6. To begin at the beginning, Darwin does not begin at the beginning. The origin of life is not part of his epic.
He begins with what had been known since mankind began raising food.
Animal husbandry, farming domestication, raising livestock and selecting the best versions is simply logical. You can call it ‘natural selection’ if you wish. You try to breed the best ones of a type.
It's not accurate to give Darwin credit for the idea that had been in operation for millennia.
Democrat Michael Bloomberg “said … that farmers don't need as much brainpower for their jobs as do those working in the information economy, …Bloomberg said, "I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer. It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that."
Mike Bloomberg Thinks Farmers Are Stupid
Maybe, maybe not, but
breeders always knew that you can’t breed, say…horses with pigs. In science, we speak of the types as ‘species.’ And any change, alteration, modification within a species is not evolution.
7. Darwin always knew that his theory rises or falls based on
explaining how the original species, assuming there was one original one, became different species. That’s why he named his thesis “On The Origin Of Species.”
His explanation has never....NEVER.....been proven.
Harvard evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr wrote “for he was fully conscious of the fact that
the change from one species into another was the most fundamental problem of evolution.”
Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, p.403.
You cannot pass ‘go’ unless you understand
the meaning of ‘species.’ I’ll reveal it next.
Actually changes within a species can lead to a new species
blogs.scientificamerican.com
Critics of evolution often fall back on the maxim that no one has ever seen one species split into two. While that's clearly a straw man, because most speciation takes far longer than our lifespan to occur, it's also not true. We
have seen species split, and we continue to see species diverging every day.
For example, there were the two new species of American goatsbeards (or salsifies, genus
Tragopogon) that sprung into existence in the past century. In the early 1900s, three species of these wildflowers - the western salsify (
T. dubius), the meadow salsify (
T. pratensis), and the oyster plant (
T. porrifolius) - were introduced to the United States from Europe. As their populations expanded, the species interacted, often producing sterile hybrids. But by the 1950s, scientists realized that there were two new variations of goatsbeard growing. While they looked like hybrids, they weren't sterile. They were perfectly capable of reproducing with their own kind but not with any of the original three species - the classic definition of a new species.
Glad you brought up this particular example.
There actually
are some confirmed cases of observed speciation in plants— all of them due to an increase in the number of chromosomes, or “polyploidy.”
In the first decades of the twentieth century, Swedish scientist Arne Müntzing used two plant species to make a hybrid that underwent chromosome doubling to produce hempnettle, a member of the mint family that had already been found in nature. Polyploidy can also be physically or chemically induced with- out hybridization.
Arne Müntzing, “Cytogenetic Investigations on Synthetic
Galeopsis tetrahit,”
Hereditas 16 (1932), 10554. Justin Ramsey and Douglas W. Schemske, “Neopolyploidy in Flowering Plants,”
Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 33 (2002), 589–639.
Observed cases of speciation by polyploidy, however, are limited to flowering plants. According to evolutionary biologist Douglas J. Futuyma, polyploidy “does not confer major new morphological characteristics . . . [and] does not cause the evolution of new genera” or higher levels in the biological hierarchy. Darwinism depends on the splitting of one species into two, which then diverge and split and diverge and split, over and over again. Only this could produce the branching-tree pattern required by Darwinian evolution, in which all species are modified descendants of a common ancestor.
Douglas J. Futuyma,
Evolution (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2005), 398.
By doubling the number of gene copies, tetraploids undergo twice as many
mutations as diploids. ... One benefit of a higher
ploidy level is that it
increases the number of gene copies that can harbor a new beneficial
mutation.Nov 2, 2007
The Evolutionary Consequences of Polyploidy - ScienceDirect