How does speciation occur?

originally posted by: 3NL1GHT3N3D1
a reply to: AllIsOne

If you were looking for a definitive answer then you won't be given one because no one knows for sure. I think the answer I gave is the most logical one, it describes evolution in a nutshell, something you say you believe in. Evolution is speciation, it gives the best theory possible as of yet, if you don't agree with it then you can't "believe" in evolution.

You sure this wasn't a bait thread?

Wow, I'm genuinely floored about your condescending post. No, I don't have a f-ing agenda and this is not a bait thread. I'm just surprised that you are not able to answer a simple question about a corner stone of the theory of evolution. I want to know how something works! I have a hunch that science works that way. And usually science doesn't accept circular logic: Evolution is speciation, therefore speciation is evolution???

Speciation is THE foundation of the theory of evolution, but nobody knows the mechanics behind it?

Sorry dude, but your post was not coming from an enlightened being. It pisses me off that once you can't explain an honest question it's automatically a bait thread. This is so disingenuous and childish on your part.

a reply to: AllIsOne

Hmmm.... getting pretty defensive.

Do you have a better answer? How can you believe in evolution if you don't think it has a cornerstone to stand on?

And yes, evolution is the theory behind speciation. If you're asking how speciation works then you are asking how evolution works. There's no circular logic in that at all.

originally posted by: 3NL1GHT3N3D1
a reply to: AllIsOne

Hmmm.... getting pretty defensive.

Do you have a better answer? How can you believe in evolution if you don't think it has a cornerstone to stand on?

And yes, evolution is the theory behind speciation. If you're asking how speciation works then you are asking how evolution works. There's no circular logic in that at all.

Not defensive, just pissed about your inability to explain and then paint me a creationist. That's not honest, mate!

How can I have a better answer when I'm the one asking the question how specification works?

I prefer the scientific approach rather then "God did it …". But what you're showing is blind faith. Pretty astonishing!

a reply to: AllIsOne

I've already answered it. Family members of a certain species migrate to different environments which in turn makes their genetics change drastically in different ways depending on what environment they migrated to. Different environments make one species that migrated to two different areas change into different animals through evolution.

I don't think you're lying, sorry for implying that. I have just seen the same tactics used by creationists, they are given answers but they do not accept them as answers.

It's a logical explanation to speciation, one species migrates to different environments which change them in different ways through evolution.

That's probably as good of an answer as you're going to get. It's in line with evolutionary theory. It's about the environment a certain species migrates to that changes their genetic makeup.

originally posted by: AllIsOne

originally posted by: theantediluvian
a reply to: 3NL1GHT3N3D1

That's pretty reasonable. Speciation happens when previously interbreeding groups cease to interbreed (because of something like geographic boundaries) and genetic differences accumulate that make the creation of viable offspring between individuals from different groups impossible.

But that still doesn't explain HOW a NEW sexually reproductive species can occur. A female AND male partner with compatible new mutations that have found their way to the sperm AND ovum. Am I correct about this, or am I missing something? I'm NOT trying to evoke God, but I want to understand … ;-)

You are explaining how the same species stops interbreeding, but how does that lead to a new species and not extinction of the species?

You start off with a standard genome common across a large population. One group splits off for whatever reason - maybe they got caught in a storm, wild ocean currents, or a landslide closed off a river. Those individuals can no longer access the main population, but they can breed with each other and expand. At the population expand, mutations build up (in the worst case, genes are deleted and reshuffled). This process keeps happening every generation. Genes shuffle around, mutate, disappear, and new genes appear. But eventually there will be so many differences that it would be impossible for the DNA chromosomes of two individuals to pair up and to recombine.

We have a similar process with source code control systems in Linux (eg. subversion) as well as genetic programming. One programming team forks off a branch for a new hardware platform (equivalent to a natural ecosystem eg. Linux desktop -> Android). Unnecessary code modules are removed. New code modules are added. Others are modified. Special case conditions are added and removed. Now after several years, try to reintegrate
those files together.. files, functions and comments will have been renamed, deleted, moved to different directories, constant values changed. The "merge" process, sometimes called "reintegration" will normally just bring in those changes that the programmer made to the main branch. But if there happens to be changes that happened to the exact same places in the main branch that the programmer changed, that means code can't be recombined safely (called a "conflict"), those changes have to be picked through one by one and chosen by the programmer. In the worst case, a fresh copy of the main branch has to be taken out, and the changes made by the programmer reapplied manually. Nature would give up at this point.

originally posted by: 3NL1GHT3N3D1
a reply to: AllIsOne

I've already answered it. Family members of a certain species migrate to different environments which in turn makes their genetics change drastically in different ways depending on what environment they migrated to. Different environments make one species that migrated to two different areas change into different animals through evolution.

