Replies

maybe someone has taken this already, but I'll give it a go after reading so many iterations of your request:

Species A gives rise to species B1 and B2.
Species B1 cannot interbreed at all with B2 or A. Species B2 can interbreed with A, but the resulting offspring are sterile.
Species A eventually "dies" out - the similar-to-A species B1 and B2 fill the ecological niche. In the meantime, at the fringes of the B populations, new adaptations are giving rise to species B1(C1, C2) and B2(C3, C4, and C5).
The "C" series are still quite similar to species A, but demonstrate not only genetic divergence but rudimentary morphological divergences.
(etc...etc...etc...)
a few million years later, after repetitions of the speciation process, there have been several hundred daughter lines of speciation, most of which are extinct, and a few which thrive. These are species X27, X35, Y205, and Z13. None of these current species resemble species A even slightly.

get it?

Species A gives rise to species B1 and B2.

This is where I fall off the train. Could you please explain how species 'A' gives rise to species 'B1' and 'B2'?

Please note that I'm not talking about survival of the fittest, or natural selection. I accept natural selection as scientific fact.

As I said earlier, the question is not whether natural selection occurs. Of course it does, and it has an effect in maintaining the genetic fitness of a population. Creatures with severe birth defects do not survive to maturity and creatures which do not survive to reproduce do not leave descendants. These effects are unquestioned, but your claim asserts a great deal more than the fact that species avoid genetic deterioration due to natural attrition among the genetically unfit. You're basically claiming that this same force of attrition has a building effect so powerful that it can begin with Species 'A' and gradually craft its descendants over billions of years to produce such wonders as trees, flowers, ants, birds, and humans.

When Darwin wrote “The Origin of Species”, he could offer no good cases of natural selection because no one had looked for them. He drew instead an analogy with the artificial selection that animal and plant breeders use to improve domesticated varieties of animals and plants. By breeding only from the woolliest sheep, the most fertile chickens, and so on, breeders have been spectacularly successful in altering almost every imaginable characteristic of our domesticated animals and plants to the point where most of them differ from their wild ancestors far more than related species differ from them. This explanation is misleading because artificial selection is fundamentally different than natural selection. Human breeders produce variations among sheep or pigeons for purposes absent in nature, including sheer delight in seeing how much variation can be achieved. If the breeders were acting in the same manner as natural selection, which is interested only in having animals survive in the wild and be able to reproduce, then the extreme variation would not exist. When domesticated animals return to the wild, the most highly specialized breeds quickly perish and the survivors revert to the original wild type.

What artificial selection actually shows is that there are definite limits to the amount of variation that even the most highly skilled breeders can achieve. Breeding of domesticated animals has produced no new species, in the commonly accepted sense of new breeding communities that are infertile when crossed with the parent group. For example, all dogs form a single species because they are chemically capable of interbreeding, although inequality of size in some cases makes natural copulation impracticable. The fact is that selection gives tangible form to and gathers together all the varieties a genome is capable of producing, but it does not constitute an innovative evolutionary process. In other words, the reason that dogs don’t become as big as elephants, much less change into elephants, is not that we just haven’t been breeding them long enough. Dogs do not have the genetic capacity for that degree of change, and they stop getting bigger when the genetic limit is reached.

I’m simply saying that these questions that remain unanswered by science. I ask you again, what proof do we have that a species can make a dramatic change into a completely different species over any period of time, no matter how long? Have scientist provided proof that what they’ve been telling us is true, or most just believe it because they said so? That question seems so elementary and it often angers people, but I still beg the answer.

You guys possess an understanding of science that reaches far beyond what little I know. But one of the things that I admire about science is that it's built upon that wonderful foundation referred to as the "scientific method". The great advantage of the scientific method is that it is unprejudiced: one does not have to believe a given researcher, one can redo the experiment and determine whether his/her results are true or false. The results are not subject to opinion, a consensus, or verified by a vote. The conclusions will hold irrespective of the state of mind, or the religious persuasion, or the state of consciousness of the investigator and/or the subject of the investigation - and science doesn't make moral judgments.

How does one test the theory of evolution? There's no absolute way to objectivity test the assertions of creation or evolution. There aren't any eyewitnesses. Both ideas are left to propose a model and then compare it with nature for consistency. Can evolution be proved false? What part of the theory of evolution is open to invalidation, some small detail, or the entire principle?

How can you honestly subject evolution to the scientific method and consider it anything more than a theory?