Proof of Evolution

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New study finds natural selection IS a general force behind the formation of new species.

When a species becomes isolated from it's main group and adapts to a new environment then the species reaches a point that it can no longer interbreed with the species it has diverged from, even if the species are reunited. This is a very important stage a species must obtain on it's way to becoming a new and evolving species.

Charles Darwin would undoubtedly be both pleased and chagrined.

The famous scientist would be pleased because a study published online this week provides the first clear evidence that natural selection, his favored mechanism of evolution, drives the process of species formation in a wide variety of plants and animals. But he would be chagrined because it has taken nearly 150 years to do so.

What Darwin did in his revolutionary treatise, “On the Origin of Species,” was to explain how much of the extraordinary variety of biological traits possessed by plants and animals arises from a single process, natural selection. Since then a large number of studies and observations have supported and extended his original work. However, linking natural selection to the origin of the 30 to 100 million different species estimated to inhabit the earth, has proven considerably more elusive.

In the last 20 years, studies of a number of specific species have demonstrated that natural selection can cause sub-populations to adapt to new environments in ways that reduce their ability to interbreed, an essential first step in the formation of a new species. However, biologists have not known whether these cases represent special exceptions or illustrate a general rule.

The new study – published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – provides empirical support for the proposition that natural selection is a general force behind the formation of new species by analyzing the relationship between natural selection and the ability to interbreed in hundreds of different organisms – ranging from plants through insects, fish, frogs and birds – and finding that the overall link between them is positive.

A full copy of the study can be obtained from the below link.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0508653103v1