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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sidney Reilly who wrote (25951)	11/15/1998 1:41:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Before my last post, I called a geneticist friend of mine, Dr. Michael Swift, who is the Director of the Institute for the Genetic Analysis of Common Diseases at New York Medical College. Here's what he told me over the phone on the subject of natural selection/evolution: "Speciation is a manmade, arbitrary concept, but it does have a definition. The key concept: Can two groups interbreed. If so, we call them the same species. For fossils, you can't do that test, so you can't use that single criterion. Instead, you look at the bones. Remember: the fossil record represents a minute proportion of all the creatures that have lived. So it is only be extreme luck that you might find so-called "intermediate" species. And, moreover, there are reports every month or year of fossils of an animal group that do appear, on morphological grounds [bones] alone, to be evolutionary intermediates. *And, it is without question possible to construct, with DNA, evolutionary trees that show the common ancestry* of different current species.** It is an absurd requirement that species representing each intermediate step be identified. BTW, the reason the creationists have given up on denying natural selection (which they did until recently) is that both natural and laboratory observations have now demonstrated clearcut natural selection. So they claim that natural selection is not the process that results in speciation. You can mention also that evolution is not necessarily so gradual. In response to a change in environmental conditions, a new species may evolve over a relatively short period of time (a few hundred or thousands of years), so there may be precious few fossil examples of the "intermediate" stages of the process. endquote. [Mike made me promise to say that he's horribly busy and please don't call him!-- E]