Originally posted by Lana
I know what speciation is, thanks.
Your welcome...😄
And it's not as simple as them not being able to interbreed. Horses and donkeys can interbreed, as can horses and zebras, yet they are different species.
Hybridization amongst animals of in the same "family" is not new concept, and supports Creationist arguments of various species of animals within a particular family, being of one particular kind.
It can not be duplicated between animals coming from different "families" (ie cat cross breeding with a dog...Human crossbreeding with an ape)
The fact that animals of the different kinds can not breed and produce intermediate offspring, and that "no intermediate forms" have been found..essentially defeats any relation between hybridization..and the concept of Macro evolution.
The thing is, their offspring is sterile.
Incorrect..hybridization has been known to to produce fertile offspring. Anyway..using yours/others assumption that hybridization more than likely causes sterility...you are essentially defeating the argument of hybridization producing sexually functional intermediates capable of producing new species of plants/animals/etc....
As the offspring of any of these finches would be, should they interbreed. They're not even all classified under the same genus, as you can clearly see when I listed out all the Galapagos finch species. They are all different species. Closely related, yes. But still different.
taken from: http://www.alternativescience.com/darwin%27s_finches.htm
On this key issue, Jonathan Weiner seems entirely unconscious of the scientific significance of his own reporting. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Beak of the Finch, he wrote; 'Back in 1983, for instance ... a male cactus finch on Daphne Major, a scandens, courted a female fortis. This was a pair of truly star crossed lovers. They were not just from opposite sides of the tracks, like the Prince and the Showgirl, or from two warring families, like Romeo and Juliet: they belonged to two different species. Yet during the chaos of the great flood, they mated and produced four chicks in one brood.'
Not only did the finches in question mate successfully, their offspring proved to be among the most fertile that the Grants recorded during their twenty years on the islands. The four chicks of this mating produced no less than 46 grandchildren.
The Grants recorded many other pairings of 'different species' of finch, which, like Lack before them, they dubbed 'hybrids'. But of course the central significance of this finding is that the identification of the thirteen varieties as different species is impossible to maintain once it is admitted that they can interbreed and produce fertile young.
The fact that different varieties prefer not to mate is very different from saying that they are unable to do so. Great Danes do not usually select toy poodles as potential mates (and vice versa) but they are capable of bearing fertile young if mated and are members of the same species, Canis familiaris. Arab stallions do not normally select Shetland ponies as mates, but they are members of the same species, Equus callabus.
Moreover, the Grants' observations undermine another myth about Darwin's finches - that individual species are 'confined to certain islands'. In order for different species to mate, they clearly have to occupy the same territory. Other visitors to the Galapagos have confirmed that this is this case. Television documentary filmmaker Gillian Brown spent a year working at the Darwin Research Station on the islands. It is common, says Brown, to find the different species all over the archipelago, rather than obeying the colored territorial maps drawn up by Darwinist ornithologists.
In almost all respects, the finches of the Galapagos are so similar that it is difficult to tell them apart. Indeed, Weiner himself remarks that, 'Some of them look so much alike that during the mating season they find it hard to tell themselves apart.' This mirrors David Lack's observation that 'In no other birds are the differences between species so ill-defined.' The finches all have dull plumage, which varies from light brown to dark brown, all have short tails, all build nests with roofs, and lay white eggs spotted with pink, four to a clutch.
It is very difficult for an objective observer to see how a group of finches who 'find it hard to tell themselves apart', and who do in fact interbreed, can legitimately be called different species.
What is the scientific basis of this identification?