This past week I picked up a copy of Speciation (Published 2004), by Coyne and Orr, while visiting Cornell. Chapter One of this book starts out with a quote from Origin and then says:
So begins The Origin of Species, whose title and first paragraph imply that Darwin will have much to say about speciation. Yet his magnum opus remains largely silent on the "mystery of mysteries," and the little it does say about this mystery is seen by most modern evolutionists as muddled or wrong.You can read part of the introduction to Speciation at Amazon. It seems obvious to me from the introduction that Coyne and Orr will attempt to deal with just about every question I have and guys like you seem to ignore. They emphasize "an insistence on hypotheses that are testable," implying that a lot of what passes for "evolution" in not testable. In fact a page earlier, they have this sentence: "But given our almost complete ignorance of how these forms of selection [natural and sexual] give rise to new species, this conclusion was based more on intuition than data."
It will probably be several months before I work my way through the book. I'll have an open mind as I go through it. It will be open because I don't know the answers. But I can recognize arguments that are "muddled and wrong" or "based upon intuition," and I see many of those posted here at FR on this topic.
ML/NJ
Wow! That's quite the statement.
Here are some interesting statements made recently about selection by a scientist in Nature mag:
...typical studies of selection do not have the statistical power necessary to detect selection that appears unrealistically strong. Unfortunately, this paradox will not be resolved simply by accumulating more data of the same ilk, as all reviews identify problems with our current methods. How, then, are we to obtain a good handle on the true power of selection in nature?
and...
Meanwhile, we are only deluding ourselves that we have a good handle on the typical power of selection in nature. Once we do, we can begin to investigate how humans are changing selection pressures, and whether populations and species will be able to adapt accordingly.
~Andrew P. Hendry, “Evolutionary biology: The power of natural selection,” Nature 433, 694 - 695 (17 February 2005); doi:10.1038/433694a
ml/nj quoting "Speciation, Coyne and Orr:
"So begins The Origin of Species, whose title and first paragraph imply that Darwin will have much to say about speciation. Yet his magnum opus remains largely silent on the "mystery of mysteries,"...
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A common misperception of The Origin of Species, especially by those who have never read it, is that Darwin wrote little (or nothing I've heard) about just that: the origin of species.
On the contrary, Darwin writes exhaustively on the CAUSES of speciation throughout the book. What he does not cover with much effect are the mechanisms. This is to what Coyne and Orr are referring. Darwin's hypotheses on this subject were indeed muddled and almost certainly wrong. The search for the mechanisms for speciation dogged him constantly since he originally formulated his theory in the 1830's and 40's.
It wasn't until 1866 that Mendel formulated the Laws of Inheritance and these were pretty much ignored for 40 years.
Heck, even now with all we know about genetics, inheritance, etc. we've still got a long way to go. Undoubtedly though, Darwin would be amazed at how far we've come.
Recapping my point though, it is something of a myth that the Origin of Species never disc usses the origin of species.