At 11:52 AM 12/12/97 -0600, Eduardo G. Moros wrote:
>I took a look at the speciation examples offered by Wesley. They are, to put
>it mildly, pathetic. The new "species" cannot reproduce. We are talking of
>suicide or homocide by forced or pseudo-natural speciation.
Here is some of what I have in my files on modern speciation:
modern speciation
"Hawaii harbors several moths of the genus Hedylepta that
feed only on banana plants. Other species of the genus feed on
other Hawaiian plants, and similarities of form demonstrate that
one of these that feeds on palms is the ancestor of the banana-
feeding species. Each of the banana-feeding species is
restricted to high mountain forests on only one or two islands,
and the reason they must bear a descendant rather than ancestral
relationship to the palm-feeding species is that, while palm
trees are native Hawaiian plants, banana trees are not. In fact
Polynesians first introduced the banana plant to the Hawaiian
Islands only about a thousand years ago. This sets an upper
limit for the evolution of the new banana-feeding insect species.
For all we know, they evolved in a small fraction of this
interval."~Steven M. Stanley, "Evolution of Life: Evidence for a
New Pattern", Great Ideas Today, 1983, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia
Britannica, 1983), p. 21
**
modern speciation
"Lake Victoria itself offers evidence of evolutionary
divergence on a much larger scale. This lake is at most 750,000
years old, which makes it quite young on a geological scale of
time, and yet it contains about 170 species of cichlid fishes,
all but three of which are unknown to any other locality."~Steven
M. Stanley, "Evolution of Life: Evidence for a New Pattern",
Great Ideas Today, 1983, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica,
1983), p. 24.
**
modern speciation
"At the margin of Lake Victoria, in Uganda, there sits a
small body of water called Lake Nabugabo that has an areal extent
of some fifteen miles. The smaller lake obviously formed from
the larger one when a sand spit grew across a channel that
formerly united the two bodies of water. Radiocarbon dating of
fossil plant material in the spit shows that Nabugabo was
separated from the parent lake approximately four thousand years
ago. Within Lake Nabugabo are, five species of cichlid fishes
unknown from Lake Victoria or any other locality in the world."
For the creationist who thinks that carbon 14 dating dates things
too old, the problem is even greater. It means that the
speciation has occurred in even a shorter time.~Steven M.
Stanley, "Evolution of Life: Evidence for a New Pattern", Great
Ideas Today, 1983, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1983), p.
22
"However, electophoretic data showed that the members of this
cichlid flock are extremely closely related (the mean genetic
distance being only 0.006 substitutions per locus), which
suggested that they might have recently arisen from a single
ancestral species."~Axel Meyer "Phylogenetic Relationships and
Evolutionary Processes in East African Cichlid Fishes," Trends in
Ecology and Evolution, 8:8(1993), p. 280
**
Modern Speciation
"It is not clear how many species of the current flock of >300
species of Lake Victoria survived the episode of drying 14,000
years ago. They may have survived in smaller marginal lakes,
springs, or headwaters of rivers and recolonized the lake after
it filled up again. It appears unlikely, (abut not unthinkable)
that most of these species of Lake Victoria arose in less than
14,000 years.
"That rates of speciation in cichlids can be astonishingly
fast has been known since the discovery of five endemics in Lake
Nabugabo, a small lake that is less than 4,000 years old and
separated from Lake Victoria only by a sand bar. These five
species are believed to have close relatives in Lake Victoria
that chiefly differ in the male's breeding coloration, pointing
to the potential importance of sexual selection for the fast
rates of speciation in cichlids."~Axel Meyer "Phylogenetic
Relationships and Evolutionary Processes in East African Cichlid
Fishes," Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 8:8(1993), p. 283-284
**
modern speciation
"Even faster rates of speciation were suggested by the finding
that the southern end of Lake Malawi was arid only two centuries
ago and is now inhabited by numerous endemic species and 'color
morphs'. These are believed to have originated during the last
200 years!"~Axel Meyer "Phylogenetic Relationships and
Evolutionary Processes in East African Cichlid Fishes," Trends in
Ecology and Evolution, 8:8(1993), p. 284
**
modern speciation
"This high degree of mtDNA similarity and the earlier allozyme
data suggested a very young age for this flock, probably less
than 200,000 years. This age estimate for the species flock is
younger than the lake, and supports the notion of intra-
lacustrine speciation, that is, the adaptive radiation of this
species flock is likely to have occurred in Lake Victoria itself
rather than resulting from several immigrations of different
ancestral lineages."~Axel Meyer "Phylogenetic Relationships and
Evolutionary Processes in East African Cichlid Fishes," Trends in
Ecology and Evolution, 8:8(1993), p. 280
**
modern speciation
"Lake Victoria, with an area of 68,000 km2, . . ., appears to
have experienced a period of almost complete desiccation as
recently as 14,000 years B. P. There was probably ample
opportunity for spatial isolation within the larger basin,
providing the necessary pre-conditions for geographic
speciation."~Axel Meyer "Phylogenetic Relationships and
Evolutionary Processes in East African Cichlid Fishes," Trends in
Ecology and Evolution, 8:8(1993), p. 283
modern speciation
20 Cichlid species examined by mtDNA 340 base-pair fragment was sequenced from
each species
Species lived in 2 volcanic crater lakes Barombi MB (4.15 km 2) 11 species and
Bermin (0.6 km 2) 9 species
"The molecular data show that the species flocks in each lake are monophyetic,
and suggest that they evolved within each lake after a single colonization
event. An alternative explanation - allopatric origin for all 20 species -
implies the independent colonization of the lakes with subsequent extinction
of the source river populations - an extremely unlikely scenario."~Ulrich K.
Schliewen, Diethard Tautz and Svante Pasbo, "Sympatric Speciation suggested by
Monophyly of Crater Lake Cichlids," Nature, 368 (April 14, 1994), p. 632.
glenn
Adam, Apes, and Anthropology: Finding the Soul of Fossil Man
and
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm