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Index to Creationist Claims,  edited by Mark Isaak,    Copyright © 2007
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Claim CB910:

No new species have been observed.

Source:

Morris, Henry M., 1986. The vanishing case for evolution. Impact 156 (Jun.). http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=260

Response:

  1. New species have arisen in historical times. For example:


  2. Incipient speciation, where two subspecies interbreed rarely or with only little success, is common. Here are just a few examples:


  3. Ring species show the process of speciation in action. In ring species, the species is distributed more or less in a line, such as around the base of a mountain range. Each population is able to breed with its neighboring population, but the populations at the two ends are not able to interbreed. (In a true ring species, those two end populations are adjacent to each other, completing the ring.) Examples of ring species are


  4. Evidence of speciation occurs in the form of organisms that exist only in environments that did not exist a few hundreds or thousands of years ago. For example:
    There is further evidence that speciation can be caused by infection with a symbiont. A Wolbachia bacterium infects and causes postmating reproductive isolation between the wasps Nasonia vitripennis and N. giraulti (Bordenstein and Werren 1997).

  5. Some young-earth creationists claim that speciation is essential to explain Noah's ark. The ark was not roomy enough to carry and care for all species, so speciation is invoked to explain how the much fewer "kinds" aboard the ark became the diversity we see today. Also, some species have special needs that could not have been met during the flood (e.g., fish requiring fresh water). Creationists assume that they evolved from other, more tolerant organisms since the Flood. (Woodmorappe 1996)

Links:

Kimball, John W., 2003. Speciation. http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/S/Speciation.html

Stassen, C. et al., 1997. Some more observed speciation events. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/speciation.html

References:

  1. Beheregaray, L. B. and P. Sunnucks, 2001. Fine-scale genetic structure, estuarine colonization and incipient speciation in the marine silverside fish Odontesthes argentinensis. Molecular Ecology 10(12): 2849-2866.
  2. Bordenstein, Seth R. and John H. Werren. 1997. Effection of An and B Wolbachia and host genotype on interspecies cytoplasmic incompatibility in Nasonia. Genetics 148: 1833-1844.
  3. Brown, Charles W., n.d. Ensatina eschscholtzi Speciation in progress: A classic example of Darwinian evolution. http://www.santarosa.edu/lifesciences2/ensatina2.htm
  4. Byrne, K. and R. A. Nichols, 1999. Culex pipiens in London Underground tunnels: differentiation between surface and subterranean populations. Heredity 82: 7-15.
  5. de Wet, J. M. J., 1971. Polyploidy and evolution in plants. Taxon 20: 29-35.
  6. Fanello, C. et al., 2003. The pyrethroid knock-down resistance gene in the Anopheles gambiae complex in Mali and further indication of incipient speciation within An. gambiae s.s. Insect Molecular Biology 12(3): 241-245.
  7. Filchak, Kenneth E., Joseph B. Roethele and Jeffrey L. Feder, 2000. Natural selection and sympatric divergence in the apple maggot Rhagoletis pomonella. Nature 407: 739-742.
  8. Irwin, Darren E., Staffan Bensch and Trevor D. Price, 2001. Speciation in a ring. Nature 409: 333-337.
  9. Irwin, Darren E., Staffan Bensch, Jessica H. Irwin and Trevor D. Price. 2005. Speciation by distance in a ring species. Science 307: 414-416.
  10. Lehmann, T., M. Licht, N. Elissa, et al., 2003. Population structure of Anopheles gambiae in Africa. Journal of Heredity 94(2): 133-147.
  11. Macnair, M. R., 1989. A new species of Mimulus endemic to copper mines in California. Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society 100: 1-14.
  12. Mayr, E., 1942. Systematics and the Origin of Species. New York: Columbia University Press.
  13. Mayr, E., 1963. Animal Species and Evolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.
  14. Murgia, Claudio et al. 2006. Clonal origin and evolution of a transmissible cancer. Cell 126: 477-487.
  15. Nevo, Eviatar, 1999. Mosaic Evolution of Subterranean Mammals: Regression, Progression and Global Convergence. Oxford University Press.
  16. Newton, W. C. F. and Caroline Pellew, 1929. Primula kewensis and its derivatives. Journal of Genetics 20(3): 405-467.
  17. Nuttall, Nick, 1998. Stand clear of the Tube's 100-year-old super-bug. Times (London), 26 Aug. 1998, 1. http://www.gene.ch/gentech/1998/Jul-Sep/msg00188.html
  18. Schilthuizen, M., 2001. (see below)
  19. Van Valen, Leigh M. and Virginia C. Maiorana, 1991. HeLa, a new microbial species. Evolutionary Theory 10: 71-74.
  20. Wake, David B., 1997. Incipient species formation in salamanders of the Ensatina complex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 94: 7761-7767.
  21. Whitehouse, David, 2001. Songbird shows how evolution works. BBC News Online, 18 Jan. 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1123973.stm
  22. Woodmorappe, John, 1996. Noah's Ark: A Feasability Study, El Cajon, CA: ICR.
  23. Zimmer, Carl. 2006. A dead dog lives on (inside new dogs). http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2006/08/09/an_old_dog_lives_on_inside_new.php

Further Reading:

Callaghan, Catherine A., 1987. Instances of observed speciation. The American Biology Teacher 49: 34-36.

Schilthuizen, Menno., 2001. Frogs, Flies, and Dandelions: the Making of Species, Oxford Univ. Press, esp. chap. 1.
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created 2001-3-31, modified 2006-9-7