Natural selection has been seen in action in England years ago. Evolution is the changing of one species into another. The snakes here didn't gain the ability to eat these poisonous toads. They are still the same snake, just smaller.

He may have a point there - I'd need to see the study to see if it was the genotype or phenotype that changed.

And as I remember it, it was the Boston bistulura moth that changed. Went from white to black to white, due to changes in the amount of soot produced. however, the genotype never changed, hence, it wasn't evolution.

I'm not sure about the moth's species. IIRC However, the moth was know to have two colorizations, one white one black. Before the industrilizaton of the area the moths would land on a tree with white bark thus the dark colored moths were spotted by birds easier and eaten. After a factory moved into the area, the soot that blew from its stacks covered the trees and gave them a black dusting. Now the black colored moths were harder to spot than the white ones....

In this particular case, I would put money on the fact that there were always these snakes that happened to have smaller heads with longer bodies. As their big headed siblings died from eating poisonous toad their particular set of snake genes become more predominate. No genotype change, just fewer big headed snake to be caught and tagged.

To clear up any confusion from my earlier post, the actual moth is Boston betularia .

See http://biocrs.biomed.brown.edu/Elephant%20stuff/Chapters/Ch%2014/Moths/Moth-Update.html for more information

Assuming that a cross-genotype change could happen in a single generation, how would we be able to tell if, say, a snake hatched from a chicken egg unless we were there to observe it? How many of these "new species" that we keep discovering all the time are actually unrecognized jumps from other, better known species? Would we even recognize "true evolution" if it ever did happen in the span of any of our lifetimes?

The problem with true evolution as you put it relates to survivability of a mutation, from a mating sense. Assuming that any given mutation happens (typically, this occurs once out of 100,000,000 base pairs) and that it doesn't occur in 'junk' DNA, the typical odds that it'll actually even survive birth are relatively low. If it does, it ends up having a 1:10 chance of being beneficial. If it's beneficial, it has a 1:10 chance mating - why? Because the new animal might look different. And if it looks different (not just bigger and stronger), then the others don't want to mate with it, effectively ending the mutation there.

And yes, we would. We now do genetic analysis on any potential new species to make sure it's not just a phenotypic distinction.

Unfortunately the example of the moth is not actually speciation, but is instead an example of selection for a certain trait... it's the same species, it just has a different color. Very much along the lines of "snakes getting smaller because smaller snakes are less likely to be poisoned by big f'ing frogs."

That said, there most definitely are cases in the literature of observed speciation. The absolute best list is here:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html

Which is, of course, taken from what is probably the best example of Usenet FAQs ever created, the talk.origins archive:

http://www.talkorigins.org

Which contains the most accessible and informative documents on biology, evolution, and science I have ever read.

aueenekarp poiuyt http://ghjkliragza.com/