30 People Share Stories About “Professionals” Who Had Some Controversial Opinions

It is not a religion! Religion involves faith, believing in something that is unprovable because you trust the people that passed the information down. The point of Atheism is not believing in things that are unsubstantiated, but instead in provable or at least logical and mathematical things like science.

I don't quite understand what you mean. We do have modern day examples of speciation like the giraffe in this article.http://www.sci-news.com/biology/four-giraffe-species-09632.html . If your asking for speciation to happen right Infront of our eyes we'd have to be immortal.

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Doesn't meet speciation criteria. Separate species, according to the definition I linked, cannot breed and produce fertile offspring. This article is the equivalent of rebranding chihuahuas as a separate specie because they no longer would breed with a German Shepherd in the wild.

If you want to observe macro evolution with your own eyes I'm afraid that's impossible. Natural selection and speciation are extremely straight forward processes. Unless you have another evidence based theory to explain our planets biological diversity you have to accept the theory of evolution even if we don't have all the pieces.

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I don't have to accept a flawed theory in absence of a workable one. In fact, that is possibly the worst position a scientist can take. Emergent species should be happening all the time. Beneficial mutations should be happening all the time in every specie in order to make evolution true. They are not and that is a huge problem with the theory. How do you have evolution without directly observable evolution?

"Beneficial mutations should be happening all the time", that's not how natural selection works.In a static environment evolution slows down. If Africa gradually began to experience snowfall every year it would give the minority albino individuals within a specie an advantage over their peers by enabling them to blend in with the snow. Eventually they would outcompete those with contrasting pigmentation and live to pass on their genes at a greater rate. Give it a million years and you'd have white coated animals in a now snowy Africa. As it is not in fact snowing in Africa, not is going to any time in the near future, animals born with a mutation characteristized by a lighter coat have not advantage whatsoever, thus keeping them a minority and reducing the chance of a new specie emerging. The example wasn't the best but hope it helps.

There is no static environment, Mohammad Ammar, or do you not believe in climate change?

Well, Truth Monster, we will be seeing a lot more change. We already see changing behaviour of migration-routes of birds due to climate-change, as well as mating-season-changes. also, that definition that a species cannot interbreed with another species successfully has been changed, it's not universal truth anymore. Dogs and wolves ARE different species, as are dogs and coyotes and wolves and coyotes, and yet they can interbreed successfully.

Why Evolution Is True Book by Jerry A. Coyne.

Just read this of you're seriously interested in understanding it.

(2) An interesting example is the Denisova cave, where remains of a up-to-then unknown species of humans had been found. What made it even more fascinating was that they also found Neanderthal-bones, AND bones of one individual that had had a Neanderthal father and a Denisova-human mother. We also know that Neanderthals have interbred with Homo sapiens. And there is no doubt whatsoever that those are different species! Another, furrier example would be the existence of fertile 'pizzlies', hybrids between polar bears and grizzlies. Of which, thanks to climate change, we might see more of https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/species/

No, it's not. Not anymore. Dogs and wolves interbreed and they are separate species. So do wolves and coyotes and dogs and coyotes and even dogs and jackals. It takes a lot of desperation for them to do so, but they can. In plant-live, it's even more common! Quercus robur and Quercus patraea interbreed and in areas where both species grow, it's sometimes hard to tell the difference. they are interbreeding and if it turns out that it is beneficial to their survival, it might be that those hybrids will one day form a new species. (SInce oaks live easily up to 500 years, you and me will probably never know, though). PLENTY of garden-plants have come to be because of breeding two separate species together, and yes, I am talking about species and not variants. Like you, I learned that a species is defined by not being able to interbreed with another species, but I've had to learn later that it just doesn't hold up as a rule anymore, so it's not one. (to be continued)

@Truth Monster, I'm really curious how you understood "we can't prove it but we believe it's true" from my comment. What I told you is 1) evolution is a fact. This has been proven over and over. Easy examples are cancer, antibiotic resistant bacteria, and pretty much any plant and animal used in agriculture, and 2) we only observed a few cases of speciation because it's hard to observe. You were claiming we never observed it, so I told you yes we did. And as Marlowe Fitzpatrick already said, the inhability to produce offspring is not a necessary condition to define species. Or do you thing that horses, donkeys and zebras are all the same species? Or that tigers and lions are the same species? As for cottus, yes the two parents species are different species, and their hybrid is on the verge of becoming one.