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Formation Of New Species Proves Gradual, Not Sudden
UniSci.com ^ | 28 May 2002

Posted on 05/28/2002 12:35:38 PM PDT by sourcery

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Formation Of New Species Proves Gradual, Not Sudden

The formation of new species is a gradual and not a sudden process, according to a team of biologists from the UK, France, Australia and the USA.

Their findings, from a study of birds on Pacific islands, are reported in today's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The "founder effect" theory, a controversial idea among biologists, says that speciation occurs suddenly due to a small influx of colonists founding new populations, in the process creating many new gene combinations and losing many others, in what is known as a "genetic revolution."

But according to the team's new evidence from fieldwork and computer modeling, the theory doesn't apply to island birds, and the way in which populations change their genetic diversity is a result of successive colonization events and long-term genetic drift.

"Our results indicate that speciation in island birds occurs gradually, not suddenly as a result of island colonization through founder effects," said Dr. Sonya Clegg of Imperial College London.

In order to carry out the work, Dr. Clegg and her collaborators visited a series of islands through the southwest Pacific.

Dr. Clegg said: "The result is exciting because this is the first time the theory has been tested using natural populations. Previous tests have used artificially introduced ones, which don't tell you much about how real biodiversity evolves.

"It's obvious that genetic changes can occur if a single pair of individuals founds a population, but the question is whether that really happens. Our results suggest that it doesn't."

The scientists tested the founder effect model in an unusual island bird species, the Silvereye (Zosterops lateralis), which has colonized a series of islands in the southwest Pacific from the Australian mainland during the last 200 years.

The Silvereye's pattern of colonization there was originally used to support the founder effect model, first proposed by Ernst Mayr in 1954. Though subsequently tested in lab studies and artificial populations, up until now the theory had been untested in a natural population because of the need to know the colonization date for a series of island populations.

The southwest Pacific islands benefit from a well-documented history of such events, and DNA samples were taken from birds captured on the islands to be compared with samples from Silvereye colonies on the Australian mainland and with samples from island populations of Silvereyes known to be founded over 3,000 years ago.

This allowed the scientists to make the crucial contrast between genetic changes in recent and old island populations.

Their computer models of evolution based on these data showed that single founder effects do not lead to strong genetic changes in the Silvereye population, contrary to the founder effect model.

Instead, genetic changes build up gradually -- either as a result of long-term genetic drift or through multiple bottlenecks. The authors estimate that the average successful founding flock would number more than 100 birds.

Laboratory-based studies have shown that founder effect models can work, but only under very restrictive circumstances, for example, with a very small number of colonists. A natural population with known colonization dates is very rare and most studies have been done on artificially introduced populations, which limit the value of subsequent results because humans have set the size of the colonizing group.

The research team included scientists from the Department of Biological Sciences and Natural Environment Research Council Centre for Population Biology, Imperial College, London; the Department of Zoology and Entomology, University of Queensland, Australia; Centre de Biologie et de Gestion des Populations, Campus International de Baillarguet, Montferrier/Lez cedex, France, and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley.

The Australian Research Council and the Stuart Leslie Fund (Birds Australia) funded the work.

(Reference: Genetic consequences of sequential founder events by an island-colonizing bird. Authors: Sonya M. Clegg, Sandie M. Degnan, Jiro Kikkawa, Craig Moritz, Arnaud Estoup and Ian P. F. Owens. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. May 28, 2002.)

Related websites:

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)

Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine

[Contact: Dr. Sonya Clegg, Tom Miller]

28-May-2002

 

 

 

 

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To: Heartlander
They are not a different species but if you take, “A Pygmy and an Eskimo”, and add, “walk into a bar” – you got the beginnings of a pretty good joke.

The punch line is Evolution…

21 posted on 05/28/2002 2:11:00 PM PDT by Heartlander
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To: Dimensio
No, the anti-Es will simply ignore it like they do everything else that utterly obliterates their arguments.

