Examples of speciation are being gathered by very hard-working members of this forum in another topic.

Here, I fully intend to make fun of them.

Question: Can Evolution not only create positive changes in any species, but can evolution work fast enough to overcome all other destructive forces in nature combined?

(Or is the opposite actually true: that, overall, all life on the planet is disintegrating, not evolving?)

Several members have been able to produce evidence of speciation in ...??... number of observations. (Try as I might, I couldn't get a number out of them. So I'm going to round up to 10,000 observable examples.)

Here are just a few of the factors working against the evolving of life forms, in this case, humans:

The lowest rate of infertility I could find at this website was 2%.

http://biology.wsc.ma.edu/biology/students/posters/popmodel/infertility/

This site sets sterility in men at about 1%.

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:-DUOuY0xxToJ:www.med...terility+rates&hl=en

I found no reliable statistics on rates of stillborn children, and anyway I'm sure they will vary from nation to nation. If anyone could assist, that would be great. Give these poor evolutionists the benefit of the doubt, though, they need it. Graciously give the lowest possible rates of stillbirths you can find, and we'll just apply it to all humans of all periods in history.

So tell me, guys: where does nature's propensity lie?

Can beneficial mutations overcome a 3% rate of childlessness in couples?

(Shall we begin adding to that percentage all the other things that cause childlessness: homosexuality, birth defects that cause death before the teen years, accidents that cause death before reproduction, natural disasters that wipe out the most advanced members of a species, etc.)

I'm not sure why you think infertility rates of 3% (or more) work against the evolving of life forms. Why would they?

As we know, reproduction is not perfect. Mistakes and random reshufflings of genes occur, and the resultant offspring have some variation. Most of the mistakes are neutral or negative in effect on reproduction. Infertility would be an example of one of these. There's no way infertility gives a reproductive advantage. It's a mistake, but it's part of the process of evolution, rather than being an objection to it.

Not very often, variations ('mistakes') occur which do give a small advantage to eventual reproduction. These can eventually spread throughout a population, because they give such an advantage, and so the DNA of the population gradually changes. Repeat that process over millions of years, countless small changes, and you can get speciation.

Infertility is an interesting question, in terms of evolution. It should be selected against, of course. Some simpler organisms have fertility rates of near enough 100%. More complex organisms, like ourselves, don't. Reproducing is an intricate process (surely not intelligently designed); there's a lot to go wrong. Being born infertile is one of those tragic birth defects caused by the imperfection of the reproductive process - but it is just this imperfection in the process that helps to drive evolution, by occasionally throwing up a chance 'improvement'.

A disussion of evolution and infertility - The evolution of infertility. (PDF)

A few days ago, a green golden retriever puppy was born - does that count as a genetic mutation bunkboy?

quote:

Originally posted by bunkboy:
Examples of speciation are being gathered by very hard-working members of this forum in another topic.

Here, I fully intend to make fun of them.

No, you're just giving credence to the short story of Mark Twain's where man was at the lowest station of the evolutionary stage and the amoeba was at the top. Twain was a master of sarcasm but at the same time, he was funny --- not just on some pointless ego trip that you seem to have your bags packed for. It really has become tiresome.

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