Carl
Speciation is a process, not a thing. Processes don’t leave fossils, things do.
Looking at ammonites for example, many intermediate forms have been found between one species, and another living millions of years later, yet the fossil record contains no videotape of the actual moment of transition. Scientist have to settle for the appearance of a succession of forms.
By asking for a “fossil record” of the moment of species transition the creationists are effectively asking for the moon. In return, you may ask them how they explain the obvious succession of forms.
Carl Berry sed:
Actually, Carl, if you “have seen how verious[sic] animals have evolved, such as the elephant & the horse”, then you have seen one species evolve into another. The fossil progression from Eohippus (“dawn horse”) to Equus (today’s horse) shows the species* Eohippus evolving into the different species* Equus.
Eohippus and Equus were not the same species - they are very diffent animals. If both were alive at the same time today, no one would consider them to be just variants of the same species. Eohippus was about a foot tall and had multiple toes with claws. Equus is about 6 feet tall or so and has single toes with specialized hooves.
-m
[sub]*Technically, Eohippus and Equus are the names of genera, not species. This is simply a convention of nomenclature – the animals themselves were quite different species.
Here is the basic outline for an experiment you can do at home to illustrate evolution in action.
Get some fruit fly cultures. You may want to ask Mom or Dad to help you with this. 
Basically you divide up the cultures into two or three different batches and then expose each batch to different living conditions, like extreme heat, cold, toxins, etc. Fruit flies mutate very easily, so within a very short period of time each culture will have changed to adapt to the different living conditions. Each fruit fly culture will have evolved into a new fruit fly species.
Here is a website that shows some of the mutations fruit flies can have.
http://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/mutant_flies/mutant_flies.html
Happy experimenting!
It all depends on your definition of “ever.” Or of species, or any of a dozen other terms in the argument.
Eohippis was not a horse, but is a species believed to be a progenitor of the current species of horse. The pony living in a remote area of the Tibetan plateau is almost identical to the horse depicted in the cave drawings as Lasceaux, fifty thousand years ago. That particular type of horse is not a separate species, but does have very specific conformational differences from other horses of modern times. The denial of the possibility that this record of change among the various members of the genus is speciation is not supported by any evidence.
There are dozens of species that are apparently the surviving examples of entire genera of species found in the fossil record. In addition, there are many species that are conformationaly similar to species in the fossil record, but with sufficient differences to justify classification as separate species. That evidence is certainly entirely consistent with the model we call evolution. Alternative theories should meet the same stringent criteria of examination as evolution has.
In some cases, the individuals in current species populations show differences and similarities in DNA and mtDNA, which are divergent in amounts entirely consistent with collateral descent from common ancestors shown in the fossil record. In cases where such comparisons can be made in populations of living species, separation and time are the factors that correlate most directly with the variation frequencies. That evidence certainly supports the contention that species evolve. To deny that evidence, in a scientific sense, other evidence, as opposed to conjecture and philosophy, would be needed.
Single celled species have been shown to evolve under direct observation. Very simple multi-celled species have also been observed to change, and conserve new characteristics. While no one in the scientific community finds this all that important, it certainly is evidence to support evolution. The main reason that you don’t find all that much new scientific evidence favoring evolution is pretty much the same reason why Heliocentrism is not studied by many Astronomers. Science moved on from this argument a half century or more ago.
Weeeeeeellll, “speciation” is not as pretty in real life as it is in biology books. It’s more of a gray scale. Let’s use the ability to breed (I’ll define that as “the ability to produce viable and fertile offspring”) as the most obvious difference between two species, but there are also behavior and, to a certain extent, external appearance[super]1[/super]. People cannot produce offspring by chimpanzees, and vice versa, despite what The Weekly World News says.
On the other hand, horses and donkeys obviously belong to different species, appearing and behaving different, but they can breed, sorta. Resulting mules are infertile, resulting hinnies are fertile, but not very. There are examples all over the “animal kingdom” of animals, say, sparrows, that look an awful lot alike to us, but they can tell the difference and do not, and cannot, breed.
