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Resurrection Ecology Gives Life to Old Eggs
Ant writes "ABC News reports that scientists are bringing the past to life by hatching eggs once thought to be dead and producing colonies of animals as they existed decades ago. They are calling it 'resurrection ecology,' and it's a whole new field that quite literally allows scientists to observe evolution as it occurred, using animals that were quite different than their kinfolk today."
But speciation has been observed. The Australian Eastern Rosella had a range extending from near Adelaide in South Australia to the Macpherson Ranges in SE Queensland. The sprcies had a continuous variation in colouring though this range from SW to NE. You could take a pair of birds of opposite gender and they would mate without needing any particular prompting.
In the 1930's the Murrumbidgee Irragation Project destroyed a large slab of habitat in the center of the range of the bird. There were now two populations of Eastern Rosellas. In each group colouration tended to the mean of each region, with the result that now birds of opposite gender from the two regions will not interbreed without major human intervention (colouring the birds, or feeding them sex hormones etc).
Given that the definition of species is a population of organisms that will mate and reproduce spontaneously under natural conditions, the Eastern Rosella is a text book case of Speciation, as outlined in the Origin of Species.
The "no new species have been observed" objection is dead in the water. Note also that we're not talking about plankton or bacteria or virus here - we are talking about a parrot a bit bigger than a pidgeon.