Posted by
The Interface on Thursday, September 24, 2009 10:05:47 PM
Argument number 12: the score to date, Creation 11, Evolution 0.
12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve.
Speciation is probably fairly rare and in many cases might take centuries. 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.
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.
One would think that evolutionists would tire of bringing out the same argument in different clothes all the time. Again, we have a straw man argument presented in hopes that you are too uninformed, or stupid, to realize that it is no argument at all. No serious creationist maintains this argument (and even if you found one that did, that wouldn’t make the point because it is not a necessary argument of the creationist position). All of the statements in this alleged argument are agreed to by creationists except for two points: the rate of speciation, and the final conclusion that this proves evolution (or at least falls into the evolutionist side of the argument).
Creationists actually expect speciation to happen much faster than most evolutionists believe. 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.
Once again, the examples provided do not represent the addition of new information to the genome, but rather rearrangement and loss of existing information. The fruit flies are still fruit flies! The mosquitoes are still mosquitoes!
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