I thought theories relating to sudden species formation were favored by evolutionist seeking to explain missing intermediary fossil evidence?

22 posted on 05/28/2002 2:11:38 PM PDT by skeeter
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Comment #23 Removed by Moderator

To: Junior
What would be the result of accumulated genetic changes within one population, but not shared with another?

Maybe nothing except a plethora of incredibly beautiful women, as is the case in Iceland. ;-) Or, more seriously, problems such as hip displasia, as occurs when dogs become too inbred.

BTW, this article doesn't actually tell us whether these colonies are truly isolated, or if there's a possibility of intermingling between adjacent islands. It seems to me that if these birds are island-hoppers, there's no reason to expect that they only hop to un-colonized islands.

If X amount of genetic changes occur in 3000 years, then how many more changes would occur in 3 million or 300 million years?

Who knows -- certainly neither of us does. If I had to guess, I'd say that the changes over 3 million years would be minor, primarily because I think the colonies would intermix over time. Nobody's claiming, after all, that this species all of a sudden appeared only 3000 years ago -- I suspect that the silvereye species has been around for a long time.

At any rate, this is pure guesswork. It is certainly not a "test" of evolution to attempt to extrapolate these results to arrive at some pre-determined conclusion. At best, I think one can claim that this is nothing more than a "test" that proves obvious fact that children bear the genetic characteristics of both parents.

24 posted on 05/28/2002 2:21:04 PM PDT by r9etb
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To: Heartlander
The punch line is Evolution…

Only if one of them is a girl..... ;-)

25 posted on 05/28/2002 2:21:55 PM PDT by r9etb
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To: Junior
"Sudden" and "Gradual" are relative terms. Sudden may mean in the million year range for mammals and ten year range for bacteria.

I would speculate that various genetic processes occur at different rates. If there were a diffusion-like drift (I haven't checked to see if this is a good model.) things would happen at all time scales. The non-independence of mutations and the effects of selection make analysis difficult.

26 posted on 05/28/2002 2:27:14 PM PDT by Doctor Stochastic
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To: AllSmiles
Are you pointing out the difference between Intelligent Designer vs. stupid designer?
Genesis vs. abiogenisis?

Are you one of those stupid designer theorists?

27 posted on 05/28/2002 2:27:39 PM PDT by Heartlander
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To: balrog666
Bumpola...
28 posted on 05/28/2002 2:45:40 PM PDT by balrog666
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To: skeeter
I thought theories relating to sudden species formation were favored by evolutionist seeking to explain missing intermediary fossil evidence?

The new fast variant, Gould's "Punctuated equilibria", or punc eek, is a hare-brained attempt to reconcile evolutionism with the actual fossil record. There is no reconciling Darwinism with the fossil record. Consider what real experts on the subject, as opposed to the legends in their own minds of talk.origins or the little evo clique on FR ("Junior", PatrickLustinmyHeartHenry, VadeRepo et. al) have had to say about what the fossil record actually tells us:

"Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of 'seeing' evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them ..."

David B. Kitts, PhD (Zoology)
Head Curator, Dept of Geology, Stoval Museum
Evolution, vol 28, Sep 1974, p 467

"The curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps; the fossils are missing in all the important places."

Francis Hitching
The Neck of the Giraffe or Where Darwin Went Wrong
Penguin Books, 1982, p.19

"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution."

Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University
"Is a new general theory of evolution emerging?"
Paleobiology, vol 6, January 1980, p. 127

"...Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils ... I will lay it on the line, there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument."

Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist,
British Museum of Natural History, London
As quoted by: L. D. Sunderland
Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems
4th edition, Master Books, 1988, p. 89

"We do not have any available fossil group which can categorically be claimed to be the ancestor of any other group. We do not have in the fossil record any specific point of divergence of one life form for another, and generally each of the major life groups has retained its fundamental structural and physiological characteristics throughout its life history and has been conservative in habitat."

