AIG has often been accused of the sin of "quote mining," accurately quoting some authority out of context in such a way that the cited text represents a position completely opposed to the thesis of that authority. This newsletter item exhibits a mined quote of a different sort. As presented by AIG:
But in the journal Science, a report stated:
“These examples say that natural selection can cause a population to change very quickly and hint that speciation could [occur] very quickly …”This statement is followed by the conclusion "true operational science confirms Biblical history."
What nonsense. No reference to the report or article is provided; it could be a letter to the editor written by AIG staff. Nothing is known about what the examples might be or what is meant by "very quickly." To an evolutionist (in this case, a geologist or paleontologist), very quickly can mean any time period from less than a second to a couple of million years; the quote provides no context for establishing the time scale.
Worse still, AIG has conflated quick change with speciation. This becomes pretty obvious when you visit the page on speedy speciation linked in the AIG newsletter. Here we meet the AIG version of a guppy story. Guppies in Trinidad were transplanted into a pool (previously without guppies) above a waterfall. These guppies matured later, became bigger, and had fewer offspring than those in the predator-filled pool below the falls. Again, "quickly" remains undefined by AIG; time should be in terms of the number of generations of guppies it took for these adaptations to occur. (Maybe the original article in "Science" has this information, but AIG won't tell you.) A more pressing problem is the question: were the observed adaptations sufficient to give rise to truly separate species?
Or, were the adaptations simply a response to an environment with fewer predators and plenty of food? In the United States, there are many environmental factors that have changed over the last 200 years or so (an extremely quick blink of the eye in geologic and evolutionary time) that are giving rise to the same sorts of changes. High quality food items are available in many varieties. Our healthcare system is widespread and generally accessible. Sanitation, clean air, and clean water are priorities. A visit to the museums in Jamestown or Williamsburg, cities founded by early European settlers, will reveal adult shoes that are almost unimaginably tiny compared to our modern feet. Men and women exceeding 6 feet in stature are no longer uncommon. American humans are changing relatively rapidly within a favorable environment. However, there is no Homo norte-americansis; no separate species. Given enough time and the political will to enforce isolationist political policies (i.e., geographic isolation in evolutionary terms), those adaptations might lead to the evolution of a separate species.
Has AIG made a case for rapid speciation? No. Given the failure to define the time periods involved, the failure to adequately reference any of their statements, and the invalid assumption of the equivalence of adaptation with speciation, it is fair to say they have again only slain their own straw man.
12/6/2007: In reading this post, I note that I made an error in logic. It can be concluded that I conflated rapid speciation as being somehow inconsistent with evolution. It isn't. There are plenty of relatively rapid speciation events, including some that are happening on laboratory time scales well within the span of a human lifetime that are cited at many sites, for example search for "rapid speciation" at TalkOrigins.
