David Bradbury (or Stephen Jones, I couldn't find the original post):
>2) Your following citation also brings up another interesting, but unrelated
>thought.
>
>"Despite a close watch, we have witnessed no new species emerge in the wild in
>recorded history. Also, most remarkably, we have seen no new animal
>species emerge
>in domestic breeding. That includes no new species of
>fruitflies in hundreds
>of millions of generations in fruitfly studies, where both soft and
>harsh pressures
>have been deliberately applied to the fly populations to induce
>speciation.
>And in computer life, where the term "species" does not yet have
>meaning, we see
>no cascading emergence of entirely new kinds of variety beyond an
>initial burst. In
>the wild, in
>breeding, and in artificial life, we see the emergence of variation.
>But by the
>absence of greater change, we also clearly see that the limits of
>variation appear
>to be narrowly bounded, and often bounded within species. ... No one has yet
>witnessed, in the fossil record, in real life, or in computer life, the exact
>transitional moments when natural selection pumps its complexity up
>to the next
>level.
>There is a suspicious barrier in the vicinity of species that either
>holds back
>this critical change or removes it from our sight. (Kelly K.,"Out of
>Control: The
>New Biology of Machines", 1995, p475)
>. . .
>Thus, over 30 years ago, Dr. Eden was acknowledging the very problem
>(inadequacy of
>Random Mutations and Natural Selection [RM+NS] to explain biological
>evolution)
>which Dembski, Johnson, Behe, et al are today addressing as Intelligent Design
>(ID), Irreducible Complexity (IC), etc. -- and which evolutionists,
>like ostriches,
>prefer not to acknowledge rather than facing up to reality.
I suspect the Kelly quote is out of context, but if not perhaps you
or Kelly should do some facing up to reality:
This article is on page 22 of the February, 1989 issue of Scientific American.:
"Three species of wildflowers called goatsbeards were introduced to
the United States from Europe shortly after the turn of the century.
Within a few decades their populations expanded and began to
encounter one another in the American West. Whenever mixed
populations occurred, the specied interbred (hybridizing) producing
sterile hybrid offspring. Suddenly, in the late forties two new
species of goatsbeard appeared near Pullman, Washington. Although the
new species were similar in appearance to the hybrids, they produced
fertile offspring. The evolutionary process had created a separate
species that could reproduce but not mate with the goatsbeard plants
from which it had evolved."
this is from the talk.origins archive which has two FAQ files that
list observed instances of speciation. Here is one of them:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/speciation.html
this FAQ lists about 7 references to speciation events and ends with
"... on and on to about #50 if you like...
There are about 100 each for every year before 1991 to 1987 in my
database. "
It's surprising neither you nor Kelly has not heard of *any* of them.
Susan
-- ----------I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who denounces them is bound to shew why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower form, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction.
---Charles Darwin
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