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Index to Creationist Claims,  edited by Mark Isaak,    Copyright © 2004
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Claim CB910.1:

Fruit flies have been mutated and bred in laboratories for generations, but they are still fruit flies.

Source:

Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, 1985. Life--How Did It Get Here? Brooklyn, NY, 104.

Response:

  1. Biological classification is hierarchical; when a new species evolves, it branches at the very lowermost level, and it remains part of all groups it is already in. Anything that evolves from a fruit fly, no matter how much it diverges, would still be classified as a fruit fly, a dipteran, an insect, an arthropod, an animal, and so forth.

  2. There are about 3,000 described species of fruit flies (family Drosophilidae; Wheeler 1987). "Still fruit flies" covers a wide range.

  3. Fruit flies do not remain the same species of fruit flies. Drosophila melanogaster populations evolved reproductive isolation as a result of contrasting microenvironments within a canyon (Korol et al. 2000). We would not expect to see much greater divergence in historical times.

References:

  1. Korol, A. et al., 2000. Nonrandom mating in Drosophila melanogaster laboratory populations derived from closely adjacent ecologically contrasting slopes at "Evolution Canyon." Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 97: 12637-12642. See also Schneider, C. J., 2000. Natural selection and speciation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 97: 12398-12399.
  2. Wheeler, M. R., 1987. Drosophilidae. In: Agriculture Canada, Manual of Nearctic Diptera, vol. 2, Hull, Quebec: Canadian Government Publishing Centre. pg. 1011.

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