John: I can't control what other Creationists believed, proposed or thought about speciation at one time. Whatever that was it appears to have changed.
I wanted you to be aware of it, not control it. And while other viewpoints have recently acquired an increased voice, probably due to ID, the viewpoint that speciation is impossible hasn't changed or gone away.
ICR and
CRS, the two foremost Creationist organizations, still teach that speciation is impossible. Their adherents participate in Creation/evolution discussion sites like this all the time. That's why I pointed out to you that this viewpoint is still alive and kicking when you said that no one since Linnaeus had believed this. By the way, the first sentence of your linked article (
Speciation Conference Brings Good News for Creationists) mentions these Creationists.
John: The problem could have been with the definition of species. I am not even sure what state it is in now (the definition of species). And once a solid definition of species "evolves", how could we test it on all the extinct fauna?
Species has a pretty clear, though complex, definition. It's complex because the different means of reproduction require different definitions. For mammals it's pretty simple: a species is a population of individuals capable of producing offspring with one another. Once you get away from mammals it can become more interesting. For example, some species are bisexual, where an individual can play the role of either sex, and so the definition is different. For asexual organisms the definition of species is even more different because there is no such thing as sex. And though there is a definition of species for all the methods of reproduction, there are still ambiguities causing biologists to debate just where the species boundaries lie.
The ambiguities concerning where to draw the species boundaries greatly increase with fossils. For fossils we must use yet other definitions for species because we can't know whether one fossil was ever capable of reproducing with another fossil. There are no living examples by which to judge, and there's no DNA, either.
The problems with identifying fossil species are made clear by a modern example. Lion and tiger skeletons are identical. If we only had fossils of lions and tigers we would conclude, incorrectly of course, that they were a single species.
John: As for the "history" of what Creationists claimed, what about the "evolution" of the theory of evolution? Where does it stand now? Is the Modern Synthesis still reign supreme? Or has it been replaced? I can never get a straight answer.
The Modern Synthesis combines Darwinian evolution with the science of genetics. This merging of sciences occurred because they were found to be interdependent, interexplanatory and mutually compatible. This wasn't understood to be the case until the work of the population geneticists back in the 1920s. We've discovered nothing over the past 80 years to cast any doubt upon genes as the foundation of heredity, and the Modern Synthesis is as valid today as it was then, even more so.
John: Now that we have directly witnessed catastrophes depositing many layers of sediments in a short time frame also puts a damper on the old line "the further down in the strata you go, the older the objects are that are found there," because in fact it doesn't matter in what layer they are found, the objects could have been deposited at the same time.
I've scanned ahead a little and noticed that Larry already addressed this, I'm not sure in how much detail, so for now I'll just mention that the geologic column is not consistent in any way with rapid deposition. We can come back to this if it makes sense.
--Percy
[This message has been edited by Percipient, 11-24-2001]