[quote]deanec wrote:
The only fact is that we have never observed one species evolve into another. [/quote]
Not even remotely true. My undergrad advisor demonstrated incipient speciation in fruit flies in about a years time. A post-doc in my Ph.D. lab repeatedly speciated yeast in the lab. I believe you’ll find a Science paper he published if you looked hard enough. I’m pretty sure speciation in dandelions in the field has been demonstrated. These are the three obvious examples, I’m sure there’s more but it isn’t really considering a big problem anymore. The aforementioned post-doc has moved on to more interesting problems. So speciation has been demonstrated in animals, plants and fungi. Done deal.
Oh yeah, and the species concept as defined by Mayr is really more or less an issue with animals–which, as we all know, are a sort of eccentric group amongst the eukarya, an atypical case if you will. Lay people sit around arguing about speciation when biologists are busy trying to come up with an entirely new framework outside of the species concept (since it doesn’t make a lot of sense for about 99.9999% of life–which is mostly Bacterial and Archeal).
Nope. See above. Flies in a year with moderate selection. You can do the yeast in a week.
Hmmm, it’s been observed in the field and lab countless times. Go look in the literature.
Repeated? Gee, I don’t know, Lenski ring a bell? Funny, my dissertation demonstrates repeatable evolution in 4 different species of bacteria. Hell, I even demonstrate repeatable ecological dynamics. And I got the stats to back it up. Not mere “adaptation”–fixed genetic change in a population under selection. If you have another definition of evolution, I’m all ears. But you’re wrong.
It’s so trivially easy to demonstrate evolution in the lab. Take the bacteria or virus, or hell, yeast, or nematode of your choice. Sequence its genome. Apply selection. Selection can be as trivial and propagating it under lab conditions (which are hugely selective for any buggers fresh from “nature”). Sequence said buggers after a thousand generations. Witness fixed genetic changes. Witness measurable phenotypic changes. Evolution, no? You can repeat it. Over and over and over again. You can predict the genetic changes that will happen and even the exact type of mutation that will happen at certain loci given a certain selective pressure. You can make a hypothesis–if I apply “x” selective force to this virus I expect to see certain changes. You can falsify it by sequencing (or whatever your phenotypic marker is).
But whatever, you’re caught up in “macro” evolution (ummm, hello, the evo-devo folks have been making huge headway there, no?) and speciation (again, we can show it in the lab and field–nothing more to explain here)–two issues that really only affect animals, and, to a degree plants and fungi. I expect the evo-devo folks will figure out how “macro” evolution occurs in the next decade. Hell, if people don’t get to bent out of shape, they’ll probably demonstrate it in the lab by making something horrible (as if the fruitflies with legs coming out of their eyes weren’t bad enough…imagine the rats sprouting wings).
So do you have any real arguments or are you too lazy to actually bother to look into the real science and you just want to throw around your half-assed ideas? Anyway, I’ll be sure to evolve something over the weekend just for you.