G. S. Carter, Professor & author
Fellow of Corpus Christi College
Cambridge, England
Structure and Habit in Vertebrate Evolution
University of Washington Press, 1967

"The history of most fossil species includes two features inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear ... 2. Sudden Appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and 'fully formed'."

Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University
Natural History, 86(5):13, 1977

"But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?" (p. 206)

"Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory (of evolution)." (p. 292)

Charles Robert Darwin
The Origin of Species, 1st edition reprint
Avenel Books, 1979

The Abundance of Fossils

"Darwin... was embarrassed by the fossil record... we are now about 120-years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, ... some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information."

David M. Raup, Curator of Geology
Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago
"Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology"
Field Museum of Natural History
Vol. 50, No. 1, (Jan, 1979), p. 25

"Now, after over 120 years of the most extensive and painstaking geological exploration of every continent and ocean bottom, the picture is infinitely more vivid and complete than it was in 1859. Formations have been discovered containing hundreds of billions of fossils and our museums are filled with over 100-million fossils of 250,000 different species. The availability of this profusion of hard scientific data should permit objective investigators to determine if Darwin was on the right track. What is the picture which the fossils have given us? ... The gaps between major groups of organisms have been growing even wide and more undeniable. They can no longer be ignored or rationalized away with appeals to imperfection of the fossil record."

Luther D. Sunderland (Creationist)
Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems,
4th edition, Master Books, 1988, p. 9

"My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed. ... The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes, and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to the scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled."

Prof N. Heribert Nilsson
Lund University, Sweden
Famous botanist and evolutionist
As quoted in: The Earth Before Man, p. 51

29 posted on 05/28/2002 3:12:19 PM PDT by medved
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To: All
The big lie which is being promulgated by the evos is that there is some sort of a dialectic between evolution and religion.

That's BS. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion which operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates would be Rastifari and Voodoo.

The real dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.

Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, Muhammed...

To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:

God hates IDIOTS, too!

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:

Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now: OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....

You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.

But it gets even stupider.

Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.

Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).

Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:

1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (Gould claiming that the lack of intermediate fossils is what his version of evolutionism would predict). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could see or hear them, they wouldn't BE witches...)
That sort of logic is less limiting than the ordinary logic which used to be taught in American schools. For instance, I could (using the same logic) claim that the fact that the fact that nobody has ever seen me with Tina Turner was all the evidence anybody could want that I was sleeping with her...

2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...

3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.

4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.

5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.

The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.

And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:

The don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"

They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:

ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!

Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.

I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?

30 posted on 05/28/2002 3:21:53 PM PDT by medved
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To: All
Those who find medved's essays and links useful will also be delighted with these:

TIME CUBE .
The Earth is Not Moving!.
Earth Orbits? Moon Landings? A Fraud! .
Flat Earth Society Homepage! .
Christian Answers Network.
Creationists' Cartoons .
Institute for Creation Research.
The Current State of Creation Astronomy.
Answers In Genesis .
THE MOON: A Propaganda Hoax .
CRANK DOT NET.

31 posted on 05/28/2002 4:29:41 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
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To: medved
I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that?

Having read your previous posts, I have my answer.

What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?

Believing in your version of "Intelligent Design" is obviously worse to even the most casual observer, but then your emphasis on 'belief' makes it a matter of faith, not facts, logic, and reason.

32 posted on 05/28/2002 5:38:20 PM PDT by balrog666
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To: sourcery
Poor Gould, his body is not even warm and his theory is being thrown out the window by the neo-Darwinists!
33 posted on 05/28/2002 6:54:00 PM PDT by gore3000
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To: All

Some useful references:

Major Scientific Problems with Evolution

Evol-U-Sham dot Com

Many Experts Quoted on FUBAR State of Evolution

The All-Time, Ultimate Evolution Quote

"If a person doesn't think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what's the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That's how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all came from slime. When we died, you know , that was it, there is nothing..."

