DrBarr wrote: "Furthermore, I just can't ignore the fact that several thousand generations of fruit flys have yet to produce a single advantageous mutation."
The biggest impediment that people have with evolution is in understanding what the theory actually says. They spend a lot of time and effort refuting what evolution doesn't say. The second biggest impediment is a lack of clear logic.
Evolution does not guarantee that any specific adaptations will occur. We can attempt to try to alter the natural course, but nature is still smarter than we are. We've discussed this tangentially in another thread. "Advantageous" is highly nonspecific term.
That said, we have witnessed advantageous mutations in nature and there are plenty of references already on here that point to that fact.
On another topic, Gordon Rattray Taylor's comments are interesting and he has a right to say them, but he's not a scientist and while it's true that he "studied natural sciences," that's not the same thing as getting a degree in them, much less in practicing science.
His comments disagree with what I read at talkorigins
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/speciation.html Check out section 5.3.1 - a new species WAS formed in the lab and it was reported in
Dobzhansky, Th., and O. Pavlovsky, 1971. "An experimentally created incipient species of Drosophila", Nature 23:289-292.
Mr Taylor is not a scientist, though, and so I guess we can forgive him for his ignorance.
