Carl Zimmer at The Loom has a simply must read post on three species of butterflies. Scientists believed that one species might be a hybrid of the other two, so they set out to test it by making the species all over again.
This is really important stuff because it goes against a common argument vs. evolution -- that it cannot be witnessed in action. Experiments like these show that it is plausible and that it occurs on human-relevant time scales.
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Scientists have figured out many ways to study the origin of species. They can build evoluitonary trees, to see how species descend from a common ancestor. They can survey islands or mountains or lakes to see how ecological conditions foster the rise of new species. They can look for fossils that…
We usually think of speciation as a bifurcating process -- a single lineage splitting into two. The relationships of those species can often be determined using DNA sequences. But we know that there are exceptions, like horizontal gene transfer in bacteria. And hybrid speciation in plants. These…
Wild specimen of the butterfly species, Heliconius heurippa.
Researchers recently demonstrated that this species is a naturally-occurring
hybrid between H. cydno and H. melpomene.
Image: Christian Salcedo / University of Florida, Gainesville.
Speciation typically occurs after one lineage splits…
To continue the dialogue with Rusty Lopez from the New Covenant blog, let's examine his latest posting. I'm going to do this one a bit differently so as not to lose the threads of each specific point of dispute. I'm going to divide this post by those areas and label them as such, and I will put my…