[farmer18th]

I'm not a biologist, nor even a scientist, (which exempts me from the orthodoxies, dogmas, and inquisitions of that congregation), but it seems to me that as recently as Nabokov, new species have been treated as an occasion to add new pages to the field guides, not as examples of beneficial mutation. The theory of evolution requires, by its own terms, millions of years to establish instances of change, and yet we are supposed to accept the last three hundred years of cataloguing as the current standard for all known species? Most of the English can't even recognize the threat of a chemical warhead pointed at them; it's not surprising to find they might have missed a weed.

[general_re]

The theory of evolution requires, by its own terms, millions of years to establish instances of change, and yet we are supposed to accept the last three hundred years of cataloguing as the current standard for all known species?

Well, given that the DNA analysis indicates its relation to the parent species, and that one of the parent species was only introduced 300 years ago to the UK, that would seem to suggest that this hybridization event has taken place sometime in the last 300 years. Even if it didn't happen last week, or twenty years ago, it's still a quite recent occurrence, all things considered.

Since the British Isles are not a particularly large place, and there have been naturalists crawling around the country looking under rocks and leaves since long before Darwin, I think it's not unreasonable to assume that the local flora have been fairly exhaustively catalogued - and we have the testimony here of a bona fide expert in plant biology telling us that this is something never before seen.

In addition, I think you are confusing the time between events with the time it takes for the event itself. Even if it generally happens that there are millions of years between speciation events (and I don't know that this is necessarily required either), the event itself could really occur in a matter of minutes - just as long as it takes an organism to reproduce. The two parents interbreed, a seed is produced, the seed sprouts, and you've got a new species, all in the space of a few weeks.