The biggest problem that creationists have, as far as I can see, is an over-simplification of a complex question. The way evolution works is as a gradual process. A mutation here and there over a LONG period of time in two separate populations and, eventually, you have something that cannot breed successfully with something that looks A LOT like it. However, even with access to EVERY member of both population, you would not be able to point to a parent and a child and say that one is of one species and the other is of another. It doesn’t work that way. It is an accumulation of small changes, not a sudden transformation. Sudden transformations are more in the realm of miracles.
Then there is their assumption that the universe is only a few thousand years old. Because evolution is so gradual, yeah, there hasn’t been enough time to produce the variety of plants, animals, and others that now live, or have lived, if Creation occurred in 4004BC. However, that is enough time to evolve two species of sparrow from a population that has been split. Again, would you be able to say “This is when this population became House Sparrows?” No.
As for the fossil record, that, again, is not as pretty as the books make it look. In a book you see a picture of an idealized skull of a modern human. In reality, everybody’s skull looks a little bit different; this is how those reconstructions of the faces of skeletonized murder victims can resemble the real people so much. Then the book shows you an idealized skull of one of our relatives, not mentioning that it was based on several partial skulls from times that could be thousands of years apart and which were found in itty-bitty pieces, like incomplete jigsaw puzzles with no box to tell the people who assembled them what they are supposed to look like.
Imagine that you are going to build a lineage of modern humans based on one photograph of one person taken every few hundred years. And most of the photographs are pretty poor, concentrating on the teeth and parts of the head and limbs. That is what is in the fossil record, lousy snapshots of an extremely tiny percentage of the creatures that ever lived. You can see trends, but that is all. Your sample is FAR too small to do more with than make assumptions and generalizations based on what is similar and what isn’t. That is what paleoanthropologists do, and they are ALWAYS[super]2[/super] arguing. As I’ve mentioned before, what we understood the human lineage to be in 1974 was completely different from how we understood it last week, and Wednesday it might have changed again. It is a science of best guesses, which makes Pure Scientists question whether it should be considered a scence at all. And that is why my degree is a BA, not a BS.
** - Always. All the time. Can’t agree on the time or what to have for lunch. Until the creationists show up. Then they circle like musk oxen.
You know, I think that what creationists really hate about Evolution, even more than it’s supposed atheism, is that the theory of evolution does away with the idea of species as fixed archtypes. Just as flat earthers can’t understand why people don’t fall off the bottom of the earth, creationists can’t seem to fathom how a population of animals could specialize to the point that it no longer was interbreedable with the base stock.
One problem encountered when discussing issues with Creationists is that they are always in a hurry. (After all, their whole world got assembled in six days, why do the Evolutionists keep stalling when they are asked for proof?)
Darwin first published his Origin of Species in 1859. His theory did not become the scientifically dominant one, as Neo-Darwinism, until the mid-1920s. Part of his theory was the utter reliance on gradualism (indicating that all changes must occur only in geological time frames–a really long time). That aspect of the theory was not seriously challenged until Gould and Eldredge posited Punctuated Equilibrium in 1974–and that idea is still fiercely opposed in some circles even though the “rapid” changes they proposed still occurred in geological time–just in shorter periods than Darwin proposed.
So, basically, we have only entertained the notion that a species could evolve “quickly” (but still over periods of time much longer than a human lifetime), for fewer than 30 years. Until now, no one was even looking for species to evolve fast enough to watch.
More recently, people have begun to study the actual “origins of species.” This site on Talk Origins discusses actually observed speciation events. It begins with plants and moves to insects and a few other small critters. (The whole page is worth reading, but if you’re in a hurry, scroll down to section 5.0 Observed Instances of Speciation.)
