How long does speciation typically take?

[Meffy]

I'll just point out that plants, fungi, bacteria, protists, etc. also have species. Not just animals. In the plant world there are whole complexes of species that can interbreed, producing intermediate forms some of which have been given species status themselves. I'm thinking of ferns in particular here.

Then there's the controversy between "splitters" and "lumpers." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers/splitters

So clearly it's wrong to say that definition of species is "not subject to interpretation and thin lines." It is very much a matter of interpretation, as division of lifeforms into species is done not by nature but by scientists. Nature creates diversity and groups, we decide how to think about the groups and the differences.

 

[blutoski]

So lions and tigers are the same species? I know that a cross breed from them did successfuly breed with one of the parent species. So that would meet the fertile ofspring catagory.

Just to expand on my last post with this example: lions and tigers are not the same species, but they do produce viable hybrids.

However, by using the more robust definition of species that says two specimens must successfully interbreed in the wild, we can see that lions and tigers would not normally qualify as the same species since they inhabit diffrent environmental and geographical niches (savannah versus jungle, africa/middle east versus India, &c). Also: their mating signals are not compatible, and in the wild, they are much more likely to eat each other than mate, so again, there is some justification for maintaining their historically different species designations.

Other examples are birds which are identical in every way, but have either different physical domains (ie: top of tree, bottom of tree, outside of tree, inside of tree, limb-sitters, branch-sitters, &c) are often classified as species instead of varieties, since they don't mate with specimens outside their domain.

 

[blutoski]

I'll just point out that plants, fungi, bacteria, protists, etc. also have species. Not just animals. In the plant world there are whole complexes of species that can interbreed, producing intermediate forms some of which have been given species status themselves. I'm thinking of ferns in particular here.

Then there's the controversy between "splitters" and "lumpers." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers/splitters

So clearly it's wrong to say that definition of species is "not subject to interpretation and thin lines." It is very much a matter of interpretation, as division of lifeforms into species is done not by nature but by scientists. Nature creates diversity and groups, we decide how to think about the groups and the differences.

Totally true, and I confess I was responding to the OP assuming the issue was Creationism. Creationists are blissfully unaware of yeast. I'm trying to picture Noah not only collecting yeasts, but actually having enough time to make sure he didn't miss any varieties, and that he had no duplicates. It would take a team of microbiologists several lifetimes to do this.

 

[blutoski]

Really? This deserves it's own thread if it's truly a debatable idea.

What would be required, though, is for one of the specimens to be a karyotype fusion or fission. That is: one of the specimens would be able to breed with the other species, but not his own.

Homo has a 'fused' chromosome, where other apes have two.

Here's a typical image: Chromosome 2 karyotypes in Human, Chimp, Gorilla and Orangutan

 

[Meffy]

I'm trying to picture Noah not only collecting yeasts, but actually having enough time to make sure he didn't miss any varieties, and that he had no duplicates. It would take a team of microbiologists several lifetimes to do this.

Good thing yeast is unclean! So just one + and one - cell would do the job, not seven pairs or whatever it is for clean. :-D

 

[Dave1001]

Totally true, and I confess I was responding to the OP assuming the issue was Creationism. Creationists are blissfully unaware of yeast. I'm trying to picture Noah not only collecting yeasts, but actually having enough time to make sure he didn't miss any varieties, and that he had no duplicates. It would take a team of microbiologists several lifetimes to do this.

Would yeast survive a flood-type deluge without the protection of an ark, though? If they would, there would be no reason for Noah to collect them. After all, I doubt Creationists think he had fish and whatnot on the Ark.

 

[Meffy]

Only the halophilic varieties. Noah would've had to make that decision along with all the rest. It's getting mighty busy -- hope ark-building itself doesn't take much time because there's a very real deadline. Supposedly.

 

[blutoski]

Would yeast survive a flood-type deluge without the protection of an ark, though? If they would, there would be no reason for Noah to collect them. After all, I doubt Creationists think he had fish and whatnot on the Ark.

Sure he would! Rain is not saline. The volume of rain that would be required to top Everest would dilute the ocean's chemistry. Too salty for fluvian life; too fresh for marine life.

Maybe estuarial gribblies'd survive, but most of them are benthic, and can't go long without a shoreline to feed off of.

And what about tidal-pool animals? They'd be a mile under for weeks. And spray zone animals, such as barnacles?

 

[blutoski]

Sure he would!

I just remembered... Hovind believes that fish must have been on the ark. One of his CS hypotheses is that the oceans' fish would have been killed in the flood. He specifically mentions this, because it is his version of a Creation Science Hypothesis. He claims that since there's an hypothesis, it's a science.

Furthermore, he says that they would have died suddenly, and in agony. This hypothesis established, he set out to disconfirm it, by finding fish fossils with a look of peace on their faces.

However, all fish fossils he found were of fish who had died in agony. Thus, he concludes, his great flood model is further supported by fossil evidence. QED.


I didn't put this in the previous post, because I had forgotten it. I had forgotten it because it is so insipid that I had pushed it into a locked box in the back of my mind for safety reasons. (It's back under key, now, so we're all safe.)

 

[Meffy]

BTW, I was referring to halophilic yeasts, not fishes. :-}

 

[ynot]

How long does speciation typically take?

About as long as a piece of string.

 

[Meffy]

Okay, ynot, then how long does speciation typically give? (It's more blessed, don'tcha know.)

 

[mommyrex]

I ran across this interesting bit: Speciation appears to happen more rapidly in the tropics.

 

[Ririon]

...
P.S. Please don't tell me this is a meaningless question. It's not.

Please note that I played nice and did not point out that it is a meaningless question, since it is a more general version of the question in the "proto-man" thread CplFerro didn't contribute much to the debate after the OP there, either.

 

[Ririon]

I know it doesn't answer your original question, but it used to take a beetle about 3-4 days to develop into a new species.

The flood was 6000 years ago.
Noah took only one "kind" of ancestral beetle on the ark.
Accurate documentation of types of beetle go back around 2000 years or more, and there appear not to have been any changes between then and the same species described now, so we can assume speciation strangely stopped after a 4000 year or so microevolutionary burst.
There are 300 000 or so species of beetle around today, so assume there were that number 2000 years ago.
Even ignoring the fact that many species may have become extinct in the last 6000 years or so, the rate of post-deluvian speciation would appear to average one species every 3-4 days.

I hate to do this, but I get over 200 years using your numbers. Does that make me the math police? If every species splits in two every 200 years, you get a lot of species after a while. We are talking extreme best-case scenarios here, of course. And NO, I am not defending the Ark.