This species concept is widely challenged, because it is… not widely appliable. It doesn’t work for bacteria, hermaphrodites, and so on.

Good exemples exists in the wild, at world scale, regarding amphibians and their parasites (involuntary reproductive isolation via geographical isolation — it is not yet published, I only see this one is conferences), and in seabirds at a local scale (http://scholar.google.fr/schol.....9310585283). Some papers dealing with mosquito species complex in africa are talking about reproductive isolation in sympatry. Also, you could find examples of sympatric speciation in parasites (There is a paper by McCoy in Trends in Parasitol named “what is sympatry” that you should definitely read)

There are lots of examples of speciation in the lab that could be given. Drosophila is relatively easy to coax into voluntary reproductive isolation. However, under the biological definition of species they must be involuntarily isolated – ie; not cross fertile producing at best sterile hybrids. As I recall there’s at least one example of that too in drosophila although it’s difficult to tell if cross infertility is absolute or merely greatly reduced.

trrrl should have been able to give a well documented & widely published example that we could look at specifically.

What novel species were created in the laboratory evolution you mention and how was it determined these never evolved in nature before? I’ll need links to support your claims this time. This will be your last comment until you successfully support those claims so don’t even bother with anything else.

I’ve already read such papers. This one (http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=a.....t=14390342) talks about interaction-induced speciation. Just send me an email if you want a PDF. Also, I have experimental/modelling papers on similar systems (I’m afraid trrll is at least partially correct in his affirmations), I’ll gladly give you PDF if you feel like reading (maths are pretty hard, though).

That would be the one argument against your point of view…

Re 58: I suspect there is an underlying dynamic: many people are not fully aware of a key problem with the logic of implication. As my old Math Prof, Harald Niederriter was fond of putting it: Ex falso quod libet.

That is, implication is such that an in fact false antecedent can give rise to true consequents, so that implication is not at all tantamount to equivalence. But also, it can give rise to false consequents, and that is why empirical refutation is so important in the real world.

Modelling uses this intentionally: we set up a “simplified” analogue for reality, and use it to “predict” consequences, then if we are confident in the models we believe and act on the results of that process.

But, why should we trust the models?

ANS: since no model is better than its assumptions, input data and algorithms [GIGO . . .], we first look for plausibility there. Then, we validate, i.e test the model against the empirical world. If it survives long enough, we trust it even where we cannot trace it.

But, a “simplified” analogue is of necessity, strictly FALSE to fact. (The point is, we test it to be confident of its robustness. And of course that is precisely what has happened with the nuke reactor modelling, which is based on a lot of serious physics and empirical observation over decades and hundreds of cases of reactors. Even so, sometimes things go wrong, as at Sellafield, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.)

Observe as well how in the linked case there is a built-in targetting of improvements and a scan across a candidate list of designs which then are promoted based on performance metrics. this is intelligently directed, artificial testing [maybe with some Monte Carlo runs on parameters], not at all natural selection. And therein lieth the fallacy.

Oddly, there is credible evidence that there were natural reactors in appropriate ore bodies. Imagine randomly seeing up parameters that spontaneously get from that natural process to a sophisticated improved PBMR reactor — every intervening “design” being functional and safe from meltdowns etc!

BTW, evolution is not to be confused with NDT-style macro-evolution which has to start with some sort of realistic prebiotic soup model and credibly get to the first functional life form.

I have lower confidence in getting to life and then to major body plans and thus to the biodiversity we observe, than in the above natural reactor to PBMR evolution by computer simulation!

At least for the latter we know that a natural reactor is not improbable once we have the ore concentration. (And, a nuke reactor is far, far more strucurally simple than a DNA based life form.)

So, it is entirely possible that von Neumann accepted that evolutionary mechanisms account for the development of life but had very low confidence that they were NDT based.

[His threshold for a self replicating automaton is in fact very high! Think about a machine that has to have in it the blueprint for itself and the self assembling machines that then create itself from that blue print . . . where did the self-assembling machines to interpret and implement the blueprint come form? The language ofr the blue print? Etc etc? I think I see either an infinite regress or else that somewhere at some point some very sophisticated things were set up externally -- the notion that they could set themselves up by chance and natural regularities simply rapidly exhausts probabilistic resources -- which was the original "Hello World" point way back up there. All the red herrings dragged across the track to lead out to conveniently combustible strawmen put up by the evo mat advocates at PT etc notwithstanding. And worse, the brightly burning strawmen so hopefully ignited by the Thumbsters have been rapidly doused before they could cloud and poison the atmosphere. Cf my always linked. H'mm: is that why Denise was talking to Bill about the pay raise for the ever so useful Thumbsters?]

GEM of TKI

What novel species were created in the laboratory evolution you mention and how was it determined these never evolved in nature before? I’ll need links to support your claims this time. This will be your last comment until you successfully support those claims so don’t even bother with anything else.

Is that a completely vacuous positive claim or do you have in mind some way of testing it?

Of course. The prediction that evolution frequently leads to different outcomes from the same starting point is readily tested (and indeed, has been repeatedly tested) in computer simulations, as well as small scale laboratory evolution experiments with microorganisms.