Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: f.Christian
Of what?
211 posted on 07/11/2002 2:03:10 PM PDT by foolish-one
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 205 | View Replies ]


To: foolish-one
12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve.
Again, a straw man, since informed creationists don’t teach this—even though some day-age advocates do, like Hugh Ross.

Speciation is probably fairly rare and in many cases might take centuries.

But it need not. In fact, speciation can happen much faster than most evolutionists (and day-age advocates) realize. But creationists following the Biblical Creation-Fall-Flood-Migration model would expect such rapid non-evolutive speciation—see Speedy species surprise. One example is a new species of mosquitoes, i.e. one that can’t interbreed with the parent population, arising in the London Underground train system (the ‘Tube’) in only 100 years. The rapid change ‘astonished’ evolutionists, but should delight creationists—see Brisk Biters.

Furthermore, recognizing a new species during a formative stage can be difficult, because biologists sometimes disagree about how best to define a species. The most widely used definition, Mayr’s Biological Species Concept, recognizes a species as a distinct community of reproductively isolated populations—sets of organisms that normally do not or cannot breed outside their community. In practice, this standard can be difficult to apply to organisms isolated by distance or terrain or to plants (and, of course, fossils do not breed). Biologists therefore usually use organisms’ physical and behavioral traits as clues to their species membership.

We agree. It’s important to note this difficulty in defining ‘species’ whenever evolutionists claim that creationists don’t have a consistent definition of ‘kinds’ (which we do as discussed before).

Nevertheless, the scientific literature does contain reports of apparent speciation events in plants, insects and worms. In most of these experiments, researchers subjected organisms to various types of selection—for anatomical differences, mating behaviors, habitat preferences and other traits—and found that they had created populations of organisms that did not breed with outsiders. For example, William R. Rice of the University of New Mexico and George W. Salt of the University of California at Davis demonstrated that if they sorted a group of fruit flies by their preference for certain environments and bred those flies separately over 35 generations, the resulting flies would refuse to breed with those from a very different environment.

None of this is news to informed creationists. Once again, there is no new information, but sorting and loss of already existing information.

215 posted on 07/11/2002 2:04:53 PM PDT by f.Christian
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 211 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson