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Butterfly effect: New species hatches in lab James Randerson / London Guardian | June 15 2006 The creation of a new species, something that scientific orthodoxy says should take thousands of years of genetic isolation has been achieved in the lab in just three months. Scientists think they have recreated the process that produced a stunning South American butterfly called Heliconius heurippa virtually overnight. And they suggest that similar rapid species creation could help to explain puzzling groups of closely related species such as Darwin's finches and cichlid fish. The finding is yet another challenge to the charge from creationists that evolutionary biologists are unable to explain large scale evolutionary shifts that result in new species. Biological dogma is that speciation, the process
by which a new species forms, happens when two populations of the same
species become separated for millennia by a new mountain range or a
change in a river's course, for example. In their separate environments,
the two diverge genetically and cannot mate when reunite. "The
orthodoxy up to now is that it mostly has a destructive role,"
said George Turner, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University
of Hull, "That's how species sometimes come to an end when they
collapse into each other and all their unique adaptations are all mashed
up together." "It was quite surprising how easy it was," said Dr Jiggins. "That really implies that the process of speciation could also have happened naturally very quickly." He said the process may explain the remarkable diversity among Heliconius butterflies. The research is reported in the journal Nature. ---------------------------------------------------
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