How does speciation occur?

originally posted by: 3NL1GHT3N3D1
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.

WOW, someone launch the firecrackers

No 3NL1GHT3N3D1 I DONT GET IT.Struth it took you this long?

I know it doest produce monkeywhales or horsecows and chihuahuas dont turn into mice

So what does the theory say, animals turn into other animals, cows turned into whales, proof please, where is the evidence

Cut the crap and produce the evidence.

a reply to: AllIsOne

Sorry, but my question has not been answered.

It has, sort of. Maybe it could have been explained better. Allow me to try.

Here's an image from Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale: picture yourself holding hands with your mother, who is also holding hands with your grandmother. Your grandmother is also holding hands with your great-grandmother, and so on all the way back a hundred thousand generations or so.

The latest link in this family chain is you, a representative of Homo Sapiens. The earliest link is a member of another species, Homo habilis or Homo erectus or some such.

Let's extend this chain still farther back in time, until we come to an ancestor who isn't of the genus Homo but who is a member of some ape species ancestral to the genus. Actually, we can extend the chain back as far as we like, all the way to the common ancestor of all life.

Every link in this chain could mate and have offspring with a member of the generation preceding it and the generation succeeding it. This is obvious and needs no further elaboration.

However, if you were to go back far enough down the generations, you would find an ancestor with whom you could not mate and have successful offspring. That ancestor would be of a different species from yourself.

Speciation, in other words, is not a one-generation event. It is a process that takes many generations to complete. 3NL1GHT3N3D1 and others have described the mechanism by way of which it occurs: reproductively isolate a population from the rest of the species, and genetic drift combined with mutation does the rest.

I think the answer to your question is that the changes happen over many generations so that if a certain line has not been crossed as far as change, they can still mate, like a horse and a donkey can still mate to birth a mule even if they are of different species. However, maybe, as species drift further apart, they can no longer mate.

I think speciation occurs partly through 'random' mutation and change of living conditions (environment), where selection then occurs. However, I think there is more to it. I suspect the system is so super-sophisticated as to have been designed with considerations millions and billions of years in advance. Meaning the designers took into consideration the great depth of time and life's unfolding from the start. Just a suspicion. But then who designed the designers? Oh no, not again. Won't think about it anymore..

a reply to: AllIsOne

How would you address Darwin's concerns?

Actually, all forms are transitional. There is sufficient variation within species, and sufficient genetic relatedness among species, to account for Darwin's concerns. Remember that Darwin had no concept of genetics. He couldn't count up degrees of relatedness and trace the ancestry of living things the way we can.

a reply to: borntowatch

So what does the theory say, animals turn into other animals,

YES. That is the definition of evolution: change in living organisms over time. What used to be a population of animals with a shared set of attributes (A0) is now a population of animals with a shared set of attributes (A1). Where A0 and A1 are sufficiently different that we choose to call them two different animals.

cows turned into whales,

NO. cows and whales have a common ancestor, just like Gorillas and Humans. Cows did NOT 'turn into' whales, and Gorillas did NOT turn into Humans.

There was once an population of land animals (that was NOT a cow, NOT a hippopotamus, and NOT a whale) that split into two populations for some reason. Those populations evolved in different directions, one branch eventually producing cows and hippopotamuses and the other eventually producing whales. Whales and Cows are related about like 6th cousins 4 times removed (or something like that) - in other words not very closely at all.

Cut the crap and produce the evidence.

Google is your friend.

Cut the crap and stop putting out stupid challenges around false images that exist only in your (fevered?) brain.

originally posted by: AllIsOne
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?

First, addressing Darwin's point, evolution/speciation is an ongoing process and we're looking at a snapshot. All current species are transitional in one way or another. You can't look at evolution as "animals all evolved and what we see now is the end result." In several million years, even without extreme weather change or some other mass extinction event, most current species will be gone or unrecognizable to their current form. It's almost impossible to observe live evidence of a process that takes so much time.

To your point, re-read what I posted above. Speciation almost never occurs in one generation because of the problem that you've outlined (a male and female having the same mutation in the same generation). Think of it more like this:

-Worm family A and worm family B are in the same region all mating together and having a great time. Their isn't a lot of genetic variation because they are in the same environment with the same factors influencing their evolution.
-Half of both families are separated from the rest by localized flooding caused by beavers (the bastards). We'll call the group that's separated "The Wilsons."
-Now, even at the start of the separation, the Wilsons have their own cluster of DNA and genetic variations that are slightly different than the rest of their families.
-Over many generations, the genetic variations and slightly different environment cause the Wilsons to evolve differently than their original families. Keep in mind, worm family A&B are still mating happily... as are the Wilsons.
-At some point in this journey, the Wilsons have changed so much that they are unable to mate with their original group because both groups have taken a different evolutionary path.

