thomas malloy wrote:
There is no evidence of one species changing into another such that they cannot cross breed with the former.
Oh come now. Millions of species have done that, probably including some domesticated species. There have been none within recorded history, but the time scale is too short. Along the same lines, Mike Carrell wrote:
"But unless I am mistaken, there has never been an experiment demonstrating the creation of a species by natural selection."
At this level, biology is an observational science. In other words, this demand is like:
asking an astronomer to show hydrogen condense to form a star in real-time;
asking Jared Diamond to show an society collapse and go extinct;
asking a linguist to show a modern language diverge into several other languages, the way Latin changed into French, Italian and Spanish.
We know that societies do collapse and languages do evolve and diverge because of the evidence these events leave behind, not because anyone has observed these things happen in real time. Biologists do not have the ability or the time to impose natural (or unnatural) selection for thousands -- or millions -- of years.
This is just what I'd expect from the magazine that was denying heavier than air machine flight in 1910!
To be fair, the Scientific American admitted that flight was real starting in December 1906, with an editorial that said: "In all the history of invention, there is probably no parallel to the unostentatious manner in which the Wright brothers of Dayton, Ohio, ushered into the world their epoch-making invention of the first successful airplane flying-machine." (Kelly, p. 146) The Sci. Am. did, however, continue to denigrate the Wrights from time to time, most recently in December 2003.
- Jed
