[shunyadragon]

</span><blockquote><span class="smallfont">Quote:</span><hr size="1" />Originally Posted by
Actually, there is no agreement on what a species is.  It is usually defined in terms of the limits within which animals can sexually produce fertile offspring; but this is our definition, and the biological world is much more complicated.  And the definition obviously does not apply to organisms that do not reproduce sexually.  Even if there is agreement on a set of criteria, it is sometimes difficult to apply even to living organisms -- so we can get widely-different numbers of species depending on whether the classifyers are 'lumpers' or 'splitters.'  Further, even if there is agreement about living organisms, the past must be judged from fossils, which sometimes lack characteristics that would help in classifying (most obviously, a fossil has a current inability to produce fertile offspring through sexual reproduction).  Thus, how long it takes to produce a new species differs, and is most-often an unknown.  We do know that some species of mammals (i.e., mice) have speciated in a matter of hundreds of years, because we know approximately (or even exactly) when they were introduced to islands as pre-existing species and that they now constitute new species that cannot productively mate with members of the progenitor species.  Still, tens of thousands of years is probably accurate for many species.

To see evolution in action in the lab, one would usually be looking at bacteria or other micro-organisms, so again there are issues about what constitutes speciation.  Still, scientists do see evolution in action in the lab, even if the changes they observe do not satisfy the naysayers.  It is doubtful that any demonstration would satisfy many naysayers, anyway, because they are operating from religious ideology that overrules any evidence.<hr size="1" /></blockquote><span class='postcolor'>

This is true. The fundimentalists are not going to accept observations of micro-organism evolution in the lab. I have read their stuff. The problems you presented as to how a species is defined makes it difficult to demonstrate this in micro-organisms. Despite the difficulty of actually defining what a species is, our observations in animal and plant populations in recent years combined with recent fossils and genetic material we have demonstrated speciation, but this is not considered 'PROOF' to those who believe in 'Creation Science'.