I think we've finally turned a corner in the evolution "debate". Actually, I should call it the "natural selection 'debate'", because evolution itself (i.e., change through time) has been widely accepted for centuries. Lamarck (or more properly, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck) was talking about evolution in the 18th century, although his idea of the inheritance of acquired traits now makes him the butt of jokes among biologists.
Can you imagine a worse fate than to be laughed at by biologists? The horror!
Sorry Dad, I forgot Rule 17 for a second...
Back to my point. I think we've come a long way recently, with Pennsylvania and Ohio the most recent states to decide that -gasp!- science belongs in science classrooms. Even the media have come around. Yesterday the Times had an article "dispel[ing] doubts about a theory of evolution", that wasn't talking about a debate over natural selection.
Thankfully, we're past that now.
Rather, the article was discussing two new studies published in that journal-of-journals Nature (Barluenga et al. 2006, Savolainen et al. in press). These two new studies give new evidence for sympatric speciation, where a species diverges into two in the same geographic area. This is a very cool idea. Usually, speciation occurs when there is a geographic barrier between populations (e.g., a mountain range, desert, ocean, etc.) that limits interbreeding, a process known as allopatric speciation. Over time, the genetic makeup of those populations will differentiate enough that they will be unable to interbreed, having evolved into separate species.
Voila! The origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life, to borrow a phrase from someone smarter than I.
Sympatric speciation is so cool because it doesn't require any geographic barriers to gene flow (man, they make it sound so technical, don't they?), relying instead on differences in behavior to prevent individuals from breeding (insert lame joke here). Until these most recent studies, it was pretty much just intellectual masturbation fodder, although it has been suggested in other species, most memorably the apple maggot fly. Yummy.
I love evolutionary biology. Good thing I'm a gittin' edji-mecated in it.
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