LRR, yes, you were a foil.
But let me correct some points you made in your post. We do understand speciation, and we have seen it. The mechanism is straightforward. [Using the fossil record is a red herring because you are necessarily dealing with partial data. That's why the scientific creationist love to dabble in the fossil record.] Speciation has been studied in excruciating detail in fruit flies (there are myriad closely related species), Lake Malawi cichlids, frogs, toads, etc. The list goes on and on. For a good, thorough explanation (albeit technical), see Ernst Mayr's Animal Speciation and Evolution.
The problem with speciation as you laid it out is that mutagenesis is a stochastic process, and environmental changes are exceedingly complex, and therefore not predictable in natural populations. But that has nothing to do with understanding speciation at its most fundamental level.
Making a new species is easy for humans to do -- we do it all the time. Asking a prediction of what species will appear in nature over the course of a few million years is another story altogether because of the staggering number of variables, the stochastic nature of the underlying causes, and the complexities of the populations.
TTFN,
CTC |