Talk Origins has a second page of updates, including references to mice and fish: Some More Observed Speciation Events
In addition, Peter and Rosemary Grant went back to the Galapagos, where Darwin first drew some of his Natural Selection conclusions by examining finches, and discovered that the finches have continued to evolve in the 170 years since Darwin was wandering around the islands. They published a popularized edition of their work as Beak of the Finch in the mid-1990s.
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The founder of the Flat Earth Society, Charles. K. Johnson, died in Lancaster, CA (where I used to live, BTW) on March 18th, 2001. Did he really believe the Earth was flat? Or was it all a giant hoax? Since Johnson was an aeronautical engineer, I suspect the latter; an interview with an Antelope Valley reporter on NPR on Wednesday indicated it might have been a joke.
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The fossil record of cetaceans shows a clear, definable path from a large land mammal to a freshwater and littoral sometimes-on-the-land mammal to a marine mammal.
Gould shows the progression in one of his essays, I don’t have it with me but I’ll find it and post a little more detail.
If you want to offer your creationist friend an example of speciation in action, you might point to the horse and the donkey.
These two animals came from a common ancestor. They have drifted apart genetically, but not quite to the “breaking point.” They can still breed with each other, but their offspring, a mule, will be sterile, unable to reproduce itself.
It is clear that horses and donkeys evolved from a common ancestor, and it is equally clear that their common ancestor has evolved into two species. Now if you dug up the fossil record, could you tell by looking at bones the exact point at which one species became two? Nah.
Lions and tigers, by the way, have a similar degree of relation. They can breed, producing a so-called “liger” (or “tiglon”) but if I’m not mistaken, the “liger” is as sterile as a mule.
dropzone wrote:
Actually, the problem is even more convoluted than that. On one hand you have the different species’ that look fairly similar; on the other hand you have members of the same species that (from their fossil records) can look radically different…
Consider a million years from now, dogs have long been extinct and due to some cataclysm, the intelligent beings that are left behind have no records of them. They happen to excavate the skeletal remains of a chihuahua and a St. Bernard… They might not easily come to the conclusion that these were the same species… They might even assume the chihuahua was a member of the rodent family… (which I sometimes suspect, myself).
As to the OP:
Since speciation can only be inferred from the fossil record, you cannot use the fossil record to demonstrate speciation. Not being able to demonstrate that a thing occured is certainly not an argument that it did not occur… as your Creationist friends should certainly agree…
There certainly seems to be evidence of speciation occuring under conditions that we can observe and demonstrate, so it seems like a pointless argument to make that speciation did not occur… on the other hand, that does little to PROVE the theory of evolution as a whole - or at least the part that Creationists have a problem with (i.e. abiogenesis -> human beings)
They would never confuse a chihuahua with a rodent. The teeth are wrong.
While fine-grain species transitions are rare they do exist. Instead of the “observed speciation FAQ”, check out the “Transitional Fossil” FAQ by Kathleen Hunt at the talk.origins site listed above.
The problem is that a creationist will always ask for the intermediate between two transitionals. And, if they get too close together simply claim that they are the same animal. You can’t win.
I haven’t read the Gould version, but a book called At the Water’s Edge : Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs, and How Life Came Ashore but then Went Back to Sea by Carl Zimmer, features a full discussion of the topic. It’s very nicely illustrated, and details the full progression of the cetacean lineage. The original land animals seems to have been fairly similar to modern canines. The book also discusses modern animals, such as the otter, that seem to be themselves a type of “in-between” species, obviously originally land animals, but part way down the road to being aquatic. This is all in the second half of the book. The first half discusses how what passed for fish early in the fossil record managed to evolve into land animals. The entire book is very well written, and I highly recommend it for any amateur evolution buffs out there.
