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The Origin of Species does not deliver on the promise of its title; it does not address speciation.

...pecies. Darwin proposed that natural selection had a fundamental role in speciation, but did not elaborate much on the mechanism. It is now believed that much speciation is due not to natural selection, but to geographical isolation and genetic drift (allopatric speciation). However, natural...

...78. Charles Darwin's biological species concept and theory of geographic speciation: the Transmutation Notebooks. Annals of Science 35: 275-297. Presgraves, D. C., L. Balagopalan, S. M. Abmayr and H. A. Orr. 2003. Adaptive evolution drives divergence of a hybrid inviability gene between two s...

Students should be taught all sides of a controversial issue. Evolution should not be taught without teaching the controversy that surrounds it.

...heory, such as the relative contributions of sympatric versus allopatric speciation. These controversies require a great deal of background in biology even to understand what they are about. They should not be taught to beginning students. They should be taught to graduate-level students in b...

Scott, E. C. and G. Branch, 2003. Evolution: what's wrong with 'teaching the controversy'. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 18(10): 499-502. Brauer, Matthew J., Barbara Forrest and Steven G. Gey. 2005. Is it science yet?:...

Evolution has not been, and cannot be, proved. We cannot even see evolution (beyond trivially small change), much less test it experimentally.

...enous viruses, show a pattern of inheritance indicating common ancestry. Speciation has been observed. The day-to-day aspects of evolution -- heritable genetic change, morphological variation and change, functional change, and natural selection -- are seen to occur at rates consistent with co...

Benner, S. A., M. D. Caraco, J. M. Thomson and E. A. Gaucher. 2002. Planetary biology--paleontological, geological, and molecular histories of life. Science 296: 864-868. Mercer, John M. and V. Louise Roth. 2003. The eff...

A true science must make predictions. Evolution only describes what happened in the past, so it is not predictive.

...ion of the prey (Yoshida et al. 2003). Ernst Mayr predicted in 1954 that speciation should be accompanied with faster genetic evolution. A phylogenetic analysis has supported this prediction (Webster et al. 2003). Several authors predicted characteristics of the ancestor of craniates. On the...

...and Mark Pagel. 2003. Molecular phylogenies link rates of evolution and speciation. Science 301: 478. Yoshida, T., L. E. Jones, S. P. Ellner, G. F. Fussmann and N. G. Hairston Jr. 2003. Rapid evolution drives ecological dynamics in a predator-prey system. Nature 424: 303-306.

Evolutionists have been unable to claim $250,000 offered by Kent Hovind for proof of evolution.

...ept important evidence. He will not accept macroevolution in the form of speciation as evidence for evolution. Several people have tried to collect on his challenge, only to get a runaround or to be ignored: Lenny Flank received only nonanswers when he asked Hovind to clarify what "fundamenta...

"David." 2005. Hovind indirectly admits that his $250,000 Offer is impossible, and is flawed. http://true.wxcs.com/hovind/flaw-impossible.htm , transcribing an interview with Hovind on Truthradio, April 5, 2005. Flank, L...

Evolutionary theory, for a variety of nonscientific reasons, has obtained the status of sacred revelation. To express doubts by bringing up the counterevidence to the theory is to brand oneself an intellectual infidel.

...f the organism, a kind of Lamarckian inheritance he called "pangenesis." Speciation: For a long while Darwin's own view on what caused new species to rise (natural selection) was rejected by most biologists in favor of geographical isolation. Only recently has Darwin's view come back into fav...

AIG. n.d. Arguments we think creationists should NOT use. http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/faq/dont_use.asp Kimura, M. 1983. The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mar...

DNA and chromosome counts differ widely between different organisms. This dissimilarity contradicts the similarity we expect from common descent. Chromosome counts should be either the same because the different forms of life descended from a common ancestor (Pathlights n.d.), or more complex as organisms get more complex (Thompson and Butt 2001). Neither is the case. For example, humans have 46 chromosomes, some ferns have 512, and some gulls have 12.

...tire genome is duplicated. Polyploidy, in fact, is a common mechanism of speciation in plants.

Lewis, Harlan, 1993. "Clarkia", In: The Jepson Manual: Higher Plants of California , J. C. Hickman, ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 786-793. Nachman, M. W., S. N. Boyer, J. B. Searle and C. F. Aquadro,...

The first individual of the new species would be very unlikely to find a mate. Hybrids are infertile, so a newly evolved individual would not be able to breed successfully with the original species. The mutation that caused that individual to be a new species would also have to occur in an individual of the opposite sex.

This objection falsely assumes that speciation must happen suddenly when one individual gives rise to an individual of another species. In fact, populations, not individuals, evolve, and most speciation occurs gradually. In one common mode of speciation ("...

...nn, Ulf and Michael Doebeli. 1999. On the origin of species by sympatric speciation. Nature 400: 354-357. Kondrashov, Alexey S. and Fyodor A. Kondrashov. 1999. Interactions among quantitative traits in the course of sympatric speciation. Nature 400: 351-354. Otte, D. and J. A. Endler, eds. 19...

