Nonsense? They leave no scratch marks on each other if they are not mating, don't you know.

They?

Who is Kettlewell?

Not an evolutionist, obviously.

How about engaging the actual science, Orrin?

This discovery is not, by the way, novel. Something very similar has long been known about spiders and fruit flies.

What probably has happened is that a Harvard biologist has devised a slight refinement of a well-known process and a BBC reporter whose credentials in biology are no better than yours has completely balled it up.

You never cite real research reports, although they are freely available (at mednet, for example). Why is that?

Chicken?

Kettlewell perpetrated the peppered moth hoax.

of course the observation isn't unique--it's meaningless. the butterflies aren'r separate species anymore than the spiders and fruitflies are.

I don't read the arcana of your faith anymore than I read Alistair Crowley or alchemists.

the butterflies aren'r separate species anymore than the spiders and fruitflies are.

Huh? Are you saying that spiders and fruitflies are the same sepcies and can mate and produce offspring?

No, the butterflies can, the spiders can and the fruitflies can--they can't together.

He's not claiming that they are distinct species yet. It is a possible mechanism for future speciation by isolating two distinct groups within a species. If the isolation continues, genetic differences in their respective gene pools can accumulate to the point where they become separate species.

I think this is also why humans developed brown, blond, and red hair, to help us speciate.

pj;

Shhhhh...after the holocaust they treat humans completely differently in their theory...even if it does make it even less coherent.

Robert:

A pluperfect statement of faith, if shoddy science.

Darwinian fundamentalists need to drop this 19th Century "they look different, therefor they are different species" definition they still use and come up with a quantitative definition based on actual DNA if they ever want to be taken seriously as scientists. Only then, when they can devise falsifiable and repeatable experiments, will they be able to figure out and discover mechanisms that might drive speciation.

If it is proposed as a theory, and not as an established fact, then it isn't bad science.

Robert:

Yes, try it.

Raoul, they already have.

No, Orrin, the reason you do not engage scientific reports is that you are afraid to.

Harry:

Afraid? I think they're hilarious. Even you can't defend this hokum. You send more and we'll post them. Your fruit fly fairy tales are always amusing.

Where? If they do, then why do they keep trumpeting these, as our host calls them, "just-so stories," as if they prove anything, other than perhaps the Creationists have competion for amount of fundamentalist gullibility?

I already gave you one source, Raoul. If you're too lazy to look, you're beyond help.

But you don't even have to read the actual research reports -- although, by that token, then nobody needs to read the Bible to know what Christians are like, but I do anyway -- you can find discussions of revisions of numerous taxonomies in ordinary, popular books.

One I read a few weeks about, "Passiflora," has a nice summary of how DNA has been used to tell whether morphologically similar plants were closely related or not.

They are.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no