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Obviously no one actually clicked through to the scientific American link I posted, or you would have seen this:
I didn't bother because I know that for every something like that, there is something like this:
Talk Origins - deceptive example of "speciation"
The following example of speciation appears on the Talk Origins website:
"Three species of wildflowers called goatsbeards were introduced to the United States from Europe shortly after the turn of the century. Within a few decades their populations expanded and began to encounter one another in the American West. Whenever mixed populations occurred, the specied interbred (hybridizing) producing sterile hybrid offspring. Suddenly, in the late forties two new species of goatsbeard appeared near Pullman, Washington. Although the new species were similar in appearance to the hybrids, they produced fertile offspring. The evolutionary process had created a separate species that could reproduce but not mate with the goatsbeard plants from which it had evolved."1
From the description, one would think that this was a very convincing example of macroevolution in action. Obviously, there must have been quite a number of massive mutations to produce an entirely new species that could not interbreed with the original. Right? Actually, every statement above is absolutely true. However, some of the important details have been intentionally left out, in order to make this example sound much better than it really is. Here is what actually happened.
The example above is not macroevolution, but is simply due to a single genetic event known as polyploidy. The original goatsbeards from Europe were standard diploid (two copies of each chromosome) plants. However, plants often do not undergo complete monoploidy during meiosis (during the formation of the sex cells, or gametes). This means that the gametes may remain diploid. When diploid gametes fuse, a new polyploid "species" is formed. No new information is created (Do you have twice as much information if you copy one book to produce an identical copy? No!), but the chromosomes are duplicated. The new "species" cannot produce viable offspring with the original species simply because of the difference in number of chromosomes. With goatsbeards, the process has happened more than once. Of course, the two "new" species have the same number of chromosomes and can produce viable offspring, since they are virtually identical.
If you look at the speciation events that are listed as evidence of evolution, most of them will fall into the polyploidy plant category. Evolutionists often "forget" to tell the reader that the new "species" are unable to produce viable offspring with the parental species simply because of a chromosomal duplication event. A casual oversight on the part of the writers? I think not! How much new information added to the new species? None!!! Were you deceived into thinking that the example given above was a dramatic example of evolution in action? Be wary of evolutionists bearing examples of "speciation."
(Source)Bottom line for me, again, is that this is a small phenomenon seized upon by evolutionist as evidence of evolution, when in reality it is just evidence of a small phenomenon. In this case, no number of successive chromosome doubling is going to turn a plant into a fish (or anything other than an identical plant with more chromosomes.) Or maybe it will. And maybe there are elephants living in caves on the dark side of the moon. I have no evidence to the contrary.
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