Friday, November 06, 2009

Things that don't happen

I hear quite frequently from Creationists that one of the reasons they know evolution can't happen is because no one has ever seen a new "species" in the making from evolution. Of course, this completely belies their ignorance on what a "species" is. They seem to think that to constitute a different species it has to be difference on the order of "cats and dogs" which, as anyone that actually passed high school biology and remembers their taxonomic classifications, is more on the order of differences between orders (and we shouldn't see those changes on such short time spans, which is where the fossil record comes in).

Yet Creationists sill claim that speciation just never happens. If pushed on it, they'll redefine species to be "kinds" which has no useful definition and allows them to endlessly push the goalposts to whatever they want.

Meanwhile, in categorically useful land where definitions actually work and make sense, yet another species has been caught in the act of diverging thanks to sexual selection. We'll just toss that on the list of speciation events Creationists claim don't exist.

Meanwhile, yet another event that Creationists promised would never happen has occurred. Nearly 3 years ago, at Behe's lecture, he claimed that evolution could not account for systems coming together to form a new system because, if each system had evolved independently, the bits that allowed each to work would be so different, they would be incompatible to the point that they could never come together.

Of course, this happens all the time where diseases jump between species. Just this past week, Behe's impossible scenario happened: H1N1 was contracted by a cat. According to Behe, such improbability means that this event must have been "intelligently designed". God must hate cats.

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