RE: The code that is DNA
December 28, 2019 at 11:56 pm
(This post was last modified: December 28, 2019 at 11:59 pm by John 6IX Breezy.)
(December 28, 2019 at 11:34 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote: What issues, exactly. Speciation has been directly observed.
The issues begin with the definition of a species; there isn't a good one. If you take the biological species concept, and use reproductive isolation to define the boundaries, you now have several problems (apart from the ones I've mentioned to you before, such as failure to account for asexual reproduction, hybridization, etc.). The major one is that speciation can only be applied at a time, not across time. What that means is that if a species evolves gradually without splitting, there is no longer a discernable boundary that allows us to know when a species has evolved into another.
For example, another user posted a Dawkins excerpt in which he writes "If you walked up the line like an inspecting general - past Homo erectus, Homo habilis, perhaps Australopithecus afarensis - and down again the other side, you would nowhere find any sharp discontinuity." That's a issue, because without discontinuity of reproduction what you call Homo erectus, Homo habilis, and Australopithecus afarensis is completely arbitrary. There's no such thing as those species, because each generation would be able to mate with the one before, down to the present day.