designed variation...
Posted by anyman on Jun 24, 2002 at 08:33
(61.183.174.34)Re: Evolution (Dogrock)
your question brings to mind the carribean lizards that we discussed on this board two or three years ago...
i don't remember all of the details (i'm sure i could dig them up...but so could anyone else just as quickly and easily :-)
but i think it was some american university that introduced a particular variety of lizard to some group of islands in the carribean as part of a designed experiment...the lizards were perhaps novel to that region or at least novel to all of the other islands but one
to the researchers great surprise when they returned to investigate some 15 years later (they never expected such events to be able to occur so rapidly) they found that their original stock had shown variant radiation into several new "species" (i use that term because it is commonly used, but i believe it to be virtually useless taxonomically)
the variation was mostly visible in leg length and coloration, if memory serves...the primary causes were almost undoubtedly enviroment and isolation
they didn't bother to check the situation any earlier because they never expected such results to occur so rapidly...so it is very possible that the variation occured faster than can be reported because no one observed it directly
all told...the rapid variation is helpful to those of us that believe the great variety of life today could have come from relatively few original kinds that got off the ark ~4500 years ago
(btw -- the rapid variation of darwin's galapagosian finches would pose no conflict for the creationary model either :-)
and since the lizards are still lizards and even essentially the same kinds of lizards, this finding offered no significant help, for the evolutionary camp
(btw -- i can't offer a much better definition of a "kind" than can the evolutionary taxonomist definitions of "species" and "genera" etc since interfertility has been demonstrated both among different "species" and "genera"...although my definition is somewhat more definitive...if any two creatures can be found to be interfertile and reproduce viable offspring, naturally or artificially, then they would by definition belong to the same "kind")
further, there was no generation of brand new highly specific complex genetic information...rather there was very likely another net loss of genetic information
i also reported to this board of a particular variety of fish, the details of which i also don't recall entirely, at about the same time
the fish were i think native to the amazon (or almost surely some south american locale)...a predator was suddenly added to the local environment...i don't remember whether it was by natural migration or artificial introduction, either accidental or intentional...at any rate, with the appearance of the predator, the fish were observed to show marked variation in size and birthing characteristics...within two years...it may have been less than two years but no one was rigorously observing in the interim
anyway, once again no real help for the evolutionary philosophy...no brand new highly specific complex information...rapid variation within genetic boundaries agrees with the biblical model for a post flood world...environment was the major influence
further, and i may be imagining this, but it seems that the predators were later removed or neuturalized and the fish returned to their former state...any such behavior (much like reproducible bacterial resistance to antibiotics, etc) would very strongly argue for a NON-random model of variation and maybe even mutation due largely to given environmental stimuli due to the fact that the same variation phenomena are reproducible in like environmental and biological conditions :-)
so yeah, what the majority of the scientific community would refer to as "speciation" has undoubtedly occured within the last thousand years
and we won't even go into, at this point, how "speciation" claims are affected by what the taxonomic communicty refers to as the "splitters" and the "lumpers" :-)
i'm sure that you can find references to those studies and verify or falsify my memory of them...time permitting, i will certainly revisit them...and when i do , i will post something if no one has bothered in the meantime
hope that helps :-)
Follow Ups:
- Re: designed variation... Dogrock 24/6 17:14 (0)