The article by Jay Davis (scroll down to “Unevolved”) in Real Detroit Weekly was yet another in a long string of embarrassments for the Expelled crew and their IDeological fellow travelers. Mark Mathis, one of the producers of the movie, came across as an utterly ignorant fool babbling on subjects he knew absolutely nothing about. All in all, a long overdue and starkly accurate portrayal, where Mathis repeatedly hanged himself when fed a sufficient amount of rope (i.e., a very small amount). It would require some serious effort to shore-up the man’s reputation after that incurring that kind of public humiliation, but who could possibly accomplish such a thing?
Jonathon Wells to the rescue. His non-argument amounts to completely glossing over every detail of Talk Origins’ article on observed instances of speciation and presenting, as a “rebuttal”, a curious bit of gibberish:
I am reliably informed that the “peer-reviewed research” Davis sent to Mathis was a link to a 1995 web page that defends Darwinism by allegedly listing “Observed Instances of Speciation.” The web page actually does include some observed cases of speciation in plants due to an increase in the number of chromosomes, or “polyploidy.” But Darwin’s theory requires the splitting of one species into two, which then diverge and split and diverge and split, over and over again. Only this — and not polyploidy — could produce the branching-tree pattern required by Darwinian evolution, in which all species are descendants of a common ancestor that have been modified by natural selection.
Nevermind that speciation events attributable to polyploidy only partially constitute one subsection in the entire article*, what Jonathon Wells has served up here is nothing but meaningless gobbledygook. Speciation, which is defined as the split of a biological population from its ancestral species, is an event that is distinct from the mechanisms behind it. In several of the cases discussed by TO, one of these is polyploidy (although to be specific, polyploidy is a specific mechanism of variation, not of how the resultant traits get fixed in a population, i.e., selection). Jonathon Wells has done nothing but assert the biological equivalent of “you need sorting, not a sorting algorithm“.
*: To add insult to injury, the section directly below it is untitled Speciations in Plant Species not Involving Hybridization or Polyploidy (My emphasis).
