To: f.Christian
Of what?
To: foolish-one
12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve.
Again, a straw man, since informed creationists dont teach thiseven 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 speciationsee Speedy species surprise. One example is a new species of mosquitoes, i.e. one that cant 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 creationistssee 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, Mayrs Biological Species Concept, recognizes a species as a distinct community of reproductively isolated populationssets 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. Its important to note this difficulty in defining species whenever evolutionists claim that creationists dont 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 selectionfor anatomical differences, mating behaviors, habitat preferences and other traitsand 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.
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