DARWIN'S MACROEVOLUTION: Why Unscientific?

[Angrboda]

[Mister Agenda]

Um, no. I appreciated and understood your point.

Ah, fair enough. Its just that rainbow paragraph took alot of effort.
I'm very proud of it.

As well you should be. It was loverly.

[libalchris]

Ring species are so freakin cool. So many places today we can see the different stages of speciation occuring. It's like the life of a star, we can document the different stages of it by observing different stars in the different stages, even if we can't observe the whole process. With life you can see the very beginning with different sub-species (domestic dogs and wolves), then as separation occurs more and more we see ring species, as apophenia gave examples of, then speciation becomes more definite. The species can make offspring, but the offspring is sterile, as is the case with donkeys and horses. And finally species that are very similar today that interbreed but cannot produce offspring.

[Phil]

Ring species are so freakin cool. So many places today we can see the different stages of speciation occuring. It's like the life of a star, we can document the different stages of it by observing different stars in the different stages, even if we can't observe the whole process. With life you can see the very beginning with different sub-species (domestic dogs and wolves), then as separation occurs more and more we see ring species, as apophenia gave examples of, then speciation becomes more definite. The species can make offspring, but the offspring is sterile, as is the case with donkeys and horses. And finally species that are very similar today that interbreed but cannot produce offspring.

One ring to rule them all

Check out my thread Evolution In Action for a few examples of speciation that is taking place over a human lifetime.

[Mister Agenda]

She just has a very small and rigidly calcified mind. She offers no rebuttals, just assertions to the contrary, back by well poisoning. A very small mind stuffed full of biblical crap, and lacking the flexibility to expand even a tiny little bit, even in defense of her bible. My dog can come up with better trick to get his food.

If you think god couldn't work a miracle and make a creationist dumber than Statler Wordorff, you are proven wrong.

I don't think it's so much of a dumbing (she may be fully functional in other areas) as a blinder on her imagination. I keep running into creationists mystified by things that only take a few moments thought. 'What good is half a wing?' Gee, I don't know, maybe you should ask a flying squirrel, fish, lizard, or lemur. 'What good is half an eye?' You know I DO wonder what good half an eye is to a tapeworm or Nautilus. Why, theyd be better off blind!

[Anomalocaris]

Yeah, think of ring species as the Latin language family. There was once on single mutually almost completely intelligible population of speakers, gradually speakers dispersed, local dialect evolved, until today, when one could go from Portugal to Spain, to France, to italy, to Romania, and never find a single break in the mutural intelligblilith of adjacent dialects in the continuum of the Latin language family, yet portuguese and Romanian on either end are mutually unintelligible despite the Latin origin of both, and are now definitively different languages.

[Epimethean]

Of course, the language that became Latin was itself a fusion of Osco, Umbrian, Etruscan and many other root languages by the time it cohered into the monster that colonized the world.