[Virginia-American]

Given the choice between mating with Mizz Thomas, or going extinct, all I can say is bye-bye

What a grotesque thought!

Now, are they a different "species" because they don't want to mate?

The criterion is whether, without help, they mate or not. The reason doesn't really matter; if they don't, the two gene pools are separate.

EG, ligars ond tigons have never, AFAIK, been found in the wild. But there are places (India, other parts of Asia) where their habitats overlap, so there is no physical barrier like an ocean preventing mating.

Therefore, lions and tigers are different species

Ditto for horses, asses, zebras, etc.

There are species of birds that are interfertile (like lions and tigers), but never interbreed because of differences in their songs or other courtship behavior. Since the gene pools are separated, they count as different species.

[Virginia-American]

I should have said "species of interfertile birds, in the same habitat, .."

Getting late ..

[P-Marlowe]

I think you have too broad of a definition of species and thus you think you can prove speciation where none really esists. In your example they are all cats. They could mate as is shown by the fact that they have been interbred. Thus they are no more different species than ugly people and beautiful people.

When you put flies in a jar and in 400 generations you have a jar full of mosquitoes, then you might have a point about the possibility of macro evolution taking place. Right now I don't think you have any evidence of macro evolution being observed. If anything the last century or two has shown that what we have observed is nothing more than macro extinction. Hence we have almost as many species on the endangered species list as we even knew we had 100 years ago. The trend is not that developed species evolve, but that they become extinct and are not, in fact, being replaced with new species.

The observation of survival of the fittest does not produce new species of highly developed animals every year as Darwinism would have predicted, but produces fewer and fewer species each year.