> FOUND a new niche?
Yes. Found a new niche. Sometimes taking a walk will put you in a whole new ecosystem where you'll prosper.
> We should be seeing selection pressures pushing for speciation into this niche once again
We have not abandoned the niches we've held for the past hundred thousand years. On the contrary... we're leading adventure safaris into them and building condos on them.
> Of course, we should be seeing speciation all over the place in the biosphere ...
Over time, yes. And that's just what the evidence shows.
---
Over time, yes. And that's just what the evidence shows.
---
Mathematics really should be required for a degree in evolutionary biology.
Time is not a factor in a continual, on-going process. It cancels out of the equations. That's why we can study stellar life cycles in human life times even though an individual star itself takes anywhere from a million to 20 billion years to go through its life cycle.
The point is, we shouldn't HAVE to look in a fossil record, we should be able to measure speciation occurring throughout the entire biosphere right now. We should be able to take sample populations, observe speciation vectors, distribution plots and harmonic resonances around a maximized form. These are all things mathematics predicts should be happening if evolution, as currently theorized, is accurate. We don't see any of this.
The dirty little secret is that biologists with a good math background already know this. That's why they keep resurrecting the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium, and then state that we are currently in an Equilibrium period.