About your fruit fly speciation claims, experiments of all different sorts have been performed on
Drosophila melanogaster, not just the mutational experiments you mention. This excerpt from Wikipedia's article on
Speciation briefly describes an experiment that produced speciation in the laboratory using only available variation and artificial selection:
The best-documented creations of new species in the laboratory were performed in the late 1980s. Rice and Salt bred fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, using a maze with three different choices such as light/dark and wet/dry. Each generation was placed into the maze, and the groups of flies which came out of two of the eight exits were set apart to breed with each other in their respective groups. After thirty-five generations, the two groups and their offspring would not breed with each other even when doing so was their only opportunity to reproduce.
I also believe you're inaccurately describing the mutational experiments, as here:
The second tier is with the fact that evolution cannot be duplicated in a lab. For instance, the Drosphila Melanogaster, which is your average fruit fly. Numerous scientists have bombarded these fruit flies with X-ray radiation, among other techniques, in order to mutate them. Well, it worked remarkably well. They were able to produce offspring with eyes missing and wings growing out of their heads.
Though not impossible, bombarding fruit flies with X-rays is unlikely to produce such specific mutations. The experiments you're describing sound like the gene-splicing experiments where they would do things like splice extra wing genes into the genome of fruit fly eggs, or remove or block the eye genes.
So anyway, when you go on to say:
Darwinian macroevolution has never been directly observed, to which you might reply, it takes years and years to accumulate enough minor gradations. Its like trying to watch fingernails grow!
This is clearly wrong, since we've observed speciation both in the lab and in the wild multiple times. Your observation about the slowness of speciation in longer-lived species is accurate, but this comment about the fossil record is also clearly wrong:
The fossil record is inept in answering these questions because we do not see any clear examples of transitional forms. Indeed, this has long been the problem for evolutionists.
There are many examples of transitional forms in the fossil record, if for no other reason than that all species are transitional, except those that go extinct. The fossil record is full of finely gradated series of species change. What is less common in the fossil record is transitions at the higher levels of classification such as class and order.
You were probably just responding to something someone else said, but I thought it important to respond to your errors, but I think this may be drifting off-topic. You're lack of familiarity with the fossil record and with speciation experiments isn't an issue in this thread, and probably disqualifies you from the discussion anyway.
--Percy
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