I don't think you're lying, sorry for implying that. I have just seen the same tactics used by creationists, they are given answers but they do not accept them as answers.

It's a logical explanation to speciation, one species migrates to different environments which change them in different ways through evolution.

That's probably as good of an answer as you're going to get. It's in line with evolutionary theory. It's about the environment a certain species migrates to that changes their genetic makeup.

As Mulder wanted to believe, so I want to understand … Sorry for being a bit emotional ;-)

Ok, but don't you think my "concern" is relevant? In order to support the theory an individual male and female with the same mutation, present in the sperm and ova, must have developed at the same time. What are the chances of that? And if the chances were that good, the fossil record should look different.

PS: I just found out that Darwin had actually the same concern and I'm reading up on it right now.

Darwin's dilemma: Why do species exist?[edit]
In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin interpreted biological evolution in terms of natural selection, but was perplexed by the clustering of organisms into species.[49] Chapter 6 of Darwin's book is entitled "Difficulties of the Theory". In discussing these "difficulties" he noted "First, why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?" This dilemma can be referred to as the absence or rarity of transitional varieties in habitat space.

Another dilemma, related to the first one, is the absence or rarity of transitional varieties in time (see diagram at the bottom of the page). Darwin pointed out that by the theory of natural selection "innumerable transitional forms must have existed", and wondered "why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth." That clearly defined species actually do exist in nature in both space and time implies that some fundamental feature of natural selection operates to generate and maintain species.

en.wikipedia.org...

a reply to: stormcell

Thank you! I'll study your answer. Interesting you mention software ;-)

originally posted by: 3NL1GHT3N3D1
a reply to: AllIsOne

If you were looking for a definitive answer then you won't be given one because no one knows for sure. I think the answer I gave is the most logical one, it describes evolution in a nutshell, something you say you believe in. Evolution is speciation, it gives the best theory possible as of yet, if you don't agree with it then you can't "believe" in evolution.

You sure this wasn't a bait thread?

isnt it funny when someone has a question that questions a belief in evolution they are called a name, next open ridicule.

the answer you provided is the most honest provided so far "no one knows for sure"

But how can you say

"No one knows for sure" then say "if you don't agree with it then you can't "believe" in evolution" thats akin to religious indoctrination
You must believe in it, have faith, accept or you are not one of us.

The strange thing is that allisone is saying he believes without evidence, evidence that you readily admit doesnt exist and you then question his loyalty "if you don't agree with it then you can't "believe" in evolution"

Thats shameful and religious like intolerance.
Fundys come in all flavors seemingly


allisone, its a wonderful thing to question everything, its also wonderful that you believe in evolution though it doesnt have all the answers.
I believe in God and creation, I dont have many answers at all either.

I question my God and faith all the time, you should question your beliefs as well. Plenty of Christians tell me I shouldn't question God, they are easy to ignore.

originally posted by: stormcell

You start off with a standard genome common across a large population. One group splits off for whatever reason - maybe they got caught in a storm, wild ocean currents, or a landslide closed off a river. Those individuals can no longer access the main population, but they can breed with each other and expand. At the population expand, mutations build up (in the worst case, genes are deleted and reshuffled). This process keeps happening every generation. Genes shuffle around, mutate, disappear, and new genes appear. But eventually there will be so many differences that it would be impossible for the DNA chromosomes of two individuals to pair up and to recombine.

We have a similar process with source code control systems in Linux (eg. subversion) as well as genetic programming. One programming team forks off a branch for a new hardware platform (equivalent to a natural ecosystem eg. Linux desktop -> Android). Unnecessary code modules are removed. New code modules are added. Others are modified. Special case conditions are added and removed. Now after several years, try to reintegrate
those files together.. files, functions and comments will have been renamed, deleted, moved to different directories, constant values changed. The "merge" process, sometimes called "reintegration" will normally just bring in those changes that the programmer made to the main branch. But if there happens to be changes that happened to the exact same places in the main branch that the programmer changed, that means code can't be recombined safely (called a "conflict"), those changes have to be picked through one by one and chosen by the programmer. In the worst case, a fresh copy of the main branch has to be taken out, and the changes made by the programmer reapplied manually. Nature would give up at this point.

