That's just it -- I *dont'* support the creationists' lies.
1) Drawings of man evolving from ape, made from whole cloth, with no fossile evidence to support it.
You're kidding, right? Read 'em and weep. Or do a web search for "hominid fossils". Man, you guys have *got* to start reading some material other than creationist screeds. Crack open a science book sometime. Hell, even "Discover" magazine would broaden your horizons immensely.
2) The lie of Lucy, where the supposed knee and hip bones determined upright walking, were found half a mile apart in soil depths that varied over 60 feet. They are NOT from the same creature! And the good doctor will not answer questions on this issue.
Speaking of creationist lies... Lucy's knee was not (let me repeat that, *NOT*) found "half a mile" from her hip. Creationists love to lie and claim that, though. Click here for the real story. Short form: A *different* knee joint was found in a separate site a few kilometers away. *Lucy's* knee was found where one would expect it -- *with* Lucy. Creationists have been confusing one with the other, perhaps on purpose. Excerpt:
To summarize: At least seventeen creationists have made this bogus claim. Three have never responded in any way to questions about it (Girouard, Menton, Willis). Another two have not responded to further inquiries (Brown, McAllister). Only five have shown a willingness to discuss the matter (Chittick, the Nuttings, Sharp, Taylor), but one (Chittick) cut off correspondence. Four have agreed that the claim was in error and agreed to stop making it (Hovind, McAllister, Sharp, Taylor), and two agreed to stop making it if further investigation showed that the claim was bogus (the Nuttings) but have continued to repeat it. One (Arndts) has indicated a willingness to believe that the claim is in error but no interest in researching further or offering a correction because the article in which he made the claim just used it as an example of a type of error in reasoning. One (LaHaye) has insisted that the claim is not in error, but agreed to stop making it at the request of the Institute for Creation Research. Three (Baugh, Huse, Mehlert) have not yet been contacted for comment. One (Brown) now denies having made the claim at all. Only three (Menton, Morris, Sharp) have issued public corrections or clarifications.3) The difference between adaptation within a species and transition from one species to another are ignored. And the former is extrapolated to predict the later, with no evidence.
What "difference" would that be, please? Be precise and specific. There *is* no "difference". In fact, some changes within a species are larger than the changes that have caused one species to spring from another.
As for "no evidence", I again invite you to eventually get around to reading one of those "science book" things you must have heard about in passing.
For a brief overview, however, check out the Macroevolution FAQ, Barriers to Evolution, Introduction to Evolutionary Biology, and especially Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ
4) The definition of species being blatently and unscientifically revised to respond to this shortcoming. etc.......
Oh look, another creationist lie...
The definition isn't "unscientifically revised"; on the contrary it's revised to *fit* what science discovers. The major part of the problem is that contrary to the creationists' simplistic notion that nature "knows" what a species is and "keeps" things from evolving out of those boundaries, in truth "species" is just a man-made concept, and when you start examining nature in all its forms and messiness, no one firm definition of "species" manages to include all the things that people would generally agree *are* species while excluding those things which people would agree *aren't* species. Nature isn't as simple as we try to pigeonhole it.
Here's a brief overview of the issue from the talk.origins archive:
There is a long answer. You can find it discussed in the listed books and references, but if you want a shorter answer, here it is:Nature is complex. Science properly catalogs that complexity, then when creationists can't keep up they whine that scientists "keep changing the answer" and must be up to something nefarious...Because species evolve many different ways of being isolated from each other, and because species are sometimes only partially isolated from each other, there is no simple definition that covers all cases of being species without at the same time also covering things that are not species. Likewise, if we give some criterion like reproductive separation, which is what most of the biology textbooks give, then there are plenty of cases where species are not perfectly isolated or where they can, but do not usually, interbreed. Even then, some organisms - as you note, plants, but also corals, bacteria, and some animals, especially birds and lizards - don't meet the criteria and will happily interbreed across species boundaries.
So, we have either got the problem of many different definitions of species (called, for obvious reasons, "pluralism") or we say that only one kind of definition is truly species (like the one in the textbooks) and that all other organisms are not actually organised into species (a view called "monism"). I personally find it odd to say that only a small part of the living world forms species, and so I push for a pluralism; on the grounds that evolution generates diversity and one form of diversity is ways of being species.
Anyway, here are the links and the books. The best introduction for the general reader is the one by Schilthuizen - it gives the history and biology in simple terms. Mayden's article is the most comprehensive list of all species concepts in the literature to date:
Links
- Observed Instances of Speciation FAQ
- Tulane course notes
- Biosis links
- American Museum of Natural History notes
- Ruedas' notes
- UC Davis Notes
References
Ereshefsky, Marc, ed. 1992. The units of evolution: Essays on the nature of species. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Hey, Jody. 2001. Genes, concepts and species: the evolutionary and cognitive causes of the species problem. New York: Oxford University Press.
Howard, Daniel J., and Stewart H. Berlocher. 1998. Endless forms: species and speciation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mallet, James. 2001. Species, concepts of. In Encyclopedia of biodiversity, edited by S. A. Levin. New York: Academic Press.
Mayden, R. L. 1997. A hierarchy of species concepts: the denoument in the saga of the species problem. In Species: The units of diversity, edited by M. F. Claridge, H. A. Dawah and M. R. Wilson. London: Chapman and Hall.
Schilthuizen, Menno. 2001. Frogs, flies, and dandelions: the making of species. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wilson, Robert A. 1999. Species: new interdisciplinary essays. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.