When you think of speciation as "one poor bastard within a group has a mutation that makes him unable to mate with the rest but along comes one female with the same mutation," of course it makes no sense. You have to realize that we're talking about evolution of a group that makes them unable to reproduce with their original group.

originally posted by: rnaa
a reply to: borntowatch

Borntowatch is only here to stir the pot and turn this into another of his train-wreck evolution threads. Please don't participate.

originally posted by: rnaa
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.

Thank you. Great explanation. I've learned something :-)

a reply to: Answer

Thank you for taking the time to explain this to me. Yes, my missing piece of info was the group aspect of evolution. But that also raises some other questions. I'll give it some time to let it all sink in.

Thanks again!

originally posted by: AllIsOne
a reply to: Answer

Thank you for taking the time to explain this to me. Yes, my missing piece of info was the group aspect of evolution. But that also raises some other questions. I'll give it some time to let it all sink in.

Thanks again!

Keep in mind that it's a simplistic description of a very complex process.

Entire books have been written on the subject so, obviously, a paragraph can only explain so much.

a reply to: AllIsOne

You are most welcome.

A day spent without learning something new is a day wasted.

a reply to: AllIsOne

II personally think that with our current knowledge the only thing anyone can call fact is variance among species. Since your a fan of evolution, what are index fossils?

a reply to: AllIsOne

Trade Schools .

a reply to: AllIsOne

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 … ;-)

It takes an extremely long time for speciation to occur. If you have a baby, your baby is not going to be born with so many new genetic mutations that he could no longer be considered human, and therefore have no suitable mate for procreation.

It doesn't work that way, natural selection is much slower than what you are thinking.

a reply to: AllIsOne

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?

Actually you are not missing anything and this will blow your mind.....
According to evolution every single species evolved in perfect synchronization, both males and females, very slowly going from asexual to sexual, so one day they suddenly decided to flip to sexual. This took place with every major species. You don't hear to much about gender evolution. Yet it's own unique topic.

a reply to: Blue_Jay33

Evolution, You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.....

Some actual reading would help you neighbor.

originally posted by: Blue_Jay33
a reply to: AllIsOne

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?

Actually you are not missing anything and this will blow your mind.....
According to what I think I know about evolution every single species evolved in perfect synchronization, both males and females, very slowly going from asexual to sexual, so one day they suddenly decided to flip to sexual. This took place with every major species. You don't hear to much about gender evolution. Yet it's own unique topic.

Fixed your statement to reflect the truth.

Before you go around pretending to know something about evolution, you should try learning just the basics so you don't appear so utterly foolish.

A lot of what you need to know has actually been posted in this thread which you either didn't read or purposefully ignored because it doesn't fit your world view.

Something tells me the extent of your biological education went something like this:

Oh and real, but unhelpful answer?

Speciation occurs slowly.

originally posted by: AllIsOne
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 are definitely missing a large portion of it. Namely the amount of generations involved. Speciation doesn't occur in a single individual. It occurs in an entire population. Single generation speciation is not possible. If this happens, they will not reproduce and the genes will not get passed down, so it essentially leads to a non beneficial change, which leads to extinction of that line. It is more about the accumulation of mutations and traits over time that leads to enough of a difference in genetic code to make it incompatible. These changes occur slowly over time and are referenced by an entire population becoming different from the original population.

male AND female mutation, occurring at the same time, that found its way to the sperm and ovum. Am I missing something?

This is what I am talking about. It is not a single individual that speciates, so your question doesn't make much sense. It is an entire population that got separated from the originals via migration and adapted to an new environment. It can also be a difference in the population that eventually makes their genes incompatible with the originals (sometimes there are hundreds of thousands of years between the originals and the species that can no longer breed with them). It's not a single generation thing. You can't change the genetic code that much in one generation without leading to extinction / genetic lines dying off. Speciation takes numerous generations, it isn't a single male and female that possess this new trait. It is the accumulation of numerous traits over numerous generations. Hope that makes sense.

originally posted by: Blue_Jay33
According to evolution every single species evolved in perfect synchronization, both males and females, very slowly going from asexual to sexual, so one day they suddenly decided to flip to sexual. This took place with every major species. You don't hear to much about gender evolution. Yet it's own unique topic.

No. Why do you attribute something to evolution that isn't true? Are you unsure of how female and male originally emerged? You act like these changes happen over night. That is false. What likely happened was that certain species gained the beneficial mutation of being able to combine genes both sexually and asexually. Since sexual reproduction is better for genetic diversity and adaptability, it prevailed and became the norm. Asexual reproduction phased itself out because it wasn't as effective and became irrelevant to survival, whereas sexual reproduction did. There is nothing in perfect synchronization evolution, in fact it's really the exact opposite.