something of a religious dogma. It is, after all, only a theory, and not a particularly strong one. It's simply the best thing anyone can come up with that excludes God, and excluding God seems to be primary goal.
I don't believe life can come from the absence of life. I believe variation occurs within species, but that is conservatory, not evolutionary. If there are a variety of wolves, it isn't because wolves are trending in the direction of evolving into something else. The variety is conservatory...it's to help wolfkind survive. If an ice age kills the short haired ones, the long haired ones will survive. If a food shortage kills the big ones, the smaller ones (needing less food) will survive. I think the mutations we see in micro-organisms are likewise conservatory, not one tiny step in a micro-organisms' evolutionary trend towards becoming a 3,500 pound mammal.
I think natural selection is proven beyond any shadow of a doubt. But I don't think there's a shred of evidence that if you traced a giraffe's ancestry back through the ages, you'd arrive at a single celled organism.
There really seems to be no explanation as to why something like an elephant would ever evolve, given that the things it supposedly evolved from are more fit to survive than an elephant.
It seems to be a quagmire for evolutionists. They must assume that the earliest life forms were simple. The old primordial soup somehow spawning some simple living cell. Though there's no evidence that life can come from its absence, that's easier for people to swallow than telling them a sabre toothed tiger simply popped into existence after lightning struck the right mixture of chemicals in some mud pit.
So they have to start with the simple and assume it evolved, over the ages, into the countless millions of species we see today. All that time extinction was occurring, but we have to assume that every time something became extinct, two or more new creatures evolved. Otherwise, the number of species would never increase to even two, let alone millions.
Yet, at every step along the way, increased complexity decreases fitness. Single celled organisms, our supposed starting point, are still going strong and can reproduce easily simply by splitting, yet they "evolved" into creatures that have to track down mates to survive, gestate their offspring, nurture their offspring, etc., not to mention many other problems.
I'm not a scientist by any means. But I do think evolutionists need to be a little less dogmatic and certainly less smug given what they're working with.