You start off with a standard genome and it mutates.
how does it become a separate species, what evidence is there? Dogs have become many and varied, where have they speciated into other species. A Wolf is a dog a chihuahua is a dog but where do they become another species other than a dog?

Its not a computer system with a programer, thats what religion teaches, thats ID not random evolution

The question for me is not just how its also where? Surely it should be happening all around in the many different animals, happening in some, even just a few, in real time.

Saying It takes millions of years means we should see a catdog alive today, a hoursecow or monkeywhale at the very least one animal speciating into something else. Where are the living cross species?

The way I've explained it before is: some people imagine speciation as "the son can't reproduce with his mother."

It's more like: "the son can't reproduce with his great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great... great great... grandmother."

After a group of a particular species branch off and reproduce for many generations, developing their own mutations within their subset, the members of that group would not be able to reproduce with the original group... therefore, they are considered to be a new species.

a reply to: borntowatch

You really have no clue what speciation is do you? It has nothing to do with hybrids, it does not make "horsecows" or "monkeywhales", it is an evolution of one species into a brand new one, a monkey or whale is not going to evolve into a hybrid monkeywhale.

This question shows your total lack of understanding of what the theory actually states. If you want to debate something then at least learn the basics of what you're trying to debate.

originally posted by: borntowatch

Saying It takes millions of years means we should see a catdog alive today, a hoursecow or monkeywhale at the very least one animal speciating into something else. Where are the living cross species?

I originally wanted to post something very condescending but I'm going to attempt to answer this without being an asshole.

Cats do not evolve into dogs, horses don't evolve into cows, and monkeys don't evolve into whales.

Speciation is not that exciting... it's more like a particular species of lizard evolving into a slightly different species of lizard. Speciation is an ongoing process that takes a lot of time and the only way to see an example of speciation is in a lab setting with organisms that have very short life-cycles.

Modern humans have been around for a comparatively insignificant amount of time and we've been studying biology for a tiny fraction of that tiny fraction of time. It would be great if a scientist could film a mammal evolving into a new species in a lab to make the process clear to everyone but that's obviously not possible.

a reply to: borntowatch

The strange thing is that allisone is saying he believes without evidence, evidence that you readily admit doesnt exist and you then question his loyalty "if you don't agree with it then you can't "believe" in evolution"

Where did I ever say the evidence doesn't exist? Evidence is not proof and it does not always lead to a definitive answer, but that does not mean the evidence doesn't exist. There is tons of evidence for evolution, it's in the fossil record.

originally posted by: 3NL1GHT3N3D1
a reply to: borntowatch

The strange thing is that allisone is saying he believes without evidence, evidence that you readily admit doesnt exist and you then question his loyalty "if you don't agree with it then you can't "believe" in evolution"

Where did I ever say the evidence doesn't exist? Evidence is not proof and it does not always lead to a definitive answer, but that does not mean the evidence doesn't exist. There is tons of evidence for evolution, it's in the fossil record.

Please please PLEASE don't turn this into another of borntowatch's "there's no evidence for evolution" threads.

It's what he does... just don't play along.

a reply to: AllIsOne

Speciation isnt a term. There is no clear cut boundary to when species split. Spieces is merely a taxonomic classification.

originally posted by: borntowatch

originally posted by: 3NL1GHT3N3D1
a reply to: AllIsOne

If you were looking for a definitive answer then you won't be given one because no one knows for sure. I think the answer I gave is the most logical one, it describes evolution in a nutshell, something you say you believe in. Evolution is speciation, it gives the best theory possible as of yet, if you don't agree with it then you can't "believe" in evolution.

You sure this wasn't a bait thread?

isnt it funny when someone has a question that questions a belief in evolution they are called a name, next open ridicule.

the answer you provided is the most honest provided so far "no one knows for sure"

But how can you say

"No one knows for sure" then say "if you don't agree with it then you can't "believe" in evolution" thats akin to religious indoctrination
You must believe in it, have faith, accept or you are not one of us.

The strange thing is that allisone is saying he believes without evidence, evidence that you readily admit doesnt exist and you then question his loyalty "if you don't agree with it then you can't "believe" in evolution"

Thats shameful and religious like intolerance.
Fundys come in all flavors seemingly


allisone, its a wonderful thing to question everything, its also wonderful that you believe in evolution though it doesnt have all the answers.
I believe in God and creation, I dont have many answers at all either.

