Best description of Christianity

[DeistPaladin]

Dogs evolve from Dogs. In that sense I don't consider the frogs to be different species.

You do realize dogs didn't come about naturally? We bred them from wolves.

This is "artificial selection", as opposed to "natural selection", but the same process is involved. This is how life gradually changes over time. You are correct that cats don't evolve into dogs. If such a thing happened, it would disprove evolution. However, when you look at going from wolf -> dog -> chihuahua, you can see the process at work.

So we see that speciation can induced artificially through animal husbandry.

As you well know, slavery was a part of Americas history where they bred people like animals in order to pass on "favorable traits", do you consider African-Americans to be a different species of human?

I regret that such a thing happened in history but I don't see how that relates to a discussion on evolution. The practice was in play long before Darwin came along. Bringing this up smacks of "poisoning the well" and "red herring".

But since you asked, no, science considers all of humanity to be one species. "Race" is arbitrarily defined and so not part of scientific discussion. "Species" however, is, like all terms in science, strictly defined with a checklist. A "species" is where it can reproduce and produce a viable offspring, meaning one that can itself reproduce with others.

For example, a donkey and a horse can breed and produce a mule but the mule isn't able to reproduce. It's sterile. So donkeys and horses are considered two separate species. They both have the same root ancestor and each developed and changed enough that they eventually became two separate species, unable to produce viable offspring with one another. This is an example of speciation.

Humanity was born in Africa and migrated to the rest of the world. We even know from the fossil records where and when these migrations happened. Those who settled in areas closer to the North Pole, away from areas with abundant direct sunlight lost their color to adapt. The melanin in the skin acts as a natural sun block. Lighter skin sucks up scare sunlight, needed to produce vitamin D. Darker skin shields from overexposure to sunlight, avoiding skin cancer and sunburn (and also, as a side benefit, reducing wrinkles in old age). Hence, the closer you get to the tropics, the darker the skin and the closer you get to the North Pole, the lighter the skin. We see this pattern not just among Africans and Europeans but all over the world (observe the different tribes of Native Americans, from the Inuits of Alaska to the Incas of Peru). As far as science is concerned, that's all it is: direct sunlight exposure over a very long period of time.

Hence, racism isn't just morally wrong but absurd. We in America have created a social system where the most important thing about you is how much direct sunlight did your immediate ancestors get.

When you demystify so-called "race", you see clearly that we're all one. There is only one race: the human race. Religion, by contrast, tells stories about "the angels that didn't side with Jesus" (Mormonism) to "the descendants of Ham" (the Old Testament).

This is one example of how religion is neither necessary nor helpful in our understanding or moral issues. Science and reason offer better approaches.