1.0 Introduction and Acknowledgements This FAQ discusses several instances where speciation has been observed. It also discusses several issues related to speciation. Other Links: Some More Observed Speciation Events A group of articles originally posted to the talk.origins newsgroup that provides some instances of speciation not covered b...

...ances where speciation has been observed. It also discusses several issues related to speciation. Other Links: Some More Observed Speciation Events A group of articles originally posted to the talk.origins newsgroup that provides some instances of speciation not covered by this document. I have divided this FAQ into several sections. Part 2 dis...

...also discusses several issues related to speciation. Other Links: Some More Observed Speciation Events A group of articles originally posted to the talk.origins newsgroup that provides some instances of speciation not covered by this document. I have divided this FAQ into several sections. Part 2 discusses several definitions of what a species...

Some More Observed Speciation Events Copyright © 1992-1997 by Chris Stassen James Meritt Anneliese Lilje L. Drew Davis By Chris Stassen Here is a short list of referenced speciation events. I picked four relatively well-known examples, from about a dozen that I had documented in...

...itt Anneliese Lilje L. Drew Davis By Chris Stassen Here is a short list of referenced speciation events. I picked four relatively well-known examples, from about a dozen that I had documented in materials that I have around my home. These are all common knowledge, and by no means do they encompass all or most of the available examples. Example...

...1963. Artificial selection induced strong intra-strain mating preferences. (Test for speciation: sterile offspring and lack of interbreeding affinity.) Dobzhansky, Th., and O. Pavlovsky, 1971. "An experimentally created incipient species of Drosophila", Nature 23:289-292. Example two: Evidence that a species of fireweed formed by doubling of t...

...s given a more detailed analysis of the species concept in the "Observed Instances of Speciation" FAQ . Note, the BSC has interesting implications for the nature of the last universal common ancestor of all life, especially if horizontal genetic transfer was extensive then (as it is today between the different unicellular "species" of bacteria,...

...line Genetic change Morphological change Functional change The strange past Stages of speciation Speciation events Morphological rates Genetic rates References Prediction 5.1: Genetic change The genetic information specifies everything about an organism and its potential. Genotype specifies possible phenotypes, therefore, phenotypic change foll...

...c change Morphological change Functional change The strange past Stages of speciation Speciation events Morphological rates Genetic rates References Prediction 5.1: Genetic change The genetic information specifies everything about an organism and its potential. Genotype specifies possible phenotypes, therefore, phenotypic change follows genetic...

...rn life as far back as we can see in the sequential layers. Prediction 5.5: Stages of Speciation The most useful definition of species (which does not assume evolution) for sexual metazoans is the Biological Species Concept: species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations that are reproductively isolated from oth...

...ese diagrams illustrate the inferred relationships between organisms and the order of speciation events that led from earlier common ancestors to their diversified descendants. A phylogenetic tree has several parts, shown in Figure 2 . Nodes represent taxonomic units, such as an organism, a species, a population, a common ancestor, or even an e...

...lutionary theory, macroevolution involves common ancestry, descent with modification, speciation, the genealogical relatedness of all life, transformation of species, and large scale functional and structural changes of populations through time, all at or above the species level ( Freeman and Herron 2004 ; Futuyma 1998 ; Ridley 1993 ). Universa...

...troviruses Part 5. Change Genetic Morphological Functional The strange past Stages of speciation Speciation events Morphological rates Genetic rates Closing remarks What is Universal Common Descent? Universal common descent is the hypothesis that all known living, terrestrial organisms are genealogically related. All existing species originated...

...Part 5. Change Genetic Morphological Functional The strange past Stages of speciation Speciation events Morphological rates Genetic rates Closing remarks What is Universal Common Descent? Universal common descent is the hypothesis that all known living, terrestrial organisms are genealogically related. All existing species originated gradually...

...l organisms are linked by common descent. Denton claims that while microevolution and speciation are proven phenomena, the common evolutionary descent of all organisms is "a highly speculative hypothesis entirely without direct factual support and very far from the self-evident axiom some of its more aggressive advocateswould have us believe [i...

...t. Bernard can be connected only by saltations? If such profound change can occur and speciation does, as Denton conceded, occur, then what is to theoretically stop a remote ancestor from evolving into all of the primates? What is theoretically to stop an ancient ungulate from evolving into a whale, or an ancient fish into an amphibian? The fos...

...luenced Darwin's thinking on the subject. Geographic (also now known as "allopatric") speciation - the idea that isolation due to geographic barriers is a cause of speciation - was something Darwin held to be important on islands, but also where rivers, mountains and other impediments prevented species split into separate breeding populations f...

...atric") speciation - the idea that isolation due to geographic barriers is a cause of speciation - was something Darwin held to be important on islands, but also where rivers, mountains and other impediments prevented species split into separate breeding populations from back-crossing. According to Mayr, Darwin prevaricated on its importance, a...

...icated on its importance, and eventually also accepted the possibility of "sympatric" speciation - speciation due to a move into new ecological or behavioural niches. Wallace designated a number of biogeographic regions (below), in which different organisms were found, and which he explained by his " law of introduction ". A number of other bot...