I question my God and faith all the time, you should question your beliefs as well. Plenty of Christians tell me I shouldn't question God, they are easy to ignore.

My belief system was a little bit shaken today, because I found out that I've accepted a lot of things about evolution that are actually not fact based, but just assumptions. For the first time in decades I tried hard to look beyond the impressive jargon. Many scholarly articles artfully leave out key questions. (On a side note: I also found out that the Gaye estate family lawyer should focus his attention on plagiarism in academia. There's money to be made! Just sayin' …)

To my astonishment Darwin already raised similar questions:

Chapter 6 of Darwin's book is entitled "Difficulties of the Theory". In discussing these "difficulties" he noted "First, why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?"

I still think that Darwin's theory is the best we got, but it's far from complete. I was naive to think that modern advances like genome sequencing sealed the deal, but that isn't so.

Just my 2 cents.

originally posted by: Answer

originally posted by: borntowatch

Saying It takes millions of years means we should see a catdog alive today, a hoursecow or monkeywhale at the very least one animal speciating into something else. Where are the living cross species?

I originally wanted to post something very condescending but I'm going to attempt to answer this without being an asshole.

Thank you for that!

a reply to: Answer

How would you address Darwin's concerns?

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin interpreted biological evolution in terms of natural selection, but was perplexed by the clustering of organisms into species.[49] Chapter 6 of Darwin's book is entitled "Difficulties of the Theory". In discussing these "difficulties" he noted "First, why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?" This dilemma can be referred to as the absence or rarity of transitional varieties in habitat space.

Another dilemma, related to the first one, is the absence or rarity of transitional varieties in time (see diagram at the bottom of the page). Darwin pointed out that by the theory of natural selection "innumerable transitional forms must have existed", and wondered "why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth." That clearly defined species actually do exist in nature in both space and time implies that some fundamental feature of natural selection operates to generate and maintain species.

And I'm still confused about speciation. I understand that beneficial mutations take a loooong time to occur, but at one point the mutant (the founder of the new species ) who can't breed with the others (that's the definition of species, right?) must have found a partner with exactly the same mutation. That's odd. What am I missing?

a reply to: AllIsOne

How come this didn't happen with us, homo sapiens? Has it been too short a time since we left Africa?

Essentially, yes. Also, it is unlikely that many human populations have suffered complete genetic isolation. It may have happened on the island of Flores in Indonesia, giving rise to a new (failed) human species, Homo floresiensis

a reply to: AllIsOne

I'm probably missing a simple fundamental detail. So please educate me.

Possibly the fundamental detail that you are missing is that individuals don't evolve - populations evolve.

Furthermore, 'speciation' doesn't occur from one generation to the next. It does not happen that a new species 'B' is born to a parent couple in some population of species 'A0. What happens is that a population of species 'A0' splits for some reason, maybe an earthquake or a flood forces a relatively permanent separation between groups. So now you have populations A1 and A2. Population A1 and population A2 continue to evolve and each generation is only a little bit different from its parent generation. Individuals within A1 population continue to mate other A1s and A2s with A2s and go on making generation after generation.

However, because the populations A1 and A2 are in different places they are subject to different environmental pressures, and the 'little changes' from generation to generation are different in each one. The two populations become more and more different from each other as generation follows generation. Eventually, the difference becomes so great that even if you then remove the barrier, they cannot or will not breed with each other - at that point they are said to be two different species, no longer A1 and A2, but B and C. (it could be more complicated than that - maybe A1 can still breed with a population of A0; then the new populations would be more truly be considered as A1 and B).

Many people miss the significance of idea that it is not the individual that evolves, it is the population that evolves. Yet is so fundamentally basic that many "explainers" take it as trivially obvious and forget to emphasize its importance.

Individuals accumulate the 'random mutations', then natural selection decides whether those mutations will spread through the population 'improving' the population, be flushed from the gene pool, or just 'rest' waiting for the time when conditions will make it useful. A 'random mutation' in one individual does not constitute evolution let alone speciation - all it does is represent a new possibility for that population.

A final pont. Biologists don't think too much about the idea of speciation anymore. The definition you cite, "inability to breed fertile offspring" has been found to have so many exceptions that it just isn't useful as a formal idea. While we can certainly say that animals that meet that criteria are different species, there are animals that we want to say are different species but don't always meet that definition.