Jeffrey Dahmer, noted Evolutionist

Social Darwinism, Naziism, Communism, Darwinism Roots etc.

Creation and Intelligent Design Links

Catastrophism

Finding Cities in all the Wrong Places

Given standard theories wrt the history of our solar system and our own planet, nobody should be finding cities and villages on Mars, 2100 feet beneath the waves off Cuba, or buried under two miles of Antarctic ice.

Intelligent Versions of Biogenesis etc.

Talk.origins/Sci.Bio.Evolution Realities


34 posted on 05/28/2002 7:02:05 PM PDT by medved
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To: Dimensio
This is news?

Not really. It's a pretty lame excuse for an article, but hey, the money from taxpayers of four countries paid for this "research" so they had to come up with some way of justifying the expense.

35 posted on 05/28/2002 7:03:17 PM PDT by gore3000
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To: Junior
Now the anti-Es cannot claim that the theory has never been tested.

WRONG! The article (like most evolutionist writings) is pretty underhanded. It only claims to disprove punctuated equilibrium, no research at all from it shows that gradual evolution occurred either. This is an assumption made by the "scientists".

In fact, I would say that this study disproves gradual evolution also! They are saying that the changes between the separated population and the original one have been shown to be quite small through DNA sampling. Since they are testing two present species, the one that is the "control" (the original one) obviously changed very little itself thus it is not proof of gradual evolution either. In fact, if anything it should be called a disproof of gradual evolution too.

36 posted on 05/28/2002 7:10:41 PM PDT by gore3000
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To: Junior
In other words, they're claiming all the evidence of the fossil record is a bunch of BS?? -medved-

Huh? The fossil record never said that speciation occurred rapidly --

Problem is that the fossil record does not show gradual evolution either. Remember that Eldredge and Gould invented (and I mean invented, not discovered) punctuated equilibrium because the fossil record from the Cambrian explosion on did not in any way justify gradual evolution. The one interesting thing about this internicine battle amongst atheists is that each one is disproving the other and thus they are disproving evolution itself - punctuated, gradual or in between!

37 posted on 05/28/2002 7:14:52 PM PDT by gore3000
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To: Dimensio
the anti-Es will simply ignore it like they do everything else that utterly obliterates their arguments.

The article nowhere gives proof of gradual evolution either, all it does is disprove punctuated equilibrium. There is no proof of gradual evolution in it. The battle between the punkies and the neoEvos has always been one of disproving the other, neither side has ever given evidence for their theory, this article is no different.

38 posted on 05/28/2002 7:17:56 PM PDT by gore3000
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To: Junior
If X amount of genetic changes occur in 3000 years, then how many more changes would occur in 3 million or 300 million years?

We have a few examples of genetic changes from 300-400 million years ago - the shark and the coelacanth. The answer is ZERO. Speculation is not science, evidence is science and you can speculate all you want but without evidence you got nottin'.

39 posted on 05/28/2002 7:23:47 PM PDT by gore3000
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To: Dimensio
That you don't like the definition of speciation is irrelevant.

There is only one legitimate definition of speciation - inability to breed fertile young. Evolutionists of course find such testing rather bothersome, I mean, such stuff is real work so they do not bother making such tests before they call something a species or not (note that no such tests was conducted by the "scientists" in this article. Also, it is much easier to claim speciation when there is none by not bothering with such scientific tests. You can just call a bird with a different song, a different color, or whatever a different species and claim that speciation has occurred. The total falsehood of evolutionist's claims based on such flimsy evidence was recently proven conclusively to be wrong. The famous Darwin finches said to be proof of evolution for some 100 years (guess they did not have the time to see if they could breed) have been shown both willing and able to mate with different 'species' and produce fertile young. So much for evolution "science".

40 posted on 05/28/2002 7:31:21 PM PDT by gore3000
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