Actually, the story is much better than that. Peter and Rosemary Grant have spent the better part of the last thirty years on one of the more remote islands in the Galapagos Archipelago, cataloguing the various physical characteristics of seven or eight species of “Darwin’s Finches.” And I mean Cataloguing, with a capital ‘C’. They measured the finches from beak to toe, noting, among other things, beak width, length, and depth. They kept track of *every single bird on the island,*recording birth and death dates, which birds breeded with which birds, and which birds were the offspring of said breedings. They also kept track of the food sources on the island, noting which species preferred which food. They developed methods of measuring the difficulty in, say, cracking open a seed from a particular cactus, and comparing it to the beak depth of the species of birds that seemed to prefer it as a food source. The amount of information they collected is staggering. Once a year they would go back to their university, I think Princeton, and enter all of the data into a computer, and try to find correlations in different chunks of data. What they found is that the different species of birds on the island were evolving *during the time that they spent on the island.*They could show that in the year after a long drought, as food became more scarce, more birds would be born with a larger beak, which allowed a bird to open tougher to crack seeds that smaller-beaked birds couldn’t eat. Then, in rainer years, the average size of the beak on birds born that year would be smaller. Over the years, as droughts came and went, the overall species characteristics didn’t change much, just sort of wafted back and forth, but the change from year to year was visible. Evolution in action, every evolutionary biologist’s dream. It’s a very good book about a pair of scientists literally proving that Darwin was correct.
Of course, it still won’t convince a creationist, but if this book doesn’t at least make a person think, nothing will.
Here’s a slightly different take on the evolution/creation argument that you can use in such discussions.
Creationists love to attack evolution, but even if someone wee to come up towmorrow with absolute, incontrovertible proof that evolution didn’t happen, that wouldn’t help to support their own position one iota. They don’t even have an argument other than ‘the bible says it so it must be true’.
[I’m gonna try some HTML here so please be patient with me]
They also like to call creation a theory to put it on on equal footing with evolution but it’s not, the proper term is creation myth. Looking at it that way, its intellectual peers are not evolution, but stories like the the ones at this site. Any one of them is as believable as what they have to offer, and has just as much evidence in its favor.
I know this is not the Great Debates forum, but I thought I would put my 2 cents in anyways…
Spoke:
To me the horse and donkey are not really prime evidence for evoultion in action. The differences between a horse and a donkey are purely from breeding certain physical traits.
August West:
the problem with say a seal like creature becoming a whale would pose considerable problems. Since the process of evolution is said to be slow, it would be difficult for offspring to adapt quick enough to survive. If its a land animal going to see, how would the offspring be able to adjust and evolve intime to be able to say suckle underwater?
You are assuming that horses and donkeys were the same animal until humans started breeding them for specific purposes? I’m afraid that the fossil record DOES show that they were different species LONG before they were domesticated by humans.
The seals of the present suckle on land, but the only thing that prevents them from suckling in water is that the young don’t go into the water, probably to stay away from predators and to stay warm. Were a seal pup in a warm climate to follow its mother into the water it is fully possible for it to nurse. They have already developed the lung capacity to stay underwater. They just happen not to.
Hey Obvious Guy, would you concede that lions and tigers are separate species, or do you suppose that some farmer somewhere has been breeding them for their respective characteristics?
Obvious Guy: To expand slightly on what Dropzone said, there is some evidence that the genus Equus is actually polyphyletic and should be split. With the ancestors of modern horses and zebras on one side and modern asses, onagers, and kiangs on the other diverging about 250,000 years ago. There has been a proposal to split them into the separate genera of Equus and Asinus. Don’t know how widely accepted ( if at all ) that has been. But it shows the separation.
The one thing donkeys and horses have in common ( and actually there are a number of things 
), is that they were both probably domesticated in Mesopotamia about 6,000 years ago.
Oops! I take that back! Horses and asses may have diverged in the Pliocene ( 500,000 to 1.8 million years ago ). It is domestic horses ( E. caballuss ) and the Przewalski’s Horse ( E. przewalskii ) that may have diverged 250,000 years ago. My bad 
.