No. I’m saying that, if two opposing theories both predict the same thing, observing that thing does not allow us to choose between the two theories.
Both Jeanson’s version of creationism and evolution predict speciation. We see speciation. Which theory is supported? Both of them.
Jeanson doesn’t even go the extra step of demonstrating that the observed rate of speciation is such that it supports his proposed ‘2.4 new bird species per year’ and does not support his utterly made-up ‘1 new bird species every 6000 years’.
It does because both depend on time. So we look at how the time affects speciation in both theories. You said we should see speciation with YEC and we do - you were inferring that with evolution we would NOT be able to observe it happening around us. So how is seeing speciation not a confirmation of his prediction?
Second article I linked - he says basically what you originally said:
As I highlighted in my previous post, evolutionists don’t typically expect to observe the formation of new species in real time. For example, they think that speciation events in creatures like birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals happen too slowly for us to observe in a single lifetime. In contrast, the YEC explanation for the origin of species posits speciation rates that are much, much faster.
But you can’t say he is correct because your version of evolution is true…so you moved the goalposts and said both theories see speciation and then you moved on to the math…
You missed where he used the word average.
[Footnote 3]. “We found that the most recent common ancestor of modern birds inhabited South America around 95 million years ago, but it was not until the Cretaceous-Paleogene transition (66 million years ago) that Neornithes began to diversify rapidly around the world.” Santiago Claramunt and Joel Cracraft, “A New Time Tree Reveals Earth History’s Imprint on the Evolution of Modern Birds,” Science Advances 1, no. 11 (2015): 1, doi:10.1126/sciadv.1501005. Dividing 66 million years by 11,000 bird species yields an average rate of 6,000 years for a new species to form.
He makes reference to extinct species and relying on an average for both - so it looks like apples to apples to me.
Except he does, right here and says the observed rate could be 5x faster than he predicted:
Taking these existing species into account (i.e., the “original” 18 finch species present before the formation of the incipient hybrid species), we can conclude that 1 new species formed per 50 years per 18 species.
If this rate held true across all bird species, we can extend our conclusions even further. Let’s multiply this rate by the total number of living bird species (i.e., about 11,000): 1 new species formed per 50 years per 18 species * 11,000 species = 1 / 50 / 18 * 11,000 = 12 new species per year. This is even faster than I predicted.
Considering these particular finches, I suppose this is the key paragraph:
Let’s return to the raw data. The formation of 1 new finch species from these 18 in just ~50 years is far in excess of the predicted evolutionary rate. For example, in the 2015 paper on the DNA of these species, the authors published their timeline for the historical origins of these species.18 The authors claimed that, over the past 900,000 years of evolutionary history on the Galápagos and Cocos, 40,000–80,000 years were required for 1 new species to form. This evolutionary rate is several hundred times slower than what the Grant’s team observed.19 No wonder the authors of the 2018 study labeled their observations rapid speciation.
I can’t log in to see the reference that is linked in the footnote, perhaps you can.
But, in my estimation, it looks like he was being generous to a mainstream understanding of evolution until we get to that paragraph.
To me, that looks like - we have no idea how to calculate this because our data is inconsistent or doesn’t make sense, and we forgot to fill out the wikipedia entry completely.
The rate at which you somehow criticize me for asking the right questions to let other people back up their own claims is really incredible @Mercer
So hard, as usual, to understand what you’re saying. I see conflation of many separate concepts here. The time required for speciation to occur is not a speciation rate. The number of speciations per unit time is a sort of speciation rate, but the term would more usually refer to the number of speciations per species per unit time. That way, the more species there are, the more speciations we would expect to happen. Doesn’t that seem more reasonable?
Now, one can attempt to estimate speciation rates based on a tree of extant species, but that requires a lot of assumption about unseen data resulting from extinctions. One can use fossils, but that too requires a lot of assumptions about the completeness of the record and the detectability of speciation. There are many attempts to correct for unknown species and various taphonomic and sampling biases. But as far as I can see Jeanson knows nothing about the extensive literature on this subject.
