Van – thats the point I was making about the biological species concept (BSC). Although producing infertile/sterile offspring is one of way of determining if two species are reproductively isolated, it’s not the only way. According to Coyne and Orr’s book on speciation, species are considered to be reproductively isolated if there is very little gene flow in the wild. Like I said, this could even be due to behavioural differences or ecological differences – basically anything that causes the two groups to rarely transfer genes.

So even if they were brought into the lab, crossed, and found to produce fertile hybrids, they still would not be considered conspecific because in the wild there is very little gene flow.

For what it’s worth, I think it would be much more accurate to say that we are seeing ‘forerunners’ of new species, or the ‘process’ of speciation, rather than the actual outcome of a speciation event.

But hey, a title like that probably wouldn’t get published

And even so, “will” breed is different than “can” breed…..so whether or not one organism “will” breed with another is beside the point….the issue is whether or not two organisms “can” breed and produce viable, fertile offspring together…… I physically “can” breed with lots of different people, but the thing is I “choose” not to. Thus, it would be silly to assign a “species” label on an organism or group of organisms who simply “choose” (or not) to breed with other similar organisms. In short, one’s sexual whims should not be a basis of categorization in a materialistic theory.

Ah yes! But don’t forget that humans are a bit different because we actually see the big picture and we can know what is preventing us from achieving our goals. That is a very important outcome of consciousness, which currently lacks a useful science-based description – because it would not be a materialist description, and current science is the handmaiden of materialism.

So, whereas an animal might simply fail to respond to calls it did not understand, a guy might say to himself, “Well, she seems like a nice girl. Maybe I should learn her language.”

Well, here’s evolution 101′s explanation of the mechanisms of evolution….they include genetic drift, but that is not an adaptive mechanism…..as far as adaptive mechanims go, mutation + selection is the only thing they list:

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/.....0_0/evo_14

then if you go to Talk Origins they say this:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faq.....ology.html

“The process of evolution can be summarized in three sentences: Genes mutate. [gene: a hereditary unit] Individuals are selected. Populations evolve.”

That’s pretty darn strait-forward and up-to-date.

The point is, some variation in the genetic (or at least epigenetic) information has to change, otherwise living beings stay the same as they are.

If with the word “mutation” one means SNPs, then it is obvious that there are other causes of genetic variation: indels are a very trivial example. But if we use the word “mutation” in the sense of any genetic (or epigenetic) variation, then that is all. I am always surprises by the arguments about “engines of variation”. There is no known engine of genetic variation that I know of, which is not some form of random genetic variation, or of intelligent adaptation according to pre-established patterns, like horizontal gene transfer, or antibody maturation (which is intelligent somatic genetic variation, but not transmissible).

In other words, for a genetic variation to ensue, genetic information has to change. That can happen randomly, or according to some pre-existing procedure. All supposed darwinian engines are random. There is the interesting possibility of neo Lamarckian mechanisms, where phenotypic adaptations are translated into genotypic new information: that’s an interesting idea, but I have never seen any detaile model of how that could happen.

So, in practice, all the known “engines of variation”, from SNPs to duplications, indels, inversions, genetic drift, sexual rearrangements, and so on, both in protein coding genes and non coding DNA, all add up to different kinds of random variations of the genetic information. I suppose that even epigenetic variations, of which I know nothing, would add up to that.

A final note about the word “random” in the above context. That does not mean that they are all equally likely, or that tere are not laws of nature which can influence their occurrence. What I mean is that they are anyway random with reference to the informational output, because nothing in the laws which contribute to their happening has any informational relationship with the kind of information which can result and with its possible function.

yeah but doest give you any macro change. Isolation without mutation cant do much at all.

These types of ‘reproductive isolation’, and thus this type of ’speciation’ don’t necessarily require ANY genetic change at all!

With the new importance that epigenetic factors are being found to play, perhaps it’s just different tools in the genetic toolbox being used the in the construction of fish as it grows in response to changing environmental factors. The inheritance of the epigenetic part of the code can account for the sustained speciation.

And of course they all amount to a world full of living things that look and feel obviously designed.