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I never said this creates diversity. In fact, if you recall I corrected Mamuthusus when he denied genetic information was lost due to bottlenecks (he later recanted, claiming I misunderstood him). What I said is bottlenecks & drift is a process that helps realize the already inherent diversity. If you don’t understand the difference between create and realize there is no point debating this further. I can only say that blue = blue for so long.
Never said it, hunh? How about this bit here, then?
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It was asked how the diversity of life can be explained given a starting point of 5K years ago with some number of kinds of animals. I illustrated how bottlenecks and subsequent drift would easily account for some if not much of the diversity we see, and I provided dogs as an illustration.
Sure looks like you're claiming bottlenecks cause/create/whatever diversity. Those are your words, right? If you didn't mean them, you should have been more clear.
No, I have no clue what you're babbling about concerning "realized" diversity. If it made any sense, I wouldn't ask you to clarify what you meant, now would I? From your non-response, it's pretty apparent you don't have any idea what it means either.
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It is one mechanism that has surely produced new species, we have observed it. I remind you that species is a man-made, subjective term. I have debated some biologists who say that merely isolating a population can qualify the isolated group as a new species. Consider that there are at least 32 species of bats. Each species could easily be the result of population isolation (pseudo-bottleneck) from a parent population (bat kind).
Besides the obvious error on the number of bat species (like by an order of magnitude), allopatric speciation IS one of the principal - albeit not the only - way speciation occurs. And duh, of course it's a man-made term. All the taxonomic classifications are, and most are pretty ambiguous to boot. What was the point of this utter and trivial irrelevancy again?
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You are making false assumptions. We first must consider only the kinds that were required to be on the ark. We are not required to account for all the species of algae, fungi, insects, fish, mollusks, etc. (note that there are almost a million catalogued species of insects/spiders!). To compare apples to apples, I will compare the number of estimated kinds (which is based on known species) to the number of catalogued species required to originate on the ark. My source for species is:
Page Not Found | World Resources Institute
4,000 Mammals
4,184 Amphibians
6,300 Reptiles
9,040 Birds
The total number of species that would have had to originate on the ark is 23,524. As you can see, it is entirely reasonable to achieve 23K species from an original 18K kinds over the period of 4000 years! It only requires 1.3 species per each kind. As I mentioned earlier, there are over 32 bat species, at least a dozen rabbit species, etc. It appears the 18,000 "kind" estimate is likely too high.
This is almost too silly for words. Okay, tell me again your rationale for excluding insects, plants, fresh-water fish, etc from your "kinds"? List, for example, all the terrestrial plants that are capable of surviving one full year's immersion in salt water. List, for example, all of the species of phytophagous insects that are capable of surviving without their host plants for twelve months.
While you're at it, explain how - with all the violent to-and-fro surging, 40 days of rain, literally mountains of sediment being deposited all over the planet simultaneously, submarine volcanos or whatever you're now calling the "fountains of the deep", massive uplift and subsidence of sea floor, etc how ANY marine creature could possibly have survived. This ought to be rich.
Someone already covered the huge volume of extinct critters that would have had to be accommodated on the ark, like litopterns, giant ground sloths, cameliids, all the extinct perissodactyls, early artiodactyls, etc. And that's just the mammals! You've left out a LOT of critters.
In other words, Fred, justify your numbers.
[This message has been edited by Quetzal, 11-22-2002]