Originally posted by Brett:
I wonder who gave you the authority to redefine scientific terms. Find me ANY definition of evolution which includes life coming from non-life. I'm sure nearly all Christians who recognize we evolved will agree that abiogenesis is bunk. Linking it with evolution makes for a nice strawman though!
Brett, any John Doe will speak of evolution in its broadest terms. This isn’t a Message Board for politically correct scientists.
So Brett, how did life start? Don’t say ‘God started it’, that’s a BIG NO, NO, in science.
Originally posted by Brett:
Simply wrong. Speciation has been observed.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html
LOL…This FAQ you supplied, which btw, the site and it’s papers aren’t Peer Reviewed, contains not one single observed instances of speciation under any controlled experimental conditions! Not one of the many lists of scientific observations can be described as ‘speciation’ in a Darwinian sense.
The author picked a definition of species to suit his attempt to prove that Darwinism is a scientific reality in his paper. This is quite obvious in the topic marked 4.1, with his ‘advantage’ comment, by picking the weaker of the definitions he gave concerning species, it was to his ‘advantage’. Good smokescreen.
Boxhorn’s example of the plant kingdom in 5.1 – 5.1.1.9 is called ‘polyploidy’, and no Darwinist would ever suggest that polyploid plus natural selection would be evolution. Polyploid is a freak mutation in the plant world where the copying of chromosomes doubles the same information. There’s NO new information, just a repetitious doubling of the same information and it’s NOT evolution. It’s not the small, gradual genetic change envisioned by Darwin. Nice try though!
5.2.1 Boxhorn claims that different species may be defined simply by counting their seeds or pollen, what an ad hoc measure to suit his examples.
5.2.2: the term ‘almost’ ain’t good enough for me here, maybe for you it is, but I thought the author was going to produce ‘instances of speciation’ not almost complete reproductive isolation.
5.2.3: Boxhorn is now defining a new definition of species, by variation in tolerance to poison by saying that a low tolerance variety is a different species from a high tolerance variety. He uses the term 'hybrid' to assert speciation without the troublesome need for proof, but even so says merely that
"many of the hybrids were unviable". Boxhorn has conveniently forgotten that the real test is not whether some of the offspring are unviable, but whether the two populations are
"reproductively isolated". By Boxhorn's own admission, they are not.
5.3.1: Here Boxhorn is saying that two fruit flies which he asserts are different species, successfully mated and produced offspring, but the experiment proved that they were the same species! Once again he uses the term ‘hybrid’ in an attempt to confuse the reader that they were different species. He goes on to say that the offspring exhibit 'behavioral isolation' kinda like my pet Pomeranian and our neighbors German Shepard, but this is irrelevant as a sign of species status. So where, in all this, is there an instance of speciation or one species turning into another?
I got sick of reading the rest of it I was getting bored.
observed instances of speciation