Definitive proof of evolution, nice.
Very cool. Now will all the ID & Creationist nutters just shut up & go away.
There is no ‘Theory’ of Evolution. Evolution is a FACT. The theory is of HOW it happens, not IF and certainly not WHY.
I think there are many people who are cool with very minor speciation but have issues with, say, a bacterium turning into a chicken. So no, I don’t think this will change too many people’s minds.
Still, cool study.
This won’t be the first example of observed speciation that Creationists totally ignore or explain away.
Cool story, though; thanks for sharing!
There’s one small problem: the study as reported only indicates that they won’t mate, not that they can’t mate. (Cf black humans and white humans.) You’d need to put mixed pairs in a controlled environment to prove it.
There’s also ample evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK, and that the World Trade Center Towers came down due airplanes crashing into them, and that men did walk on the moon.
Those who refuse to accept evolution will not be swayed by this. If they could be swayed by evidence they wouldn’t be creationists anymore.
Those that say that evolution means that a bacterium will turn into a chicken simply don’t understand what evolution is.
Of course, those same people are the ones who will always refute evolution in the first place.
The problem with this and similar studies is that they’re predicting where evolution will head in the future. They may, and probably will, separate into two species, but then again, they may not. And if they don’t, evolution is still OK with that. It’s always dangerous territory to predict evolutionary trends, what with it being essentially a random process and all that.
That would only be a “problem” if they were claiming that the speciation was already complete. If they could not mate then there would already be two separate species and it would not be a particularly interesting discovery (they would have discovered a new species, very similar to one already known, but there are zillions of cases like that). What they are telling us is interesting here is that the speciation event is still in progress.
Ah no, they never get it on together by choice, do they Mr. President? :rolleyes:
Actually, whether or not they mate in captivity has nothing much to do with whether they are species or not. Plenty of good biological species can mate in captivity and produce perfectly fertile offspring. The real test is whether they will mate in nature.
Many–maybe most–creationists accept what they call micro-evolution, say that turns one ancestral prunus species into plums, apricots, cherries, almonds, etc. But they do not accept that, say, an invertrebrate ancestor species can evolve into vertebrate species.
Let me plug a wonderful book, The Ancestor’s Tale" by Richard Dawkins. Not that I am shill for Dawkins. I didn’t much care for his atheist book, even though I am one myself.
If porn is any indication, this happens all the time. 
I’ve read plenty of “Creation-Science” stuff over the years & I’ll definitely say most accept micro-evolution. Some yahoo Sunday School teacher who doesn’t believe in dinosaurs either might believe that God created poodles, collies, shepherds & dachshunds separately, but the people who do Creationism for a living have no problems with speciation & absolutely adore dinosaurs.
Besides, how do we know God didn’t decide to create a new species of bird, just slooowly?
But do these birds have a valid American birth certificate!!!1111
That’s my view. ‘In the beginning, God created evolution.’
Recently read a book on birdwatching titled something like To see Every Bird In The World. Tho I know nothing about birdwatching, or taxonomy, the book commented on the difficulty of identifying exactly how amny species there are for watchers to spot. Apparently there is an ongoing tension between “splitters” and “lumpers,” as to whether or not similar birds should be considered a single or different species. It commented that breeding populations can be quite small; some birds will not breed with others on the other side of a river, or the other side of a hill. So a birdwatcher should record every example of bird he sees in different locations, because if the 2 populations are later determined to comprise 2 distinct species, the watcher will gain an additional species on his life-list. Of course, when 2 previously accepted distinct species are “lumped,” the watcher can lose a species.
Another thing I found interesting was a school of thought that started from the point of birdsong to define species. Says that birdsong is generally what most birds use to identify friends or foes instead of appearance or behavior - especially in dense jungles where you have the most diverse speciation. Said if birds sang different songs, they would not interbreed. So beginning from identifying different songs, they were generally able to identify genetic differences.
Like I said, I know nothing about this and just read about it for fun. So I may be comletely off base. But I thought it might be relevant to this discussion.