They're coming through slowly ... it'll probably filter through over the next forty-eight.
The pepper moth, incidentally, has its pepper pattern to enable it to blend with tree bark, etc. After the industrial revolution filled the nation's skies with beautiful, black smoke, and several hundred tonnes of picturesque coal-dust joined them, the pepper moth darkened rapidly to a uniform black. It is now returning more or less to its former colour.
From what I recall of the more enlightened creationist arguments, they probably use the pepper moth to accept the existence of limited-level evolution, while denying the existence of speciation (the key point at which a single species of organism becomes two or more species incapable of interbreeding -- actually, horses and donkeys can be bred to produce mules, but mules are sterile, in other words, the interbreeding process is either imperfect or completely non-functional).
It has been argued that speciation has never been observed, and therefore, that there is no scientific evidence for it. It may be that horses and donkeys are actually in the process of speciation, so perhaps mules will become an impossibility at some future point; however, seeing that we don't have a complete manifest of all species on earth, we may never be able to tell when a new species comes into being (unless it be from a well-known population of one species which has already been studied).
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Date: 2003-10-24 04:40 pm (UTC)The pepper moth, incidentally, has its pepper pattern to enable it to blend with tree bark, etc. After the industrial revolution filled the nation's skies with beautiful, black smoke, and several hundred tonnes of picturesque coal-dust joined them, the pepper moth darkened rapidly to a uniform black. It is now returning more or less to its former colour.
From what I recall of the more enlightened creationist arguments, they probably use the pepper moth to accept the existence of limited-level evolution, while denying the existence of speciation (the key point at which a single species of organism becomes two or more species incapable of interbreeding -- actually, horses and donkeys can be bred to produce mules, but mules are sterile, in other words, the interbreeding process is either imperfect or completely non-functional).
It has been argued that speciation has never been observed, and therefore, that there is no scientific evidence for it. It may be that horses and donkeys are actually in the process of speciation, so perhaps mules will become an impossibility at some future point; however, seeing that we don't have a complete manifest of all species on earth, we may never be able to tell when a new species comes into being (unless it be from a well-known population of one species which has already been studied).